There’s much more under the hood of Todd Haynes’ Safe than the basic slow death by suburban life plot, but regardless of which ambiguous analysis you follow the endpoint is still the same: Julianne Moore’s character is compelled and/or logically decides that living in a germ-free igloo is the only way to recover some real or imagined medical/emotional/psychological control.
I never would have expected Safe to be in that small list of “future now” tales like Blade Runner where the social milieu/whathaveyou inside supersedes the story. Well maybe not so soon. Enter Snowflake, Arizona…
In this town 150 miles northeast of Phoenix, “for sale” signs have become as commonplace as sagebrush. “Real estate has gone crazy around here,” said Bruce Wachter, an agent with the local Century 21 franchise.
But one “for sale” sign has a group of residents worried. They suffer from multiple chemical sensitivities, an illness that led them to flee cities for this remote high desert town.An electrical engineer from Mesa, a broker from Chicago, a software executive from Santa Cruz, Calif. — all settled in Snowflake to escape pesticides and paints that they say caused them devastating health effects.
Now they fear that a nearby house could be bought by a family that wants to use chemicals on its lawn, or install a blacktop driveway, rendering the fragile haven a haven no longer. “We might have to evacuate some people,” said Susan Molloy, who has lived in the area since 1994.