![]() ![]() Every utterance, in her meek Valley upspeak, registers as a question, or an admission of her own uncertain place in the world. Pale, frail Carol White, with her girlish squeak of a voice, can barely complete a sentence. (The film could just as well have been called I’m Not There.) Elusive by design, the typical Haynes protagonist is a blank slate, a vessel for meaning sometimes this means a shape-shifting trickster figure, as with his Dylan and Bowie surrogates, and sometimes, as in the case of Safe, it means a person who seems barely to exist. Cain’s Depression-era novel), all his films revolve around the mysteries and traps of identity, calling attention to the social and cultural processes through which it is constructed. Whether they fit the former category (1998’s Velvet Goldmine, his glam-rock fantasia about a David Bowie–like singer I’m Not There, from 2007, which uses a revolving door of actors to trace the shifting personae of Bob Dylan) or the latter ( Safe the 2002 Douglas Sirk pastiche Far from Heaven the 2011 miniseries Mildred Pierce, which removes the noir trappings of the Joan Crawford vehicle and reinstates the class conflicts of James M. Superstar encapsulates the two types of films we have come to associate with Haynes: essayistic anti-biopics of pop icons and cerebral riffs on the melodramatic genre that Hollywood used to call women’s pictures (and he himself has termed “stories about women in houses”). Using the vernacular of mass culture against itself, his movies are queer not necessarily in content but certainly in form. In the two decades since, he has carved out a continually surprising and somewhat improbable career smuggling ideas from critical theory into off-Hollywood entertainments. Unlike most of his peers, though, Haynes sought not to be assimilated into the mainstream but to infiltrate it. The American independent film scene of the nineties, fueled by the Sundance boom, was a hotbed of crossover ambition. Safe, starring Julianne Moore, at the time emerging into major stardom, moved Haynes beyond the role of troublemaking iconoclast. A graduate of Brown University who majored in art and semiotics in the heyday of postmodernist deconstruction, and an ACT UP activist at the height of the AIDS crisis, Haynes sparked controversy again with his first feature, Poison (1991), a Genet-inspired triptych of stories about transgression and stigma that won prizes at Sundance, jump-started what came to be known as the New Queer Cinema, and, thanks to a completion grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, became a lightning rod in the culture wars of the 1990s. The first home is opulent, the second one spartan both are designed to keep out the world, safe havens that are also prisons of the self.Īn existential horror movie in which the monster is both all around us and nowhere to be seen, Safe (1995) marked a turning point in the career of Todd Haynes, who came to notoriety with the forty-three-minute cult hit Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), an unauthorized account of Karen Carpenter’s losing battle with anorexia, shot in Super 8 and starring a cast of Barbie dolls. Home is no longer a faux Tudor behemoth but her very own windowless porcelain dome, where she has retreated, oxygen tank in tow, in a bid to stave off the ambient contaminants that may be making her sick. ![]() The first words from her mouth are a complaint that sounds like an apology: “It’s freezing in here.” Toward the end of Safe, Carol is again heading home, this time hundreds of miles away, in the still of the New Mexico desert. The film’s protagonist, Carol White, steps out of the car into her garage and sneezes, a portent of maladies to come. The mood is ominous, even funereal, and our destination, which lies behind a sliding electric gate, is a mansion as welcoming as a mausoleum. The swelling synthesizer hum on the soundtrack gives this traveling shot a science fiction sheen, the sense of traversing an alien landscape. From inside a black Mercedes, beneath a deep blue dusk sky, we move past the manicured lawns and iridescent street lamps of a moneyed suburb in the San Fernando Valley. S afe begins with a journey home, an eerie glide through a frictionless world. ![]()
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