In First Things, Sohrab Ahmari describes a 1995 movie that looks like a commentary on 2020.
Safe with Julianne Moore and Xander Berkeley tells the story of a woman who has closed herself off from those around her. She comes to believe she is allergic to the modern world and, if not already, at least on the verge of becoming desperately ill. She takes refuge in a kind of spiritual camp in the desert to help keep the world away.
Ahmari describes the message of the camp: “Things are getting better out there in the dangerous outside world, thanks to ‘workplace sensitivity training’ and ‘multiculturalism,’ but meanwhile, the patients must avoid all risk, must remain at the center, and must avoid negative thoughts.”
Because we can control our world, if we only remain aware of it and ourselves. We can survive by receiving positivity and blocking out germs and whatever else the environment has to kill us.
Carol begins the movie in an alienating gated community—and ends it even more alienated, eventually in a literal safety pod. Rather than face the social-structural crises head-on—crises rooted in our modern obsession with individual mastery and autonomy—the safetyist “cure” requires an even more aggressively individualistic vision. As [Director] Haynes himself told an interviewer in 2015, “isolation becomes the problem and the answer to the problem.”
