[Safe] in LA
Thirty years after the release of Todd Haynes’ psychodrama [Safe], Jenna Dorn explores its haunting, ever more pertinent vision of the pursuit of health, wellness and safety in southern California and how it overlaps with her own experiences growing up in the San Fernando Valley.

Todd Haynes’ haunting 1995 film [Safe] screened in theatres just a few months shy of when I would trade the insular safety of my mother’s womb for the real world. It was an eventful year in the US: the Oklahoma City bombing, the OJ trial, the deadly Chicago heat wave. The latter had killed 739 people, mostly elderly poor residents who could not afford air conditioning.
[Safe], however, takes place eight years prior, in 1987, at the height of the Reagan/Bush era. Haynes wanted to set the film during a time when New Age and self-improvement ideology began to infiltrate our institutions and enter the zeitgeist, reinforcing American individualism. Leftist movements of the previous decades had imploded; focus on the establishment turned inward, toward personal transformation. With the right products, the right diet and the right exercise, one possessed total control over their life, their wellbeing, their destiny; exposure to anything deemed toxic was a threat to it.
[Safe] interrogates this phenomena with stunning clarity, and, on its 30th anniversary, has proven as prescient as ever. Carol White’s illness is symptomatic of a larger cultural illness, in which the pursuit of health, wellness and safety has become synonymous with the pursuit of control. It’s an uncanny reflection of my upbringing in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles’ suburban sprawl, where the first half of the film is aptly set.

The roots of the modern wellness industry can be detected as far back as early 20th-century Los Angeles. The city’s mild, dry climate was promoted as a cure-all for the infirm and unhealthy. Sanitariums for sufferers of tuberculosis and other ailments sprung up all across the Southland. This line of promotion was particularly pushed by the chamber of commerce. In 1908, the Southern California Fruit Growers Exchange, renamed Sunkist, launched the famous slogan “Oranges for Health, California for Wealth.”
This rhetoric has been baked into the culture of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. It’s one of the reasons my grandmother and grandfather moved there from Colorado after the war. In LA, my grandmother started watching and became greatly influenced by the Jack LaLanne Show, the longest-running exercise programme on television (LaLanne, known as the ‘Godfather of Fitness’ was a nutrition guru who referred to physical culture and nutrition as the “salvation of America”).
She heard about Rancho La Puerta in Baja California, one of the world’s first wellness retreats, and brought the family there to vacation. They took exercise classes, went to lectures and ate organic food, which remained a staple of my mother’s diet, an imperative even. In her early twenties, she started taking vitamins and hasn’t skipped a day in the 40 years since.
My mother believed that virtually every illness or genetic predisposition could be prevented and healed with a holy trinity of the right supplements, the right food regimen and sufficient exercise. For a brief stint, she worked a couple of days a week at her sister’s New Age store Aura Visions and learned about balancing chakras, about purification and protection stones such as Shungite, about energy healing. She voraciously read books like The Ageless Revolution, and Tox-Sick, the pages dogeared, highlighted and annotated as if she was a research scientist, seeking to answer the eternal question: how does one immunise themself from harm?
Los Angeles’ reputation as a health haven is ironic to say the least, considering its pervasive smog problem. One of the car capitals of the world, the city is famously difficult to traverse without a vehicle, and public transit – up until the last few years – has been unreliable and severely underdeveloped. Some pockets are walkable, but like virtually all other suburbs, most of the city is not – the San Fernando Valley is definitely not.
LA’s car culture is a vision of insularity and control. You can live in LA without ever really having to interact with anyone. Inside the car, you have the illusion of safety from strangers and violence and undesirable locales. You are behind the wheel. It’s notable then that the film’s Lynchian opening sequence begins with a car driving along a dimly lit residential street. Suburbia, defamiliarised by the film’s score of eerie synthesizers. The camera, vaguely floating at the centre of the dash, gazes through the windshield, creating a disembodied point-of-view that’s neither driver nor passenger, almost like the car is driving itself.
As the Benz pulls into the garage of a gated home, Carol emerges from the passenger side, her husband from the driver’s side. Cut to an uncomfortable sex scene, during which Carol remains a passenger, expressionless and dissociative beneath the weight of her husband. During the first half of the film, she only ever seems to take charge when she’s arranging home renovations, telling a mover where furniture goes or protesting when that furniture is the wrong colour. The housekeeper, Fulvia, almost appears to have more command over the domestic space, standing in for Carol while she’s out.
Carol’s everyday routine closely resembles that of most middle-upper-class valley housewives, including my own mother’s: going to aerobics class and to the hair salon, picking up dry-cleaning and other household items, getting lunch with girlfriends. In a word: errands – all done by car.
During one horrific errand, Carol absently listens to some Christian radio show about the end of the world when a dump truck ejects fumes at her front windshield and through the open window. Coughing uncontrollably, she skids and swerves inside a deserted parking garage. The camera alternates between Carol and the same disembodied point-of-view from the opening scene, evoking the sensation that Carol is not in control of the car, that it’s seized command of the wheel.

Carol’s routine isn’t one of agency but a reconfiguration of the cult of domesticity. As evidenced by the coughing, the nosebleed she later suffers at the salon, the asthmatic attack at the baby shower, and the seizure at the dry cleaners, she’s blighted by the harmful culture of consumption that characterises modern suburban living.
Despite the safety and security this life supposedly affords, Carol gets sicker and can’t seem to escape the source, not even in her own home. When Carol is home, she’s framed by wide angles that make her appear small, meek and alone. The interior’s washed out pastels are wan, almost sickly hues of vein-blue. Around her, slipcovers blanket the furniture as workers repaint kitchen cabinets. The white noise of local news and a helicopter play from somewhere off screen, fading into an ominous hum that estranges the domestic space.
The suburbs have long been mythologised as utopias, free from violence, filth, destitution and crime. But there’s a reason they’ve become such a popular setting for horror movies, with their own subgenre: ‘suburban gothic’. Suburbia is a project of social control, of racial and economic segregation – designed to alienate and then marketed as refuge. It makes sense a mother would raise her children in the suburbs; once they’ve left the womb, she no longer has the same power over what happens to them, over their surroundings.
In his 2007 book Shopping Our Way to Safety, sociologist Andrew Szasz coined the term “inverted quarantine” to describe the phenomenon in which Americans react to the changing natural environment. Instead of advocating for collective action or governmental regulations to address public safety issues, people attempt to isolate themselves from perceived dangers through consumer choices (eg eating only organic food, moving from a city to a suburb, being enclosed in a gated community). Individuals, vulnerable and unprotected by the ruling class, scour for some sense of control.
Though I don’t fault my mother for it, living in a moderately affluent suburb in the valley did not placate her safety concerns. Nor did the protection of a guard gate, an alarm system and additional locks on the front and back doors. No such security measures could protect us from the deadly wildfires that have increasingly plagued Los Angeles for the last several decades; the Palisades and Eaton fires of early 2025 being the second- and third-most destructive in California history.
Our neighbourhood, flanked by canyons that run through the Santa Monica and Santa Susana mountains, was always susceptible. Almost by default, we were in an ever-present evacuation zone. In March of 2025, Environmental Health News reported that “Climate Disasters Challenge the Myth of ‘Safe’ Havens”. Inverted quarantine may result in some form of transitory protection, but, in the long run, individualistic action is futile, especially in the face of ecological threat.
When Carol flees to the Wrenwood Retreat’s protective barriers and extreme insulation in the final act, her health theoretically should have improved. Instead, she seems to only grow sicker, with every additional sequestration and safeguarding. I never knew exactly what scenario my mother was afraid of, if not all of them, but I think it came down to a deep, immanent fear of vulnerability, of circumstances outside of her control: that something bad could happen to me, my brother, or her, despite her best efforts.

There’s nothing more disempowering than having your reality dismissed. Throughout millennia, women have been so routinely disbelieved by doctors, police, men of virtually every institution that I, myself, have come to expect it. None of the experts or authority figures whom Carol consults believe her illness to be serious or even real; none of them believe her when she points to the source of it.
Being stripped of any authority over her own lived experience, one might think that the self-improvement lifestyle bastioned by Wrenwood would serve to empower Carol. Instead, she’s told that everything that has happened to her is her fault, that her health is an individual problem for which she must take responsibility. True, Carol’s illness drives her to, for seemingly the first time, engage with her experience; and only through illness is she able to escape the confines of a sanitised, docile life that was meant to protect her. The Wrenwood Retreat, however, is just another potemkin village, a rearrangement of the same power structures that governed her suburban life.
What’s made Carol sick is not her fault, whether chemical poisoning or insularity. Illnesses suffered by Wrenwood residents – namely Peter, the retreat’s cult-like leader who has AIDS – are treated as individual, moral failings in an attempt to course-correct for government inaction, institutional neglect, randomness, and, consequently, a sense of powerlessness.
Up until her late sixties, my mother was fortunate to not have any notable health issues. While she would attribute this to her lifestyle, which I’m sure there’s some truth to, it couldn’t protect her from everything. In 2021, after suddenly losing vision in one of her eyes, doctors discovered a tumour on her brain. It was a golf-ball sized meningioma, pressing against her optic nerve. Then, a day or two after her brain surgery, she had a stroke.
We didn’t understand how this could’ve happened to her, the mother who did everything right. She’s since blamed the progesterone cream she’d been taking, which some studies have linked prolonged use of to meningioma growth. Maybe the progesterone cream is to blame, maybe she’s to blame, but maybe there’s nothing to blame; maybe it was random. Blaming yourself is easier than facing the horror of randomness or of variables outside of your control. No matter how austere your diet is, how consistent your exercise regimen is, how secure your home is, how much you love yourself, harm finds a way in. Safety is an illusion.
More on [Safe] and Todd Haynes
Nowhere to hide: Todd Haynes on [Safe]
By Amy Taubin
Where to begin with Todd Haynes
By Simran Hans
“I like feeling uncertain, displaced and unnerved”: Todd Haynes on May December
By Amy Taubin