“I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS,” Bob Hope said, on July 4, 1986. It was the setup to a joke in a routine that three hundred and sixty people had paid a thousand dollars each to hear. Those donors, as well as President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, and the French President, François Mitterrand, and his wife, Danielle, were celebrating the rededication of the Statue of Liberty aboard a yacht named Princess. “Nobody knows,” Hope continued, “if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island ‘fairy.’ ” Cameras caught the Mitterrands cringing and the Reagans laughing. More than fifty thousand Americans were diagnosed with AIDS between 1981 and 1987, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 95.5 per cent of those people died from it. The numbers of sick and dead would spike in the years that followed. The image of a President and his wife, surrounded by swells and supplicants, roaring with laughter in the face of all that suffering, at the prompting of a fossilized icon of showbiz convention and at a celebration dedicated to a monument of the nation’s greathearted inclusiveness—honestly, it is a bit much. But metaphors tend to fail in the face of a plague. Under that kind of pressure, everything just comes to look more and more uncomfortably like itself.
Todd Haynes’s 1995 masterpiece, “Safe,” begins with the camera crawling at something like the speed limit through a meticulous stretch of twilit upscale suburbia that a credit somewhat redundantly identifies as California’s San Fernando Valley, and much more helpfully as 1987. It is a specific moment that Haynes chose for a specific reason, but it is also a moment to which, in the culture’s grim and farcical process of lapping itself, everything seems to have returned. A lower-rung celebrity that no one ever really held in terribly high regard, and whom everyone had lately figured out was a crook, is somehow in charge. Joe Biden is somehow still running for President, if only he could figure out why he deserves or even wants the gig. The houses lining the road are white and proud and modern and ensconced behind tall gates; there are no pedestrians to be seen. When Haynes’s camera finally arrives at the home of Carol White, the film’s blankly afflicted heroine, it pauses while an electronic gate yields to admit the Mercedes-Benz that is carrying her back to the gracious modern living space and comfortable life that will, in short order, begin trying to kill her.
Then, as now, there is a plague haunting the premises and trying the locks. Then, as now, those in power have disclaimed any responsibility and elected to wait and see how things play out; the President is once again posturing and chuckling through a crisis that he can’t quite bring himself to take seriously. Once Carol is safely inside the home she’s made with her husband and the son from his first marriage, she is on her own, stuck fast at the shrinking center of one deep long shot after another. Her isolation is clear from the start. We first see her face, impassive and absent, under the convulsive rutting body of her husband, in bleakest missionary position. The camera, in a series of queasily patient zooms, stands in for the oppressive moment in which Carol finds herself increasingly trapped and lost. The casual lies and happy-talking denial and leering qualification of the crises gathering outside the gates by the people in power, the blithe cutting of bait when it came to the vulnerable people and politically useful cities that those crises came to claim—these are all invisible and absent in these tasteful interiors. And yet Carol seems not just lost in all those lovely rooms but surrounded by them. The comforts of home close in on her.
Carol, played by Julianne Moore in one of the great performances of her career, fits into all these luxe California rooms like a luminous furnishing or abstruse piece of art. She’s breathy and passive and somehow all the more indistinct for being so beautiful; her friends from aerobics class notice, with playful envy, that she doesn’t ever sweat. The radio is a wash of AM-band evangelical blood and thunder and prosaically dire traffic updates. Her tween stepson’s current-events essay for school is a fetishistic recitation of both the carnage wrought by gang warfare in “the black ghettos of Los Angeles” and the specific weapons used to deliver it. Her life as a homemaker, on the other hand, is a series of light errands and lighter lunches. Even before she contracts the mysterious illness that will send her reeling and shrinking away from this life, Carol floats through her days—and, in a white silken robe on sleepless nights, through her icy, Kubrickian home—like a ghost.
When Carol develops an acute and sudden sensitivity to unseen and unknown elements in her environment—toxins, fumes, chemicals, particulates—the ambient chaos of the broader world breaches the gate and leaves her weak, confused, and without any real avenue of retreat. Her doctors are helpless, baffled, and then impatient as her condition grows worse. Carol brightens into something like assertiveness after embracing her identity as a sick person, then recedes as the poisons around her (and, perhaps, her fixation on the poisons around her) begin to overwhelm her defenses. She finds Wrenwood, a community of the similarly afflicted, presided over by the spookily self-assured guru Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), who lives high above his flock in a grandiose hilltop manse. He speaks the scattershot language of what we now call “wellness,” one rooted in self-lacerating shame, ritual, jargon, and a suffocating individualism. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Dunning tells a full house that includes Carol’s visiting husband and stepson, “I have a confession to make. I’ve stopped reading the papers. I’ve stopped watching the news on television.” Even reports of the outside world, he’s concluded, are simply too big a risk. “If I really believe that life is that devastating, that destructive, I’m afraid that my immune system will believe it, too. And I can’t afford to take that risk. Neither can you.”
At Wrenwood, Carol learns that her affliction, whatever it is, is fundamentally her fault, and can only be cured by loving herself—that is, by embracing her poisoner and tormenter—more fully. (“The only one who can make you sick is you,” Dunning tells a patient mourning the recent loss of her husband. “If your immune system is damaged, it’s because you allowed it to be.”) At the end of the film, put on the spot at an impromptu dance party by a gentle addict (James LeGros) with whom she’d enjoyed a tentative flirtation, Carol delivers a halting speech about what she’s learned at Wrenwood. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she apologizes, “just that I really hated myself before I came here, so I’m trying to see myself hopefully more as I am, more positive, like, seeing the pluses. Like, I think it’s slowly opening up now, like, people’s minds, like, educating, like, AIDS, like, other types of diseases—and it is a disease—we just have to be more aware of it, even ourselves. Like, reading labels, and going into buildings.”
The film leaves Carol, in a rare close shot in the porcelain-lined igloo on Wrenwood’s grounds into which she’s made her last long retreat, staring into a mirror, uncertainly saying “I love you” to her own reflection. Haynes would go on to make numerous more overt nods to Douglas Sirk’s mid-century Hollywood dramas of buried domestic despair, but this inverted moment, a “happy ending” that is unmistakably a moment of abject, wrung-dry defeat, is particularly devastating because of how little Carol has left: that grim sanitized room, a place under the thumb of a smug sadist who offers only blame and calls it love, and the impossible task of healing herself. “For her to say ‘I love you’ in the mirror should feel like something has resolved,” Haynes told Film Comment, in 2015. “But all the film language in Safe should be telling you that nothing is resolved.” Anyone watching this movie in this moment, shut away in their homes for the greater good but also for their own tenuous safety, will know the feeling.
