Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 1-September-02
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Safe (1995)

In 1995 I went to see "Dead Man Walking" because I read that it illustrated how every person, even convicted murderers, possesses a human soul of some intrinsic value. This intrigued me, because sometimes I have trouble accepting this idea and the related truism that we're all the same under the skin. However, it struck me at the time (and afterwards) that I don't necessarily regard murderers as inhuman (particularly ones as dopey and reluctant as Sean Penn was in that film); after all, fear, rage, stupidity, and rashness are entirely human traits, and I'm sure that remorse and guilt are felt to some degree by the majority of killers. Where I get stuck is when I come across people who appear, not to have a corrupt or damaged soul, but to have none at all, or to have a soul so completely suffocated by an unnatural way of life as to be all but negated. I have encountered people like this (in real life and fiction), and I have no idea what to make of them.

Todd Haynes' "Safe," which also came out in 1995, offers up just such a person and suggests that she does have a soul which needs to expand and be understood, even if she doesn't know it. This is a film that manages to be unique, startling, and unforgettable without resorting to the inferior (but common) use of shocking images and situations. Instead, it relies on clean, focused storytelling and excellent acting to depict a life that is at once recognizable and disturbingly alien. In doing so, it encourages viewers to consider what it is within us that imparts worth and meaning to the bare fact of our existence.

Julianne Moore stars (in the finest performance I've seen from her yet) as Carol White, the shallow, demure, sheltered second wife of a rich businessman in 1980s California. Carol spends her days gardening, going to aerobics, socializing with other women exactly like herself, driving her stepson to soccer, and managing a big, new, gaudy mansion (with the significant assistance of a Hispanic maid). Her vacant expression, quiet voice, and timid demeanor never change. She is infallibly polite and obliging. She is incapable of passion or enthusiasm; the most anger she can muster is a wan frustration (as when the furniture store delivers a black couch instead of the teal). She doesn't enjoy sex, although she submits to it dutifully; she doesn't smoke or drink (not even coffee). As someone notes at the gym, she doesn't even sweat. She is the very epitome of societally programmed stasis. She exists only as a part of her immediate family unit, and, in relation to that unit, is on par with the black Mercedes in the garage: a respectable looking, reliable, necessary part of the picture.

If anyone were to question how she felt about her life (she certainly wouldn't do so herself), Carol would undoubtedly say that she was perfectly content. But strange things begin to happen which not even her colossal vapidity can stifle. At first, she becomes chronically tired; then she starts suffering from insomnia, nosebleeds, coughing fits, rash, and bouts of nausea; finally, she experiences attacks of hyperventilation and faintness (all of which surprise her husband and friends, who have never had a moment's trouble with her). Her doctor tells her she is perfectly healthy and eventually recommends a psychiatrist, who accomplishes nothing. Then, by chance, Carol hears of a new disease called "environmental illness," which manifests itself in the symptoms she has evinced. Suddenly the significance of the images we have seen --- the car exhaust on the freeway, the aerosols in her bathroom, the pesticides she uses on her roses, the fumes from the dry cleaners, the perm she got at the salon --- is revealed. Could a constant exposure to chemicals be ruining Carol's health?

At this point you may wonder, as I did, what the movie is trying to say. Is Carol's subconscious engaging in a psychosomatic cry of agony, or is her body more than usually sensitive to the extreme toxicity of her suburban American lifestyle and surroundings? Having set up up these questions, writer/director Haynes moves Carol to a clinic in the desert and provides the answer: yes. When Carol watches an infomercial which asks, "Are you allergic to the 20th century?", the ambiguity of the question is telling. Yes, her illness is caused by the unhealthy psychological and emotional state of the closed-off, desensitized American trophy wife with no purpose whatsoever, and yes, it is also caused by the external environmental conditions that are currently threatening the earth and all its inhabitants. We are beings with distinct, primal, interior needs who are wedded to the world in which we live. We make our environment and then use it to construct our lives, for better or for worse.

The clinic to which Carol retreats in a final attempt to regain her health is a new age, touchy-feely sort of place run by a guru who suffers not only from environmental illness, but also from AIDS. To his mind, there is no difference between these two afflictions or the ways in which they must be battled. "If our immune system is damaged," he teaches, "it's because we have allowed it to be." All of the inmates have undergone emotional suffering (from grief, guilt, or simple, uncontrollable anger) and have thereby contracted a physical illness. Now, the one cannot be cured without addressing the other. Left alone in this atmosphere of self-realization and self-expression, Carol knows she has found something, but she cannot understand what. In group therapy, she is too embarrassed and repressed to speak, and her physical symptoms do not go away. In the end, she moves from her airy cabin into a "safe house:" a tiny, windowless, fiberglass igloo, minimally furnished, in which she shuts herself to search for the one thing that can begin to fix her, which she could not define and has never glimpsed before: her own soul.

"Safe" is obviously not your average Hollywood fare. It's a very strange movie that addresses difficult issues and does not provide a clear-cut ending. We really don't know what will happen to Carol, whether she will emerge whole from her safe house or become even more lost to a sickly non-existence. (It seems pretty clear, at least, that her marriage is all but over by the end.) But, despite her remoteness and the gaping holes in her personality, Carol is recognizable throughout as someone whom we may have met before. Would I have one single word to say to such a person? No. She would terrify me; there would be no way to reach her, no common thread of life on which to form even the smallest connection. But as the movie shows, there is something inside even the emptiest person that demands self-awareness and the acknowledgment of its own truth, and this thing will make itself known one way or another. No one is safe from that.

Copyright © 2002 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.