At two separate moviegoing experiences in the span of less than one week, I heard audiences burst into laughter during what I considered serious moments of films I admire. The first occurred during the Oak Street's revival of director Nicholas Ray's noir romance They Live By Night, which opened in 1947; the second was during an advance screening of Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, which opens at the Uptown today. The two movies may not seem to have much in common, but the fact that audiences felt compelled to laugh at both is particularly telling of how audiences react to movies today.

Though it contains some fairly humorous jokes from its colorful secondary characters, the audience with whom I saw They Live By Night was more inclined to laugh at the film's dated elements––namely the Clifford Odets-like flourishes of stylized working-class speech and the unexpected gravity Ray gave to the chase sequences. Personally, I responded sympathetically to both devices; then again, I've also seen a number of film noirs and romances of the 40s, and I could recognize where Ray's style transcended the genre standards from which his story emerged. Further, I knew when Ray's style stayed close to that of his blander contemporaries, although I found these moments more generic than funny.

Far From Heaven is, if nothing else, the most sustained technical achievement I've seen in a movie this year. It has been made to resemble––in virtually every way, from music to line readings––Douglas Sirk's Technicolor melodramas of the 1950s. Haynes' mimicry is thorough and authentic, an exhibit of both meticulous filmmaking and faithful film viewing. If the preview audience of a few weeks ago was any indication, however, Haynes' recreation is bound to produce as much self-satisfied laughter as it does genuine admiration, as moviegoers of all ages chuckled at the use of rear-projection (during close-ups shots of driving sequences) and the word "swell" as though such features represented the height of cinematic barbarism.

Granted, the film sometimes relies on the outmoded style for ironic effect (such as when, in a chilling moment, a character makes a homophobic slur and then laughs at it with a bourgeois passivity reminiscent of Bing Crosby), which is very different from camp. But if my experience at They Live By Night suggested anything, it's that audiences no longer find any difference between any outmoded style and straight-up kitsch.

When trying to define the slippery beast, Susan Sontag once suggested that camp was that which fell into the "so bad it's good" category or something so artificial that it one could only approach it with mock affection. An artistic device doesn't necessarily lose its potency, however, simply by growing old (Look at the haiku, for instance). Has the definition of camp simply expanded so much that it encompasses anything that's "before one's time"? Or have American audiences lost touch with their own film history (and, in turn, their social history, which movies help define) to the extent that they feel no emotional connection to older movies and thus have a knee-jerk reaction to scoff at whatever is recognizably different?

I wonder if there would have been as much laughter at Far From Heaven if it had been preceded by a screening of All That Heaven Allows, the Sirk film to which it seems the most indebted (Readers who want to get a handle on Sirk can find restored versions of three of his films––All That Heaven Allows being one them––on Criterion Collection DVDs at Macalester Media Services and view them for free). Such a double bill would illustrate the parallels between Sirk and Todd Haynes and help illuminate Far From Heaven's agenda.

For one, both directors are great Hollywood subversives: Sirk played straight the soap opera plots to which he was assigned while putting a scathing criticism of American hollowness in the films' margins; the inexplicably rich color schemes and set design took on nose-thumbing significance. Haynes also has a history of depicting cliché material with a limited amount of ostensible contempt (most successfully, I think, in the 50s horror-movie parody of his first feature, Poison), yet he also recycles familiar Hollywood plots to call attention to the ills of American sexual politics––primarily the positions granted to gays and lesbians in mainstream culture. On the negative side, both directors counter a sympathetic handling of actors with the tendency to come across a little cold.

When Haynes breaks from this last trait (as well as his aesthetic of pastiche), Far From Heaven generates moments more frightening than anything I've seen in Sirk's canon. The very plot––about a 1950s housewife who discovers that her successful husband is a closeted homosexual and subsequently pursues, to her white-bread Connecticut community's dismay, a friendship with a black gardener––seems very close to its author's heart, a continuation of the fascinated (if not always sympathetic) look at iconoclasts and misunderstood queer culture previously seen in Poison, Safe, and Velvet Goldmine.

Further, Haynes demonstrates an acute understanding of the all-American malice that creates outcasts in the first place. An early tea-party sequence abruptly switches to contemporary dialect when four housewives begin gossiping about the sex lives of their absent friends. Filmed in the rich autumnal colors of a 1950s production, this may be the most shocking scene of the film; the anachronistic dialogue in the otherwise faithful recreation points to a contempt for "abnormal" sexuality which films of that era could never explicitly address and thus never convincingly deny.

A later scene which depicts white schoolboys throwing rocks at a black girl might have been filmed under the Hays Code, although Haynes gives it a paranoid suspense that renders the scene a personal attack on the culture which continues to produce boys like these.

For a film so rich in detail and politics, it's strange that its center should feel somewhat hollow. Julianne Moore, a very expressive actress, seems to have been directed simply to imitate great housewife performances of classic Hollywood (primarily Jane Wyman's role in All That); while she apes these mannerisms impressively, Cathy, the main character often feels as distant as the sarcastically-utilized faux-exotica that decorates many of the sets.

This seems to be part of Haynes' agenda, though. Much of Far From Heaven's charge comes from the watching the posh character of a Sirk film interact with victims of racism and homophobia (played by Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert, respectively), who ultimately come across as more sympathetic than the protagonist. It's worth noting that Haynes associates Cathy with the potentially campy elements of 50s cinema more than he does any other character, another means of drawing sympathy away from the protagonist and thus implicitly attacking the complacent liberalism she represents.

Haynes is well aware of audiences' instinct to feel superior to outdated material, as he has noted in a recent Spin magazine interview. Perhaps he has discovered a way to manipulate a depressing trend in American moviegoing into a means of challenging the social norms which helped to bring about its existence.