We Will Not Be Safe
Todd Haynes’ 1995 meditation on danger is 2017’s most relevant film.
Late in Abraham Riesman’s recent reappraisal of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, the author expands beyond the literal infertility at the center of Cuarón’s story to make it relevant to our current situation. “It’s a story about how people like me, those who have the luxury of tuning out, need to awaken,” he writes. “This has been a brutal year, but we were already suffering from a kind of spiritual infertility: The old ideologies long ago stopped working. In a period where the philosophical pillars supporting the global left, right, and center are crumbling, the film’s desperate plea for the creation and protection of new ideas feels bracingly relevant.”
Cuarón’s genius in Children of Men is having created a startlingly earthy sci-fi film that supports such an interpretation. Much of Riesman’s piece is about how Children was a commercial flop, but the miracle is that it’s such a great action film. Cuarón came this close to creating an anti-fascist blockbuster before resigning himself to banal blockbusters like Gravity.
But if the spiritual dimension of Cuarón’s film is an Easter egg to be excavated, it is the unflinching (though elusive) center of another film celebrating an anniversary of sorts this year— Todd Haynes’ Safe, which is set in the San Fernando Valley in 1987, exactly three decades ago.
Safe’s plot concerns Carol White, a desultory housewife—played by Julianne Moore — who appears to develop some sort of environmental illness. I say “appears” because the film denies us easy conclusions about the cause of this illness, leading us down a series of blind alleys.
Carol does not appear well from the first scene, when we see Moore’s peach-ringed eyes over the shoulder of her husband’s labored love-making. Shot with the antiseptic clarity of 2001 and layered with a portentous horror film score, Carol is being stalked by a monster we never see but about which we receive ominous clues — or what we inevitably take as clues. There are the painters and the new couch and the perm, yet her caretakers —all male, her husband and a series of doctors — can’t find anything medically wrong. Finally, she finds a community of fellow-sufferers led by a charismatic guru.
In a devastating final scene, Carol, who has retreated to a porcelain-lined “safe house” — compared earlier in the film to the inside of a refrigerator, that childhood avatar of certain death — attempts to face herself in a mirror and utter the words “I love you.”
Mapped onto the conclusion of Children of Men — in which the hope for humanity’s rebirth, the first child born in ages, sets sail on a boat — Carol’s affirmation can be read as a new beginning. Chased to near extinction, Carol will rebuild herself, perhaps, from the inside out.
Are we now, or have we ever been, safe? Is safety something humans can secure? Do we agree what safety is?
Donald Trump ran both for and against competing ideas of safety. He ridiculed the safe spaces of the campus left and promised job security and safety from external threats. Paradoxically, a sort of implied safety played into Trump’s viability as a candidate.
In New York, one of the first things that strikes you is how dangerous the subways are. Not because of crime — which is overstated here and elsewhere — but because the subway tracks lay open, dirty trenches of mechanical violence. You can walk right up to the edge; throw yourself in if you want.
Out in America there is a higher expectation of regulatory safety — signals at every railway crossing — though the conditions of this expectation have become invisible to those who enjoy it. Protected from danger, they forget it exists. This is how history works: tearing itself apart as each generation forgets the conditions of its unprecedented safety and saws the ladder out from under itself like some useless dead branch. This is the absurdity of the Tea Party’s demand for the destruction of the state even as they stand atop its achievements. Safety seems like a given, part of nature — or, rather, nature presented in a certain way. Could Donald Trump have ever been elected if he had not hosted The Apprentice?
I mean he was on that TV show? He can’t actually be a fascist, right? They wouldn’t let us walk right up to the tracks.
So Trump voters enjoy a constituted safety that they experience as natural while marginalized communities seek to constitute safe spaces where they find none. The former’s “natural” safety appears as absurd to the latter as the latter’s self-consciously constructed “safe spaces” feel redundant to the former.
The end result is that, while Americans’ absolute safety is arguably at or near an all-time high (though it is, like the future, unevenly distributed), obsession with safety has intensified. We stockpile guns and slather our hands with anti-bacterial lotions, we are so afraid of each other.
Google’s Ngram Viewer shows incidence of “safety” hitting a low in 1910, with noticeable bumps for World War I and World War II, followed by a long steady rise starting in 1970.
Many interpretations are possible — conclusions can be little more than poetic —but one could see this as corresponding to the shredding of the safety net initiated by Reagan. One might also see this as coinciding with the rise of the divisive style in American politics generally, with demagogues conjuring threats from which they, and they alone, can offer shelter. If there is something common to all discourses of safety in America, it is that safety is perfectible. Total safety is possible.
If Carol White is not safe, safety does not exist. That is the point of departure for Safe’s “argument.” She is the picture of modern affluence, yet she is dying — figuratively and literally. What is happening?
Haynes guides us through a series of interpretations. The most obvious is that this is yet another tale of modern anomie, which even by 1995 (when Safe appeared) had been aestheticized to the point of camp. Carol is materially fulfilled yet empty, wan and bloodless as a Prada spread. This toxic comfort finds its objective correlative in the unseen chemicals around her. But early on, it is clear there is something else going on — something more to this monster.
In an early scene, two of Carol’s friends chat after an aerobics class about a self-help author whose theory is that “we don’t really own our own lives. We’re taught what to do and think, but emotionally we’re not in charge.”
A standard self-help diagnosis, but even the friend who advocates it can’t commit to the solution. “I just think he’s very good on certain things,” she says twice, reiterating, “He’s very good on certain things.”
Carol’s friends cannot commit to a total view of their predicament. Instead they mix and match, selecting individual pieces like the couch we see Carol agonizing over. The idea that their problem is fragmentation — spiritual dismemberment — is confirmed when Carol meets with some fellow sufferers. They are, it seems, as lost as Carol’s other friends — they share stories about how no one believes them — but they are energized by a shared narrative, a secret knowledge that holds them together. They know — or think they know — why they suffer. It energizes Carol, too, who demonstrates the only real vivacity she shows in the film, talking eagerly — if confusedly — about what she has learned. She has gotten religion.
But Safe is not a recovery story. Carol’s attempt to tell herself “I love you” in the final scene cannot be read as the catharsis of an after-school special. We find this out when she commits herself to the Wrenwood Center, a remote retreat run by Peter Dunning, a domineering guru who advocates ever-increasing detachment from the outside world. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have a confession I’d like to make,” he announces. “I’ve stopped reading the papers.”
Safe’s most obvious reading, of course, is as an allegory of the AIDs crisis. “I really wanted to make a film that targets people who make AIDS someone else’s issue,” Haynes said at the time. Carol gets sicker and sicker as doctors and gurus fail her. But Haynes has also noted that the Dunning character, an AIDs sufferer, serves as the film’s false moral center. He lives in a mansion on top of a hill — not much different than the one Carol is supposed to be detoxing from — and he is cruel to those who cannot put mind over intractable matters, even childhood brutalization. All sickness is the sufferer’s fault. There is a grotesque, tortured figure who stomps the ground like a wraith from Dante, because — Dunning says — he has not let go of his fear.
It is against this background that Carol, as sick as we have seen her, enters her “safe house” and attempts her affirmation.
Safety makes Carol sick, but the pursuit of safety from this sickness makes her sicker. So goes the dialectic of safety that Haynes sets in motion. Seen this way, Carol White brings to mind two other women: one fictional, one real.
First, consider Franny Glass from Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger’s spiritual (if not literary) masterpiece. Like Carol White, her privilege has made her sick. She faints on a date with her stuffed-shirt college boyfriend. Unlike Carol, her sickness is not passive, but a kind of active rejection. She has become so smart, so goddammed Caulfieldian, that she sees through everyone else’s pretentiousness until she can’t take it anymore. She returns to her family’s Manhattan apartment and throws herself on the couch and prays. She turns inward, as it were, and tries to say “I love you.”
Ultimately, she is counseled by her worldly brother Zooey, who explains that if she thinks spirituality is about withdrawing from the world, then she’s gotten it wrong. He explains:
You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don’t realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don’t see how you’ll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment.
This culminates in Franny’s re-entry into the world of action through the mediation of “the Fat Lady,” a childhood image passed onto them by their precocious older brothers as a symbol of the ceaseless, gratuitous action recommended by the Bhagavad Gita.
The spiritual writer Simone Weil presents another possible outcome for Carol White. The possibility of permanent detachment and, ultimately, death. While the medical causes of Weil’s death are debated, she is popularly thought to have starved herself, to have weaned herself off the world until she left it behind. (Salinger would have understood. “You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddamn phenomenal world,” Zooey says in Franny and Zooey.)
Biographer Richard Rees writes of Weil, “As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.”
Will Carol White live or die of love? Will she re-enter the world, or will she fade away? In any case, she — like us — will never escape danger. She will never be safe. The pursuit of safety will only bring more danger. This is the space between terror and hope where Haynes leaves us.
As Haynes short circuits this recovery narrative, one is reminded of Auden’s contested line from September 1, 1939, written in response to the outbreak of World War II: “We must love one another or die.” Famously bowdlerized by Mitch Albom in Tuesdays with Morrie — as “Love each other or perish” — it has become a trite affirmation and a social media banality. Auden himself was immediately ashamed of it. He omitted the line from later anthologies and — in one case — altered it to the devastating, “We must love one another and die.”
Because if Carol White cannot be safe, none of us can be. Not those who live in safe spaces or those who seek to construct them. Not in New York or in the rest of America. Nowhere. No one. Not ever.
I love you.
