Mechanisms of Colonialism

​How Privilege Informs Safety and Control in Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995)

Written by Emma Dahl
Submitted for Film 305 - Political Cinema with Dr. Matthew Croombs (Winter 2022)

In the article “Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes,” Mary A. Doane considers how Todd Haynes’ cinema challenges the binarization of emotion and intellect. Melodrama and its use of pathos, often aligned with a marginalized protagonist, evokes feeling, immediacy, and the familiar. As seen in Safe (1995), Haynes unites the seemingly oppositional site of pathos with the permanent or ideal ethos, largely through filmic distanciation, to demand that cinema be both felt and thought. In the critical analysis, I will consider the effects of integrating the seemingly contradictory at the level of mise-èn-scene and setting in terms of privilege. I will emphasize how the juxtaposition between structure and location—culminating with the igloo in the desert of New Mexico—functions as an indicator of exploitation and colonial power.

Summary and Discussion: “Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes

Doane describes a recurring shot distinctive to Haynes’ work that produces a paradoxical notion of subjectivity and anonymity. It is a long tracking shot that traces the monotony of suburbia—all too similar little boxes in never-ending rows, isolated from the rest of the world. The familiar suburban home is the site of the family and its oppressive power structures, of the guise of safety due to its homogeneity and distance from the criminal city and its economic and racial Other. In Safe, this shot is seen through a car windshield from the point of view of Carol White, the protagonist who is repressed by such familial and suburban structures. This close shot of a woman looking through the window mirrors the placement of women in 1940s and 1950s films, as the window was the symbolic intersection between spaces differentiated along the lines of gender—between exteriority and interiority. For Haynes, this shot serves to unite the supposedly contradictory: pathos and subjectivity, with spatial and emotional estrangement.

Oppressed by the patriarchal space that she is expected to perfectly maintain, Carol alone carries the burden of pathos—the primary emotion of the melodrama. However, unable to control this space, Carol’s story becomes a response to risk—in particular, environmental risk. Such risk creates the desire for control, but as this is ultimately ineffectual, control dwindles to the space of the individual body. Emphasized by the mise-èn-scene and framing, Carol is dominated by her environment. Long shots and wide-angle lenses present the space of the house as cavernous and relentless, trivializing conversation by its overwhelming nature and isolating Carol and the viewer by denying close-ups. In this way, the heavy, controlled suburban space functions as a nonplace, stripped of community, significance, and natural life. Faced with a lack of power over her domestic space and its patriarchal expectations, Carol begins to tightly regulate her own body, becoming increasingly ill without clear cause. Her physical health issues reduced to female hysteria by her doctor, she turns to Wrenwood, a New Age recovery centre that validates Carol’s illness, locating it within the individual and only able to be fixed through isolation. Accepting this discourse, she resolves herself to an igloo-like structure, sealed off from the outside world. In the only close-up of the film, Carol looks at herself in the mirror and unconvincingly whispers “I love you" [1]. Despite the close-up being a conventional instrument of providing interiority, the audience is still denied subjectivity.

Haynes’ cinema is “saturated” with pathos, which means suffering or deep feeling [2]. Often opposed to logos (speech or reason) or placed as the emotional opposite of the calmer ethos, pathos is accessory to “lower” forms, such as melodrama, and associated with the feminine. In Haynes’ work, this often takes the form of historical cinematic references, but prior familiarity with the origin is not necessary to get pathos. Rather, pathos turns into an affect through repetition of distance and miscommunication—cinematic allusion only emphasizes such instances that are independently recognizable and immediate. It is this obviousness and recognizability that is crucial for the potency and radicality of Haynes’ melodramas: the image must be a surprise, yet at the same time, already known. Haynes employs pathology to unite two seemingly incompatible tensions: closeness and accessibility are implied by pathos but interrupted by distance. Both pathos and the pathological concern marginality, and in Safe, this site of abjection is the woman. At once, Carol is the familiar, conflicted protagonist of the melodrama and the infected, abnormal Other, representative of social panic and the failings of contemporary self-obsession. Here, melodrama is not simply used as classification or stage for pathos, but as a “generator of cinema” both cited and displaced [3]. Employing the pathological to challenge the notion of emotion and intellect as mutually exclusive, affect and estrangement are inseparable, demanding that cinema be both thought and felt.

A critical analysis of Safe’s mise-èn-scene and location in relation to mechanisms of control
​
At the level of narrative, Safe is about an upper-middle class white woman faced with risk, and the resulting desire for control. Carol’s relationship to control is complex and contradictory: she is disempowered by patriarchal systems and her illness changes her relationship to normativity, yet her illness and the self-centred “safety” she seeks also signify a form of privilege. Safe shines a light on the white upper-middle class’s radical separation from social responsibilities upheld and established by colonial power within the U.S.

Within the global city of Los Angeles, the Whites are situated in the suburban space of the San Fernando Valley. Here, the elite are kept safe from the growing danger of the non-sanctioned racialized presence, as signified by Carol’s stepson’s explicitly racist essay on the criminality of Los Angeles and the threat “Black and Chicano gangs” increasingly impose on “mostly white areas" [4]. Representative of this unapproved occupancy is the delivery of two black—rather than teal—couches to Carol’s home, starkly juxtaposed to the otherwise white and pastel-hued space. Shocked and irritated, she protests the unacceptability of the couches to a furniture store clerk, insisting on the impossibility of a black presence within the space of the white suburban home. As mentioned by Cynthia A. Young, such policing acts as a form of colonial violence on behalf of the national bourgeoisie [5]. Although not overtly violent, disciplining strategies, such as “rules about where to live,” are subtle power mechanisms of colonialism and control that are “equally destructive" [6]. Further, that same pristine domesticity threatened by Blackness is only made possible by the labour of people of colour. It is the labour of Fulvia, the Hispanic housekeeper, that allows Carol the privilege to maintain strict bodily focus. In this way, contact with people of colour is only sanctioned when white domesticity is benefitted.

Carol flees the Valley and its racialized contamination, seeking rejuvenation at a New Age treatment centre positioned as an alternative to Western medicine. However, this removal simply takes her from one exclusive space to another. Led by Peter Dunning masquerading as guru, Wrenwood proves to be a similarly oppressive system that reinforces colonialism through New Ageism—a movement closely connected to Orientalism—which at once upholds Western materialism and “laments the loss of spirituality and tradition projected onto the East" [7]. Here, the East is deemed a resource for Western excess, indicated by Peter’s McMansion placed high on a cliff, overlooking the rest of the facilities [8]. While juxtaposed to the humbler space of his customers and the notion of being connected to “nature,” this signifier of wealth is not truly in opposition to the teachings of Wrenwood. Orientalist New Ageism reformulates Eastern philosophy into commodity, forwarding consumerism and the American myth of rugged individualism. At one point, Peter even tells his clients he has stopped keeping up with the news, explaining “I don’t need it" [9]. Wrenwood is suburbia repackaged, promoting blindness and complicity to systemic inequalities that cause illness and harm.

In Safe, the “open” land of the New Mexican desert is evoked as a fetishized and uncontaminated space of self-restoration. Emptied of the presence of Indigenous Peoples and Mexican Americans, this purportedly uncorrupted space is one where “genocide has depopulated the land and reinscripted within it a naturalness posed as already-existing" [10]. Paradoxically, an Indigenous presence is commodified at Wrenwood to sell the promise of a healing return to the natural self, based on the projection of an eco-oriented community free of industrialization. This fallacious appropriation of Indigenous cultures is signified by the structure Carol retreats to in the film’s final moments. Due to its shape and porcelain white surface, the structure is clearly imitating an igloo constructed from blocks of compacted snow. The igloo, or snow house, is functionally and spatially juxtaposed to the goals of Wrenwood and the New Mexican desert—the igloo is traditionally used by Inuit of Canada’s Central Arctic and Greenland’s Thule region in the winter while travelling and hunting to provide insulation and a wind-free environment under arctic conditions [11]. Entirely removed from its original community and environmental context, Inuit cultural specificity is exploited to sell the suggestion of a newfound safety outside of societal conditions—but such disconnect is only available to the socioeconomic elite.

Carol’s reaction to the non-sanctioned Black presence in suburbia, Peter’s mansion representative of wealth reinforced through Orientalism, and the decontextualization of the Inuit snow house for commodification work to suggest that “racial segregation and discrimination are a constitutive part of the U.S. nation-state rather than structural anomalies capable of reform" [12]. Safe reveals control and safety as deeply implicit to colonial space and its upholding of privilege.

 [1] Safe, directed by Todd Haynes (Criterion Pictures, 1995), ​01:54:55-01:55:42. 
[2] Mary A. Doane, "Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes," Camera Obscura​ 19, no. 3 (2004): 10. 
​[3] Doane, 18.
[4] Doane, “Pathos and Pathology,” 6; Safe, 00:24:38-00:25:05.
[5] Cynthia A. Brown, “Shot in Watts: Film and State Violence in the 1970s,” in Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 227.
[6] Brown, “Shot in Watts,” 226–27.
[7] Danielle Bouchard and Jigna Desai, “‘There’s Nothing More Debilitating than Travel’: Locating US Empire in Todd Haynes’ Safe,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22, no. 4 (2005): 365.
[8] Bouchard and Desai, “Locating US Empire,” 367.
[9] Safe, 01:33:35-01:34:18.
[10] Bouchard and Desai, 359.
[11] Peter G. Kershaw, Peter A. Scott, and Harold E. Welch, “The Shelter Characteristics of Traditional-Styled Inuit Snow Houses,” Arctic 49, no. 4 (December 1996): 38; Peter Whitridge, “Landscapes, Houses, Bodies, Things: “Place” and the Archaeology of Inuit Imaginaries,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 11, no. 2 (June 2004): 228.
​[12] Brown, “Shot in Watts,” 234.

Bibliography

Bouchard, Danielle and Jigna Desai. “‘There’s Nothing More Debilitating than Travel’: Locating
US Empire in Todd Haynes’ Safe.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22, no. 4 (2005): 359–70. 
 
Doane, Mary A. “Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes.” Camera Obscura 19, no.
3 (2004): 1–21. 
 
Haynes, Todd, dir. Safe. Criterion Pictures, 1995. 119 min.
​
Kershaw, Peter G., Peter A. Scott, and Harold E. Welch. “The Shelter Characteristics of
Traditional-Styled Inuit Snow Houses.” Arctic 49, no. 4 (December 1996): 328–38.
 
Whitridge, Peter. “Landscapes, Houses, Bodies, Things: “Place” and the Archaeology of Inuit
Imaginaries.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 11, no. 2 (June 2004): 213–50.
 
Young, Cynthia A. “Shot in Watts: Film and State Violence in the 1970s.” In Soul Power:
Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left, 209-44. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.