Slightly more than two months ago, I watched Todd Haynes’s Safe for only the second time, after several years. “Damn,” I thought to myself, clear as clear can be, “this is a terrifyingly well-composed movie. I really hope Nathaniel picks it for Hit Me with Your Best Shot sometime. Because every shot is perfect. Even the most generic, functional establishing images are so clearly worked into the visual strategy of the whole movie by Haynes and cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy. You could literally grab just any random shot and know that you’d have something to talk about.”
Well, now Nathaniel has picked it, and I decided to put my money where my inner monologue is. I did, in fact, decide to pick a random shot. Truly random: first I flipped a coin to decide between the first and second halves of the movie, then I used a random number generator to determine the minute, and then again to determine the second. And it is with pleasure that I thus introduce to you the image that occurs 1:31:55 into Safe:
Random, I tells ya. And still perfect.
Safe, if you haven’t seen it – AND YOU NEED TO SEE IT, it’s unquestionably in the top tier of English-language films from the 1990s – is the mystifying, horrifying story of what happens to Carol White (Julianne Moore, in what’s still probably the best performance of her career) when she becomes allergic to the 20th Century. When all of the usual sources for support – the confused medical industry, her pleasant but emotionally inaccessible husband – prove unable to help her, she turns to the apparently kind folks at Wrenwood, a New Age-style retreat in the desert whose founder and leader, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), is closer to a cult leader than medical guardian.
So let’s dig in and do some image analysis, huh? This shot comes relatively early in Carol’s sojourn to Wrenwood, before the full impact of its relentless-unto-bullying positivity has played out on her body. It’s one of Peter’s many group pep talks, to a group of people suffering from the same environmental sensitivity, and that’s Carol all the way over to the right. Let’s talk about her position within the frame, and the lighting: there’s a great trick in this shot of isolating Carol without actually isolating her. There are two people right there in her space, after all. But consider the use of white to separate her out from them, and consider even more that slice of light crossing her left side. It makes her the only human being in the frame who is given that kind of hard, distinguishing lighting, and it makes her stand out as somehow different from all the rest. Plus, the bulk of the people are all in one solid block of the composition, curving around and directing our eye, not to Carol, but to the gap between her and the lamp, setting her apart even more. And so we have the quiet implication of the cult: she is with people who understand her suffering and give her comfort, but this is unfulfilled and artificial – she’s still on her own.
And now let’s pull back to the whole composition: do you know what’s amazing about this shot? You see something in this shot you almost never ever see in a basic conversational wide shot, though it happens quite a lot in Safe. You see the ceiling. And those giant white circles of light, in addition to suggesting that the space is kind of alien and and science-fictional (so to with all the white in this white-heavy image), are so obvious and eye-catching that they tend to make us extra-super aware that we can see the ceiling.
So what we have is a low, crouched angle pointing up, and at divergent lines to the room (you’ll note, we’re staring into the far corner, and there’s nothing parallel to the plane of the camera lens in the whole space), with our protagonist set off to the side, watching the activity like a solitary audience member in a theater. It’s slightly weird, slightly uncomfortable, slightly disorienting; it’s a shot that is not right. I wouldn’t call it threatening, though there are other shots that are, stressing the unstressed menace of Wrenwood. What it does, however, is perfectly express Carol’s own sense of not-rightness, and of having the environment around being an inapt fit for her. It is a space that, without being in any way abnormal, is thoroughly uninhabitable. And that’s Safe‘s subject, plot, and mood, all in a nutshell.