Safe

Space, Pressure, Femininity aims to open up discussions around gendered space, cinematic space, hysteria and its contemporary manifestations and mutations, hysterical spaces, the space of and the space for representation, social space, social pressure, psychic space and psychic pressure... SAFE - Todd Haynes 1995 Sat 11th October 5pm HOUSE OF MIRTH - Terence Davies 2000 Sat 8th November 5pm TEN - Abbas Kiarostami 2002 Sat 29th November 5pm Safe Todd Haynes 1995 Sat 11th October 5pm "I wanted the opening to be a glossy, slow entry into this world. The way it's described in the script is that the viewer is driving up a hill and watching houses go from small to large to larger, all more and more simulated in their architecture. I was thinking of Encino, where my parents just happen to live and where the architecture is at once stunning, frightening, and fascinating - fake Tudor, fake country manor, at night bathed in the iridescent blue-green glow of street lamps and landscape lighting, with that buzz of electricity in the air. Everything the film is about can be seen in those houses from outside at night." Todd Haynes on Safe in an interview for Art Forum in 1995. The following excerpt taken from sensesofcinema.com: Safe is a masterpiece - if for no other reason than the discomforting feelings of claustrophobia in open space that its imagery so expertly generates. Its visuals have the sterility of Kubrick. They transform familiar suburban and natural landscapes into boxed-in prisons. This complements the story of Carol White (Julianne Moore), a housewife in 1987 California who becomes allergic to her environment. Her disease baffles everyone - her doctors, her husband - and she finally goes to the Wrenwood Center, a New Age health retreat, where she hopes to recover. A childlike viewpoint is evident throughout Safe. Carol's house is filled with possessions and pictures accumulated over a lifetime that constantly haunt her with history. Haynes pans over a family picture display at one point, and it is frightening to see the change in Carol's expression from early childhood to early adulthood. The smiles of a toddler Carol are juxtaposed with the blank, passive expression of a high school photo, suggesting that this bird has been trapped for years in a gilded cage, completely unawares. Carol is also stepmother to her husband's son - a metaphor of disconnection from the people around her, and nicely played out in a later scene at Wrenwood when the young son is framed at the far right of the image away from Carol and her husband as if separated by an immense gap. We might call this an illustration of Carol's loss of innocence, but Haynes doesn't seem to wholly believe in the innocence of children. Rather, he suggests there are worlds of difference between adult and child - each stage has its own rules of conduct and behavior, and yet it is inevitable that the two sides will confront each other. In Haynes' work, this is oftentimes a cataclysmic meeting of the minds - from the intentionally mangled Barbie dolls in Superstar, to the child's murder of his father in Poison, to Carol's physical and emotional journey in Safe. Indeed, Carol appears to regress, over the course of the film, to a childlike state. Sealing herself in a sterile, white igloo at the end of the film, Carol looks in the mirror, past herself and into the audience, and says, "I love you." In this moment she is born again, but at the expense of the physical trappings of humanity. She is now a child locked in a protective womb, and we regard her both as alien and compatriot. The disease gives Carol identity, and she passes this onto us, infects us with her own truth. It's as powerful an image as that which ends Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), albeit one whose aims are even more ambiguous and unsettling for being confined to a recognizable, earthly plain. The following excerpt taken from The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling Good in Todd Haynes's Safe and the American Cultural Landscape by Julie Grossman, Other Voices, v.2, no.3, January 2005. In Todd Haynes's 1995 film Safe Carol White becomes environmentally sick as a sublimated response to the empty upper-class housewife's role she leads. Although she acquires no voice with which to articulate her rebellion against the husband, the medical doctor, and the psychiatrist, all of whom see nothing wrong with her, she rebels by developing multiple chemical sensitivity. As has been noted, Safe functions as a late twentieth-century reprise of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's celebrated short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" about a woman's postpartum experience of the rest cure. 1 Like Gilman, Haynes charts the story of a woman forced into sickness and, strangely, forced through her sickness to rebel against a thoroughly masculinist culture ruled by discourses that inhibit human agency and imagination. While Gilman's unnamed narrator escapes her confinement through madness, the affect-less Carol White, brilliantly played by Julianne Moore, escapes her indoctrination as a sanitized Stepford-wife servant of male consumerist culture, first, through illness, then, as a response to that illness, through the adoption of the mindless self-help rhetoric of the Wrenwood retreat, a bogus support group. Both texts are about a woman's attempt to own her life in a culture utterly defined by stifling conventions and social regulations: in particular, the male-defined discipline of medicine. Gilman's narrator wishes to counter her depression and isolation by becoming active and by writing; her doctor-husband insists that she has "a slight hysterical tendency," and she is "absolutely forbidden to 'work' until [she is] well again" (Gilman, 42). Reading Safe in juxtaposition to "The Yellow Wallpaper" helps illuminate the strongly feminist spirit of the film, 2 which can be understood in two related ways: First, Safe offers a scathing critique of the masculinist cultural disciplines-most especially a radical individualist insistence on self-help-that organize American experience and self-definition. Second, the film subverts the principle of ameliorative cinema, a shallow optimism where a feminist position can only be imagined in terms of paradigms of role-modelling, which holds troubling implications for the prospect of feminist representation. These two elements of the film are connected in an important way, since the film's refusal to lend effective and conscious agency to Carol-frustrating and disturbing critics and viewers-shows aggressively not only the extent to which social disciplines victimize women but also the limits of feel-good representations of women who overcome obstacles and manage their oppression. Safe's meaning is less ambiguous, though no less complex, than it is generally taken to be, much more than the "chic postmodern chiller" it was deemed by Rita Kempley (Kempley, D2). Further, the critical response it has elicited points to the powerfully persistent role of ameliorative cinema, even in the context of independent filmmaking. The film forces us to de-Gump our sentimental reading of film through its alienating mise-en-scene and through its presentation of a woman whose distance from a conventional feminist ideal moves us to consider the limits of that ideal as it is sentimentally portrayed in mainstream American film, as well as the brutality and danger to women inherent in the social disciplines that rule, define, and explain the character of Carol White. Indeed, Todd Haynes is the ultimate Foucauldian social-problem film director, all of whose films are about how social institutions (including, as Edward O'Neill notes, the cinema) produce identities. 3 Safe shows the very categories of mind and body to be unreliable barometers of health and well-being. The social institutions - of marriage, and medicine, and American individualism and the cult of self-help, as well as the larger organizing principles of class, gender, and race (Carol's surname of "White" marks an illusion of "safe" identity that the film destabilizes 4 ) - determine Carol's unfortunate fate. While Naismith documents the effect of these structures on Carol, the way, for example, Wrenwood "ignores the social and structural factors that produce ill health" (379), she stops short of articulating Haynes's critique, since she, like other viewers and critics (see Lynch, for example), maintains that there is ambiguity regarding the sources of Carol's illness: "Despite a bias towards the physical explanation, Haynes makes it impossible to settle definitively on one reading over another because of the complicating factors of Carol's fragile sense of identity, which enters into both her and our response to her illness, and the absence of concrete knowledge about environmental illness. Safe sets up these possible readings, only to throw their validity into doubt, so that our understanding of what and who is to blame for Carol's illness constantly fluctuates" (368). I want to contest this reading of Carol experience as ambiguous: Haynes clearly identifies as criminal all of the social disciplines and structures that appear in the film, and Carol's case is too hopeless to allow for anything but sympathy for her. It is, I believe, our psychological and socially inscribed need to rebuke individuals who have no power to change their circumstances that makes us want to find fault with Carol. Two points need to be made regarding our frustration with and criticism of Carol: first, focusing on the trouble with Carol bypasses her status as a character: a symbol in a pattern of meaning; this issue I will return to, as I later discuss other examples of feel-good films whose virtues are limited to our regard for models of viewer identification and projected desire. Second, far from evading politics by showing his "heroine" to be "merely" a victim with no hope of transforming her condition or circumstance, Haynes offers an uncompromised and, I would argue, deeply politicized view of a diseased system of social regulation. The film begs viewers to examine the process of the social production of identity - in this case, sick identity - and to consider the serious cost of both leaving these processes unexamined and settling for trite or easy answers.