Unsafe at any distance: Todd Haynes' visual culture of health and risk

Film Quarterly

Volumn 51, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 32-44

  Reid, Roddey ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949860866     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1213600     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. On "thinking differently" (penser autrement), see Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, Robert Hurley, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1986), pp. 8-9;
2. on the regulatory effect of "health," see An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, Robert Hurley, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1980), pp. 122-25.
3. The present essay may be seen as an attempt to show what kind of analysis is made possible by combining current questions in film studies with recent work in cultural studies, especially cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine. For a complex study of the overlapping visual cultures of medicine and the cinema, see Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);
4. see also Emily Martin, "The Body at War: Media Views of the Immune System," in Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon,, 1994), pp. 64-81;
5. and Donna Haraway, "The Politics of Postmodern Bodies: The Constitution of Self in Immune Discourse," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 203-30.
6. CDHS anti-smoking media campaigns were first inaugurated in April 1990 and continue to this very day.
7. For an in-depth analysis of ads targeting secondhand smoke, see Roddey Reid, "Healthy Families, Healthy Citizens: the Politics of Speech and Knowledge in the California Anti-Secondhand Smoke Media Campaign," Between Life and Death: special issue of Science as Culture 29 (1997): 541-81.
8. See California Department of Health Services, "Toward a Tobacco Free California" (s.l. 1995)
9. Ulrich Beck, The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Mark Ritter, trans. (London: Sage, 1992).
10. See Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 14;
11. David Armstrong, "Public Health and the Fabrication of Identity," Sociology 27.3 (1993): 407;
12. and "The Rise of Surveillance Medicine," Sociology of Health and Illness 17.3 (1995): 401;
13. Robert Crawford, "Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life," International Journal of Health Services, 10.3 (1980): 365-88; and Martin, passim.
14. Manohla Dargis, "Endangered Zone: With Safe, Director Todd Haynes Declares His Independence," The Village Voice, 4 July 1995: 39.
15. The film also articulates the disappointment with alternative therapies, including (as Haynes himself notes) the recourse to New Age psychotherapy that claimed that the return to health depended solely on PWAs willpower and self-esteem. See "Diary of a Sad Housewife: Collier Schorr Talks with Todd Haynes," Artforum (Summer 1995): 128.
16. Thus, the relative visibility of the "cause" of human immune deficiency assumed by the proponents of HIV testing and research has now been compromised and shrouded in uncertainty; and even the legible marker of AIDS (and gayness) in the media, popular culture, and the covers of many medical textbooks on AIDS - the purple welts of Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) melodramatically displayed by Tom Hanks in Jonathan Demme's film, Philadelphia (1993) - turns out to have a viral origin that is not HIV. On the "spectacle of AIDS," see Simon Watney, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings and HIV/AIDS (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 46-59;
17. see also Paula Treichler, "How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: The Evolution of AIDS Treatment Activism," in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, eds., Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 57-106;
18. Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996);
19. John Nguyet Erni, Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of "Curing" AIDS (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Finally, it must be noted that renewed optimism concerning combination drug therapies emerged in August 1996 following the annual International AIDS Conference held in Vancouver, British Columbia.
20. Haynes, "Diary," 126.
21. See Robin Wood, "An Introduction to American Horror Film," in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 195-200.
22. The intertextual references to Flaubert's novel are numerous, beginning with Carol's exclamation of how the cold the garage is, which replicates Emma's reaction to the recently plastered walls of her new home in Tostes, a small town to which she and Charles have moved in order to cure her of "vapors." In the Artforum interview, Haynes even goes so far as to echo Flaubert's famous boutade, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi!": "'So is Carol you?' Haynes: 'Yeah, I think she is'" (p. 88).
23. On health as a symbiotic equilibrium or relationship between an organism and its environment see René Dubos, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, 1959 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 62-128.
24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 233-309;
25. see also Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 93-141;
26. Rosi-Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 111-123.
27. In this sense, Carol stands as something of a synthesis of Emma and her inarticulate husband Charles.
28. Constance Penley, private conversation.
29. Janet Maslin, "Life of a Hollow Woman," New York Times, 23 June 1995: B1. I do wonder, however, whether Haynes isn't enjoying a private joke about heterosexual Jewish men's fascination with well-brought-up blonde shiksas in the context of suburban assimilation.
30. The only possible exception is the early love scene, but its very awkwardness drains it of any eroticism.
31. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 156 and 408;
32. see also Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Michael Hardt, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). The preceding paragraphs owe much to conversations with Lisa Bloom and Linda Brodkey.
33. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 52.
34. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 50.
35. For Clover, see Men, Women, and Chain Saws, pp. 21-64.
36. Clover, pp. 35-64.
37. R. Leriche, quoted by Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, Carolyn R. Fawcett, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Zone/MIT Press, 1989), p. 91.
38. "Safe," in Stranded in the Jungle (http://dhalgren.english. washington.edu/steve/Stranded/02.html). More could be said than space permits about the film's complex cinematography and mise-en-scène, which shift somewhat in the section devoted to Wrenwood. In contrast to the first part, there are more tracking shots of Carol suggesting perhaps her greater agency; moreover, warmer browns, tans, and greens suffuse the decor but fascinate less, and intimate the very hope extended to Wrenwood residents of human community, shared understanding, mutual support, and renewed inner life made possible by the natural setting. One key sequence features a lengthy middle-distance shot of Carol's wood cabin to which she returns after the welcoming ceremonies. From the outside we can see everything; the cabin appears utterly open and transparent to residents and viewers alike (no security-obsessed community here), while Carol stands alone inside, stares frame left, and bursts into tears. From frame right enters Claire, the associate director, who consoles Carol by hugging her, recounting her own story, and teaching her the phrase of self-love that Carol will repeat at the film's end.
39. Roy Grundmann, "How Clean Was My Valley: Todd Haynes' Safe," Cineaste 21.4 (1995): 25.
40. Foucault once remarked with respect to New Age arts of existence that "most people think if they do what they do, if they live as they live, the reason is they know the truth about desire, life, nature, and so on." (In Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983], p. 236.) In Safe, Peter knows the "truth" of self-hatred and Carol makes awkward attempts to embody it.
41. Martin, Flexible Bodies, pp. 47-112.
42. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 188-96.
43. Beck, p. 41.
44. I have been struck by reactions of colleagues who, when they express their admiration of the film, nonetheless strive to distance themselves from it by claiming that Safe is, in the end, only a California narrative (i.e., not about the Midwest or the East Coast) or, failing that, only a Los Angeles story (not about Palo Alto, Berkeley, or San Francisco).