Wellness as Power in Todd Haynes' 'Safe'
- Oliver K. Johnson
- 1 hour ago
- 7 min read
“I just eventually found the whole 12-step thing to be just another addiction.”
So warns one of Carol White’s gym friends at the start of Todd Haynes’ caustic 1995 breakout film, Safe. Another woman chips in, citing an audiobook as the foundation for her new belief that no one really owns their life. The friend retorts that with exercise, good dieting and healthy habits, it’s possible. Carol, played by an up-and-coming Julianne Moore (in one of her best roles to date), says little, speaking only when peers comment on her lack of sweat. This tiny moment lays clear just how incisive the film is about wellness culture. There are numerous threads in the film – an AIDS allegory, a satire of suburban life, a critique of medical institutions’ treatment of women – but all funnel into the main argument that health is, and has always been, a matter of power.
The audience notices that Carol’s life is off before she does. Her daily routine is monotonous, her marriage dispassionate and the Southern California suburbia stifling. The houses in the film are a particularly brilliant bit of mise-en-scene; they’re furnished like real estate showings without a trace of life to be found, and shot at such a distance that the huge spaces ironically appear claustrophobic. Yet, Carol subscribes to upholding these appearances; a major plot point in the first half of the film revolves around acquiring a new couch for the living room. When asked about her profession in a later scene, she clarifies that she’s a “homemaker,” not a housewife, yet the lack of homeliness in her house suggests she feels just as alienated from that role as she does as a spouse.
Symptoms of a mystery illness begin to creep into Carol’s cold world. At first suspicion falls upon Carol’s new fruit diet, a vague, fruit-centric way of eating introduced to her by a friend, which is maligned by her husband and questioned by her peers. She quits the diet, but the coughing fits only get more intense. All the while, every doctor she visits insists that she is perfectly healthy.
One of the most quietly distressing scenes comes around thirty minutes in. Her husband, Greg (played by Xander Berkeley), calls her new haircut sexy then asks how she’s feeling. When she responds that she still has a headache he becomes sullen and pouty. He shuts her down when she attempts to offer an explanation. The second that Carol can’t fulfill her role within suburban life, she is problematized. People want Carol to get better so as not to disrupt their normalcy; illness challenges those traditional power structures.
As Carol’s illness worsens, signs of a way out appear more in the diegesis. Fliers appear at her gym asking, “do you smell the fumes?,” On the radio wellness experts question “are you allergic to the 20th century?” This talk of fumes destroying people’s lives creeps in, generating paranoia about chemicals from ink and the plastic on her new couch. Carol starts attending support meetings for victims of environmental illness.
Another compelling sequence comes during a conversation between Carol and a group of women attending these support meetings, where they discuss the idea that simply being aware of chemicals in the atmosphere can make you sick. The sentiment is retorted by the sole woman of color there, who argues that the way the world is set up makes it impossible to avoid fumes and plastic. Rather than acknowledging this as a large-scale issue, Carol and the other women in the group perceive the issue on an individual level. In Carol’s mind, she must alter her routine to escape the fumes. She’s quick to adopt the anti-toxins agenda, describing to her friend how she had a reaction to citrus because her oranges were wrapped in plastic; she then blames Greg’s newspapers and the couch’s toxins for worsening her condition.
In spite of her fervent efforts to avoid toxins, Carol’s illness persists. To her, the only solution is total isolation from her environment. While hospitalized, she sees an ad for the Wrenwood Center, a retreat in the desert for victims of environmental illness and is instantly drawn to it. Haynes is smart not to portray her as completely gullible. She’s naive, trusting and easy to walk over, but she’s not stupid. Her search for a cure is very much grounded in an unspoken, unrealized discontentment with her life. She listens to the people around her talk about agency and taking action to “change their life".
So, when the opportunity presents itself for her to gain similar power, it’s no shock that she should accept, even if the retreat winds up being another trap. Moore plays these shades of Carol with brilliant restraint, imbuing her with a warmth and eccentricity underneath the malaise ensuring that her character is more than just a woman suffering at the hands of society.
“What you are seeing outside is a reflection of what you feel.”
This is the core philosophy behind the Wrenwood Center. Run by a new-age ex-lawyer named Peter (played by Succession’s Peter Friedman) the retreat offers Carol everything she lacks in her daily life: validation for her feelings, a genuine sense of community, and a safe space from the modern world’s ailments. At least, so it seems.
The retreat is very much tinted as a cult. The strict rules about outsiders and its emphasis on upholding modest dress suggest similar white Christian power structures to those seen in the suburbs. An avoidance of outside news is also stressed, further isolating members of the Wrenwood. Peter, who is at the center of this movement, is ambiguously coded; he is a recovered AIDS patient who seems to genuinely have a passion for helping people, but in a narrow, self-focused way. The film doesn’t portray him as an outright grifter, though it’s clear from the insert shot of his mansion looming above the retreat’s cabins that his intentions can’t be totally altruistic.
Barring the cultish overtones of Wrenwood, the real failure of this wellness retreat is that Carol does not become well. If anything, her physical condition deteriorates. When her family visits, she appears lethargic and splotchy, and her voice has become raspy. That’s because the wellness movement is only concerned with the narrative of being well – not taking the case-by-case measures required to heal people.
Near the end of the film, Peter twists a patient’s words back to them repeatedly until they admit that they were responsible for their addiction. By equating addiction and environmental illness as personal choice, the people at the retreat can feel more autonomy in their lives, even if such conditions originate from causes more systemic than the individual. He continues to direct the patients through a self-love exercise – another tool that, on its own, is fine and necessary to a stable life, but here is subtly bent to prop up the retreat. Self-love alone is not enough to negate the real-life effects of the patients’ symptoms.
As Carol celebrates her birthday at the retreat a few scenes later, she says that she hated herself before she came to Wrenwood. While that could be how she feels in the moment, the authenticity of this realization feels forced. Is Carol merely adopting the language and ideals of the retreat the same way that she did with the suburbs – to find community – or is she actually having a breakthrough? The film is intentionally obscure about her sincerity, in the Wrenwood-centric second half. There’s never any outright condemnation or support for what occurs; the film places the interpretation in the hands of the audience. In that way, Safe prioritizes empathy over social critique even if such a critique is insinuated over the course of the movie.
By the end of the film, Carol’s the sickest she’s been, enclosed within an isolation chamber saying ‘I love you’ to a mirror. It’s bleak, and as if the point of the retreat was to manufacture self-hatred vis a vis Peter’s insistence that the participants were the ones who made themselves sick so he could sell self-love as a solution. Carol achieves the goals of the retreat, but her personal goal to have agency, especially over her health, is still a long way away.
Safe is a jumping-off point for Todd Haynes’ career-long probe into suburbia's repression of women. Films like Carol (2015) and the Moore-fronted '50s throwback Far From Heaven (2002) delve even deeper into the loneliness that comes from trying to uphold the role of the perfect woman under patriarchy. Like Carol White, these women struggle to fit their roles and find solace in achieving personal agency by breaking from daily routine, in these films via taboo romances.
Haynes' most recent film, May December (2023), is the closest he’s gotten to recapturing Safe’s sinister sense of dread. The suburbs are as much a void as any of his other films, only there, the goal is complete integration. The disconnect isn’t from the characters per se, but from what the audience and Natalie Portman’s surrogate character know about protagonist Gracie’s (played by Moore) home-life and past, versus how the family presents themselves. It really makes me wonder where Todd Haynes will push his explorations in future productions.
Beyond, Haynes’ own oeuvre, the influence of Safe seems to be growing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s cerebral drama The Master (2012) owes much of its depiction of cults to the film. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia (2025) feels like a direct continuation of the film’s pry into the world of health and medicine. In many ways, Carol White is as much a predicator to the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement as Bugonia’s protagonist Teddy is a current cinematic iteration of some of those ideas. Her concerns with environmental illness and intense dieting that leave her isolated are the exact kind of individualistic approaches to health that MAHA props up.
The culture’s prescience within these suburban communities makes sense, because people in these suburbs like Carol wield the social capital to be able to “take their health into their own hands.” Her plea for agency while being wronged by a patriarchal, capitalist medical establishment is similar to Teddy’s, whose mother was rendered comatose by a medical company’s experiments. The key difference is that Teddy lacks the suburban resources to funnel these anti-medical ideas into diets, exercise, and wellness retreats, so they quickly devolve into conspiratorial rhetoric and violence. Even with all of Carol’s resources, she still winds up sick and self-cannibalizing her own figure. Ultra-individualistic views on health and wellbeing are a lose-lose scenario for Teddy and Carol.
Bugonia and Safe ultimately go in very different directions (if you know, you know) but the former’s thematic concerns about the medical establishment and conspiracy theories prove how Safe’s themes have only gotten more prevalent within mainstream film consciousness. It makes sense that a film so incisive and dense would continue to inspire acerbic auteurs 30 years later, especially when the internet age renders health discourse more volatile than ever. The discrediting of science in favour of absurd individualized solutions to our illnesses has ensured that we are no safer than Carol.
-Oliver
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