Health anxiety: the deeper meaning of Todd Haynes film ‘Safe’
The movies of Todd Haynes starkly vary in tone and topic, although one uniting factor is that they often explore the most dysfunctional parts of the human psyche, sometimes through the eyes of a celebrity figure. The Californian director has examined the life of Karen Carpenter in Superstar, the AIDs crisis and queer culture in Poison, and the cult of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.
One of Haynes’ most curious films, though, is his second feature-length offering, Safe, a project which starred Julianne Moore in the lead role. The 1995 psychodrama focuses on an affluent late-1980s suburban housewife whose life is thrown into difficulty and disarray when she develops a strange illness supposedly caused by the very environment in which she lives.
Moore perfectly portrayed Carol White in showing how her seemingly-perfect life, as she is seen shopping for expensive furniture, eating at lavish restaurants with her friends and exercising in motivational group classes, which actually becomes a thing of boredom and drudgery. Not only is Carol’s very existence as a housewife shown to be utterly banal, but perhaps it is also proven to be the very cause of her newfound illness – one that we’re not entirely sure actually exists.
Carol’s symptoms come on suddenly; she struggles to breathe whilst driving and when attending a friend’s baby shower, and she suffers a nosebleed at the hair salon. Naturally, Carol and her husband, Greg, quickly seek out the doctor’s advice, and when no known disease is found, they attend psychotherapy sessions. Sadly, these prove to be even less fruitful.
All the while, Carol’s husband grows frustrated, at points believing she is merely putting her illness on for attention. In many ways, one might argue that the onset of Carol’s illness actually comes from the way Greg treats her, given that they have completely emotionless sex, and Greg is utterly disinterested in how his wife actually feels about having to live a life utterly devoted to serving him at the cost of her own desires, wants and needs.
Carol is eventually faced with only one option: an extended stay at Wrenwood, a new-age community in the desert where several people with “environmental illnesses” seek an existence free from contaminative chemicals and anxiety-inducing factors. But even at Wrenwood, it seems as though Carol is never really truly understood, and she falls into an ever-worsening state of being, influenced no doubt by the dogmatic teachings of the community’s cult-like leader, Peter.
The big question surrounding Safe – one that is never truly answered (and for a good artistic reason) – is just what is it that Carol suffers from? We audience members never quite manage to subscribe to the notion that she is indeed afflicted with environmental illness, but rather believe that she is instead experiencing a psychosomatic disorder.
What it appears that Carol is actually going through is akin to health anxiety, a form of mental illness in which one is convinced that they are sick, no matter what biological and medical tests are undertaken to prove otherwise. Carol spends so much time worrying about being sick that it completely dominates her life.
The fact that Carol catches an infomercial about environmental illnesses at home surely leads her to believe that she is suffering from such an affliction, in the same way that one may become convinced they have a serious disease like cancer if they see such a word in the small print of an article when searching online for information about something like a benign lesion or skin condition.
The problem for Carol is that rather than focusing on the anxiety itself, she becomes obsessed with the idea of environmental illness rather than the psychosomatic one she indeed appears to be in the throes of, likely caused by her unsupportive husband and her banal existence as a housewife. If Carol could have confronted Greg about his behaviour and told him how she actually wants to live her life, then she might just have seen some of her symptoms slowly alleviate. Instead, she is perceived as bothersome by her husband and cruelly left at Wrenwood to deal with the problem herself.
Safe serves as an excellent and accurate portrayal of the very conception of something like health anxiety. Carol can never quite shrug off her suspected illness despite the reassurance of medical professionals, and, worst of all, she is never afforded the opportunity to examine its real cause. Haynes’ film is a difficult and intense watch, not for the light-of-heart, but it’s a fascinating exploration of the kind of psychosomatic illnesses that so many of us are becoming more and more afflicted by each day.
