MOVIE REVIEW : Erotic but Not Explicit

So, what exactly is “Poison?”

I’ve seen Todd Haynes’ controversial movie twice now. And, while it seems to be many things all at once--an English-language version of Jean Genet’s prison novels, campy horror parody, pseudo-documentary, perverse romance, AIDS allegory, cultural satire, an impassioned cry of anguish and isolation--one thing it definitely is not is explicit gay male pornography.

Nor does it contain, as the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the Mississippi-based American Family Assn. has claimed, “explicit porno scenes of homosexuals engaged in anal sex.” Or explicit scenes of any other kind of sex. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice claims to have seen a male organ in this film--for about a second. But if it’s there, it would take stop-action to be offended by it.

Taxpayers churning with anger at what must have seemed an unconscionable waste of their tax dollars can rest assured: Compared to the way sexuality is regularly handled in mainstream Hollywood movies, from “Fatal Attraction” to “Ghost,” “Poison” is almost discreet.

Explicit is not the right word for it. It’s mostly implicit and secretive, speaking in codes, by inference. Woven together out of three stories--”Hero,” “Horror” and “Homo”--it works by disorienting juxtapositions, a gradual commingling of themes and relationships.

“Homo” is the Genet adaptation, a story of the obsessive love of one convict for another that ends in rape, attempted jailbreak and death.

“Horror” is about an earnest young scientist who isolates the sex drive in a “molecular coagulation,” accidentally drinks it and turns into a reluctant monster, a “leper killer.” This segment is obviously an AIDS allegory.

“Hero” is a mock-documentary in which reporters investigate the disappearance of a young boy whose mother claims that he shot her husband to save her from a savage beating and then leaped out a window and flew away. It’s full of symbolism, quotations from Genet, social satire and quite a bit of sentimental self-pity--all highly artificial and self-conscious.

“Horror” is a parody of black-and-white horror movies, shot in the slightly exaggerated noir form, all the skewed angles and stark shadows that flowered in the ‘60s TV episodes of “The Twilight Zone” or “The Outer Limits.”

The mock documentary “Hero” is full of banal camera set-ups and talking heads. The Genet sections are shot in an ultra-romantic style that suggests Hollywood romances of the ‘50s: soap operas by Douglas Sirk and Nick Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause.” In some shots, the lead actor of “Homo,” Scott Renderer, is an eerie double for James Dean.

“Poison” is an arty, literary, socially conscious movie, exactly the kind government arts agencies often subsidize. The people who complain about this, who want the National Endowment for the Arts abolished or punished, forget that most other Western nations subsidize the arts extensively, and that subsidies are usually geared toward artists who aren’t popularly oriented; artists who may, therefore, offend some people. Filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman owe their entire careers to state-subsidized film industries; they probably couldn’t have functioned as well outside them. They might have ended up like Orson Welles, unable to make a movie in his own country.

In fact, the West German government helped fund a more explicit adaptation of Genet’s “Querelle” by director R.W. Fassbinder almost 10 years ago.

But I realize that, for many people, the question of whether “Poison” is technically hard-core pornography is irrelevant. The very fact that it sympathetically portrays homosexuals is enough to damn it and call down wrath on the NEA and its beleaguered head, John Frohnmayer.

Portray homosexuality it does. The prison scenes in “Poison” unspool like a swanky gay fantasy: washed in romantic blue light, populated by blue-clad convicts, who occasionally remove their shirts and finger their scars, tenderly. Earlier reformatory scenes are even more romantic: scenes of sexual initiation or degradation in a sylvan glade, a strange courtyard abloom with exotic flowers and splashed with sunlight.

These scenes aren’t real at all. They’re deliberately imbued with erotic fantasy. And that may be more disturbing than explicit sex for some audiences, who may become convinced they’re seeing more than they really are.

None of the sexual scenes in “Poison”--and there aren’t many--are free of suggestions of pain or fear. The entire film, right from the opening moments--a card that reads “The entire world is dying of panicky fright” and subjective shots of police breaking into a besieged apartment--is soaked in paranoia.

It seems to be about the pain and isolation of any deviance. the dedicated scientist who turns into a monster of leprous sexuality is like a Dr. Jekyll of venereal disease and the young boy who kills his father, saves his mother and flies away is like a mixture of Oedipus Rex and Peter Pan. All three main characters are linked but, while the scientist plunges to his death from one window, and the boy soars away through another, the convict will apparently remain locked away from the sky.

Haynes says the theme of his movie is “deviance,” which seems right. It’s also clear that the “poison” of the title is, partially, society’s attitudes toward the three “deviant” characters--whom it beats up, imprisons, hunts down. That’s what makes the reaction to “Poison” so ironic. The foes of the movie--and the people who want to take down the NEA because of it--seem bent on proving that its paranoia isn’t a fantasy.