Safe

Safe follows Carol, a middle-aged suburban housewife, as she trudges through a life she is seemingly discontent with. Through each moment she is detached, unhappy, unsettled and plainly put depressed. Early in the film, a conversation plays out between two other women at Carol's exercise class, one woman explains that she has read a book on how to own your own life, "We're told what to think, what to feel.. we don't really own our own lives... he's good on emotional maintenance, stress management" she describes. So we have a seemingly normal conversation, where women living a similar housewife lifestyle to Carol, have learnt how to better control and manage themselves. However, having just travelled through Carol's day-to-day, and seeing where she goes as the film progresses, the attempt to take control is quite tragic. Carol clearly hates her muted role: she hates being under her husband for sex, she hates the vapid process of consumerism, and she hates the people she must spend time with. Julianne Moore plays this role perfectly, as Carol will never outwardly state she feels this way, but through subtle performance, you can see pain seep through an afflicted smile. Carol mustn't think that way, so she then must uncontrollably feel discontent around her life grow, without any knowledge as to the reason. In the 1990s, western society shifted away from being accepting and open to the label feminist. Feminism has succeeded, and women already supposedly have the autonomy to make decisions, no more work is necessary. Hall and Rodriquez (2003, p. 883) document phenomena they label "No, but.." feminism. Women would resist the feminist label while still fundamentally agreeing with the ideals. “I don’t label myself a feminist. Not for me, but for the guy next door that would mean that I’m a lesbian and that I hate men” (quoted in Bolotin 1982,103). It is henceforth that Safe explores this brainwashing we can easily undergo, we may be told to fundamentally believe ideas to be good or bad, without totally understanding why. In Safe, Carol is ill. She is ill, and she doesn't know why. It is a physical illness, and we come to learn, an environmental sickness. An allergy, to the chemicals and all that is man-made around her. Historically, there is a repeated connection made between the isolation of the housewife role and deteriorating mental health. Betty Friedan (1963, p. 15) writes, "The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years, in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring sense of dissatisfaction... Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. She made the beds, shopped for groceries... lay beside her husband at night---she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question---'Is this all?'" As the film progresses, Carol finds herself surrounded by people who suffer the same illness, and then in a retreat, a world detached from fuels and smog. But it doesn't feel right. Something is off about the retreat, it feels cult-like and alien, and Carol is controlled and lacks autonomy. Is the illness even real? Is the illness not just a manifestation of something totally separate? Naturally, we view Carol's illness in parallel to her internal detachment from the world she exists in, and actually, the retreat is exactly the same as suburbia. Carol just fits one better than the other. The illness is unwanted and annoying to people in suburbia, but in the retreat, it is embraced. We the viewer can't help but feel as though the retreat is cultish. And it is, their ideals are strange, they constantly control and guide Carol. However, the absurd nonsensical ideas of a cult do mirror the absurd ideas we as a society create. As Safe closes out we realise, that the only thing actually polluting our and Carol's mind is looming existential dread. She is not understood or cared for in society, she is happy and at peace with the oneness of herself and nature when at the retreat. By the end of the film, Carol is cornered and alone in a pod. She finally loves herself, stripped of every decision she'd made, every reminder to hate herself. Delusional and further lost, but if she thinks she's happy and healthy, then who is to tell her otherwise? Nobody, that's who. Friedan, B. (1963) The Feminine Mystique. Place of publication: George J, McLeod Limited, Toronto Bolotin, Susan. 1982. Voices from the postfeminist generation. New York Times Magazine 17:103-103. Hall, E. J., & Rodriguez, M. S. (2003). The Myth of Postfeminism. Gender & Society, 17(6), 878-902. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243203257639