Are We Safe? Review of Todd Haynes’ Safe

After watching the much acclaimed Carol (2015) by Todd Haynes, I decided to watch one of his earlier movies Safe (1995) with the great - and at the time of the movie aspiring - Julianne Moore. Although I thought Carol was pretty good, it did not thrill me as much as I had hoped and expected, at least not like the brilliant mini-series Mildred Pierce (2011), which I had seen previous to it.

The movie Safe is about a young married woman incidentally also named Carol (!) who seems to have a safe albeit dull well-to-do life in the San Fernando Valley. The movie opens with a drive home at night and then a scene of love-making with a close-up focus on her face. She, unlike her groaning husband Greg White (face unseen) does not enjoy the sex very much as her facial expressions do not change and definitely do not show any kind of pleasure gained. At the end of their intercourse, she merely taps her husband lightly on the back.

Her life is filled with boredom. They have a Mexican servant who fulfills all the everyday necessities, including the care of her stepson, while she is in charge of some of the interior decorating of the spacious house. She is upset that the new furniture is not the color she had ordered and complains about this to the factory.

Apart from that, she meets up with some of her female friends at the gym. Those women seem superficial and are interested (one might say even obsessed) with their looks and appearance. One of them urges Carol to try out a new diet fad that includes the sole consumption of fruits, and she accepts.

Yet gradually, her health begins to deteriorate. She has a very persistent coughing fit one day when driving home from work; she was forced to tailgate a truck emitting substantial amounts of exhaust fumes, and she blames her cough on that. Then she has a serious asthma attack at a baby shower of her friend, not to mention an ominous nosebleed at the hairdresser’s. Her doctor, however, insists that she is physically fine and suggests that she see a psychiatrist.

None of these remedies work for her. She is sent to an allergy specialist who determines that she is highly allergic to milk. Yet cutting out dairy products and returning to a regular non-fruit diet does not alleviate her symptoms; in fact, over time her symptoms worsen, and she even faints at the dry-cleaner.

One day she hears of a group that claims that many people are allergic to their environment and that they are suffering from what they term multiple chemical sensitivity or the Twentieth-Century Disease. Curious about this group, she attends one of their meetings and finds people who seem to have similar symptoms. Slowly, she becomes convinced that the reason for her malaise lies in her environment, a dangerous cocktail of chemicals and pollutants that can even potentially kill a receptive and sensitive person like her.

Soon enough she joins some of the more extreme group members in a retreat that is located in a deserted and secluded area and where they sing songs, hold hands and are given motivational speeches by Peter Dunning, the author and so-called inventor / discoverer of this disease as well as its so-called cure. The cure, he insists, lies in positive thinking and to shelter oneself from all the evil that happens in the world, including violence and pollution. The retreat Wrenwood becomes their “happy” and “safe” place.

As we witness this group, we are reminded of both New Age philosophies as well as religious cults. Although the members are not openly religious or Christian, there is a lot of overlap there. We can sense that at first Carol is not comfortable in this place, but soon she comes to accept it as a possible alternative to her ills.

Curiously enough, she keeps getting worse until she decides to find shelter in a highly secluded place that has its own ventilation system. She basically lives in a bubble, far from any contact with other individuals, be they members of the retreat or even her husband.

This is a very sad movie that offers various layers of meaning and interpretation. First off, it shows the disillusionment and dissatisfaction of upper-class women who consign themselves to the home. The founding member of the group Peter Dunning (who himself incidentally suffers from AIDS) claims that each of their members is to be blamed for their ills. The reason they got sick was because they did not accept themselves as who they are and, more importantly, they did not love themselves sufficiently.

Partly, this may apply to Carol, but also it can be expanded to many other people in the modern industrialized world. We live in a place that has become too convenient for our own good and although the movie was made before the era of iPhones and iPads, it seems even more relevant and urgent now.

Our technological progress has left an indelible mark on us making it more difficult to communicate with each other and of having a satisfying and fulfilling relationship with ourselves and others. This malaise that she feels might also apply to us living in a world in which we find it hard to encounter personal meaning and relevance; while technology in its heydays used to spellbind us only in our homes with television sets, it has now become ubiquitous in the form of our handy and mobile smartphones.

Another layer of the film includes the fact that we are exposed to chemical hazards and pollutants in our daily life. The food that we eat is for the most part artificial and filled with chemicals and genetic manipulation; the air is mostly unfit for us to breathe filled with constant exhaust from cars and factories; our climate is becoming erratic and uncontrollable due to our own greed and negligence.

The more health-conscious groups these days may think they are evading some of these aspects by eating organic non-GM food, but they are also deluding themselves. There is no real safety from these growing pollutants and one needs to be as radical as she is in the end, to live in a self-contained bubble with self-grown food and sterilized water etc. to be “safe” for that matter.

As defeatist as that may sound, we are trapped in the consumer world and there seems to be no safety net and no exit from it all. The idea of completely blocking or isolating ourselves from others or even from these dangers and hazards is equally, if not more, harmful than accepting and living with them.

Add to this, the fear of lethal and contagious diseases, like the AIDS syndrome or more recently, the unpredictable Ebola virus or the antibiotic-resistant super-bug. These are just a few of the dangerous and even mortal infections that plague us and make us paranoid. The dark irony is that despite our advances in medicine, we are not safe yet. There is still danger lurking around the corner. (I am omitting other kinds of dangers here, in terms of incipient wars including those on drugs and terror, natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, and also tragic accidents like that of Chernobyl dipping surroundings with all its sentient beings and food and plantations in harmful radiation.)

Considering the fact that the film is set in the 80s makes it plausible that Carol’s mysterious, never clearly identified disease could be indeed AIDS. Not only does the founder of this group openly state that he is infected, but the movie also shows us a sex scene at its inception. She might have been infected by her husband, which is merely a theory as we are not given any concrete proof of his philandering. Nonetheless, the movie also captures some of the paranoia, helplessness and, in the case of AIDS, even prejudice and ignorance that are often associated with new unknown and infectious diseases.

Finally, the movie has another layer that includes a possible criticism of New Age philosophies and of religion and religious cults. In our despair, we are ready to swallow and believe anything that could get us out of this mess, that could give our life a little more sense, meaning and security. Although Haynes does not openly criticize the group (they are for the most part seen as rather honest if slightly deluded and naïve people), there is a sense that none of this will actually help but merely exacerbate the problem. At the same time, the raison d’être of this group seems to most likely be the financial rewards achieved by its founding author who himself does not live in the sheds like the members but in his luxurious home above the hill.

I very much enjoyed this film as much as it frightened me. This is the world that surrounds us, and so many of us walk around in a daze or in pain. The illness may be invented but it does hit the nail on identifying our own malaise in this modern consumer world of ours. There is a spiritual vacuum that each has to fill on their own; unfortunately, there are many charlatans out there that claim to guide and help us find our ways, while in many cases, they confound us even more.

At the same time, doctors and psychologists do not seem adept to help and heal us in a profound manner. Science addresses and redresses many ills and diseases, but some parts of us remain untouched, while the malaise still persists. The film itself urges us to look into the direction of our dis-ease, of our lack of ease in the modern world; to first recognize it and then to find something worthwhile to hold onto in the faint hope of being able to remedy it one of these days.