Oranges film wrangle

"‘That was the day I stopped believing in the wild ardour of things. Perhaps in love … the love in books and films … that tells us to abandon our lives and plans all for one brief touch of Venus… The world just seems too fragile a place for it … Perhaps it’s just we who are too fragile.’

This is the wife talking in Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), (a reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows, 1955), to her black gardener with whom a tender forbidden love is developing, as her husband descends into a hell of homosexual guilt. Haynes stays with Sirk’s post-war New England suburbia, and it seems a delicious perversity that at a time of almost unlimited technical and narrative possibility he’s chosen to work within this tight 1950s’ frame. The film is artificial and exultant, but so cruelly truthful it made me feel sick and afraid for three days. It’s completely airless. The décor in the family home is so dominating that the place starts to look like a prison in which the husband and son’s lives are shaped by the furniture. Watching the confused prejudices, aspirations and ludicrous taboos and hypocrisies is equivalent to listening to a long, bad joke. The auburns and oranges, the wife’s flame hair and the autumn leaves, produce an over-heated nostalgia, which becomes sickeningly suffocating. No amount of gorgeous hue can dispel the sadness of observing recurrent, wilful human error." (Rebecca Warren; frieze magazine, Issue 103 November-December 2006)

shattered glass, phone calls burning out over wireless connections, blood flowing from my arm into the vile for examination, my first ekg, an hour huddled in the closet after hearing gunshots at 2am in lebam, mortal sin vs mortality sincerity, an eclipse orphaned off to write its hangnail memoirs on the drip of moonlight fallen down her stairs, puffy perch fried deep in gras englais, villian cooper tire burns in the finer details of the photograph, pluralism in rural america, evey's hot turkey sandwich with stuffing and gravy, millstones throw me into the swollen river of time, graduates fill their pencil shavings with floating mantles of recognition.