It's rude of me to speak of Todd Haynes's new picture as if it were a symptom; but then, he's the one who's always consulting doctors. From the time of his career-making short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which re-enacted the death by anorexia of its title character, Haynes has consistently used pathology as an organizing metaphor: in a Freudian case study (Dottie Gets Spanked), a sci-fi horror scenario (Poison) and, most famously, a dry-eyed melodrama, Safe, which stars Julianne Moore as a woman who becomes allergic to her environment. (Whether the allergens are chemical or marital is impossible to say.) In each of these movies, the attempt to medicalize our drives and dissatisfactions has come in for Haynes's mockery--none of it more scathing than in his current film, Far From Heaven, in which a 1950s-era psychiatrist talks about the odds for a complete recovery from homosexuality, to be effected perhaps with the aid of drugs and electricity.

Haynes would like people to be freed from such thinking, and so would I. When I watch Arthur Dong's recent documentary Family Fundamentals, whose evangelical Christians propose to cure gay people of being themselves, I could wish for an end to all prescriptions and therapies for our behavior, all psychosocial get-well cards and books of chicken soup. But could Haynes go on making films if the health police were ever to let up? He apparently needs to define himself in opposition to their controlling mindset--and in Far From Heaven, this need has paradoxically led him to proceed as if he were a diagnostician, examining society's skin for clues to an underlying unease.

In doing so, Haynes is mimicking the work of Douglas Sirk, who turned out a series of now celebrated, color-drenched melodramas in the 1950s: Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life. Ostensibly, these were nothing more than lush, time-killing women's pictures, as formulaic and corny as any soap opera transferred to the wide screen. But by means of an almost clinical style--one that drew attention to the plots' emotional excesses and the performers' emotive shortcomings--Sirk transformed these movies into not-so-implicit critiques of "normal, middle-class life," as the term was then understood.

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