Flowers and Convicts: Jean Genet and Poison

The author that we are currently reading in class is Genet, who is relative to class as he has been the subject of both films indirectly. In the first film "Poison" the director Todd Hayes takes three of Genet's works and fuses them together to form a trifecta of cinema. Hero, Horror and Homo. The main portion of the film based mostly on Genet's work "The Miracle of the Rose". In all three of these stories there is the ever present trope of  being the other. However it is not demonstrated in the contemporary view that we have it today. The first story "Hero" deals with a little boy who seemingly enjoys the abuse that others thrust upon him because they can sense his otherness. He manages to build for himself in an in-penetrable bubble of happiness as he comes to accept his situation and then transform into a sort of pleasure. He becomes a hero when he shoots his father and saves his mother, the only one who accepts/tolerates him in his true form. This could be interpreted as a version of Genet and what he considered himself to be in society. Born into poverty, he became a ward of the state but was later recovered by his mother who was a prostitute/waitress. He was essentially a product of the French penal systems, being in and out of the system for being a thief. Like the little boy in Poison who is given a position in society, instead of being in constant loathe he comes to embrace this notion of himself. He comes to love the degenerate world that he is in and feels more comfortable in this penal world than in the actual world where he does not fit into its normative standards.