Dangerous Spaces: 'Safe'

Released in 1995, 'Safe' (US/UK) seems in many ways radically different from Todd Haynes's earlier work. On one level, the film is a forward-moving story about the increasingly debilitating, unidentified illness of a middle-class, suburban homemaker. Devoid of flashbacks or more avant-garde techniques of narrative disruption or interruption, the film's structure appears deceptively straightforward. Attempting to find a cure for her disease, the central protagonist, Carol White (Julianne Moore), commences a journey that takes her away from her comfortable domestic environs in Los Angeles to a retreat in the desert of New Mexico, where she submits to various New Age-inspired therapies. Despite its apparently conventional content and form, 'Safe' confounded critics with its polysemic openness to multiple interpretations and its refusal to offer audiences any insight into the central protagonist's experience or emotional life.¹ These responses are symptomatic of the film's deployment of seemingly contradictory modes of filmmaking. 'Safe' regularly employs a distanced style of cinematography while constructing sequences that deploy editing techniques ordinarily used to suture viewers into the narrative. The effect of this combination is to withhold the identification with character that such classical techniques conventionally secure, while at the same time foregrounding their usual ideological effects.