Safe

This movie was so fucking brilliant I stayed up until 3 AM watching it, reanalyzing different scenes, watching interviews, and scrolling through reviews with work in the morning. In my own mindless self-indulgence, here I am still writing my own review late into the night. Safe is a fairly appropriate response to Michael Parenti’s biggest critique of the loosely similar themes of Cassavettes’ Woman Under The Influence in his perception that Mabel Longhetti’s ailments are implied to have been cured had the family been just a little more middle class. I’d say the end result of both films allude to something much bigger than that in their takedown of the individualistic social structuralism run amok that fuels the fascist undertones of our dog-eat-dog capitalist world. In Safe, the notions of a life on the margins haunt Carol White even in the literal rapprochement of a security guard questioning her sanity and in her stepson’s fetishitic, racist, and ignorantly enthusiastic report of encroaching Black and Chicano gangs into their affluent and white San Fernando neighborhood. That tense subtlety is no accident and runs deeply without fail, underlying the entire film. Carol White’s elusive environmental illness threatens the hollow power structures she clings to for the first time in her life, and the resulting trauma and underlying fear culminates in her voluntary stay in an equally corrupt and hollow wellness retreat. The physical ramifications of her illness are very real. Her constant dismissal from doctors and her husband even in well-meaning gestures are very real. However, unlike her housekeepers or peripheral service workers kept nearly on the outside of her privileged lifestyle, unlike even Longhetti of Cassevettes’ world, she’s given ample options for her stay at a voluntary retreat in terms of treatment and is still immediately taken to the hospital when experiencing severe reactions. A massive discrepancy without direct life consequences in opposition to the inevitable limited choices of massive financial burden, institutionalization, or incarceration that overwhelmingly trap those who don’t check Carol’s boxes. Her overwhelmingly constant and humiliating rejections by upscale family doctors are by no means to her benefit, but they’d still be out of reach without the money conversation to most Americans. Maybe it serves as the basis of some of her fear that she wasn’t quite as protected as she thought, however disturbingly quiet and vapid her life proved to be. Wrenwood retreat’s new-age psychology only adds fuel to the corrupted fire. Run by a pseudo-sociologist theorist living with AIDS, he lives in a mega-mansion overlooking the retreat and blames his condition on negative media, himself, and in a not-so-subtle portrayal of his own shame; promiscuity. Unlike meetings on environmental illness with a tense school board meeting supplied by its waspy constituents (the ethos previously lauded by and largely capturing Carol and her husband), the work at Wrenwood hides under the facade of a hippie-era self-acceptance and love, but it twists itself into a critique even broader than the insidious banal positivity of individualist yuppies. While AIDS plays a prominent role in the third act and the parallels of fear and repression surrounding the era are mentioned in brief, it’s clear all of the residents suffer a litany of mental and physical problems while being grifted into repressing their guilt into meaningless platitudes to placate the traumas they’re unwilling to accept. Instead of working through and further elaborating on those complications, they are all forcibly adamant at some point that they’re only responsible for their own sickness. While the film ends with Carol tentatively whispering affirmations of self-love while staring into a mirror (albeit her illness appearing to progress for the worse), it tells us less about Carol and much more about the world we live in. Julianne Moore’s portrayal is fantastic in its equal parts meek and desperate shine because it allows us to gain insight into Carol’s world while knowing very little about her. She’s boring, seemingly only invested in her indulgent lifestyle driven by money, misogynistic conventions, and palpable racist fears; and yet it is easy for the viewer to be invested in her journey too. Her life is depressing, she has panic attacks, and she might as well not emotionally exist to those closest to her. One of the many fallacies in the acceptance of new-age individual thought is that in all its appeal, it only provides its owners a means of control and little else for those suffering. In a turbulent world where biological health models ignore the material and psychological factors of those that suffer under their weight, it’s understandable to be pulled towards the side of charismatic holistic scam artists. I’m a young diabetic with severe nerve damage myself, and as much as I hate any idea that I could cure it myself, I wish it was true. But it’s not. The juxtaposition of self-flagellation and self-affirmation is a product of our exploitative world and fully denies the mental and material dialectics that accompany our struggles. It’s hard to feel understood with an illness or disability, it’s hard to truly love yourself. But without admittance of your own culpability in the systems that govern many of those harmful modes, without serious non-judgmental self-introspection, without acknowledgement of uncomfortable truths and profoundly honest acceptance of yourself as you are, Carol’s faux love is only to her detriment and nearly meaningless in the face of her mysterious illness as her isolated life is sure to continue. Why is there a holistic wellness community to fascism pipeline that’s taken such a firm hold, particularly in groups of middle-aged white moms of the Lularoe ilk? While certain elements of financial desperation inherent to those schemes aren’t applicable, I wonder if there are parallels. As much as I feel for Carol in her terror and confusion over the sexist constraints, gaslighting, and denial of her illness- Safe tells us we ought to be valuing our collective empathy and acceptance to confronting the larger structural issues at hand as we work on the more uncomfortable truths in our lives. Something that can only be done together. Something that repression under the guise of holistic self-love only serves to combat and to reinforce insular human suffering.