POISON (1991) | Dir: Todd Haynes | My first awareness of Todd Haynes was SUPERSTAR, a film about singer Karen Carpenter but made with Barbie dolls instead of human actors. Sounds like a joke, but trust me, it is far from it and is incredibly moving, ultimately. Anyway, Karen’s estate apparently threatened Haynes with a lawsuit if he didn’t remove the film from circulation and so it became a cult film, duplicated to death on VHS and shared widely. At some point, I had a copy. You can see if online if you dig. But POISON was Todd’s first feature and I saw it at the Anjelika Film Center at Houston at Broadway. There was a lot of press around the film and the burgeoning new “queer” cinema and I remember being so excited to see it, even though I didn’t know what the film was about. POISON interweaves three narratives, each with its own aesthetic language: a tv news-style documentary, a 1960s-style horror, and a more straightforward drama inspired by Jean Genet. It was produced by the great Christine Vachon and released by Zeitgeist Films, who went on to distribute some of the more adventurous and risk-taking films of the last twenty-five years. POISON introduced me to queer cinema and to Genet. There are images from scenes that still haunt me and clearly bothered the most squeamish, including my nemesis, Senator Jesse Helms, who denounced it as pornographic and explicit, of which it is neither. It is sexy, scary, dangerous, provocative and beautiful, though. I still have the poster, framed.