What Is Wrong With Carol?: Narrative, Genre, Feminism, and Language in Todd Haynes' Safe Public
Polk, Martha Elisabeth (2013)
Published
Abstract
This paper examines the ways in which Todd Haynes' 1995 film Safe subverts the epistemological claims of narrative, genre, feminist interpretation, and language. By inverting an Althusserian symptomatic reading approach and thereby fashioning an interpretive strategy that names Safe's sites of narrative, generic, feminist, and linguistic coherence as symptomatic amidst an otherwise chaotic discourse--this paper draws out Safe's indictment of our very need to know, diagnose, classify, narrativize, and explain. The project catalogues the ways Safe invokes but never fully commits to the medical discourse genre, horror genre, melodrama, post-war European art film, suburban dystopia film, Gothic text and its contemporary iterations, patriarchical and medical conspiracy film, environmental catastrophe plot, New Age cult narrative, and feminist consciousness picture. As all of these narratological and generic ways of understanding Safe fall short, a feminist perspective offers a broader way to interpret the film, but this too fails to capture or explain all of Safe. Finally, a discussion of language in the film offers a distilled site at which Safe undermines the ways we come into and express knowledge. Taking a lesson from Safe's own philosophical bent, this project aims not to settle on a final, elucidating interpretation of the film, but instead to testify to the radical experience of unknowing that it produces. This experience is both rare and important for a world governed by epistemophilia yet filled with bodies and traumas that refuse to make sense.
Table of Contents
Safe: The Story of Carol White 1
Can We Write Off Carol as Just Crazy? 8
Subversion of Narrative and Genre 11
The Medical Discourse Film 12
Reading Strategies 18
Althusserian Symptomatic Reading 20
Narrative Tropes and Generic Coherence 27
Feminist Analysis 46
Environmental Illness 58
Language 71
Conclusion 89
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