Jackson

Safe follows Carol, a homemaker in Los Angeles who slowly becomes overwhelmed by her suburban environment and begins to experience mysterious bodily maladies. She has headaches. She can’t breathe. Her body erupts into seizures. Carol’s mysterious illness confounds biomedicine, but can be understood through the framework of the political ecology of health and body in which “health and sickness are more-than-human; they are an ecology” (Jackson and Neely, 2015: 2). Carol’s body is reacting to her geography, a home and social life infused with de-politicized silence and disconnection. Reecia Orzeck (2007: 499), working with Harvey, argues that “the body, for Marx, is porous: the dialectical product of worlds without and within.” As a result, she argues, “if the body reflects the world it must have a mechanism for absorbing that world.” Carol’s body is allergic to her world. As she tries to absorb her “place,” she becomes sick from her everyday life, what the film calls “multiple chemical sensitivity” (for more about the condition, see Murphy, 2000). The film theorist Dennis Lim (2014) says Safe is an “existential horror movie in which the monster is both all around us and nowhere to be seen.”

As Carol gets sicker she moves between two homes, starting in a suburban mansion and ending in a porcelain igloo. According to Lim (2014), “The first home is opulent, the second one spartan; both are designed to keep out the world, safe havens that are also prisons of the self".

She becomes increasingly isolated due to her condition, and she finds a safe space in the landscape of New Mexico, a retreat for people whose bodies are also rejecting their environments. Using this site of alternative healing, Todd Haynes—who was ACT UP activist at the height of the AIDS crisis—depicts the “blaming the victim” attitude that was pervasive around HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s by examining how “we attach meaning and personal responsibility to illness” (Tobias, 2014). This commune does not heal Carol. A withdrawn figure in a hazmat suit that constantly circulates around this commune represents the unlikeliness of a cure. Instead, Carol ends up alone, getting sicker and sicker. The film, and Haynes, never reveal any cause for Carol’s sickness. Peter the commune leader tells his followers, “The only person who can make you sick is you,” echoing many very real New Age thinkers in the eighties and nineties who said that positive thinking was a miracle cure to any ailment. In the final scene Carol, alone, looks into the mirror (which is also the camera) and repeats “I love you.” It is a stark reminder of the limits of self-care in a culture of relentless individualized self-help.

Paul Jackson

https://www.academia.edu/34257281