gender troubles

I am so excited about the new version of Mildred Pierce on HBO by Todd Haynes. He has always been a director I admire, mostly for how he consciously he thinks about the world and constructs his films. I am a fan of all his films but I was blown away by 'I'm not there'. The director's commentary gave me chills.

I have seen part of the new series and then I read this wonderful interview with him in art forum magazine which I have copied one of his answers from, and two photos, below. He talks about using Saul Leiter’s photographs for inspiration so I couldn't resist adding one in. I now have to read the book!

(via junkforcode)

AT: What is it about the mother-daughter relationship in the book that drew you to it?

TH: The ways in which it relates to issues of identity. And, of course, identity and its pathologies have always been interests of mine. What an incredibly fraught process the separation of mother and daughter is, maybe even more so than of father and son. Because of the role as object that women are encouraged to play in society, the differentiation between mother and daughter is full of confusions and projections. I think that men, who are allowed to simply become subjects, have an easier time. Male aggression and competition help propel that division between father and son, through classical Oedipal terms.

In the book, the struggle for identity is all tangled up in the American dream of social ascension, the hope that your children can achieve goals that you yourself couldn’t. Mildred gives Veda all these things that she didn’t have growing up. She dreams her daughter will one day be a concert pianist. And Veda is striving to be something great, which for her entails rejecting—even looking down on—everything her mother stands for. It’s amazing to me that the one consistent thing about the woman’s film is the extent to which class plays into the mother-daughter dilemma, the way women and women’s bodies are the displayers—almost the conductors—of class aspiration in the family. The mother is always the one who says, “No, we’re this kind of a family, and these are the things we do, and this is how we dress, and this is how we behave.” And that plays into the American desire to keep transcending class limitations generationally. And it’s all the more fully played out here because Mildred is the provider. Mildred is this industrious figure who is the breadwinner, so she literally materializes the rise in social standing that she also projects onto Veda. What I discovered is how much those middle-class American expectations of ascension took shape in one decade: the 1920s. And today we’re suffering from this psychic crisis of a crumbling economy after thirty years of unbridled consumption. We share the same crises of social identity after the crash that we see in Mildred Pierce, which is the story of middle-class identity crisis. Today it’s not breadlines and dust bowls but the middle class worrying about who we are now that we’re not making the money we once did. Those expectations and values took form in the ’20s.
 (via artforum)

Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore Annie Leibovitz