There's a famous story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman called "The Yellow Wallpaper" that I had to read for sophomore year in high school. It's about an unnamed woman who descends into madness after she spends months inside a room at home believing that she's severely depressed, and her husband, a doctor, seems oblivious to her feelings. She starts to obsess over the queasy yellow wallpaper in the room, whose swirling design seems to constantly change, and whose color rubs off on whoever touches it. Eventually, she sees what looks like a woman crawling on all fours behind bars, and in a bout of madness, rips the entire wallpaper off. Her husband comes in, faints, and she says, "I've got out at last."
Todd Haynes' "Safe" doesn't dare to let its protagonist, or audience, escape. In one scene, Carol (Julianne Moore), similarly "diseased" like the woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper," lies down next to her fellow camper at an environmentalist retreat, partners in one of many spiritual exercises. When asked to recount to her partner a room she remembers living in during childhood, she says: "There was yellow wallpaper..." and is interrupted by an ambulance, announcing the death of one of the inmates.
"Safe" is, more than anything else, a great and important L.A. movie. Not only does it display some of our most memorable highways and venues, but it digs deep into the core of how privileged, upper-middle-class Southern Californians feel all the time. Or in the late 1980's, at least. In a way, it's David Lynch's "Rabbits" segment of "Inland Empire" stretched out to a feature length film, complete with fuzzy, low-lit photography and detached high camera angles. It reaches a similar kind of realism as "Short Cuts" (also starring Moore), except Haynes takes into account the faux-religious (or, should I say, cultish) influences that lure these rich, unhappy people into believing that they have the cure. This movie is about Scientology and The Kaballah Center, but it's also about me.
There's a particularly funny scene where Moore's stepson reads out an essay at the dinner table: "In the 80's there are more gangs in the Los Angeles basin. Plus, many more stabbings and shootings by AK-47s, Uzis, and Mac 10s, killing numerous innocent people. L.A. was the gang capital of America. Rapes, riots, slashing throats...are all common in the black ghettos of L.A." "Why does it have to be so gory?" Carol asks. "Gory? That's how it really is! God," he replies. This is the whitest family you've ever seen, and watching Carol's bafflement is a hilarious display of her ignorance. Does Carol really have problems if those people have it so bad? Later on, the son asks how "uzi" is spelled. "Exactly the way it sounds," says his father (Xander Berkeley).
Carol impulsively gets her straight red hair permed, which, as we see later, is a result of her trying to fit in. There's a neat use of color coding throughout the film, such as when Carol is at a party with her friends, each of them wearing a distinctly different color of the rainbow, each of them permed to perfection. Later on in the film, while Carol watches a commerical on TV, we see color bars, and then the title card: "WHERE ARE YOU?" This is the turning point of the film, where Carol becomes convinced that she, like several others, suffers from "environmental illness."
But don't we all have environmental illness? Living in Los Angeles, where you feel like there are more cars than people, can be incredibly suffocating. I took a week-long trip to Arizona last year to visit friends, and I was amazed at the vast expanses of highways that are completely empty, aside from a car or three. It's almost a form of meditation, driving alone on the highway, in the DAYTIME, but my friends seemed to think nothing of it. It's funny how things look from different perspectives, which is another reason I watch movies, and why I found "Safe" both hilarious and terrifying.
In fact, I think I've even been to the place where the environmentalist camp was filmed, which made me feel even more uneasy. Religious retreats happen there all the time. Do you see how this movie is starting to creep into my life?!
Anyway, I'm rambling, but I think this is one of the best movies I've ever seen, one that anyone who has lived a good portion of their lives in L.A. should make essential viewing. There's a great line in the movie where the preacher of the environmentalist cult/thing says, "We need to give up the rage...and strive for a quiet light." I think it's road rage he's talking about, and in a movie filled with quiet light, I think I'm kind of worried.
Oh, and on a side note: Watching "Safe" reminds me of other movies, particularly Lynch's, which oddly works in its favor. Perhaps the opening credits of "Mulholland Dr." were borrowed from any of the highway sequences in this film, complete with a Badalamenti-esque synthesized score, and angled shots of the backs of cars. That doesn't make me love Lynch's film any less, but it's interesting to note that films about L.A. can have similar motifs.
Grade: A
