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Todd Haynes' Safe
by Stephen Brody
July 20, 1995
www.stephenbrophy.org

Sometimes a movie requires us to think through its implications rather than telling us step by step how we are supposed to feel. This happens so infrequently that we might think there is something missing from the movie, but that is not the case with Todd Haynes' new film, "Safe," even though several critics have demonstrated an inability to rise to it's challenges. "Safe" takes on the "disease movie of the week" genre and subverts it into a queer critique of mainstream and "new age" medical culture.

Carol White, luminously portrayed by Julianne Moore, floats through her San Fernando Valley days and nights, conscientiously filling her roles as wife, mother and upper-middle class homemaker, but gradually becoming aware that something is wrong. She has unexplained headaches, tiredness, nose bleeds, and her doctor can find no cause for these symptoms. He suggests that she visit a psychiatrist.

Eventually Carol figures out that she is allergic to her entire style of life, and to many of the chemicals that make it possible. She has to retreat from this life, to Wrenwood, a new age shelter in the New Mexico mountains. There she finds a circle of sufferers from similar ailments, and an HIV+ guru who tells them they have to look inside themselves to find the causes of their problems. It is particularly in this section that the audience is challenged to see and understand that Carol is no better off in this new age retreat than she was in the hands of her family physician.

Julianne Moore is an inspired choice to create the central role of Carol. She conveys with seeming ease both the vulnerable fragility that invites our involved concern and the restless intelligence that will not, at first, settle for the pat solutions offered by husband, friends and doctor to explain away her predicament. Xander Berkeley plays Greg, her husband, and convincingly demonstrates the conflicting tensions of frustration and concern generated by his wife's mysterious condition. Rising star James LeGros has a small role as one of the patients at Wrenwood, and Lorna Scott and Kate McGregor Stewart stand out among the other, numerous supporting roles.

Haynes and his cinematographer, Alex Nepomniaschy, create an alluring but suffocating environment for Carol to move around in, one so color saturated and focussed on interior design that it seems to swallow her up. This environmental tension is underscored by the dark music composed for the film and performed by Ed Tomney. This subtly melancholy atmosphere contrasts very nicely with the seemingly much more sunny Wrenwood, which makes Haynes' undercutting of this supposed solution to her problems all the more remarkable.

Many of us have been seduced at some point in our lives by the apparently simple solutions to complex problems offered by self-help books and new age gurus. This seduction is made possible by the basic, common sense truths that underlie these books and philosophies. Todd Haynes does not deny these truths, or try to hide them. He merely invites us to look more closely at the false ways they are used to control our lives. He demands that we think for ourselves, and we would do well to accept his invitation.

THE INTERVIEW

Todd Haynes has had to answer too many questions about why, as a queer filmmaker, he hasn't make a queer movie, and he doesn't understand why so many people can't see how queer his movie is. After all, he is telling the story of someone who "realizes that her body and her life are incompatible with this world she's been thrust into, and feels pain for the first time, feels really alone for the first time."

In a conversation with me recently at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, where his new film, "Safe," will open this week, he went on to say, "Carol's isolation is the mark of her resistance or her inability to assimilate. But this is the thing most social groups are bent on denying. We become a part of groups so that we feel a part of something, so we can stop feeling our ultimate loneliness, which is something we all have. We try to identify ourselves in relation to the people around us, and when that slips through Carol's fingers when she becomes sick, she is at the most radical point in her life."

Quoting James Baldwin, Haynes says, "a victim who can articulate her experiences as a victim is no longer a victim - she has become a threat." This was a guiding principle in his most notable previous work, "Poison," with its three interlaced stories of outsiders coming to terms with the limitations of their environments and transcending them. But in "Safe," he shows that once "Carol has begun to threaten the world around her, there are places like Wrenwood that come charging in and quickly socialize her and put her back in order, define her again as a subject."

The Wrenwood segment of "Safe" has generated the most critical disagreement. "What I don't understand," says Haynes, "is this insistence on the part of certain critics that I have no point of view, or it's too ambiguous. Wrenwood is so carefully constructed to create a sense of doom - every scene is leaning toward some potential doom, that's either facing Carol or the people around her, or marking the leader's suspicious elements. It's very persistent in that way - I don't get people's confusion."

He is saddened by the fact that the "comprehensive political critiques about society in the 60's and 70's have been turned into this sort of cure-all, this overly reductive or simplistic way of resolving problems."

I reminded him that he had once said (in a 1991 Cineaste interview) that "films ... about gay characters, like Longtime Companion or Making Love or Cruising are really straight ... because formally and structurally ... they follow the rules completely without any attempt to look from a different perspective." He replied that "Safe" is "a film about immunity and the body and therapeutic solutions to diseases like AIDS. Maybe most importantly for me, its a film that takes genres, like disease movies and completely inverts the values and the messages that those films are all about maintaining."

"In every movie we see, we identify this great big beautiful hero, who's always can speak better than we can and act more valiantly than we can and do all these courageous things. And when their conflicts get resolved at the end of the movie, we feel affirmed in the process. To me that's one of the ways in which dominant or mainstream films function. So I'm trying to look at that structure from a markedly different perspective."

"I'm interested in what is irreconcilable with homosexuality to mainstream heterosexual culture - I don't want to just find a nice, happy, comfortable place at the table. I like how our sexuality undermines and calls into question straight assumptions ... Environmental illness is the most brilliant metaphor ... it's the body saying 'stop - I can't handle this world that we're living in.' Whether you're intellectually ready to accept the implications of that or not, your body is saying stop."

Next up for Haynes is a movie "about the glitter rock of the early seventies, taking up the whole question of bisexual androgynous culture - Iggy, Ziggy, Roxy, and all those people.

It was actually a pretty rich and fairly diverse period with a lot of remarkable similarities and contrasts with ... the trend of bisexuality today ... it's such a different cultural climate in the nineties than it was in the seventies." This project, still in the writing stage, "is based on a story that I wrote with James Lyons, [Haynes' partner] who was the editor of Safe, Poison and Dottie."

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