安然无恙

In Todd Haynes’ film Safe (1995), the relationship between the protagonist Carol and her surroundings (largely the artificial environment of a middle-class community in the first half of the film) is characterized not so much by tension but rather by a strange form of alienation, which is expressed through composition, perspective, lighting, and other techniques. The imagery of isolation that seems to cause this alienation becomes increasingly unreliable as the film progresses, with boundaries being constantly breached, infiltrated, and dissolved into a larger continuum—this dissolution of boundaries is one of the sources of the film's unsettling tension.

In the scenes following Carol’s move into her luxurious suburban villa, exterior shots focus on closed-off wire fences and incomplete, uninhabited construction sites, serving as a critique of the controlled aesthetics of suburban middle-class life in the 1980s. As will be analyzed later, this dual desire for control over both external objects and oneself ultimately fails. Inside the homes of Carol and her friends, the composition of the interior spaces emphasizes the sharp edges of household appliances, the borders of walls and mirrors, and the geometric structure of the architecture. These elements combine to create compositions that evoke a strong sense of isolation. Carol is often alone, occupying a small portion of the visual space, frequently separated from other parts of the house and the activities of workers. Further, Carol seems to lose the ability to respond to people and objects in other divided spaces, often appearing absent-minded. This disconnection from her surroundings reaches its peak in a series of Hitchcockian zooms, culminating in distorted boundaries: in one shot, Carol sits silently in the living room holding a glass of milk, while the furniture and walls around her slowly flow, distort, and stretch, as if possessing their own will beyond Carol’s control. As these objects shift, the framework Carol relies on to anchor her sense of self becomes unstable, inducing a strong sense of dizziness.

In several shots, the camera is placed at a raised position, neither grounded nor suspended in the air, thus "can't be situated either from a position of omniscience or from a strictly subjective one" (Reid, 2015). Although Carol’s small figure remains centered in the frame, this ambiguous camera position, combined with a tilt-shift-like technique, distorts the familiar streets (under Carol's feet) and buildings (above her head), rendering this moment strange and almost surreal. In these shots, consistent with the previously mentioned compositional strategy, the materiality of the streets and buildings is highlighted. Considering that tilt-shift techniques are often used to create a toy-like quality (as in Lego or Barbie dolls), materiality in these scenes does not merely press against Carol as an external force, but Carol’s own alien materiality is also invoked—her subjectivity is not squeezed by external forces but begins to disintegrate from within, tending toward extreme passivity until she "becomes the other." In other words, from the beginning of the film, the increasingly paranoid undercurrent is not only directed at uncontrollable external objects but is rooted in something unsettling within the body itself.

The most psychologically suspenseful sequence in the first half of the film is undoubtedly the part involving the wrong installation of a pure black sofa in Carol’s home. Accompanied by a close-up of Carol’s terrified expression, we are led to expect something sinister; however, in the reverse shot, Carol explains that her fear stems from the fact that the delivered sofa is not the color she originally ordered. This can be seen as a shallow satire of middle-class culture, but more importantly, the imagery of the black sofa is more complex than that. In the evenly lit, bland interior environment, the black sofa absorbs light like a black hole, making its texture difficult to discern and appearing blurry. This ominous sign suggests the toxicity in the air (or Carol’s paranoia about her potential illness) and her dissipating subjectivity: after suffering from sudden illness and dizziness, Carol finds herself waking up on the sofa, weak and almost swallowed by its blackness. After Carol’s first meeting with the family doctor, where she receives some reassurance, the black sofa is removed and replaced by one that matches the room’s color scheme. However, when her condition worsens and she is referred to a psychiatrist, Carol, in a state of extreme fragility, once again finds herself sitting on a patient’s sofa, which is the same black color.

The presence of the sofa is not the only psychological thriller trigger set by Todd Haynes. If the black sofa, which absorbs light and dominates space with its enormous presence, can be interpreted as a metaphor for the uncontrollable spread of cancer cells, then the scene in the hair salon, where close-ups of hair with a wig-like texture are followed by Carol’s nosebleed, seems to hint at chemotherapy. However, despite the use of subtle metaphors, the director does not intend to provide a definitive explanation for Carol’s illness. The film seems to suggest its inability or refusal to produce specific knowledge about toxicity. Instead, the unpredictable yet pervasive environmental risks are kept in a state of deferral, and the only things presented are the fragile body that seems to be threatened and the repeatedly defeated, out-of-control subjectivity.

While some critics have separated the satire of white middle-class lifestyles in Safe from the fear brought on by the unknown external chemical threats (White, 2013), I argue that these two aspects are interconnected, resulting in an uncanny sensory experience. As the film makes great effort to show, when Carol herself feels out of place in the surrounding spaces, the furniture and parts of the house seem to gain agency, threatening to overwhelm Carol, the supposed master of the house. At the same time, the basic framework that defines the conditions of subjectivity is twisted and dissolved. The disappearance of boundaries is also displayed through some of the living habits of the white middle class, bringing a similar sense of crisis: for example, the minority workers who are always working in the house but are placed in the corners of the frame, separated from Carol by the house's structure. These racial and economic "others," whose subjectivity can usually be safely isolated, must now be confronted directly as the protective measures of walls and other boundaries collapse, triggering a profound sense of crisis. In these scenes, the minorities are metaphorically linked to external material objects and invisible toxic chemicals, truly evoking an uncanny emotion.

I follow Freud’s (2017) interpretation of the "Uncanny," where he developed Schelling’s definition that the uncanny effect is triggered by things that should have remained hidden but have come to light. For Freud, these reemerging ghosts are certain childhood complexes or primitive beliefs (which Freud saw as related). Although Freud’s conclusions regarding repressed elements may now seem limited, in the case of Safe, we can expand Freud’s concept of "animism"—which belongs to primitive beliefs and was repressed by the Enlightenment subjectivity—into the film’s portrayal of the agency of human and non-human actors (primarily chemical toxicity). We may have, in early childhood, imagined that external living and non-living things possessed spontaneity, but this notion was suppressed by current Western-centric and anthropocentric culture. It is only when our bodies and private spaces are infiltrated, harmed, or even dominated by external substances that we panic and recognize the return of those repressed agencies. Cinema, as Freud pointed out, is particularly effective in creating the uncanny compared to the real world because the contents of fantasy are not subject to the faculties that test reality. The porous nature of the film medium itself allows for the reemergence of the vitality of repressed, seemingly inert objects into human life through the film. This porousness of film, in its ability to display the vitality, agency, and invasive power of the "other," will be further discussed later.

The sequence where Carol’s health takes a dramatic turn occurs in an outdoor scene (notably, outdoor scenes are not as frequent as one might expect in this film), where Carol is driving. In this subjective shot, exhaust fumes from the truck ahead pour into Carol’s car, causing her to cough violently. The subsequent shot shakes intensely, accompanied by Carol’s unstoppable coughing, continuing until she drives into a stifling, ominously blue-lit underground parking garage. What’s most interesting about this scene is that, despite Carol immediately closing the car windows, the fumes seem to be blocked out, yet her painful reaction intensifies. This leads us to wonder: did Carol’s closing of the windows actually trap the fumes and toxins around her? Is the expensive car’s airtightness and filtration system inadequate? Are the toxic fumes truly unstoppable? This scene reveals that both the private car and Carol’s body are inevitably porous, with airborne particles and toxic substances flowing almost unobstructedly between the exterior and interior spaces of the car and the body. As previously mentioned, in the embodied experience of chemical exposure, isolation and boundaries do not exist.

Unlike the dramatic exhaust fumes scene, most chemical exposures are not so theatrical, and often they are not even visible. Many environmental chemical risks lead to "enfeebling encounters" that are subtle yet progressive (Shapiro, 2015). However, I suggest understanding this intense scene as part of the chronic weakening from environmental toxicity implied throughout the film, akin to what Rob Nixon (2011) refers to as "slow violence." Another marker of this chronic, long-term exposure to toxic chemicals is the gradual accumulation of lesions on Carol’s face. Although Carol obsessively seeks the source of this chemical exposure, unsuccessfully, and attempts to flee to a fully enclosed, sterile environment—interestingly, this sterile community contains many "cultural carriers" from the late 1980s (Wald, 1997), implying a falsely sterile yet cloistered community—her body’s gradual decline and impending collapse negate the possibility of isolating or escaping from toxicity. Skin, car interiors, suburban fences—all prove to be non-sealed, porous, and constantly vulnerable to intrusion. The social order built upon the concept of an isolated body and subjectivity is under attack, forcing us to recognize that we must coexist with chemicals and their potential toxicity.

Carol’s paranoia should be understood as a struggle against the anthropocentrism and isolationism constructed by a rational Western society. However, Carol’s bodily chemical sensitivity and her sensory practices related to low-dose, everyday, and long-term chemical exposure—which by definition involve "a potency that can directly implicate the vulnerability of a living body" (Chen, 2012)—suggest an epistemology different from that of the Enlightenment subject. In the context of toxicity—a microscopic disruption that is difficult to isolate—the body must adopt sensory practices that avoid normalization-induced desensitization, spread out more diffusely across time and space, and merge materially and affectively with the living environment and measurement technologies. This is why Carol’s illness cannot be circumscribed by her own language, the language of television ads, or even the professional discourse of family doctors. In the context of toxicity, the dominance of Enlightenment reason dissolves, as diffuse toxicity demands an open and porous body that is "attuned" to its surroundings, attentive to subtle physical experiences. The epistemological and ontological revelations brought about by toxicity lie in recognizing the potential of our bodies to amplify "the tensions, agitations, and dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards" (Shapiro, 2015), making us aware of pervasive disturbances and indivisible confrontations.

Nevertheless, the future seems pessimistic: both Nicholas Shapiro and Todd Haynes believe that the relative enclosures and ineffability of corrosive ecologies (which, from another perspective, can also be seen as a form of introverted intimacy) prevent atomized individuals in post-industrial society from forming connections, or they may only lead to isolated, cult-like, and potentially corrupt communities. However, I argue that critical reflections on toxicity and the sensory capabilities of cinema and its aesthetic tools seem to hold positive potential to overcome the despairing atomism of the current age. Erly Vieira Jr. (2016) uses the term "Sensory Realism" to refer to a type of cinema that emphasizes the reintegration of the body into the time and space of everyday life, presenting and translating this through sensory experiences mediated by audiovisual language. This cinematic attitude encourages people to "feel first and reason second," resonating with Shapiro’s notion of "bodily reasoning": the aesthetics of Sensory Realism elevate debilitating micro-encounters from mere personal bodily experiences into shared public ones, where the vulnerability of the human body in the face of ubiquitous toxicity, and the entanglements between the two, become the common foundation for the emergence of a new community. Specifically, to address the dispersal associated with toxicity and its sensory patterns, Sensory Realism invents a fluid aesthetic, reorienting narrative and emotion around "bodily microevents and microdisplacements." The fluid aesthetic emphasizes the micro over the macro by adopting diffuse sensory qualities, multi-shapes, networked, and dispersed characteristics, subverting the logic of industrialization—abandoning notions of stability and enclosure, and reimagining the world as fluid and always temporary. Moreover, recognizing various porousness means that cinema itself must also be seen as porous, extending outward and connecting the audience’s sensory experiences with the micro-sensory experiences of film characters, the immaterial presences within the film, and the materiality of the film as a medium in the strict sense (de Roo, 2024). As Camila Vieira da Silva (2018) said, we must understand "cinema as a body, in the sense that the camera behaves as a sensitive body in contact with other bodies that compose the matter being filmed (scenic objects, actors' bodies)."

Finally, the fluid aesthetic of cinema might have the potential to break the "visuality of the Anthropocene" described by Nicholas Mirzoeff (Mirzoeff, 2014), in which the modern visual regime of the Anthropocene-aesthetic-capitalist complex has deeply colonized our perception. The aesthetic products of this complex have become a form of anaesthetics, rendering us blind to humanity’s extractive practices on the planet (Yusoff, 2013; Jaikumar and Grieveson, 2022) and nature’s protests. Aesthetic resistance to this visuality would necessarily involve rejecting the hierarchical dominance of humanity, dissolving the normative ideology of the sensory organs, and embracing aesthetic tools that recognize the continuity between human and non-human materiality. Chemical sensitivity and bodily porousness, along with the fluidity of cinematic and aesthetic strategies, seem to introduce a new epistemic capacity: recognizing the accumulation of toxicity, its socio-political-economic origins, the slow violence it enacts, the porousness of the body, and the necessity of coexisting with toxicity (chemical others).

References:

Chen, Mel Y., 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

de Roo, L., 2024. Mediating the elemental: an immaterialist ethics for ecomaterialist media theory. New Review of Film and Television Studies, pp.1-27.

da Silva, C.V., 2018. Entre a superfície e a profundidade: câmera-corpo no cinema asiático contemporâneo. Eikon, (4).

Freud, S., 2017. The uncanny. In Romantic Writings (pp. 318-325). Routledge.

Jaikumar, P. and Grieveson, L., 2022. Media and extraction: A brief research manifesto. Journal of Environmental Media, 3(2), pp.197-206.

Mirzoeff, N., 2014. Visualizing the anthropocene. Public Culture, 26(2), pp.213-232.

Nixon, R., 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.

Reid, R., 1998. UnSafe at any distance: Todd Haynes' visual culture of health and risk. Film Quarterly (ARCHIVE), 51(3), p.32.

Shapiro, N., 2015. Attuning to the chemosphere: Domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime. Cultural Anthropology, 30(3), pp.368-393.

Vieira Jr, E., 2016. Sensory Realism: Body, Emotion, and Flow in Contemporary Cinema. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 33(6), pp.511-528.

Wald, P., 1997. Cultures and carriers:" Typhoid Mary" and the science of social control. Social Text, (52/53), pp.181-214.

White, R., 2013. Todd Haynes. University of Illinois Press.

Yusoff, K., 2013. Geologic life: Prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31(5), pp.779-795.

#PCC 看完好久一直没写影评，感觉影片由环境污染引发的疾病是虚无的，环境污染本身不重要，疾病才是根本，而引发疾病的到底是什么？不论是中产生活的物质精神失衡，亦或者现代社会消费主义的批判，甚至当寻求“解救”这种最脆弱的时刻所追去的归属感带来的另一个层面的隔离，感觉这些都是异化的现代社会对人的影响。

电影可以看作是对现代社会的批判，同时社区性的疗养院也像是一种对于该种出路的反思，影片整体的疏离感让我想到了《红色沙漠》，那种远景下的角色，而带有逃避性质的剧情让我想起《砂之女》，就如同她本身就被现代社会隔绝，当她进入社区后面临的是另一种隔绝，结尾处尤为绝望，对着镜子中的自己说我爱你预示着她始终找不到自己。

女主表演的太细腻了，尤其是接近结尾处的演绎，从表情到身体语言再到台词上都很生动的表现出了一个一步步走入自我批判及自我怀疑人的内心表现。

视觉上，非常细腻的表现，很大程度的达成了用视听呈现内的状态。镜头运动时分缓慢，有一种危险步步紧逼的感觉，远景展现的与环境格格不入和全景的压抑感塑造的非常好。很多情况下也利用前景遮挡和门框来压缩角色所处的空间，让观众从世界上就能感受到那种压抑感。

    谁拥有最多的生活空间？当然是中产以上的阶级。可是更多的空间并不意味着更多的安全。如<SAFE>前一半很多镜头表达的那样，标准的室内构图，正常对话状态，生活状态，都取的是中景和远景，特意营造疏离感，而近景基本都给了开始症状的摩尔。为数不多的几次镜头推动，把摩尔一点点变化的情绪，从不知所措到草木皆兵，全部展现在我们面前。

    不过这些人，包括存在感严重缺乏的摩尔，他们到底是为的什么过敏呢？其实这是个有趣的话题，而Todd的态度也比较暧昧——不管怎么着，我就逃离，不管那是不是现实，我只有去作一只鸵鸟。其实美帝人民还确实以过敏多而闻名，其中花生过敏更是一绝，但说开点去，不过是过敏于化学品和尘烟，也总比过敏于政治比较好。

    后半部开始治疗以后，故事的推动力变弱了许多。更多的室外景打破了室内的憋屈感，但对于治疗感来说，空间反倒是越来越小。美帝人民确实有很大一部分相信冥想治疗，不过这种对宗教性质的治疗方式细致入微的描绘，似乎让电影的主题有一点点偏道。

    它本应该是一部寓言性较强的作品，因为主题非常特别，但Todd融合了很多空虚感的影像在里头，有点弱化了对主题的挖掘。最后留下来的，只是摩尔愈发憔悴的面庞，以及一遍遍地对自己说：
    I love you.

    没想到它还拿了SIFF的美国独立电影奖。

真的好不像托德·海因斯 Todd Haynes拍的片子。看似将环境大气污染、外界化学侵蚀直接定义为朱丽安·摩尔 Julianne Moore饰演的主角病因。适当的往下深究，其中也有关于中产阶级“no zuo no die”的社会自知顽疾，以及从上世纪末电影中经常出现并蔓延至今大小银屏中关于末世危机的表现。

但从整体去体验，影片一直呈现的无害化处理是我最“警惕”的部分，前半段女主人公仿佛就是各种无公害，即便面对新沙发颜色问题也是各种和颜悦色，和丈夫出现裂隙也未有任何明显表现，一切都往自我心里压。而后半段来到了那个”伊甸园“，所有一切运作都处于一种非现实状态，人与人之间都只谈爱和希望，与如今常看到的同类题材的自相残杀之人性截然不同。

特别是导演通过冗长不断推进越发证明了这种虚假性，即便里面有个别点表现些许“人性”。其实这种处理和那种过度高尚化起到了相似效果。

也许真正的疾病和外界都无关，而是我们对于自我的过度关注以及过于在乎呈现于别人的形象。最后一幕“我爱你”，你到底是在爱谁？

《安全》描述了在现代社会下一种莫名的过敏症疾病。身处中上层阶级的家庭主妇Carol过着大家梦想的安逸生活，却突然间得了一种貌似对化学物质过敏的综合症。此后，她才发现很多人都患有这种病，并称之为“对21世界过敏的环境病”。然而，从影片的角度，并没有为该病例作出任何确定性的结论，观众无法断定病因是否来自于免疫能力的崩溃还是来自于精神心理的病态。此外，从Carol表面的生活来看，富裕的物质生活、稳定的婚姻、和睦的交友圈、适当的运动以及合理的膳食，没有任何外因可能导致该病症的突发，影片也没有任何关于Carol心理问题的暗示。因此，影片是在一种缺少原因的情况下发展并结束的，在此过程中，我们发现Carol对于自我认识也并不成功，在互助团体中，她总是发言最少的，而且她的情况并没有得到更好的改善，却使她一步一步地走向更加孤立的境地。电影结尾不断重复的“我爱你”，不仅是Carol的自我安慰，也是她自我拯救的最后途径。