Todd Haynes | Safe / 1995

in harm’s way

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todd Haynes (screenwriter and director) Safe / 1995

 

After finishing his highly sophisticated and experimental gay work Poison, director Todd Haynes took on a rather odd subject for him in his 1995 Safe, in which actor Julianne Moore first was given to the chance to perform one of her trapped and put-upon housewives. In this case, Moore as Carol White seems to be a perfectly happy well-to-do suburban housewife who is far more interested in the color of her couch than in the well-being of her own life.

    Her friends are as superficial as she is, gossiping about the newest diets and attempting to flaunt what little power they have by convincing their fellow women friends to join them in their newest hobbies.

     But out of nowhere something begins to happen to Carol, little by little, that seems to suggest that she is terribly hypo-allergic to the very environment in which she inhabits. A trip to a shopping mall during which she is trapped in traffic behind a pollution belching vehicle ends in a serious coughing fit. She begins to have headaches, feels continual weakness, has difficulty catching her breath.

     In 1995 the signs were also very much those of thousands of young men and some women who had come down with AIDS. But in Carol’s case it seems to be related to the environment, a sickness that, not so very different from AIDS, doctors have not yet fully come to comprehend.

     At a baby shower she suddenly has difficulty in breathing; getting her hair permed, she suffers an intense nosebleed. And as she begins to explore the chemicals which unknowingly surround her, it becomes clearer to her that the world in which she lives is out to destroy her. In a dry cleaner being fumigated with pesticides, she has a complete physical breakdown.

     Doctors can find nothing wrong with her and suggest psychotherapy. But things seem only to get worse.

      Although AIDS might be Haynes’ metaphor, it is also apparent that her caring and rather kind yet highly competitive, conservative husband, Greg (Xander Berkeley) may be one of the most serious of her allergens. If nothing else, it is hardly a metaphor to say that she is allergic to her current life.

      One doctor attempts to track down her allergies, tracing some of them to a diet she has been exploring with one of her friends. But none of the specialists, mostly male doctors, can find any “real” cause and seem to suggest to Greg—speaking to him, while seeming to ignore her existence in the same room—that her problem is mostly psychological.

      Her “friends” gradually exclude her, and Greg and her their son Rory begin to work around her increasing inability to take part in their lives, further closing her off. Reading material on her own, and taking a lead from one advertised program, Carol gradually perceives that she is no longer able to function in her current life, and seeks out the help of a new-age desert community for people with just such environmental illnesses, Wrenwood.

      There is meets up with a seemingly intelligent and gentle devotee who attempts to put her mind at ease, while introducing her to the community as well as subtly intruding upon her privacy, hinting at possibly guiding her into lesbian sexuality.

      The head of Wrenwood, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), who is openly gay—a purposeful attempt on Haynes’ part to help his primarily gay audiences to find Peter, at first, to be sympathetic—initially sounds quite sane and helpful. And indeed, the community outwardly appears to be one of great eccentricity and openness. But gradually, after hearing a few of Dunning’s lectures, himself evidently suffering from AIDS but believing that good thoughts can heal it, we can begin to perceive the cult-like qualities of Wrenwood and its followers, a kind of self-help fascism that may be worse than those who pretend that such diseases do not even exist. And even here, isolated from the chemical world in which she previously lived—one member of the community would not even allow the taxi in which Carol arrived to enter the confines of the camp—Carol still discovers new lesions appearing on her face. Ultimately, she separates herself even further by moving into an igloo, especially built for one hyper-sensitive individual who has recently died.

      A visit from her husband and son puts everything in even clearer perspective as she casually points out a mansion rising from the hills behind Wrenwood where Dunning lives. And it is evident from that visit that Carol will not be returning to family life any time soon.

      In the final scenes, she has taken the advice of her female friend, repeating over and over to herself in the mirror, “I love you. I really love you.”

      There is no “end” to this movie, no answers provided; and many of his audiences have been confused and unsure of how to define the heroine’s illness, or even if there is a true illness other than a psychological one.

     As Julie Grossman has argued in her essay “The Trouble with Carol,” (Other Voices: A Journal of Cultural Criticism, January 2005) Carol as a victim of male-dominated society is able to take charge of her life somewhat in the manner of Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—a work Haynes has acknowledged he had in mind in creating Safe—in the end she merely replaces the standard heteronormative world with the equally debilitating self-help culture which demands that the patient see him or herself as the cause and cure of all illnesses.

      Grossman finds few good signs in the ending of this film, despite the patient’s attempts at self-love. And in his essay of 2014 “Safe: Nowhere to Hide” critic Dennis Lim goes even further in describing the perniciousness of such ideas as preached by the character of Peter Dunning 

     

“As a ‘chemically sensitive person with AIDS,’ Peter has an ‘incredibly vast” perspective, one of his acolytes tells Carol. Where the doctors questioned the existence of her sickness, Wrenwood affirms it and, in so doing, validates her. But it also instills a poisonously mixed message: even if the chemicals are making her sick, the cause lies within. The cure is a regimen of self-improvement that sounds an awful lot like self-blame. ‘The only person who can make you sick is you,’ Peter tells his charges, more or less quoting from The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach, one of several best sellers by New Age empress Louise Hay, who made a fortune in the eighties and nineties stumping for positive thinking as a miracle panacea.”

 

     It appears what we have to recognize at the film’s end is that Carol is perhaps quite ill, but as long as there is no open perspective in which to truly and fully explore her disease (perhaps both physical and psychological) there will be no recognition that there is such a problem or even a search for a possible cure. Much like AIDS, which took several decades for doctors and scientists even to recognize it as a true disease from which not only gay men were suffering before they truly began to seek out and find possible alleviations. There is still no cure from AIDS, no cure for those with sensitive systems triggered by our polluted environments. The new “disease” of our age, not first attacking individuals but the entire planet, the warming of our earth, has still to be recognized as even existing among numerous world leaders and politicians, and will surely eventually kill off millions around the world as others repeat their mantras of everything being a disease of the mind, offer up other simple cure-alls, or simply try to ignore it.

     As Haynes makes clear, there is no safety in a world of ignorance and pretense.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).