Last December, I visited the Midlands Arts Centre for a screening of Safe, Todd Haynes’ 1995 horror/melodrama starring Julianne Moore. I’d seen the film many times before (it’s a personal favourite), but this was both my first viewing in a cinema and the first time I’d seen it with descriptive subtitles. The screening was part of an Independent Cinema Office tour called ‘Crip Melodrama: She’s Hysterical’, programmed by deaf and disabled curators Emily Simmons, Charlie Little, and Florence Grieve. There was also an optional audio description newly created by the independent distributor Matchbox Cine. Both the big-screen environment and the subtitles opened up a new way to experience this film that I thought I knew inside out. I’ve made a short video, Safe and Sound, in response.
Safe tells the story of Carol, an affluent San Fernando Valley housewife living the consumerist dream of the late 1980s. Carol’s world unravels when she develops mysterious symptoms of nausea, dizziness, seizures, and confusion. She is passed from male doctor to male psychiatrist, both of whom insist that her symptoms are psychosomatic because they have no way to diagnose them. Carol instead comes to diagnose herself with environmental illness or multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS): an officially unrecognised disease reported by patients as a series of allergic reactions to the many chemical pollutants of modern life. Ultimately this indeterminate condition makes Carol illegible in her milieu, and she seeks out an alternative community. Safe is an ambiguous and enigmatic film; the story has prompted many interpretations from the AIDS crisis to suburban misogyny, though it is also, of course, a film about illness itself.
Haynes builds a busy and rich soundscape across the film, contrasting an austere visual style of wide lenses, closed frames, static cameras, and very few close-ups. With Safe and Sound, I have extracted and compiled the descriptive subtitles to present the impression offered only by the sounds (excluding character dialogue). They highlight the amount of noise pollution in Carol’s world: traffic, radios and domestic appliances provide a near-constant source of sounds that audiences may or may not tune out. The subtitles also clarify the thematic relevance of background radio ‘chatter’, such as a discussion of the right-to-die activist Elizabeth Bouvia and the ostensibly Christ-like suffering of an embattled President Reagan. Other voices are indistinct, themselves becoming part of the noisy landscape of contemporary urban life.
In showing only what the subtitles ‘show’, I want to point to how there are many different ways to access both movies and the world at large. How much of the film is preserved by this approach? Is there still a coherent narrative? The film in this form becomes vague and indeterminate, and yet it still makes some real and undeniable sensory impression – much like Carol’s experience of MCS. The programmers of ‘Crip Melodrama: She’s Hysterical’ aimed to position Safe through the lens of the Social Model of Disability, which recognises that ‘disability is caused by ableism, social exclusion, physical inaccessibility, and other societal barriers’ (read more on the subject here). Access accommodations like descriptive subtitles embed this context into both the text of the film and the audience’s own environment. I feel fortunate that this tour came to Birmingham, and I hope to see more curatorial practices that open up diverse ways of experiencing cinema for all audiences.
If you enjoyed Safe and Sound (as you should), good news! You can watch many more of Joel's video essays at his Vimeo or Youtube page.