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Safe Review
by Kirk Hostetter
from 24fps Fanzine

ONE: Carol White anticipates the delivery of her new blue-toned couch. Anyone would. But when she arrives home to find that a black one has infiltrated her habitat in the Valley, she gasps as if having just found her child bleeding on the floor. After all, it is not the one she had ordered, and her life is now out of balance.

TWO: Some time later, Carol guides delivery men into her living room and, having placed the teal couch in its proper place, they all stand still and silent, staring in various directions, camera resting on them as all involved (including the audience) wait for a cut. Perhaps Carol is taking the moment to recover from her setback, for now all is right in her world. What is for certain, though, is that she is waiting, waiting for something to do.

This is a very telling pair of scenes from Todd Haynes' Safe, a film that exhibits the physical and emotional fragility of its main character, a fragility formed by the shallow and lifeless world that she occupies--that of her San Fernando Valley circa 1987. Carol (Julianne Moore) is a suburban housewife, spending her days tending her gardens, socializing with her fluffy friends, satisfying her husbands needs and aerobicizing (although [android?] she never breaks a sweat). Julianne Moore glides through her role with a tentative grace, her pale complexion and delicate features working hand in hand with a hesitant and unassertive demeanor. She is the perfect victim-heroine for the director/writer's subject, and he seems both critical and sympathetic of her, effectively walking the line between the two.

Haynes places her within wide-framed, aesthetically cold, muted and barren interiors, keeping the camera at a distance so as to isolate the film's human subject. Safe's first act pulses and literally drones along, with television emissions and gentle, mechanized hums filling the soundtrack. The effect is unmistakably 2001esque (The New York Times accidentally described the film as taking place in the future), and Haynes credits Kubrick's 1968 project as an influence. And although at times Carol's life seems to be playing out inside some sort of machine, the HAL 9000 that controls the fate of 2001's heroes does not exist in the San Fernando Valley. This heroine's fate lies in the hands of another human creation, her upper class suburban sprawl.

Suburban life in general and suburban Los Angeles specifically has had its place contemporary films. But whereas Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands satirizes the suburban world as pure caricature, with its childlike color coded sets, and Spielberg's suburban California is a place where magical things can happen, Safe's San Fernando Valley offers a somber and ultimately bleak outlook on the state of human beings' "privileged" habitats. This slice of life has gone numb from segregated isolation and lack of stimulating personal contact (even Carol's "intimate" moments of lovemaking are spent staring upward, emotionless, assisting along her husbands pumps and groans.) These influences comprise the disease that has broken down Carol's immunity system; she is, as the bulletin board flyer states, "allergic to the 20th Century."

It is no wonder, then, that Carol begins feeling weak and sick for reasons that neither she nor her husband can understand, and that her doctors will not accept. From a hospital bed, she views a television commercial for Wrenwood, a New-Age compound in the Arizona desert and decides to give this healing resort a try. Here she falls under the aid of group guru Peter Dunning (played with a dry, subtle subversion by Peter Friedman), and begins her "healing" process. To his approximately 20 understudies, Dunning preaches the necessity of gentleness, understanding, and love, and though he adds a bit too much sugar to the recipe, these are facts difficult to argue. His questionable thesis, though, begins to reveal itself as he proclaims "I have stopped reading the newspapers. I have stopped watching the news on television." Dunning feels, in addition to looking inward, that completely isolating himself (themselves) from the outside world is a solution to their suffering. In doing this, he is replicating the very system that has destroyed many of these people. By turning his back on the world, he has dismissed not only its pains, but also its pleasures, created a false sense of well being, halted inoculation and perpetuated the "disease." [Haynes may be accused of rallying behind this point of view if it were not for the visual revelation of Dunnings ostentatious mansion, sitting on the hill (recalling, from Schindler's List, Camp Commander Goeth's gunning quarters), overlooking his subjects.]

Carol's husband visits, and though she claims that she has improved during her "temporary" stay at Wrenwood, he cannot even gain a kiss goodbye without eliciting a physical reaction: "maybe it's your cologne....I'm not wearing cologne!" Carol has "progressed" to the point where she cannot consummate her most intimate relationship. From this moment on, her fate is sealed, and after her birthday party celebration in which she gives a pathetically sad, "I fit in" speech thanking her fellow Wrenwooders for helping her so, she retreats to her white bubble-pod, stares into her mirror, and proclaims "I love you." All the while, the anonymous growth-boil-scab that has become more readily apparent on her forehead, grows.

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