Stephen Leonardi via Pexels
One of the first signs that something is wrong with Carol White in Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) appears during a routine trip to the hairdresser, where a perm leaves her with a nosebleed. The threat, as this moment suggests, is not an outside force but something woven into suburban domestic ritual.
Like Haynes’ later films Far from Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015), Safe follows an affluent housewife who can no longer conform to the ideal assigned to her. In those films, the break comes through forbidden desire: each protagonist falls in love with someone society deems unacceptable, threatening her place within the community. In Safe, the break comes through illness. Yet Safe does not merely show a woman marginalised by the world around her; it asks us to consider who stands to benefit from her exclusion.
Carol lives in 1987 California, a world that symbolises the unbridled materialism of that era, whilst her illness functions as an allegory for another defining issue of 1980s America: the AIDS epidemic. Her symptoms, her failing body, and the friends who keep their distance mirror the experiences of AIDS patients, whose plight society was reluctant to fully grapple with. Labelled a “gay disease”, AIDS was something the heterosexual majority could ignore. Haynes challenges that complacency by imposing AIDS’ debilitating effects upon an upper-middle-class heterosexual woman, transporting the disease’s battleground from the fringes into the domestic centre.
For Carol, repeated trips to the doctor bring neither relief nor cure. What makes her sick – the chemicals in the domestic cleaning products, the Los Angeles smog, the fumes her car emits – forms the foundation of her American “dream”. Safe thus becomes a meditation on the AIDS crisis, as well as a reflection on the environmental cost of consumerism. With her home, the traditional place of sanctity, now seemingly responsible for her illness, Carol retreats from the community she has worked so hard to belong to and seeks alternative treatment in the desert community of Wrenwood.
Wrenwood does not offer the traditional path of medication. Instead, Carol is taught that self-love holds the key to her recovery, an idea reminiscent of Louise Hay, who gained prominence in 1980s America by promoting the notion that a positive mindset could “cure” illness. What does Wrenwood symbolise exactly? Its very presence reflects an American approach to healthcare in which responsibility falls on the individual rather than on institutions. Carol is taught to hold herself responsible, rather than question the consumerism that may have rendered her ill. How can a society confront the possibility that the environmental destruction sustaining its wealth is also poisoning its people?
Wrenwood’s falsity as an institution is implied through a seemingly innocuous exchange. When Greg asks where Peter, the leader of Wrenwood, lives, Carol points to an extravagant house at the top of the hill, a luxury in contrast to the meagre lodgings Carol now calls home. The falsity is confirmed in the film’s final moments, when Carol repeats “I love you”, as instructed, this time into a mirror. Her reflection reveals a woman who arrived in search of improvement and is now in clear physical decline. Wrenwood has enriched its leader rather than healed the residents it claims to help.
In the film’s final moments, Carol repeats “I love you”, as instructed, this time into a mirror. Her reflection reveals a woman, one who had arrived in search of improvement, now in clear physical decline.
Wrenwood also foreshadows the modern wellness industry, which is forecast to grow even further in the coming years. Whether driven by funding pressure on public healthcare or by a culture that exploits “personal happiness” to suggest everything has a cure – usually in the form of a supplement with an exoticised ingredient list and several zeroes to its price tag – the result is the same: an unregulated wellness industry seeping into the space vacated by public healthcare. In Safe, Carol, unable to access the treatment she needs through conventional healthcare, is forced into the hands of an alternative wellness industry that exploits her desperation for its own financial gain.
Safe is effective not because it diagnoses the toxicity beneath the economic boom of the 1980s, but because it grapples with what comes next. Carol is failed by society, but it is the vacuum she gets sucked into, filled by a nefarious actor, that is so troubling. When society fails the sick, or is the direct cause of their sickness, who exploits the vacuum for their own gain?