‘Safe’: What’s wrong with Carol White?

Posted On April 3, 2025April 3, 2025

In the world of action flicks and adventure tales, audiences have grown accustomed to seeing the world through the lens of male fantasies. Whether directed by Michael Bay or George Lucas, the women are often painted in a pathetically needy and overtly sexual light, from Princess Leia’s humiliation ritual in the gold bikini to the invasive pan across Megan Fox’s entire body while cleaning a car. While being undressed through the gaze of the camera and reduced to silent objects, women have been subjected to decades of stories that entrap them in a bubble created to serve one overarching and extremely limited purpose of serving the male gaze.

However, with countless stories in which men are allowed to revel in these reductive fantasies, from the extremes of Westworld to the films of Christopher Nolan, there are a few that flip this narrative, with one that shows the physiological effects of patriarchal oppression through the perspective of a Los Angeles housewife.

Carol White is the pristine image of domestic perfection and submission—her presence is painfully apologetic, with a meek voice that barely makes a sound. Her life revolves around finding the perfect aesthetic rotation and colour for her sofa and lying flat under her husband while they have sex. Through his 1995 film Safe, Todd Haynes creates a stifling yet subtle portrait of a woman on the edge of being invisible, blending into the background of her home as a barely living presence that merely decorates the space around her.

However, while Haynes is known to hone in on larger cultural forces through his work, striking a balance between critical theory and entertainment, the film has been interpreted by many as a commentary on the AIDS crisis or the effects of consumerism. The story veers towards horror as Carol develops a mysterious illness that disrupts the serenity of her servile existence. The illness drips into her life in small bursts, at first through a nosebleed at the hairdresser and then an asthma attack during sex with her husband.

But slowly, her symptoms grow in severity, with Carol having panic attacks and fits of breathlessness in which she passes out, found lying lifeless in her clinical home by her maid. The doctors attribute her symptoms to female hysteria, turning her illness onto her and claiming that the disease is coming from within her mind—the only way to be cured is through self-actualisation.

Not one person is shown taking an interest in Carol’s inner world. Not even Carol displays any signs of repressed interiority or hint of dissatisfaction, seemingly content with her mindless performance of hyper-femininity and domesticity. But the journey to discover the truth behind her illness leads Carol to find purpose outside of the male fantasies that have been projected onto her for so long that she has completely lost sight of her own identity. She reacts with strained awkwardness in everyday conversations and is unable to muster a single authentic thought, hollowed out from the emptiness of her existence and successfully brainwashed into the cult of 20th-century womanhood.

However, when her illness is disregarded and belittled by everyone around her, Carol is forced to seek agency by finding the cause of her sickness, eventually stumbling upon an ad that says, “Do you smell fumes? Are you allergic to the 20th century?” 

She attends a group meeting and discovers that they all suffer from multiple chemical sensitivities, becoming deeply averse to the toxins and chemicals of the modern world and suffering from allergic reactions to things like radio waves, cleaning products and phone signals. Carol feels seen through their shared experiences, resonating with their pains and finding comfort in the knowledge that she is not the only one suffering.

However, after latching onto this cause, Carol begins to develop an identity around her unknown ailment. Despite her increased understanding of the suspected cause, she only becomes sicker, with intense coughing fits and rashes that break out after venturing into the outside world. Eventually, she hears about a wellness centre called Wrenwood—in which chemically sensitive people live in the middle of the wilderness in isolated pods. They are encouraged by a guru wellness leader to ‘look inwards’ and find the root of the pain and are told that the cause of their sickness is a lack of self-love. The film ends with Carol blankly staring into a mirror, looking worse than ever, with hollowed-out cheeks and mysterious cuts all over her skin, repeating the words ‘I love you’, attempting to drill in a message that will supposedly save her.

While we have been inundated with stories about women who aren’t given the privilege of resisting their own oppression, Safe spins an alternate version of this story by showing a woman who is being eroded by patriarchal ideas and male fantasies, except in a manner reflective of this insidious system; she is unable to see the root cause and believes it to be her fault.

The modern world has taught women that we are to blame for our insecurities and lack of freedom, with multi-billion dollar industries that profit from it by selling us products and ideologies that further imprison us in our own bodies. Carol believes herself to be free after joining Wrenwood, believing that she has found agency by trading one prison for another, shifting the cause of her sickness between equally benign sources.

These days, women on the internet have supposedly found peace from their repressive lifestyles through crystal healing, astrology, juice cleanses and becoming trad-wives. But Carol condemns the toxicity of everything around her, unaware that this was never the root cause of her problem. The most insidious trademark of the patriarchy is its ability to trick you into thinking you are to blame for your oppression, That you simply aren’t confident enough, pretty enough or resilient enough, leading you to buy into similarly bullshit systems that promise to free you of these restrictions, while actually deepening your own imprisonment within the patriarchy and bondage to stifling male fantasy.

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