THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 59
wife, the well-named Carol White (played
by Julianne Moore), who finds herself al-
lergic to her environment, “Safe” was
Haynes’s attempt to take on the discourse
of recovery. As a heroine, Carol is sensa-
tionally uncharismatic: thin-voiced, re-
mote, desireless, a stranger to herself. Her
identity is defined by the bourgeois per-
fection of her material world. Unlike tra-
ditional “disease movies,” which, under
the guise of teaching about illness, as
Haynes put it, “are really the story of peo-
ple’s personal victories over the odds,”
“Safe” provides no clear explanation for
Carol’s malaise. Is it chemical? Biologi-
cal? Psychosomatic? “I was coy, I was
tricky,” Haynes said. “I wanted to touch
that little bit in everyone where you just
aren’t convinced that who you think you
are is really who you are—that moment
when you feel like a forgery.” “Safe” also
refuses the moral certainty and the re-
demptive narrative resolution of the genre,
which, according to Haynes, would have
been “contingent on the central charac-
ter coming to accept her illness, ‘finding
herself.’” “There’s no achieving perfect
health,” Haynes said. “There’s no resolv-
ing the conflict of desire and oppression.
There’s no resolving the individual and
the civilization.”
“One of the things that’s interesting
to me about Todd is that he’s always ex-
amining our position within certain so-
cial structures,” Julianne Moore told me.
“Is identity purely your own? Or is it
something that you’ve assumed?” Carol
ends up at a ramshackle New Mexican
community of fellow-sufferers, who pur-
vey the mantra of self-love. (The film
does not explicitly address aids, but does
wink at the New Age recovery language
adopted in such books as Louise L. Hay’s
1988 “The aids Book: Creating a Pos-
itive Approach,” whose argument Haynes
summarizes as “If you loved yourself
more, you wouldn’t have gotten sick.”)
At her birthday celebration, Carol, sur-
prised by a cake, is asked to make a
speech. In Haynes’s script, she is not
only lost for words; she is entirely lost.
Her sentences are a scaffolding that holds
up a nonentity:
I don’t know what I’m saying, just ... it’s
true how much I ... (she stumbles, her eyes filling
unexpectedly) hated myself before I—came here,
so I’m ... trying to be more—aware ... see-
ing myself more as I hopefully am. ... More
positive, like seeing the pluses—like I think it
slowly opens people’s minds, it’s like educat-
ing and AIDS and other types of disease—and
this is a disease.. .. ’Cause it’s out there. It’s
just making people aware of it and even our
own selves. I mean we have to be aware of
it. .. reading labels ... going into build-
ings.. .. (Carol stops, suddenly forgetting what
she was saying.)At the finale, Carol, cut off from all
connection to the outside world, sits in-
haling oxygen in her white, ceramic-tiled
“safe room.” It’s a moment of almost
lunar loneliness. She walks
over to a mirror and stares
into it. “I love you, I really love
you,” she whispers. Then, a
little louder, “I love you.” S h e
waits in front of the mirror
for something to happen, as
if her words will somehow in-
flate her into being. “Noth-
ing happens” is the last line
of the script, before the film
cuts to black. In that devas-
tating moment, “Safe,” which won the
Village Voice’s 1999 poll for the Best Film
of the Decade, becomes a coruscating
metaphor for the negative.
In “Safe,” the chaos is internal; in
Haynes’s subsequent works, including
“Far from Heaven,” “Mildred Pierce” (a
2011 HBO miniseries adaptation of
James M. Cain’s novel), and “Carol,” the
battle between social norms and re-
pressed desires is filtered through the
external tumult of the melodrama, a
much criticized form that he has en-
thusiastically adapted to his own ex-
pressive needs. “We don’t live in West-
erns, noirs, murder mysteries, and shit,”
he said. “We live in families and we have
relationships that come and go; we suffer
under social constraints and have to
make tough choices. And that’s really
what all these stories are about.”
In “Far from Heaven,” Haynes put a
semiotic shellac on his homage to Doug-
las Sirk’s rococo fifties domestic weep-
ies, which featured lush, saturated color,
claustrophobic décors, and attractive stars
in gorgeous clothes speaking in vapid
full sentences, who nonetheless played
ordinary people struggling to be happy
and stand up to society. “From the out-
set, I think it was about embracing this
beautiful, almost naïve language of words,
gestures, movements, and interactions
that were totally prescribed and extremely
limited—not condescending to it, butallowing its simplicity to touch other
feelings that you can’t be over-explicat-
ing,” Haynes told the Village Voice. In
his meta-melodrama, the beautiful Cathy
Whitaker ( Julianne Moore, playing the
flip side of Carol White) is living the
Populuxe dream in Hartford, Connecti-
cut. But her paradise is soon lost to the
conflicting desires of those who inhabit
it. Her husband, struggling in vain with
his homosexuality, divorces her, and she
falls for her African-American gardener
only to see him forced out
of town by bigotry.
“To me, the most amaz-
ing melodramas are the
ones where, when a per-
son makes a tiny step to-
ward fulfilling a desire that
their social role is built to
discourage, they end up
hurting everybody else. It’s
like a chess game of pain,
a ricochet effect where ev-
erybody gets hurt but there’s nobody to
blame,” Haynes said. The pragmatic
restaurateur Mildred Pierce (Kate Wins-
let, who earned an Emmy for her per-
formance in the miniseries), for instance,
wins wealth and social standing in the
midst of the Great Depression by turn-
ing her domestic skills into a business,
but it costs her her relationship with her
daughter. Likewise, in “Carol,” an adap-
tation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel
“The Price of Salt,” the suave Carol (Cate
Blanchett), who is going through a diffi-
cult divorce, and the jejune Therese
(Rooney Mara) act out a kind of Ka-
buki of normality, while the signs and
signals of their attraction are being sent,
received, and returned. In the aftermath
of their connection, Therese loses her
fiancé and Carol loses custody of her
daughter.
Haynes calls his melodramas “assaults”
in which “identity as a natural and sta-
ble property is the target.” By contrast,
his music films celebrate the protean
self. Haynes’s goal in the glam-rock fan-
tasia “Velvet Goldmine” (1998) was to
construct a “parallel universe in which
the self-created fictions and high camp
of glam rock become the raw material
of a ‘Citizen Kane’ structure, in which
no depiction of the ‘famous subject’ is
unchallenged.” His Cubist interrogation
of Bob Dylan, “I’m Not There” (2007),
shows how Dylan turned the strategy