Carol Movie Analysis: Coming into Focus

Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) tracks the coming-into-focus of Therese and the woman she loves through her twofold romantic and artistic awakening. This coming-into-focus is also a calling-into-focus of cinematic ways of looking that attend to socially marginalized individuals with open-minded compassion.

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Filmography:
--Carol (Todd Haynes, Killer Films, 2015).
--“Rooney Mara,” Carol DVD special feature.


Texts:
--Cocozza, Paula. ‘How Patricia Highsmith’s Carol became a film: “Lesbianism is not an issue. It’s a state of normal”’, The Guardian, 2015.
--Gilman, Sander L. ‘Black bodies, white bodies: Toward an iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth-century art, medicine, and literature’, Critical Inquiry, 12:1, pp. 204–42, 1985.
--Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Harvard UP, 2007.
--Metz, Walter. ‘Far from toy trains’, Film Criticism, 40:3, pp. 1–4, 2016.
--Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, NYU Press, 2009.


[adapted from the original publication in Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 5.1]