Phenomenology, Safe (1995) and the Irksome Quality of (Post)Modern Life

~~ Introduction: Embodied Phenomenology and Safe (1995) ~~

Phenomenology has produced some of the more engaging philosophical revelations of the 20th and 21st century. Cognition and experience make up phenomenology’s wide scope of study, as those that work within this poorly defined field of philosophy attempt to describe and understand the philosophical underpinnings of our daily lives. They deal with concepts such as intersubjectivity and subject-object relationships, and how human existence is structured through a complex web of interrelated beings or things. It promotes and understanding of being as part of a greater net: the isolated atomic individual cannot touch the object; the phenomenological being touches and is touched by the object, showing that individuality is predicated on a connection. John Russon, in his excellent crash course on the subject, Human Experience, describes this as an embodied touching-touched. There is an intuitiveness to this that I really like, as Russon describes writing his book as a process of connections through time — as he recalls the authors he references, and his previous experiences that allow him to write the present words — and connections through space — as he describes he fingers typing on a keyboard, touching him back and the keyboard’s connection with his desk, then his house then the earth, as a web of touching-touched spreading out and supporting his writing project. In referencing this touching-touched, he reminds us of Merleau-Ponty, the father of embodied phenomenology, who connected all experience with the cite of the body, as a direct reaction to contact with things. We are always in contact, always in the world, and this contact makes up our phenomenological experience of being anything. In short, we are because the world — the chair we sit in, the desk we rest are arms on, the computer we gaze at, and ultimately, the people we talk to — pushes feelings, embodied sensations and reactions, upon us. It is these revelations which keep phenomenology topical, especially as we move into increasingly tumultuous and inconsiderate times.

I was thinking a lot about this vision of embodied experience while watching the Todd Haynes film Safe (1995). Set in 1987, Safe deals with the experience of living in a rapidly modernizing age, with various environmental, social and emotional threats looming over the characters of the film. It’s a truly eerie film because of a sort of impending doom which is never fully visualize. Normally, we talk about eeriness as an extension of the plot: the film takes place in a creepy house, the plot is irksome, or the visual concepts get under ones skin. Yet, Safe doesn't perfectly fit into any of these molds. The first half of the film is benign — in that it feels rather without concept or core; it meanders and establishes things slowly methodically plodding it’s way towards the second half, which develops on the first, increasing the tension, while still maintaining a very subdued and distant approach to the subject matter at hand. Ultimately, Safe feels rather empty and without any thematic motivation as the eeriness is always just there, never resolved, never really understood. The growth the characters experience throughout the film becomes all the more uncomfortable through this: their change is not because of some catharsis, so reversion to the good old days or some identification of the horror of the subject matter. Instead, the film just kinda covers things over, trying to hide any need to identify the real cause of the discomfort the audience feels. The film essentially establishes a coping mechanism for some eerie thing that can never fully be known and thus can never be resolved.

While the experience of watching Safe is irksome, having a real sense of discomfort about the cinematography and music, all of which feel oppressive and fatalistic, the characters in the film never seem to feel the same eeriness that we do. The main character — Carol White, played by Julianne Moore — recognizes something is off, yet she never manages to make her experience understood — she never manages to explain the emotions and feelings she feels. Instead, her experience — and really her understanding of her experiences — seems directed by the other characters. While she feels something, while she is clearly sick, she never has the agency to understand the symptoms she experience; instead, she listens and calls on those around her to explain and extrapolate her feelings for her. This fact of her character has two facets: in one sense, we see this as an indictment of masculine power relationships, and our societies general mistrust of the feelings of women; in another, we see this as a sort of representation of humanities phenomenal experience in general, in that people can only understand their own feelings and reactions to their environments through communication and input from others. To this point, she is a blank slate, one which becomes effected by those opinions and thoughts of those around her. I think that watching this process occur — watching her husband talk for her, watching her freinds convince her that a fruit diet will cleanse her toxins, watching doctors attempt to explain the problems, watching a guru attempt to psychologize symptoms — seems to be the most simple explanation for the irksome nature of the film. We watch the process by which people are effected, shifted, convinced, of their own faults and their own truths. Ultimately, we see the inescapable intersubjectivity of our own existence.

~~ The Eerie Phenomenology of Safe ~~

This is why I was thinking a lot about phenomenology when watching Safe. The film shows the embodied intersubjective nature of being in the world, showing that we are always already affected by our environments, in part through the actual chemical make up of the air, but also through the social environments we engage in, through the way we live. We are always in the world, as Martin Heidegger said; we are always already in the world and the world is always already changing the way that we experience the things around us. In Safe, we see these being in the world represented in two ways: first, Carol’s physiological interactions with the fumes — chemicals, products, gases — that the modern world has shamelessly pumped into the atmosphere. Her embodied experience is effected by the real environmental factors around her, ultimately changing the way that she lives. We also see this being in the world as represented by her lack of agency as a person: her lack of action, her seeming disaffected nature, is an extension of a society which has told her she should not be active, that her feelings and emotions are not normal. All the way up to the end of the film, she is simply parroting — the horrible scene with her disjointed speech perfectly encapsulates how she has not really made up her own mind about anything, that she only seems capable of thinking what people have told her to think; the last moments of the film show that she can only do what she is told in order to heal. We should not here be tempted to call Carol stupid, through all of this; we are all Carol, in some metaphorical sense, in that we all are, in part, blank slates that are deeply effected by the words of those that speak around us. What Carol does, and what Safe does, ultimately, is highlight the perversion that this fact of our existence takes on. Intersubjectivity — the theory that our individual subjectivity only comes into being through it’s relationship to other subjectivities; that I can only be the person I am because others tell me I am that person — and ultimately, phenomenological theories, are scary, in the way the identify this sort of irksome way in which we are all just a part of others, and that the words others speak ultimately come out of our own mouths.

There are moments when Carol does make decisions for her self. She is not completely accounted for by her husband (he is not the embodiment of pure masculine evil, but rather just a guy who is also a product of his society); she manages to escape her doctor who does not believe her illness. She does end up at Wrenwood, a recovery center for those who suffer from Environmental Illness like herself. Those that inhabit this space are all looking to be safe: safe from chemicals, safe from modern society, safe from a world which (they felt) was no longer embracing love and happiness. This is where I think the film engages with the eeriness of phenomenology most effectively. Carol finds her self around like-minded individuals, people with similar phenomenal conditions to her. The residents of Wrenwood thrive on the fact that those around them feel this same way as them, confirming their physical and psychological feels. While another film might play Carol’s arrival at Wrenwood as the positive emotional climax (some homecoming for Carol, where she can finally be her self and heal), Safe does not wish to delude you and instead opts to play up the predatory cultish trap that these sorts of self-help/healing institutions often fall into. Yet, Haynes also avoids the exaggerated negative cult trope: while many of us might assume that the cult like language is simply wrong, that there is something subversive and sneaky going on (and there is evidence to support this — as Peter Dunning’s mansion makes a brief appearance to show the wealth being amassed by those in charge), the cliched aspects of cult films are never played as part of the conflict of the film. Carol is never strapped for cash (we never even hear about her having to pay to stay there), there is never a sense that Dunning is abusing the residents all that much. Ultimately, Haynes writes Wrenwood as a profoundly ambiguous cult: on the one hand, Carol feels better while residing in her lovely wooden (and later porcelain) house; the community there most certainly feels meaningful in their quest to find love, happiness and a safe environment in which to live. Yet, on the other hand, the EI patients lifestyle at Wrenwood seems futile: full healing (some return to normal) never seems in reach and a revelation as to the cause of their physio-psychological sickness never arises.

Ultimately, the nature of Wrenwood is the paradox of the film, one which Haynes identified himself: going to Wrenwood is both the solution and the problem for Carol and the other residents. To interpret this phenomenologically: we might see Carol as the representation of the paradox of subjectivity, as an exemplification of the paradox that she at once needs to be safe at Wrenwood, with people that support her, but that this in fact works to isolate her from the world, leading her simply to exist as an extension of the environment where she is safest. She, in effect, becomes part of Wrenwood not in some frightening “the cult leader is controlling their minds” sort of way, but instead by the very process of needing to feel validated in her embodied feeling of reality. We are only ever phenomenologically safe when we have literally blocked out everything else from contaminating our phenomenal experience: Carol must block out chemicals and people that distrust her own feeling of bodily health, more broadly we tend to create echo chambers that block out those disagree with us, be that online, or in life. Phenomenologically, safeness is a homogeneity and consistency of experience and environment, it’s a happiness within the phenomenological truth of your own existence. The horror of Safe is that we are condemned to be shaped by the beliefs that circle us — the ideological fumes of others poison us — and that ultimately we find places where we are safe from the fumes that make us sick, which is at once the solution — in that it makes us happy, and keeps of feeling good in our own being (Carol finally saying “I love you” to the mirror) — and the exact problem — that living in a group of like minded people obscures the actual challenges that the world faces.

The core irksome quality of the film is the thus the identification of our echo chambers, of our (post)modern life’s tendency towards supporting our own conclusions through isolation. We are all safe when the outside is outside. But, we still feel the outside. Just as Carol can never fully heal from EI — she has to stay at Wrenwood in order to stay healthy — we can never fully escape those things outside us that make us sick or stressed. There is always an outside through which we respond, there is never a way to be fully safe. The cult-ish nature of Wrenwood, in all its ambiguousness, represents this precisely: sure they all feel better but nobody is cured. We might understand this more generally: we (privileged) people of the modern world can isolate ourselves — make ourselves safe from all of those things around us that make us feel like the world is closing in around us — but the fact remains that those things are always still present; the slogan “out of sight, out of mind” is true (unfortunately), but this does not mean it is satisfying to forget the reality of the world. (Post)Modern life allows privileged individuals to remain un-satisfyingly, un-fulfillingly safe. The more we cut ourselves off to remain safe, the more we loose the very phenomenal connections to the earth and to people that made us feel human. All we have left might be to love ourselves in a sort of resignation to a solipsistic life of selfishness.

~~ Dwelling in (Post)Modernity? ~~

I think Heidegger’s essay “Building Thinking Dwelling” might be a nice way to tie these disparate ideas together. If anything, this paper discusses the disconnect between peoples lived lives, and the places in which they experience those lives. Heidegger — always arguing for a sort of return to nature — argues that we must strive to dwell through our thinking and building. By this, he means that we ought not to think about building a house as simply a place to live, but as a place to live in the world. In a sort of poetic fashion, he calls us to engage not just with living in a house, but living as a connection between the sky (sun and moon), the earth (blossoming bounty), the deities (the many gods) and the mortals (humans). He refers to these things as the fourfold; all of these are connected — “oneness of the four” — in that they cannot exist without each other. Dwelling is the human process of saving these four things in their unity (paradoxical I know, but bear with me). Saving the sky means leaving the sun and moon to their path; saving the earth means not exploiting, but setting it’s natural essential capacities free; saving the deities means waiting for the divine to show itself, rather than creating false idols; and saving mortals means allowing to death to occur as death, recognizing the human life cycle as “beings unto death”. Only when this saving occurs do we manage to dwell as Heidegger defines it. We might see here the intersubjectivity of being: a dweller is one who recognizes all of the things that allow them to take place in the world. They are not one individual but a piece of the sky, earth, deities and mortals, not only the connection between these different earthly beings, but also a mediator, a thinker of how they fit within this web of interconnected aspects of being.

Heidegger during his own exodus from the ideological fumes of modernity

Is it possible to dwell in this (post)modern world? Heidegger would say: only if or buildings allow for true dwelling. His example of dwelling is a rustic farmhouse (built by the dwelling of peasants) in the Black Forest, as it brings together the sky by not using electricity to cheat the path of the sun, as it has become one with the earth by growing a garden and allowing vines to reclaim space on it’s walls, as it has made space for a community alter for the deities, and as it has incorporated the “tree of the dead” into it’s structure, recognizing the mortality of humans. With this in mind, we might take a pessimist view of modern dwelling: if we are to believe Heidegger about dwelling, then it seems we have lost the ability to dwell. On the one hand, this could simply be that Heidegger has rosy glasses on for a past in accordance with nature; on the other, we might recognize that we have lost something inherent to the structure of life on earth. We have most certainly cheated day and night (some great examples of this exist in the book 24/7 by Jonathan Crary). We have most certainly lost a connection to the earth as we have exploited it and detached ourselves from our roots in the soil. We have most certainly lost a connection to gods in a general sense: we might see this loss in our hyper realistic understanding of the world, we might see this loss in a cynicism towards things that are not deemed practical (another book recommendation: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram is an excellent phenomenological project on magic in the world). We have certainly lost a connection to death, as we have extended life to such an extreme that we have begun to fear our own end, rather than recognizing the “being-unto-death”-ness of being mortal. Heidegger would say in response to all of this, that we are incapable of dwelling in the world; there is no connection between all of the different phenomenal aspects of being on earth. Because of this, the houses we build are not dwellings, but rather crude buildings, unthoughtful things that allow progress to move us forward, leaving behind the fourfold. The progress of modernity is inherently inconsiderate, and unthoughtful. As such, Heidegger identifies thought with dwelling. All of these actions — building thinking dwelling — must be a part of each other, must have a oneness of the three. Is it possible to dwell any more? Certainly not in the way that Heidegger describes dwelling.

Again, we might chock this up to Heidegger’s rosy look at the past. But, we might also look back to Safe. What is the problem with not dwelling in the way that Heidegger describes? I think the film does a pretty good job of highlighting this. We might see EI as a representation of not dwelling with the sky in mind, as corporations pumped the atmosphere with chemicals leading to Carol’s sickness. We might see Carol’s detachment from here home and life — and her attempted engagement with flowers — as a building against the earth. We see no deities in the film, only false idols, be these money, be them vanity — the sofa might best be describes as the false idol vanity, be them pseudo-cults that are partially doing the right thing but really just exist to help people cope with a lack of dwelling. And ultimately, we see no respect of moral death in the film: the chemicals cost people their life on the earth, trapping them in porcelain igloos and sapping their strength. Nobody dwells in this film, and ultimately, we might identify this with the irksome quality of the production. It’s eerie when people are not respected, when there is no connection. It’s eerie that Carol’s only solution is also her biggest problem. It’s ultimately eerie when it is impossible to dwell. We might see safe as a near-nihilistic condemnation of modern life, giving voice to he fact that there is ultimately no solution to problems of “living with EI” which we might equate to the problems of experiencing modern life. We living in an eerie, post-dwelling world, where nothing we do seems to break through to the meaning that we might find in engaging in the world. We don’t have to dwell like Heidegger said — he was just some white German (Nazi) who had some opinions about being in the world. But we might want to learn (from his essay) that there are things that root our experience on earth. There are things that allow our phenomenal experience of the world to be meaningful. There are ways to think that allow for successful building towards a better future. How will we attempt to dwell, even if it all seems lost? How will we try to establish some connection to our own oneness with the world?