Carol and the Past I Never Knew

Cate Blanchett in Carol, Picture Source Here 

After hearing all of the buzz around the premiere of the Todd Haynes film Carol, I picked up the Patricia Highsmith book that it was based on, The Price of Salt.  I had every intention of loving it: a travelogue and thriller about the then-forbidden love between two women.  By the book's end, I found the central characters elusive, their chemistry arbitrary and the narrative a bit slow.  Still, I can't wait to see it in the hands of two brilliant actresses, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.

For me, the book is most interesting when considered in its social context (particularly its place in LGBTQ movements when it was published in 1952).  Patricia Highsmith's 1950 Strangers on a Train was a wildly successful first novel.  It was made into an Alfred Hitchcock movie the next year, catapulting her to literary stardom.  She followed that debut with The Price of Salt, about three-dimensional gay women.  In a bold departure from the lesbian pulp novels of the time it had a hopeful ending.  When the book was released as a mass-market paperback, billed as "the novel of a love society forbids", it sold more than a million copies.

Carol/The Price of Salt is a story that exists firmly in its time.  Its sweet romance was revolutionary.  Its women were forced to endure the indignities of a bigotry that has subsided to some degree.  Still, another aspect of the past that makes movies like this all the more captivating.  There's a quality, beyond the photogenic nature of cigarette smoke and full skirts, that draws us into stories like say, Mad Men so fully.

In a perfect line from his review of Carol, critic Anthony Lane writes, "The time is in the nineteen-fifties, perhaps the last epoch when, as a movie-goer, you could still believe that some enchanted evening you would see a stranger across a crowded room, and somehow know."

I look forward to a Carol/Brooklyn double feature soon.