Before effective treatment was available for HIV/AIDS, many understandably sought out cures outside of conventional medicine for the illness ravaging their bodies. Louise Hay, a self-help author and proponent of “New Thought” who evangelized that positive thinking could literally cure physical illness, convinced many desperate gay men of the power of positive thinking in the 1980s. Director Todd Haynes, a vanguard of the New Queer Cinema movement whose early films dealt obliquely but powerfully with AIDS, has observed and critiqued the influence of Hay’s philosophy: In a 1995 interview, for instance, he explained that “her book literally states that if we loved ourselves more we wouldn’t get sick with this illness. And that once you get it, if you learn how to love yourself in a proper way, you can overcome it. That’s scary. I kept thinking of the people who have no answers to their situation and who turn to this.” Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, an aesthetically stark and emotionally ravaging narrative of a placid suburban housewife who becomes incapacitated by a mysterious disease, is in part a response to how the systems of thought encouraged by public figures like Hay align so neatly with American capitalist culture and convinces the afflicted that their suffering is their own responsibility. When one’s own environment — their own culture — sickens them, it is seductive for the afflicted individual to narrow their focus inward.
The troubled, troubling heroine of the 1987-set Safe is Carol White (Julianne Moore), who lives with her husband Greg (Xander Berkeley) and 10-year-old stepson Rory (Chauncey Leopardi) in an ostentatious Tudor mansion in the San Fernando Valley. Her home’s interior is pristine and gelid — the sleek décor is dominated by chrome, white, ice-blue, hospital green. She speaks softly and is physically unobtrusive; her benign and predictable routine is dominated by mundane errands, aerobics classes, and lunches with friends. Carol’s health, though, starts to falter. Slight congestion and fatigue slowly mount until she finds herself wheezing while driving on the freeway, yet when her doctor assures her that nothing is physically wrong with her, she chalks up her ailment to stress and an ill-advised fruit diet. Carol’s condition worsens: her nose bleeds after she gets her hair permed; she vomits after hugging Greg, who has just applied hairspray and deodorant; she hyperventilates at a baby shower. After an aerobics class, Carol spots a flier aimed at those who experience unexplained symptoms like hers, and that poses the rhetorical question: “Are you allergic to the 20th century?” This leads her to a meeting that informs her of “environmental illness,” a malady caused by one’s one environment, specifically by toxic chemicals that, while tolerated by most, cannot be endured by some sensitive people.
To Greg’s helpless confusion, Carol radically changes her lifestyle in response to this new information, taking an array of supplements and carrying an oxygen tank. She becomes more articulate and develops a sense of personal identity in response, able to state confidently that common chemicals are making her ill. After enduring a massive seizure occasioned by workers spraying chemicals at the local dry cleaner, Carol sees a news segment about a retreat for “chemically sensitive” people from her hospital bed. She goes to the desert compound, Wrenwood, with a sense of purpose, but struggles to adjust to Wrenwood’s isolation and its idiosyncratic norms and philosophies — she lives alone in a cabin, and she must follow certain social codes like dressing “modestly” and observing silent meals, with men and women seated on opposite sides of the room. Quasi-religious services preaching love are regularly led by Wrenwood’s founder, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), a “chemically sensitive person with AIDS.”
Under the attention of Peter and Wrenwood’s director Claire (Kate McGregor Stewart), Carol submits herself to the compound’s norms. She absorbs the philosophy that negative emotions like self-hatred and anger cause illness, and that love is the only real cure. She also becomes convinced, with Claire’s encouragement, that her chemical sensitivity is so acute that she should rarely even go outside. Her world becomes smaller, more contained, and more profoundly isolated than before, even as she feebly professes to Greg, who visits and helps her move into Wrenwood’s most hermetic, igloo-shaped dwelling, that her condition is improving.
Haynes has cited Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as aesthetic references for Safe, both of which are telling inspirations for the film’s form, content, and style. Like the eponymous character of Akerman’s film, Carol lives a constrained life dominated by small domestic routines, and she is emotionally recessive, cryptic to viewers accustomed to seeking out emotional mirrors in film actors. Carol is defined by the spaces she is in more than any inner sense of personal identity, with Haynes and director of photography Alex Nepomniaschy often placing her in the margins of wide shots of interiors, dwarfing her with architecture and furniture. The alien vastness of 2001 is also echoed in Safe, with the glossy, yet strange and defamiliarized depiction of 1980s suburbia creating an uncanny distance between the film and its viewer. Nepomniaschy shoots the film with cool discipline, and in conjunction with the oppressive, antiseptic environments crafted by production designer David Bomba and the hypnagogic synth score composed and performed by Ed Tomney, a smoothed-over and unsettlingly blank world is created. Haynes has compared the film’s cloistered mise-en-scène to an airport: “All traces of human life, or natural life, have been excluded and taken over. Air is controlled and space is controlled. There’s no trace of humankind, of the mess of human beings.”
Moore is our guide through Safe, and her performance is startling in its near-erasure of any sense of an inner life. Moore speaks in a reedy, thin voice for much of the film, and often in incomplete sentences, emphasizing her lack of a voice in her own life. She barely expresses any legible emotion other than a sort of pleasant neutrality for much of the film’s first act, only reaching expressive maximalism when her illness overwhelms her body into terrifying convulsions. Moore’s ability to restrain from projecting a complex inner life — antithetical to what most consider to be accomplished acting — is what ultimately makes Carol a compelling character. Because of her emptiness, Carol has allowed herself to be moved along through pre-determined social structures, and she lightly fills the domestic role that has been culturally assigned to her. Her sickness is a massive rupture, causing distress that baffles her, but that also makes her reconsider her identity and begin to assert herself — yet those supervising her paid stay at Wrenwood have little trouble directing her toward neatly filling the role of a “chemically sensitive” person who needs protection and guidance that can only be found there. Moore briefly becomes more pointed and direct in her vocal tone and mannerisms when Carol first gains cognizance of her illness, but in the film’s final act, she fades into the form of a pale, compliant shadow, physically and symbolically dwarfed by Peter Dunning’s mansion that overlooks Wrenwood.
Haynes — who would return to the theme of environmental toxicity in his 2019 film Dark Waters, which confronts DuPont’s cover-up of the carcinogenic effects of PFAs — crafted a provocative and multifaceted political critique in Safe. These political ideas are not expressed textually, but are deeply, inextricably encoded in the film’s narrative. In a 1995 interview with Amy Taubin, Haynes said that “I think what [Safe] is really about is the infiltration of New Age language into institutions. And about the failure of the left; how it imploded into these notions of self and self-esteem and the ability to articulate and share emotions in the workplace or whatever. And it’s such a loss because what was once a critical perspective looking out, hoping to change the culture, is turning inward and losing all of its gumption and power.” More recently, Haynes noted to Michael Koresky in the book Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process, when discussing the New Thought concept of overcoming disease through self-love, that “it is so fundamental within a free market ideological landscape, where the individual is made to feel responsible for their conditions.” The façade of a place like Wrenwood is anti-establishment and critical, seeking to help those who have been failed by a culture that is literally poisoning them; yet underneath the patina of progressive inclusivity and social change, they prevent their adherents from connecting their struggles to a broader social critique by placing the blame at their own feet — and Haynes takes care to remind us that Peter Dunning profits off of this self-abnegation. Carol, a blank slate of a character, is the perfect symbolic receptacle for how a burgeoning awareness of how one’s society is harming them can be quickly, ruthlessly co-opted.
Haynes was directly inspired by the AIDS pandemic when making Safe, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, dominated by isolation, fear, and ever-growing social mistrust, some made connections between the issues surfaced by the contemporary pandemic and Haynes’ film. The COVID-19 pandemic also hastened the mainstreaming of fringe ideas about health, some of which have much in common with Louise Hay’s, culminating in the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who sowed skepticism about COVID vaccines and repeatedly made the false claim that the recreational usage of poppers caused AIDS — as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. At the time of this writing, President Donald Trump has also nominated Dr. Casey Means as the United States Surgeon General, a healthcare professional who has relentlessly promoted the idea that stringent dietary restrictions and constant glucose monitoring is the path to health, and who herself sells glucose monitors through her company, Levels. Meanwhile, ruthless cuts to government-funded medical research are underway.
Haynes has clearly proven to be both a sharp critic of his contemporary cultural moment and a sadly prescient observer of where American society is headed. In the final shot of Safe, Carol White, gaunt, sallow, and with a mottled bruise marking her forehead, stares into the mirror and weakly repeats an affirmation: “I love you. I really love you. I love you.” In this “false happy ending,” inspired by those crafted by one of Haynes’ most prominent directorial influences, Douglas Sirk, Haynes suggests that Carol has mistaken her own subjugation for empowerment. Carol White is a potent, multivalent symbol — of passive acceptance of social roles, of physical revolt against these same constricting roles, of the hollowing out of interiority encouraged in a society that relentlessly categorizes and mechanizes individuals — but she possesses a haunting familiarity. Outside of the sleek, suffocating frame of Safe, hordes of people are pressed into lives that are as physically and spiritually flattening as Carol’s, and are made to believe they alone are to blame.
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