Safe (1995) and Human Ecology, or Can We Escape Toxic Air?

Safe (1995) and Human Ecology, or Can We Escape Toxic Air?

Safe (1995) updates alienation from the modern industrial world explored in Red Desert (1964) with a focus on the multiple chemical toxins in the air as of 1995 and their horrific effect on an upscale suburban homemaker, Carol White (Julianne Moore), but the film makes its point by transforming an everyday event into a thrilling eco-disaster. Rita Kempley of the Washington Post argues that the film’s director, Todd Haynes, “takes what might have been a deadly disease-of-the-week and turns it into a chic postmodern chiller.” Desson Howe, another Washington Post staff writer, states that Haynes takes a “world of postmodern angst and makes it tremendously affecting and eerily compassionate.” And Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle suggests that Haynes “wants to engage us on a deeper level—to challenge our notions of illness and identity, make us wonder if we aren’t all, in some way, allergic to the 20^th century.”

As in Red Desert, pollution surrounds Carol throughout the film. She drives down crowded streets, accepts furniture and other goods from delivery trucks. Conversations between Carol and her husband, Greg (Xander Berkeley) or best friend, Barbara (Ronnie Farer) are blurred by the noise of machinery: a vacuum cleaner, a phone, a television or radio. Roger Ebert asserts that this “low-level hum on the soundtrack… suggests that malevolent machinery of some sort is always at work somewhere nearby…. The effect is to make the movie’s environment quietly menacing.” In a literal homage to Red Desert this menacing environment sickens Carol so much she becomes alienated from it, a response illustrated by long shots of her, even in her own home. She is set apart from her maid and other servants and the painters whose work is accompanied by a television voice explaining that critically ill patients die of chemical exposure. According to Guthmann, these “master shots and slow, stately camera moves… recall[] the eerie austerity of Stanley Kubrick’s films and suggest[s] a seething menace under the hushed metallic veneer.”

Settings associated with chemical toxicity are also shown in long shot. A shopping center where Carol takes her dry cleaning is shown from a distance, for example. Then the connection between toxic air and Carol’s sickness is made more palpable when Carol’s car is stuck behind a truck spewing smoke. Carol coughs so violently from the smoke that she races into a parking garage to escape. The squeal of her wheels and car radio heighten the painful coughing until she is gasping for air. These initial scenes introduce the elements of human ecology explored in the film. Humans are causing toxic air, and humans are suffering because of it. This environmental message is amplified by an image of earth from space and a television message about deep ecology, “a new more holistic approach.” Within this toxic environment, Carol grows sicker, yet the male figures in her life blame her emotional state rather than the state of the environment for her ill health. Her stepson Rory (Chauncy Leopardi) illustrates the masculine violence they embody with a report about Los Angeles gang violence. The family doctor finds nothing wrong with Carol. Her husband gets angry with her headache claims and suggests she is withholding sex, even though she is now suffering nose bleeds because of a recent permanent wave at a beauty shop. A second visit to the dry cleaner, now filled with pesticides being spread by a masked exterminator, sends Carol into a life-threatening event. Rushed to the hospital and intubated, Carol’s doctor claims she has no discernable problems. Her disease is hysterical, the doctor implies, and mollifies Carol by supporting her demand that a nurse cease spraying the room with air disinfectant. 

A flyer advertising the Wrenwood Center and its programs seems to offer Carol a solution. “Do you smell fumes? Are you allergic to the 20^th Century?” the flyer asks. Instead, Carol’s doctor suggests she see a psychiatrist, handing the doctor’s card to her husband.  Even though the Wrenwood Center’s leader, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman) tells Carol and other audience members attending a seminar that “certain people’s tolerance to everyday chemicals” is weakened and an allergy testing session proves her reactions are environmentally-based, Carol’s stay at the Wrenwood Center seems to worsen her condition. Peter Dunning even tells her and other group members that they “allowed themselves to get sick. Carol is at fault for her condition, not her toxic environment, they all tell her, a message that becomes even more horrific when the film begins to focus more closely on the red sore on Carol’s forehead as she tells herself, “I love you” in her safe house mirror. Overall, however, earlier segments of the film demonstrate well the human causes for a toxic environment and suggests the need to find a safe haven free from poisonous air.