This film came out in 1995, and I was terrified of watching it. Well, it's been ten years, and tonight I watched the DVD. But I was right to be nervous: this is a movie about how completely far a given human can be from safe, even in the seemingly civilized, protected, compartmentalized world of an affluent Southern California housewife.
Julianne Moore plays Carol White, a "housew
homemaker" who slowly becomes allergic to her environment. Moore's
performance is excellent (more about that below), but what first struck
me was her physical presence in the show. The camera makes the environment
as much a part of the cast as the people, and frequently Moore is a fragile,
pale asset to the world around her: the beautiful home with the large
garden she tends, the wide living room she adorns by standing and speaking
on the phone, the stark parking garage she stops in to wait through an
asthma attack.
Carol is primarily a reactive person. She follows the lead of people around her, who initiate conversations and thoughts. Her initial problems are serious not because they hurt her, but because they impair her ability to play her role in society.
There are minor symptoms of her trouble to start. She doesn't perspire. She has a rash and headaches. She "spaces out" in a manner remarkably similar to a petit mal seizure. Her doctor tells her it's the fruit-oriented diet and too much dairy. Then she has a perm and a manicure (both chemical-laden events) and develops a nose bleed. Her relationship with her husband, Greg (Xander Berkeley), suffers as her libido is sapped by her symptoms. Greg is sympathetic but frustrated by what he perceives as being an imagined illness. Carol can't function well socially, either.
Returning to the doctor, post-nosebleeds and vomiting, Carol is referred to a psychiatrist. She gradually becomes less able to live her life, growing too weak to continue her aerobics, and so forth. It becomes all too obvious this is about Carol's environment, and the damage pollution, power lines, and so many other things are doing to fragile Carol. All too obvious is apparently what director/writer Todd Haynes thinks, too, since the movie is about to make a sea change. Haynes would later direct Moore in Far From Heaven.
Chemical sensitivity is a serious problem for anyone who suffers from it. The root of the problem lies in the simple fact that within the past century or so, humans have begun to create vast quantities of chemicals for which our bodies never evolved a response. For some people, the body simply decides to treat all such chemicals as the enemy, creating an auto-immune response to them. But since the auto-immune system can't do much with these chemicals—about the best it can come up with some toxic substances is incasing them in fat, like insulation—it ends up attacking the body. That's when problems start.
In the early nineties there was no testing for such problems, still less any treatment. This movie takes place in the late eighties. The best hope Carol can find in her increasingly limited life is a rehabilitation center called Wrenwood, an isolated community which promises to cleanse the body and restore the soul. Carol packs her life in two suitcases and moves to Wrenwood, further isolating herself from her family and friends.
Carol drags her oxygen tank around Wrenwood like a security blanket, but it can't stop her from noticing the obvious flaws of Wrenwood. The cult-cultivating Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), the personality behind Wrenwood; the death of a fellow patient; the removal of contact with the outside world (no newspapers), the mantra: "We are one with the Power that created us; we are safe, and all is well". And as she carries the tank around, we begin to notice she feels a need to use it more and more. A genuine physiological need develops to meet the answer of the oxygen. Likewise, a dependency on the Wrenwood group grows to meet the constant offering of support. Is Haynes saying we are evolving to suit our environment?
A glimpse of what we may become shows up briefly, in Lester, a camp patient. Lester hovers at the edge of the camp, completely covered, walking more like a stick insect than a human. "Oh, that's Lester. He's just—very very frightened. Afraid to eat. Afraid to breathe." Lester lives in the uncanny valley Carol is moving toward, slowly but surely. He is human but not quite. He is more fear than person.
Peter, the Wrenwood cult leader, essentially turns out to be offering the same version of non-help Carol's family doctor offered. Where the family doctor tells Carol her problems are diet and a psychosomatic response to stress, essentially putting the responsibility on her shoulders for her problems, Peter tells patients they are the cause of their sickness. In a group session he prompts patients until he elicits the same response from each, that they caused their own illness. He encounters a problem with Nell, who is resistant to this. Asked how she felt when she began to get sick, Nell responds, "I just wanted to get a gun, and blow the heads off everyone who got me like this." But eventually Nell gives in to Peter's persuasive powers.
Roger Ebert noted that Haynes seemed to proffer several explanations for Carol's plight, and perhaps intended all of them. Carol's environment poisons her body, Carol's cult poisons her mind, Carol's mind poisons her self. But I think Haynes is making a point about what the self is. The flaw in the thinking of the traditional doctor and impatient husband is the classic dualistic flaw of separating the mind from the body. A psychosomatic illness is "all in her head" and therefore not real. But what is in the head is very real indeed, and significantly affects the body. There is a strong, direct correlation between stress and illness. But aside from her allergy to life, Carol's environment seems stress-free. Is Carol's stress her lack of initiative in her own life? Is this an illness of the soul? Certainly as Carol pursues a cure she only grows worse.
The film ends with Carol completely isolated in her "safe house," an igloo on the Wrenwood compound where she can take off her oxygen tube and relax, as much as she is capable. She catches sight of her drawn, tired, sore-plagued face in the mirror and approaches it. "I love you. I really love you. I love you." We are left to wonder if Carol's love is genuine, or more along the lines of "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief." If real, will this love save her? Or is she doomed to the fate of the last person to live in the same safe house, who died.
Or is Carol speaking to us? Isolated, surrounded by substances our bodies were never made to handle, important to ourselves only in the roles we play, pushed and prodded and conditioned to react appropriately, and pushed out to the fringes of society when we are unable to do so?
Post script My personal fear in watching this show springs from my own chemical sensitivity. In late 1992 through early 1993 I and about a dozen coworkers were exposed to toxic fumes while our office building was being remodeled. These included benzene, formaldehyde, xylene, and many more toxic substances. We all became ill, some more than others, and eventually there was a day three of us were rushed to the emergency room of the nearest hospital. X-rays showed lungs that "look like you've been trapped in a burning building" according to the ER doctor. Luckily, time, care, and asthma medication have helped restore much of my lung capacity and health.
June 7, 2005
