Hollywood Utopia

In fact, the director locates the whole film within Carol White’s subjectivity. But
rather than alienating the audience from her, the measured wide-angle, hyper-real
mise-en-scène becomes an efficient expression of the alienation she experiences.
According to the director, in an interview with Amy Taubin in Sight and Sound, the
film is above all a critique of a passive society in which people ignore the ecological
disaster all around them and wait helplessly for someone else to tell them what to
do about it (May 1996: 32).
Haynes suggests that the disease is the best thing that happens to her: ‘It’s the
thing that kicks her out of unconsciousness, out of this unexamined life.’ The
director also remains very critical of Peter Dunning, a new age guru who has AIDS,
who believes he can save White in his clinic away from the pollution of the city.
Peter’s new age philosophy - ‘love yourself more’ - comes out of a 1960s ideology,
which applies the reflective eastern tradition to the western context. ‘It claims to
change the world through self-esteem,’ says Haynes, ‘but I see it as a reiteration of
basic conservative arguments about the self, which are closely aligned to
masculinity and patriarchy’ (ibid.: 32). Like Ellie in Contact, the protagonist in Safe
is also predetermined within a dominant patriarchal society, which inaugurates a
psychological identity crisis that must be overcome before she can become fully
human. 32
This film is addressed at the often-dispirited ‘Left’ audience and remains critical
of any totalising philosophy. It is also unlike most conventional radical avant garde
aesthetic approaches that articulate an alternative lifestyle forged from within a
post-1960s critical sensibility which apparently had less cultural currency in the
late 1990s.
The director creates a ‘synthetic’ environment which is reminiscent of the clinical
mise-en-scène of The Andromeda Strain discussed earlier. 33 Haynes’
(post)modernist critical sensibility helps create a complex investigation of the
human self in its impure (both allegorically and physically) western environment.
His film also serves as an effective counterpoint to the oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman,
the great modernist and humanist director who continually questioned the
ultimate spiritual quest yet remained caught up in its controlling power and
influence.
For Haynes, as cited in Sight and Sound, environmental sickness is, like AIDS,
another horrible fact of life. ‘What most concerns him is not the mystery of the
disease itself’, but - like Bergman, whose aesthetic he appears to emulate - ‘the
perplexing human response to it: the apparent need to assign blame to it, the
inability to accept that “dirt”, danger, chaos and all its works are an integral part of
life’ (May 1996: 60).
4 Conspiracy Thrillers and Science Fiction 175