THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 57
say that my being gay made her grow as
a person and rethink the world.”
At Oakwood, Haynes’s intellectual
“exceptionalism,” as he called it, was
matched by his exceptional appearance—
he kept his hair in a long blond mane.
“He did look like a girl. Everybody
thought he was a girl,” McGovern re-
called. “It never bothered him.” Haynes’s
androgynous look was the outward sign
of his increasing ambivalence toward
middle-class convention. “I always felt
identification with the outcast, fragile,
vulnerable people in the classroom,” he
said. “I had an empathy for kids who
had a harder time fitting in.” In a high-
school-era letter to McGovern, Haynes
spelled out his own sense of separation:
Sometimes my life is so desperately alone
and full of sorrow. It sounds self-centered to
say, so pretentious, but I feel so truly different
from anyone I’ve met. Sometimes I can barely
imagine seeing things the way people do. I do
not feel better or worse than them, but apart.
In ninth and tenth grades, he made
a twenty-two-minute film, titled “Sui-
cide,” which depicted a similarly trou-
bled outsider, Lenny, who is terrified of
making the transition from junior high
to high school. He is “enraged at the
world for making him feel so afraid and
subjugated and minimized, and uses his
body to exorcise his rage,” Haynes said.
The film grew out of a humanities as-
signment to write a hero myth. Haynes
wrote the competing voices in Lenny’s
head with different-colored pens. Len-
ny’s first words, written in red, were “I
carefully and intricately began cutting
myself into several pieces”—a prescient
line for the incipient filmmaker. “The
teachers were quite impressed with the
method, the style, and the sort of Mod-
ernist construction” of the written piece,
Haynes said, and he and a few friends
decided to turn it into a Super-8 movie.
The film crosscut scenes of Lenny stab-
bing himself with scissors in an all-white
bathroom with scenes of schoolyard
humiliation and maternal consolation.
Lenny’s last voiced-over words are “Re-
ally hard to live.” Although Haynes
maintains that “Suicide” wasn’t his story,
some of its motifs have endured in his
work: the montage structure and the
idea of a derangement of identity as a
form of liberation.
The movie looked good but didn’t
sound good. Through connections to a
Hollywood producer, Haynes and his
cohorts were able to get the sound re-
mixed on a soundstage at the Samuel
Goldwyn Studio. “We were the session
booked after ‘The Last Waltz,’ ” Haynes
said. “We brought our little Super-8
projector and synched up to a mixing
board, with all our tracks of 35-mm.
sound, the music, the effects, the dia-
logue. We did it in a real way. It was
crazy.” When the movie was done, they
staged an ersatz Hollywood première
at a theatre in Westwood, with a limo
hired by one boy’s parents. The experi-
ence, however, gave Haynes second
thoughts about the template of studio
filmmaking. “I kind of turned against
that in my head,” he told me. “I said, ‘I
don’t want to replicate that system. I
want to make experimental films, and
I want to do them alone.’”
When Haynes was in eleventh grade,
his film teacher, Chris Adam, told him
“that films shouldn’t be judged on how
they conveyed reality, that films were
not about reality,” Haynes said. Cinema
was a trick, almost like Renaissance per-
spective: a two-dimensional event that
represented three-dimensionality; it cre-
ated the sense of direct, unmediated life,
whereas, in fact, everything in it was
mediated. The notion, Haynes said, was
“a revelation to me.” He began to inter-
rogate our “endless presumptions about
realness and authenticity. It started to
make me think about stylistic and for-
mal changes and deviations.”H
aynes’s graduation project at Brown,
in 1985, was “Assassins: A Film
Concerning Rimbaud”—a forty-three-
minute rambunctious mashup of artifice
and anachronism, in which glimpses of
the libertine lives of Arthur Rimbaud
and Paul Verlaine are crosscut with scenes
of the film’s construction, all set to the
sounds of Iggy Pop and Throbbing Gris-
tle. In voice-over at the end, Haynes
reads the last line of Rimbaud’s “Morn-
ing of Drunkenness,” a salvo directed at
bourgeois stability: “Now is the time for
assassins.” The words are a kind of aes-
thetic battle cry against cinematic con-
vention. “I was never going to crawl into
the Hollywood world of feature film-
making,” Haynes said.
The world of experimental filmmak-
ing, however, was changing. In the wake
of such groundbreaking works as SallyPotter’s “Thriller” (1979) and David
Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (1986), narrative
began to leach into experimental films,
and experimental technique was leach-
ing into narrative films. Haynes’s first
major offering, which he produced in
1987, while he was in the M.F.A. pro-
gram at Bard College, was the forty-
three-minute “Superstar: The Karen
Carpenter Story” (co-written and co-pro-
duced with Cynthia Schneider, another
friend from Brown). The film set out to
tell a straightforward story of the sing-
er’s life, tracing Carpenter’s trajectory
from her early success to her slow death,
of anorexia, at thirty-two—but drama-
tized it all with modified Barbie dolls.
As Haynes wrote in the introduction to
his screenplays, the question he was try-
ing to answer through this radically
artificial conceit was: What would hap-
pen “if the narrative gears subsumed by
our identification were quietly revealed”?
Would viewers’ “desire to identify even
succumb to an ensemble of plastic”?
Haynes made meticulous sets and props
for his Lilliputian world, and structured
his story using documentary tropes—
talking heads, newsreel footage, perfor-
mance clips, laxative ads. Of the first
screening, Vachon wrote, “When it
began, there were gasps and laughter
from the audience, because it was so
funny and perfect to have Karen Car-
penter played by a Barbie doll. But at
the end, when the doll turned around
and half her face was gone, carved away
by weight loss, it wasn’t so funny any-
more, and some people burst into tears.”
“Superstar” was a success at the 1988
Toronto International Film Festival,
and played at a few venues in New York,
getting unexpectedly good notices in
the Village Voice and Artforum. Another
unexpected indicator of its impact was
a cease-and-desist order served by Karen
Carpenter’s brother and musical part-
ner, Richard Carpenter, the estate of
Karen Carpenter, and A&M Records.
Haynes had failed to acquire the rights
to the Carpenters’ songs. “My orientation
was that of guerrilla filmmaking, where
music rights were historically ignored,
never assuming a film would have a com-
mercial life of any sort,” he said. At first,
he tried to deflect the demands, but the
lawyers prevailed. In 1990, “Superstar”
was ordered withdrawn from exhibition
and all copies destroyed. Nonetheless,