Slow Movies by Ira Jaffe

Author:Ira Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, SOC022000, Social Science/Popular Culture
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Bebe’s unlikely counterpart in Todd Haynes’ Safe, a film also set in 1987 but in affluent Southern California and picturesque New Mexico rather than in Romania, is Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), founder of Wrenwood, the desert retreat in the foothills of Albuquerque where Carol White, convinced that she suffers from environmental illness, and that she is allergic to the twentieth century, undertakes what she and other guests call the “healing process”. Dunning dictates the often humiliating physical and emotional steps in this process, at times through Claire (Kate McGregor-Stewart), Wrenwood’s director, and an assistant, Susan (April Grace), both of whom are as persistently genial, and possibly as fatuous, as he is. Claire explains in a welcoming speech to Carol and other patients that total silence must be observed at breakfast and lunch, “with a side of the room for men, and a side for women”. “Moderation in dress and restraint in sexual interaction” are among other requirements. “We ask that you try and focus these kinds of feelings inward”, she adds, “toward your personal healing and self-realisation.” Claire introduces Dunning, whose most evident passion is to further specify which inward feelings are permissible and which are not. He insists that patients allow only good, warm feelings, only love and forgiveness, from which must ensue only sunny views of the external world, since what we see, he says, merely reflects our inward disposition. “Remember your affirmations”, he adjures Wrenwood’s staff and patients. His regime is an extreme instance of America’s commitment – in Robert Warshow’s words, cited in this book’s introduction – to “a cheerful view of life” – and to the creed of positive thinking analysed recently in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.59 Like other rigidly positive outlooks, Dunning’s precludes vast realms of thought, feeling and social exchange, and tends as a result to reduce rather than enhance the well being of those in Wrenwood’s care.

Although Carol goes to Wrenwood to rebuild her body’s resistance to the chemical toxicity of the modern world, she grows more frail, fearful and withdrawn under Dunning’s influence. She becomes, as Murray Pomerance has noted, even more of “a paralyzed wraith” than before,60 and finally retreats within Wrenwood to sleep in what the screenplay aptly describes as the “clean, white emptiness” of a miniscule “safe room” suggestive of “an antiseptic space capsule”.61 Roger Ebert describes the room as “a kind of igloo that is completely sterile”;62 Janet Maslin calls it a “porcelain-lined igloo”.63 In this barren enclosure as the film ends, Carol turns on the green oxygen tank that has become her most constant companion, breathes in deeply, puts the oxygen mask down, and approaches a small mirror on the wall that occupies a position coincident with the camera’s. Her face very close to the mirror, the camera, and in a sense the film’s spectator, she clears her throat and repeats meekly and hesitantly, “I love you. I really love you.”

Dunning too has a retreat within Wrenwood

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