739 Safe

[RobertB]

I have never lived in America, but I remember the scare stories in 1982-84 about AIDS. The victims got very little sympathy as you say, but the fear was massive. Not just in USA. It calmed down a bit when scientists learned more about AIDS and the first sympathy, as already has been mentioned in this thread, was when children caught it from blood transfusions and got barred from going to school.

[Numero Trois]

Ask any Aids activist and organization, they will tell you that the Aids crisis in the early 80s was neglected by the government

As shown in depth in the documentary How to Survive a Plague

[RobertB]

Ask any Aids activist and organization, they will tell you that the Aids crisis in the early 80s was neglected by the government

As shown in depth in the documentary How to Survive a Plague

Looks very interesting. Thank you! I have not seen it.

[FrauBlucher]

Sorry this has gotten away from a thread for Safe. This will be my last post discussing this current topic.

I have never lived in America, but I remember the scare stories in 1982-84 about AIDS. The victims got very little sympathy as you say, but the fear was massive. Not just in USA. It calmed down a bit when scientists learned more about AIDS and the first sympathy, as already has been mentioned in this thread, was when children caught it from blood transfusions and got barred from going to school.

As a man born and bread in NY and am in my 50s, I remember the era very well. The only "fear was massive" in the early 80's came from the gay community, as they were dying by the thousands. The fear did not come from anywhere else. You could have gone into any community in the midwest, south, southwest and even pockets of NYC, etc., and they said, "it's a gay thing," and many said it in very derogatory terms. What you said earlier that "the scare was gripping all of the USA" is so over the top. I can tell you first hand there was no panic in the streets. No one gave a shit. It's a shame you want to revise the history of this awful time..... But yes, the Ryan White episode started to change the perception of aids, especially in middle America.

[Lost Highway]

I think there always has been a little too much emphasis on the film as an AIDS metaphor. That's certainly there but it's not the only thing Safe is about or even the main thing. A lot is about disease as an escape and as a cry for attention, which is not specific to AIDS. It's also a satire of a particular strand of New Age quackery which blames the patient for their predicament and which was very popular at the time the film was made. And it is arguably a feminist satire on the trope of a woman in a patriarchal system taking charge of her life and (in this case in a horrific way) her body.

I run a little hot and cold on Todd Haynes and Safe is the only one of his feature films which truly works for me. All his other features I regard as interesting if flawed, including the overpraised Far From Heaven. To me that's a rather superficial homage to Sirk which doesn't do anything Fassbinder had not already done better in the 70s. Its style strikes me as mannered especially as modern film stock doesn't come close to the luminous quality of 50s Technicolor, no matter how many gels you put on the lights. That said I loved Haynes' featurette, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and his HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce and he made an outstanding short called Dottie Gets Spanked.

Safe is probably my favourite US film of the 90s and its a film I find difficult to shake whenever I watch it. Kubrick often gets mentioned in regard to the chill the film casts but Safe seems to me most influenced by Altman's 3 Women, another favourite of mine. Julianne Moore's character is like a spiritual sister to Shelley Duvall's Millie in the Altman film, both women with little self-awareness, who define themselves by the men in their lives and who are endlessly distracted by surfaces. Both actresses are outstanding and they never condescend to characters who would be treated as a joke in other films. Both films also have a sun drenched quality with "institutional" color schemes. Safe also is a true body horror film, a more low key take on Cronenberg's brilliant The Brood, which plays with similar ideas about the body violently externalising the internal.

I remember reading about the film in producer Christine Vachon's entertaining semi-autobiography Shooting to Kill. She wrote that they shot Safe in California during the 1994 earthquake and one of the leads took off after that and never returned and they wrote out her role. Does anybody know if this explains the relatively small role Jessica Harper has in the film?

[kristophers]

Great post above, Lost Highway. This is an excellent film, and is open to much interpretation.

I have always connected to the main character being unhappy and not knowing why, and the psychological effects of that downward spiral where 'normality' and the people in her life slip away. She is a well-caged bird. Eventually self-deprecation and more confusion ensues, and only when she has totally reformed her world (so to speak) she takes some control and finally accepts/loves herself again. Of all the times I've watched this film I've never come away thinking it was commenting on a certain disease or was about disease. It seems clear to me there is no disease.

[_shadow_]

One more thing about this movie that is brilliant is the dialogue, Haynes is definitely "very good on certain things".

There's an amazing passage early in the film that is completely oblique yet absolutely clear to the viewer based on cultural cues:

"It wasn't..."
"No. That's what everyone keeps-- Not at all." (pause) "Because he wasn't married."
"Right."

[FrauBlucher]

Gary starts off with a "Wow".

[zedz]

Gary starts off with a "Wow".

Looks great, and it also looks like the colour timing on the old DVD was all over the place: some of the shots skew red; some skew blue; and a couple in the middle seem to skew both, i.e. purple!

[Cronenfly]

Gary starts off with a "Wow".

Looks great, and it also looks like the colour timing on the old DVD was all over the place: some of the shots skew red; some skew blue; and a couple in the middle seem to skew both, i.e. purple!

Not to sound like one of those crazy VHS enthusiasts/apologists who seem to prize degraded transfers, but having only seen the original Sony DVD, I feel like I might miss the otherwordly quality the old, erratic color timing imparted, as if the movie were taking place on the moon (that shot of Lester in the field being a case in point).

[colinr0380]

Although to counter your argument Cronenfly, my recorded from television VHS copy of this film has an extremely annoying hiss on it, a problem which might not be too bad with many films but a lot of the quieter sequences of this film get drowned out by it! And ambient, spacey underscore didn't really work to its fullest when I could not tell if it was intentional or just from the tape! So I'll be glad to get a copy with crisp, quiet audio!

[movielocke]

Gary starts off with a "Wow".

Looks great, and it also looks like the colour timing on the old DVD was all over the place: some of the shots skew red; some skew blue; and a couple in the middle seem to skew both, i.e. purple!

Look at the shot of her holding the little girl. The wall in the back round was neutral gray/white and she is magenta/red/yellow as a result. The DVD colorist used an eyedropper tool on that wall to remove the color cast which was meant to be blue green cyan as on the bluray. Using the wall to white balance forced the rest of the image to look so wildly off.

[Magic Hate Ball]

Holy cow.

[PfR73]

Holy cow.

Fixed.

[AnamorphicWidescreen]

I had seen Safe years ago on the older DVD. I mainly watched it for the beautiful Julianne Moore....the storyline was quite disturbing...IIRC, the premise was that a suburban housewife got extremely sick because of all of the household cleaners she was using...I always thought it was a metaphor for the destruction of the environment...

Glad it's being re-released on the Criterion label, especially since, IIRC, the older DVD is long OOP....

[Minkin]

Bluray.com

[oh yeah]

I haven't picked up the Criterion yet, but I just watched the film on the Sony disc again and here I am once more, impressed but chilled to the bone. There is something so uniquely unsettling about this film but I can't quite put my finger on it. I suspect that much of it lies in the second half at Wrenwood (as eerie as the first half is), in how it pares down Carol's psyche, her surroundings, her sense of self -- everything -- until there's just a crushing, deeply disturbing sense of pure emptiness withering away at her and us. I don't feel that I read the film terribly differently from viewing to viewing, except maybe on the second viewing (seen it about five times now). I just get the same unsettling experience which has me thinking about the inherent power that cinema yields and how there are a special handful of films that can somehow get into your brain and refuse to leave. I particularly like this brief review (though it mixes up Carol's name), which gets to the core of the strange and perturbing way this and some other films operate.

[therewillbeblus]

This is a challenging film dressed up as a domestic medical drama, an empty canvas for interpretation with the only focal point that drives a choose-your-own-adventure reading to be the nebulous invisible force that drives a person to illness. What I love so much about this work is that in its vagueness around the illness itself, the question redirects itself to become headlights in the fog projected on dissecting the PIE (person-in-environment). There is an exploration of a layered biopsychosocial assessment that considers the source as scientific, psychosomatic, or a product of suppressed identity in a social world where it is unsafe to embark into self-actualization territory. The relationship between the individual and their social context is the key, but to what end? Is the environment defined here as the physical space with toxins, or the sterile closed systems that aggressively force definitions of the self while putting up barriers to accessing validation or self-exploration? The interesting thing about somatic disorders is that they can be both fake or real in their problematic symptoms and effects, so even if this is somehow sourced in the mind it doesn't necessitate a situation where the illness isn't harmful. Especially today as we begin to discover an increased connection between stress and biological consequences, the chicken-or-the-egg analysis- while interesting- becomes secondary here to the unleashing of this unexpected event precipitating a process of self-evaluation without the tools to achieve that pragmatically or securely.

So where do we go, when our social environments are unwelcoming and we cannot begin to fathom what is happening inside of us? Where is safe? This film has been called a horror movie by numerous critics and on Criterion's own description, and it is my absolute favorite kind of horror movie, because it traps us in a space with intangible phenomenon that serves as a weapon to strike our Achilles heel of how vulnerable we actually are in an individualistic culture whose only safe spaces are falsehoods in ideology and superficial comforts. I've shifted my interpretation of this film many times over, but I'm of the mind that the ending serves as a mirror to consider a multifaceted approach to life, by outlining our needs, rather than to provoke a single lane of analysis. If this disease is in her mind, or if the causes are due to stress from a block, then the cult - regardless of its financial abuse, dishonesty, and systemic oppression - is helpful, by providing a subjectively interpreted safe space, despite objective problems. This sheds light on the need for support in our culture, as well as the lacking of it (this is the best we can do?) I think of how few self-help groups exist for non-normative particular issues, primarily in the mental health field. Aside from certain 12-step fellowships, I've tried to refer people or have had loved ones desperately seeking support for superficial self-harm and suicidality, eating disorders, bi-polar disorders, or other common presenting problems and found either nothing, expensive weekly clinical sessions, or some group two states over. The failing of our own support systems even in liberal social-work heaven MA is frightening.

The other reading is that if this is a medical issue, how awful this is to be deprived of proper medical care by being 'duped' into this cult- sure it casts focus on the failings of our medical systems, but the real violence is in the overall lack of social support around intangible conditions which produce stigma when we cannot provide answers. We fear the unknown and so we turn our backs on those who suffer from these phantom episodes; they are like ghosts to us, haunting in their inability to be controlled or understood and carrying a risk too great of undoing the paper-thin facades of stability we have built to get through the day. So, in a sense, the cult still winds up looking pretty good, again raising the same question... this is the best we can do? Personally, I swallow my skepticism and anger at the cult in this film and commend it, and Moore, for - moral issues and responsibility aside (after all, if we're going by Maslow's hierarchy of needs to assess immediate objectives, physiological safety and emotional/social well-being - here actually tied together!! - trumps ethics) - providing and taking advantage of the only wellwater being offered with a smile. There's something resilient and self-preserving about that choice by Moore that is commendable while reflecting back a very sad situation we are complicit in and victims of, a cycle without answers on how to end, or survive, but a hell of a lot of information on how to experience, if we dare to look in that unsafe direction.