A few days after Todd Haynes’s weekend-long appearance at BAMPFA in March, I was at my friends’ apartment and came face to face with a new addition to the decor: a homemade collage of Haynes’s leading ladies framed above the toilet. Julianne Moore in Safe and Far from Heaven, Moore and Natalie Portman in May December, and Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in Carol all peered back at me with their characteristic tragedy and doe-like reserve while I washed my hands.

At Berkeley, so many of the friendships I’ve formed have been anchored by film and talking about film, and in many ways Todd Haynes is the filmmaker who matters most to our group. When Dominic showed me Carol for the first time, we both sat in silence for a few minutes after the credits rolled, before fervently dissecting its performances and as many of Haynes’s creative choices as we could identify on our balcony for the next hour. When May December played at the Mill Valley Film Festival, which Hafsah and I were attending for The Daily Californian, we argued for days over who would get to write about it (I eventually gave in). And now as I stood in Ian and Denis’s living room, I noticed another newly hung piece of wall decor — the cover of the BAMPFA leaflet distributed for this retrospective: Julianne Moore in her cat-eye sunglasses reading Cosmopolitan. 

Prior to sitting down to write this piece, I hadn’t really tried to put words to why Haynes’s work affects us so deeply and consistently. I think much of it has to do with subtlety, political coherence, and precision — qualities that seem lost on so many of the films we’re subjected to now. While some would balk at the description of melodramas as “subtle,” the qualifier is perhaps better understood as affect, a light auteurial touch that reveals an emotional core. 

For me, the exemplar of Haynes’s craft is his second feature, Safe, a film that rewards, if not insists, on multiple viewings. On March 8, Haynes appeared at BAMPFA to introduce the film, and later, to sit down with UC Berkeley film professor Mary Ann Doane (who was also once his professor at Brown) for an after-screening Q&A. 

Haynes identified Safe as part of an “unplanned trilogy” that includes Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Poison, his first feature, which cemented Haynes as one of the key players working within “new queer cinema.” It seems to me that you could also add Dark Waters to this list — a 2019 legal drama about the case that exposed the chemical company DuPont’s disposal of unregulated chemicals into the water supply of Parkersburg, West Virginia. 

Each of the films in this trilogy that Haynes identifies works with the theme of illness and is set around the time of the AIDS crisis; Dark Waters takes place at a later time, but Haynes still alludes to the crisis in the ways Parkersburg residents wait years for a science panel to provide conclusive explanations of their incurable illnesses or of the way dark sores appear on the arms of the first plaintiff. Present throughout Haynes’s films that deal with illness is a clarity afforded by the hindsight of AIDS. During the Q&A, Haynes noted that the crisis “equipped [us] with more knowledge about [state and conservative] dominance,” and that the “applied direct action” of the crisis can be read as a template for addressing current issues. 

Haynes did not write a film about applied direct action with Safe, though the film doesn’t negate its necessity, either. Instead, it reckons with illness in a way that is maybe more immediate or intuitive. Illnesses without a cure — AIDS and the “environmental illness” Carol suffers from — are more often worked through in alternative, ideological, and individualized ways, Haynes suggested. 

Safe, Haynes’s second feature film, follows Carol White (Julianne Moore), a housewife in the San Fernando Valley, as she begins to experience symptoms of a strange illness. After receiving word from her doctor that there is nothing wrong with her, she begins attributing her ailments to chemicals in the environment. When her condition worsens, she takes refuge at Wrenwood, a desert community for people suffering from environmental illness. 

Carol is the ultimate individual in the sense that she remains impenetrable to the viewer. Doane identified one of the mechanisms Haynes uses to achieve this as a “refusal of the close-up.” Indeed, the close-ups in Safe are scant; more often Carol is glimpsed through a wide angle. She speaks relatively infrequently for a protagonist, and Haynes often sets her silence in relief against other characters who love to hear themselves speak — Carol’s friend Linda, and Peter Dunning, the grifter who runs Wrenwood, the isolated desert community Carol joins — being two obvious examples.

One of my favorite moments of the movie, and one that hinges on Carol’s inability to speak or to understand, is when Carol makes a birthday speech to other patients at Wrenwood. In her awkward and strange attempt to legitimize her disease to this new community of individuals whom she perceives to be like her, Carol reveals her social naivete through her ignorance of the underlying reason why she or anyone else is there. Moore’s measured physicality and whispered politeness betray Carol’s unknowability, even to herself, and lends the decline in her health an uncanniness that is part of what makes Safe an interesting exploration of cross-genre pollination.

Many will know Haynes as a melodramatist of the Sirkian tradition. While it is true that Safe gestures towards melodrama with its domestic subject, the film is also invested in what other pop genres allow it to do with the interplay between subject and viewer, as well as disrupt the linearity between expectations and knowledge that these genres often establish. Haynes spoke about his influences while working on the film. While Safe draws on classics like Jeanne Dielman and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Haynes also endeavors to riff on what he termed the “TV disease movie of the week.”  

This particular pop genre implies for Haynes a “pop pedagogy” that is replicated again and again in each iteration of the disease movie, whereby viewers are expected to derive satisfaction from “learning something.” In Safe, this trope is subverted by the fact that we don’t ever receive clarification, prompting questions like the one an audience member asked: Is Carol’s disease purely psychosomatic or is there a trace of genuine illness? 

As soon as they asked it, I knew Haynes wouldn’t have an answer, since the way he sketches the Wrenwood community is answer enough. At Wrenwood, which Haynes describes as an “institute of narrative redemption,” community members are told by Dunning that their illnesses are self-imposed, and that the onus is on them to make themselves get better. But, per Dunning, “getting better” is only possible within the confines of Wrenwood: he is selling them a singular version of recovery contingent on his own profit (he lives in a mansion on the property) and the sequestering of their illness and recovery in this small, austere, apolitical enclave. Safe is ultimately a film about “free market mentality,” Haynes said, quoting a critic’s review. 

It's possible to say that Safe never resolves the tension it holds between self-medication and self-care as a reflex and as resistance. Haynes seems to be of the mind that these practices aren't clearly separate, and slippage often occurs between the two. Any attempt to settle their relationship risks an unsettling of one of Haynes’s most essential commitments as a filmmaker: showing over telling, story over discourse. As he said in his 2019 profile in the New Yorker: “To provide an audience with a solution — to give them the revolution — is to deprive them of creating their own.”