Safe
I know that Americans are supposed to hate whatever they can’t understand, and certainly current Hollywood filmmaking is predicated to the point of tedium on this truism. But part of what makes Todd Haynes’s Safe the most provocative American art film of the year so far–fascinating, troubling, scary, indelible–is that it can’t be entirely understood. The mystery and ambiguity missing from mainstream movies are all the more precious, magical, even sexy here, in a 35-millimeter feature employing professional actors set partly in the plusher suburban reaches of the San Fernando Valley.
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Haynes’s layered constructions of sounds and images have a way of defamiliarizing–making strange, as the Russian formalists put it–the characters and settings. But having set this unhinging process in motion, Haynes seems as helpless as his spectators at controlling the fallout, and as a result there isn’t much agreement about the meanings expressed. Unlike some of my colleagues I would argue that this movie’s emotions are much clearer than its ideas, but certainly the degree to which satire figures in the film is not crystal clear. Attitude outstrips analysis in this movie by a ratio of about three to one, and one of the confusions fostered by this imbalance is the idea that Haynes’s hatred for his characters and their milieus and his precise grasp of their speech patterns (“All right, hands up, who wants decaf?”), their appearance, and their homes necessarily add up to a careful analysis of who they are and what makes them tick.
In the scenes that follow, everyday events seem to take the place of any plot, and all the interior and exterior spaces are made to seem massive, with Carol lost in their reaches like a loose cog. Even more impressive than Haynes’s visual sense is his sound track, which in these sections creates an eerie SF atmosphere and a feeling of displacement through a number of subtly alienating strategies. These immense, opulent suburban settings are inflected by our sense of their emptiness, not to mention Carol’s.
The Village Voice’s Georgia Brown and the New York Free Press’s Godfrey Cheshire, both intelligent critics, have accepted this ending as somehow hopeful rather than the final nail in Carol’s coffin (my own interpretation). Brown has even chastised me in print for calling Haynes “heartless” (in fact I called Superstar heartless), arguing that Safe is brimming over with compassion for Carol and Superstar with compassion for the Carpenter family, and I suppose Barbie dolls too. (After all, in more ways than one Safe is a remake of both Superstar and the disease-horror segment of Poison.)
