TY - JOUR
AU - Barnett, Joshua, Trey
AB - Abstract Locating in Todd Haynes's (1995) film Safe an example of “ecological art,” this essay demonstrates how formal and narrative elements of the film generate an “atmospheric rhetoric” within which audiences are invited to attend and attune to both the protagonist's and their own ecological enmeshment. These forms of attention—to the banal details of coexistence—and attunement—to the strange sounds of everyday life in postindustrial societies—provoke a mode of “ecological thought.” As this essay argues, thinking ecologically engenders a meaningful mode of political engagement that invites reflection on the consequences of impure relations. Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment.” (Alaimo, 2010, p. 2) Earthly coexistence is impure: to live on Earth is to engage in messy forms of relationality that cannot be completely controlled, cleansed, or purified. Ongoing ecological transformations make palpable the impure relations that give shape to everyday life and death on Earth. As Alaimo (2010, p. 2) argued, being human is “ultimately inseparable” from the ecosystems that sustain human life. Humans are “always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” in knots of interconnection, only some of which are benign. “Trans-corporeality” names these impure entanglements that both sustain and threaten human life, displacing the categories that have conventionally permitted humans to slice up and make use of the world—culture/nature, human/animal, living/dead, animate/inanimate, organic/inorganic, and pure/impure, among others. These dualisms prove less than helpful once we appreciate how we are never located safely on one side of some divide, but perched precariously in impure, often unsafe interstitial spaces. Impurity has become a slogan among scholars interested in ecology, glimpsed in other concepts such as “vital materialities” (Bennett, 2010) and “ecologies without nature” (Morton, 2007), to name just two. Though important differences distinguish these concepts, they each insist upon the irreducibly impure relations that shape earthly coexistence. In addition to academic theories, ecological art—with works like Whitman's “Song of Myself” and Muir's “A Wind-Storm In the Forest” being perhaps obvious examples—brings earthly coexistence to the foreground in ways that shape an understanding of ecology. One remarkable example of ecological art is Todd Haynes's (1995) critically acclaimed film Safe, which goads viewers to consider the impure interfaces that compose everyday life in postindustrial societies. Routinely read as an AIDS allegory, Safe, set in the late 1980s, formally and narratively subverts many conventional aspects of popular cinema. Documenting a woman's diminishing ability to cope with the toxic, chemically polluted world around her, Kollin (2002, p. 121) summarized, “Safe traces the experiences she faces as she moves from a debilitating sickness to a strange form of health.” The film's protagonist, Carol White (Julianne Moore), wheezes, bleeds, sneezes, vomits, and convulses as she traverses her suburban San Fernando Valley community and eventually the Albuquerque outskirts where she seeks chemical refuge at Wrenwood Center, a New Age retreat. Carol gradually links her symptoms to her surroundings, including automobile exhaust, aerosol antiperspirants, cleaning supplies, fumigation chemicals, newspaper ink, and milk. She learns later from a support group that she may be suffering from “environmental illness,” also known as “multiple chemical sensitivity” (MCS), an illness marked by sensitivity to toxic chemicals. As one of the film's chapter titles puts it, Carol seems “allergic to the twentieth century.” Despite withdrawing to the arid high country of Albuquerque (filmed in California), Carol's symptoms remain and even worsen. At the film's end, Carol looks unhealthier than ever. Dark skin lesions appear on her forehead and she opts to reside not in an open-air cabin but in an air-tight, porcelain-lined, igloo-shaped shelter on the margins of Wrenwood. One of Safe's lessons, then, is that no matter how hard one tries to avoid toxins, purity is impossible: No one and no place are “safe” from contamination. From a rhetorical perspective, Safe is an example of what Kelly (2016, p. 3) recently called the “toxic screen,” or “the assimilation and representation of toxic imagery in narrative” television and cinema. Drawing upon and extending Peeples's (2011, 2013) notion of “toxic images” and Barnett's (2015) theory of “toxic portraits,” Kelly suggested “that environmental communication scholars should also attend to the moving toxic image […] where toxic imagery is dramatized through popular television” and film (p. 5). This essay heeds Kelly's call by examining the formal and narrative qualities of Safe to understand better how this film generates modes of perception and thought appropriate to impure ecologies. As an exemplar of the “toxic screen,” Safe manifests and evokes several modes of visual attentiveness (seeing, noticing) and aural attunement (hearing, tuning in) that are the focus of this essay: by activating what I call an atmospheric rhetoric, which concentrates attention on the taken-for-granted material and aural elements of everyday life, Safe generates ways of seeing and hearing the mundane details of ecological relationality. By provoking these forms of visual and aural engagement, Safe encourages audiences to think ecologically. “The ecological thought,” as Morton (2010, p. 7) argued, “is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it's also a thinking that is ecological.” Here, ecology is content and method. Safe is not just about ecologies—postindustrial urban societies and rural retreats alike—but it also thinks ecologically—visualizing and enunciating interconnectedness and interdependency. My assessment of Safe hinges on three inextricably linked elements. First, the film moves slowly. Compared to fast-paced Hollywood cinema, Safe progresses at a remarkably sluggish pace, with many takes lasting a minute or longer without any cuts, which invites viewers to see material relations they might otherwise overlook, such as the impact of certain chemicals on Carol's body. Second, the film attunes viewers to ambient soundscapes. By decentering human dialogue, which is sparse in Safe, the film creates an aural space for extradiegetic sounds to be heard, such as the humming of electronics, the whir of airplanes overhead, the sounds of cars in the background, and the mediascapes that permeate suburban California. As such, sonic perturbations destabilize human centrality. And, finally, Carol White enacts trans-corporeality. As Alaimo (2010, p. 2) defined it, “trans-corporeality” describes the “material interconnections between the human and the more-than-human world”; it also “indicates movement across different sites,” which “opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.” Carol attends and attunes to the world differently because of her heightened trans-corporeality. Through the cinematic techniques noted above, Safe also enables audiences to see, hear, and think like Carol. By activating an atmospheric rhetoric, Safe makes visible and audible the material and aural interconnections that constitute everyday life. In developing this argument, I begin by reviewing the existing critiques of Safe, which suggest the need for a robustly ecological approach to the film. Having mapped this terrain, I then sketch several tenets of “ecological thought” and argue that film is a particularly potent form of “ecological art.” As I discuss later, the ecological approach adopted here moves away from an explication of meaning to an exploration of force. Taking the nondiscursive, the more-than-human, and the synaesthetic seriously, this ecological orientation is sensitive to the ways in which forms of relationality are composed on- and off-screen through particular rhetorical strategies. Through a close reading of Safe, my criticism demonstrates how the film provokes a mode of ecological thinking. I conclude by considering the implications of the forms of attention and attunement at work in Safe. Opening one's eyes and ears to the banality of impure ecological relations, I ultimately suggest, is a necessary and alarming mode of moving through the world. Although thinking ecologically can overwhelm, it can also give way to new forms of ethical relationality among human and more-than-human beings. Safe viewing Although now more than 20 years old, Safe continues to garner critical attention. Owing to its cinematic qualities and peculiar narrative, scholars of gender, race, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, and ecology have found fodder in this film. Several useful analyses consider social explanations when explicating the film's meanings (e.g., Bouchard & Desai, 2005; Kollin, 2002; Lessy, 2006; Lynch, 2002). Many of these critics argue that Safe is an allegory or metaphor for social issues such as gender oppression, racialization, and psychological repression. In particular, given that the weight of ecological enmeshment is saddled by a female protagonist, gender has been a central and compelling component of many such analyses (cf. Christian, 2004; Kollin, 2002; Lessy, 2006; Lynch, 2002). However, social explanations for Carol's illness often elide the ecological relations Safe brings to the surface. Responding to these social critiques, Hosey (2011, p. 91) argued that “The failure to acknowledge Carol's illness is itself symptomatic (to use a medical metaphor) of a larger denial of the potential of human industry to have unintended effects on human life.” Put otherwise, social explanations jump too quickly from the visible to the invisible, offering accounts not of what happens on screen but of what is hidden behind psychological or ideological veils. Fortunately, other critics concentrate on the ecological characteristics of Safe, especially the film's articulation of Carol's experience with environmental illness. Examining how Haynes visually constructs health and risk, Reid (1998, p. 42) convincingly argued that “In Safe, a new set of environmental pollutants—chemical, biological, social, discursive—are imposing their own order and, as a consequence, space implodes.” The film accentuates the impurity of spatial and ecological relations by demonstrating how pollutants undo the presumed safety of certain places. Similarly, Potter (2004, p. 135) positioned space as a key factor within the film: “all of Carol's symptoms,” she noted, “are configured as crises of space.” It is precisely the incursion of various spatial configurations, according to Potter, that prevents Carol from becoming a fully autonomous subject. “Rather than representing the body,” Potter suggested, “Safe forces us to consider what envelops it, what defines the body and its boundaries” (p. 148). In other words, the film demonstrates the ecological enmeshment of Carol White. Furthermore, Hosey (2011, p. 88) maintained that “being privy to scenes that begin to authenticate her illness, the audience is invited to imagine a legitimate cause-and-effect relationship between environmental toxins and Carol's condition.” Like Reid and Potter, Hosey considered the ways the film itself illustrates forms of interconnection among humans and the more-than-human world. Attending to Carol's trans-corporeality, Alaimo (2010, p. 136) argued that, “Safe demonstrates how easily the vast environmental and political implications of MCS [multiple chemical sensitivity] can become corralled into an echo chamber of psychological affirmations” and “into a merely personal problem.” These critics variously explicate how Safe presents Carol's illness as inextricably linked to her ecological relations with the more-than-human world. Ecological thought, art, and film Extending these criticisms, I argue that Safe provokes ecological thinking. I emphasize ecological here as a way of suggesting that there is a difference between environmental and ecological thought, and that the field of (environmental) communication might profit from a reconsideration of its relationship to the lessons of ecology. As Morton (2010, p. 10) asked, “What is an environment? Is there such a thing as the environment? […] Might the word environment be the wrong word?” In questioning our terminology, Morton draws attention to the assumptions at work in the language we use to describe the more-than-human world. One key difference is that environmentalism often assumes or projects a pristine “Nature” apart from culture, an environment separable from humans. Environmental communication scholars often rely on this nature/culture distinction to strategically propel political and ideological efforts, many of which I am sympathetic to. It is telling that, for its first 7 years, the field's flagship journal was titled Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture; the subtitle was dropped by the publisher in 2014 (Pezzullo, 2016). Cox's (2007) call to see the field of environmental communication as a “crisis discipline” is emblematic of this strategic use of the nature/culture binary since it posits a cultural solution to a nature in crisis. Ecological thinking requires giving up this distinction, however. Rigorously engaging with ecology entails a profound transformation in the way that we think about and approach the question of (im)purity. At its simplest, ecology is about relationships among human and more-than-human beings, organic and inorganic substances, geological objects, weather patterns, and so on. From an ecological perspective, rigorously delineated realms make little sense. As such, “ecological thought” moves slowly through messy thickets of strange encounters to perceive how the human and the more-than-human are intimately entangled. Thinking ecologically proceeds slowly, methodically, and carefully. Slow movements are vital for serious thought, but also for meaningful engagement. As if writing copy for a bumper sticker, Morton (2010, p. 125) wrote: “Don't just do something—sit there. But in the mean time, sitting there will upgrade your version of doing and of sitting.” Sitting and thinking are frequently derided, as if acting quickly were the only adequate response to the variety of ecological crises we face today (cf. Cox, 2007; Schwarze, 2007). Precisely because the forms of interconnection and interdependency that give shape to our world are so complex, dynamic, and precarious, however, we need the contemplative mode of ecological thinking in addition to more popular forms of environmental thought, which often presuppose right answers and morally upright responses: “The injunction to act now,” Morton argued, “is ultimately based on preserving a Nature that we are finding out never existed” (p. 128). Without abandoning critical praxis, thinking ecologically entails slowing down to contemplate which forms of action are not just convenient but also commensurate with an ecological perspective. Moving slowly also means becoming open to the messiness of ecological relationality, even when this makes us uncomfortable. Thinking ecologically can lead the willing into strange spaces. One of the key figures in Morton's work is the “strange stranger.” Strange strangers are everywhere because almost anything can become strange if you think about it long enough. The spider scurrying across your kitchen floor, the bacteria in your gut, the coyote lurking in the hills by your house, the human laying next to you in bed: All are potentially strange strangers. The more we think about strange strangers, and the ways that we interface with them, the stranger they become. Thus, ecological thinking is about confronting the strangeness of the world without trying to assimilate others. Ecology includes, among other things, waste, detritus, death, decay, competition, and pollution—in short, what Evernden (1992) called “wildness.” We may not like these things, but they nevertheless shape how we move through the world and so cannot simply be repudiated. Within the field of environmental communication, thinkers like Barnett (2015), Kelly (2016), Peeples (2013), and Pezzullo (2007) are already engaging strange strangers in the form of toxic chemicals that permeate everyday life. By examining how toxins insinuate themselves into popular discourses, these scholars show us the ubiquity of chemicals, how naturalized their presence has become, and how varying rhetorical strategies expose them in different ways. By embracing strange strangers, thinking ecologically also disables binary, hierarchical understandings of the world, including how humans interface with more-than-human beings. Numerous environmental communication scholars have developed this argument in more detail than can be achieved here (e.g., Barnett, 2016; DeLuca, 1999; Plec, 2015; Rogers, 1998; Schutten, 2008; Seegert, 2014), but a common thread links these thoughts, namely, the idea that being human is only possible in relation to what is not human. As Abram (1996, p. 22) put it, “We are human only in contact, and in conviviality, with what is not human.” Taking seriously the active role of the more-than-human not only in ecosystems but also in ecological politics poses substantial challenges to environmental communication's all-too-typical anthropocentrism (cf. DeLuca, 2007). It would mean, for example, that instead of positing the “environment” as merely a background context for human activity, we would begin thinking of strange ecological assemblages as vital to politics. As Bennett (2010, p. 108) contended, “the appropriate unit of analysis for democratic theory is neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective but the (ontologically heterogeneous) ‘public’ coalescing around a problem.” This means relinquishing the magisterial role of the human in politics and becoming open to the ways in which more-than-human beings are always already on/in the scene. “Ecological art” enables humans to perceive how the human and more-than-human are intricately interconnected and interdependent across ecosystems. Molded into specific artistic forms, such as poetry, painting, or film, ecological art has the effect of underlining its own ecological embeddedness. It moves audiences to the extent that it enables them to experience ecology anew. Form is exceedingly significant for ecological art—its material qualities become the conditions through which audiences gain the capacity to apprehend precisely how heterogeneous actors are entangled. One way it does this is through the staging of “irony and difference” (Morton, 2010, p. 17), which highlights the banal and not necessarily benign forms of interconnection that permeate everyday life. Other kinds of ecological art, Morton noted, “emphasize consciousness” (p. 105) by commanding audiences to think about things that normally go unconsidered. Ecological art works, then, by both depicting ecological relations and drawing attention to the ecologicalness of form itself. A book, for instance, may be about ecological relations; it is also ecological because it is made from trees that once lived in a forest and ink that is more than likely derived from petroleum; furthermore, it creates an ecology of attention for the reader. Ecological art draws attention to this ecological shaping and pushes audiences to notice forms of interconnection. In doing so, ecological art provokes ecological thinking. If thinking ecologically entails noticing forms of interconnection and interdependency, film may be a particularly potent form of ecological art since it facilitates multisensory, mediated experiences (e.g., Gunn, 2012; Ott, 2010; Williams, 1991). As Ott (2010, p. 41) claimed, since “cinema appeals directly to the senses […] it sways viewers somatically as well as symbolically.” Films not only attract visual attention but they also submerge audiences in sound, all while demanding that the spectator/auditor remain relatively stationary. Cinematic mediation involves the whole body. While narrative is central to most films, all films exceed narrative meaning to the extent that they invoke synesthetic forms of attention and attunement. Even the most narratively driven movies invite audiences to identify “with the process of viewing” and, I would add, listening and feeling (Ott, 2010, p. 42). As such, film is an ecological medium insofar as it produces ways of experiencing the world that direct attention away from the individual subject and toward embodied relationships—not only among sentient beings, but also among sounds, textures, smells, sights, and so on, both “on” and “off” of screen. In short, film productively immerses audiences in sensorial spaces and times that can (at least temporarily) generate ecological modes of attention and attunement. Unlike many popular environmental films, the synesthetic dimensions of Safe are not simply supplementary to a larger narrative or political goal. It is not another “eco-savior” film, as Kelly (2016, p. 7) wrote, “in which one charismatic environmental crusader saves a community threatened by industry.” Other major films that deal with toxic pollution, such as Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, articulate antitoxics activism to sexy protagonists and adhere to many formal conventions of contemporary cinema (Pezzullo, 2006). In contrast, Safe works primarily as an incitement to see and hear the world differently without prescribing a politics. We might place Safe within the “body genres” (Williams, 1991) since, as Gunn (2012, p. 369) contended, “bodily excitations in the film stimulate the bodies in the audience.” Whereas fast-paced, narratively driven films invite audiences to follow along as exciting characters navigate extraordinary circumstances, Safe encourages audiences to wander slowly with Carol White as she incoherently inhabits a world of impurities. Thus, Safe disrupts a tendency in contemporary filmmaking to transform environmental (justice) crises into blockbuster films by decelerating the speed of industrial society, by magnifying the mundane, by tuning in to the sounds of everyday life in an impure world, and by underscoring the ecological enmeshment of ordinary people. In a word, Safe induces ecological thinking via an “atmospheric rhetoric.” Attending and attuning with Safe Atmospheric rhetorics produce scenes in which perception itself is momentarily altered through both formal and narrative elaborations of a thought or sensation. Atmospheric rhetorics neither provide logical, linear arguments, nor do they offer teleological conclusions. Rather, they cultivate ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling the world so as to channel perception into particular ways of thinking, moving, and acting. In other words, atmospheric rhetorics call on audiences to shift their attention to their surroundings, to tune in to the world around them. As Stewart (2007, p. 127) suggested, what takes shape is a “mode of attunement, a continuous responding to something not quite already given and yet somehow happening.” We start noticing what we had not noticed before, and in noticing, we conceptualize the world differently. Importantly, shifts in attention and attunement are made possible from elsewhere. As Rickert (2013, pp. 8–9) put it: “[A]ttunement is given in its dynamic unfolding by an originary, worldly rhetoricity, an affectability inherent in how the world comes to be.” That is, rhetoric is always already at work shaping both how and to what we attend and attune: It directs, without determining, how we move through and make sense of the world. Atmospheric rhetorics function, then, not primarily through language but through other kinds of mediation, such as nondiegetic sound, movement and gesture, odor, and potentially even taste. The “toxic tours” that Pezzullo (2007) studied offer an example of atmospheric rhetorics at work since they invite audiences to encounter and engage polluted places in a multisensory way. So, too, do the “animate rhetorics” disseminated by coyotes in Chicago that Seegert (2014) analyzed, for they too encourage audiences to pay attention to their habitat differently. Atmospheric rhetorics induce in audiences a “sense” of how things are/feel from a different perspective. Throughout the following pages, I put this notion to work by demonstrating, through close ecological attention/attunement, how Safe mobilizes an atmospheric rhetoric to provoke ecological thinking. I hone in on the visual, aural, and narrative elements of the film that make it possible for audiences to not only perceive Carol's ecological interconnections and interdependencies but, potentially, their own as well. The speed of thought One characteristic scene of Safe shows Carol as she runs errands. After brief and prosaic stops at a dry cleaning shop and then a furniture store, viewers are transported into the car with Carol, who drives down a bustling urban street with the windows open. The banality of the drive is interrupted when a large truck passes her on the left. The continuous cloud of fumes spewing from this truck nearly suffocates the protagonist, who lapses into a coughing fit that refuses to end even after she rolls up her windows. She coughs and coughs while trying to maintain control of her car. Gasping, Carol swerves into an underground parking lot, circles into its depths, and eventually screeches to a halt in a barren part of the garage before pushing her door open to get a breath of “fresh” air. The scene ends with a long take of Carol hanging out of her car coughing amid the immense surrounding structure. This scene is exemplary of the slowness that constitutes the pacing and duration of Safe. Viewers watch as Carol coughs for a frustratingly protracted period of time—nearly a minute—before finding temporary refuge in the most ironic of spaces: the enclosure of a parking garage full of the very vehicles that thrust her into the coughing fit in the first place. In the moments before Carol stops the car, the camera position alternates between her point of view and the hood of her car, peering in as she steers the vehicle out of the busy street and into relative safety. Before the scene comes to an end, viewers are exposed to several cuts, each lasting several seconds. The measured movement from the inside to the outside of the car and back heightens the suspense of this otherwise ordinary scene of everyday life. That ubiquitous Southern California activity—driving one's car down a crowded street—is transformed into an extraordinary event marked by convulsing confusion. The scene cultivates a sense of disorientation, especially in its portrayal of Carol's spiraling descent into the seeming safety of the garage. Upon descending, the cuts between the inside and the outside of the car become more and more frequent, undoing any sense of stability fostered by the preceding takes, and the camera frenetically circles, blurring our view, as Carol speeds toward an open spot to park her car. In both its slowness and duration, this scene evokes ecological thinking. Driving, which would typically constitute no more than a taken-for-granted transitory passage (perhaps marking the movement from one act to another in a film), drags on for more than a minute. Moreover, it is the second of several long scenes filmed from a moving car. The opening credit take, which spans a minute and a half, is one continuous scene from inside the Whites' Mercedes as it moves through their neighborhood and eventually into their garage. As Carol gets out of the car in the opening scene, she coughs and comments, “It's freezing in here.” Like the film's opening, this second scene of Carol's driving makes the usual seem strange. By highlighting the passage itself, this second driving scene invites viewers to notice the everyday modes of movement that bring us into webs of interconnection and interdependency. This sense of strangeness is strengthened by the background music that accompanies the scene—an eerie synthesizer that signals impending danger. Thus, viewers glimpse in this slow scene several sorts of relationality: Even with her windows closed, the fumes from the truck breach the boundaries of Carol's automobile and threaten her health. Unfolding slowly, this scene invites viewers to attend to the benign and not-so-benign interconnections facilitated by banal byways. Not only are roads unsafe because they raise the risk of physical collision but, as the duration of this scene suggests, they are also hazardous because they create contact zones between humans and toxins. Another long, slow scene enables viewers to get a sense of how everyday objects can become nefarious. This scene begins after we see Carol and her husband, Greg, go to bed angry with one another after a failed attempt at conjugal contact. Set in the stark morning light in the Whites' bedroom, the scene begins with a medium-close shot of Carol in bed. In the background is the sound of morning talk radio and, citing the driving scenes that both precede and follow this one, traffic reports. As Carol wakes up, the camera cuts to a shot of Greg in the bathroom. Clothed in dress pants and a white tank top, Greg looks into the mirrored wall as he sprays deodorant onto his armpits, combs back his dark, receding hair, and coats his head with hairspray. The sounds and sights of Greg's morning routine are heightened: Viewers hear the schwooooooo of the aerosol sprays being released; they see the white mist leaving the can and landing, partially, on Greg's body. The stillness of the camera, positioned behind Greg, also enables viewers to take stock of the arsenal of supplies waiting in ready—colognes, sprays, pastes, and soaps line the bathroom counter. The film then returns viewers to the bedroom where Carol sits upright and apologizes to Greg for what happened the night before. When Carol gets out of bed to hug Greg, she buries her face into the crease of his arm, which he uses to caress and comfort her. After a few seconds pass, Carol's body begins to convulse—almost as if she is crying—before she pushes Greg away and pukes onto the carpeted floor. By decelerating Greg's morning routine, this scene makes it possible for audiences to attend to the banality of ecological relationality. In this instance, common commodities—the stuff of morning rituals—come into view as potentially noxious chemical culprits. Making toxins visible, though fraught by challenges, is a common rhetorical tactic within environmental and environmental justice movements (e.g., Barnett, 2015; Kelly, 2016; Peeples, 2013; Pezzullo, 2007). In the slow movement from the bathroom, where audiences visually and aurally encounter the aerosols, to the bedroom, viewers watch as the chemicals travel with and on Greg's body to the bedside where he embraces Carol. Ignoring the material agency of this cocktail of chemical sprays, Christian (2004, p. 96) read Carol's reaction as a psycho somatic response: “It is as though Carol's body can no longer tolerate the sexual misuse it has endured in the interests of adhering to a normative ideal of femininity.” While Christian's reading is provocative, it passes over precisely the interconnection made visible in this scene. In contradistinction, what I suggest here is that the slowness of scenes like this enable viewers to draw connections between the human and more-than-human, to see the world (and, consequently, human health) as a confluence of strange forms of entanglement. As Kelly (2016, p. 15) argued, a scene like this “addresses indifference to toxic pollution at an axiomatic level, intervening into the ideological portraits of how daily life appears in a society that tolerates toxic exposure.” The pacing of Safe also undoes our capacity to tell the background and foreground, the realms of passivity and activity, apart. Scenes in Safe often position Carol within the built environment as one part of a broader assemblage. In these scenes, viewers are confronted with stillness, since the camera is either completely stationary or engaged in a slow zoom toward Carol's body. For instance, in one much discussed scene, Carol enters the living room and sits silently in a chair. Viewers see her from the torso up, sitting still, peering directly into the camera. Behind her, viewers glimpse the main stairway of the home, the pale walls and furniture that fill this home, and, via a pass through window into the kitchen, domestic laborers at work painting, cleaning silverware, and tidying the house. Viewers are forced, when watching scenes like this one, to lend their attention to what conventionally constitutes the set or stage of the scene. The stationary camera enables viewers to witness Carol's entanglement with the material world around her; although she occupies the center of the screen, activity takes place on the margins. By decelerating this ordinary moment and allowing the camera to settle on this domestic scene, Safe blurs the boundaries between foreground and background, between an inactive character and a no-longer-passive environment. By letting scenes of everyday life drag out, by pausing to reveal the agency of marginal humans and more-than-humans, Safe invites viewers to shift their attention from the protagonist herself to the webs of relations that both make her possible and threaten her existence. Ecological thought is also slow. It is contemplative and attentive to otherwise taken-for-granted details. Thus, the pace of Safe stunts the quick jump from representation to critique, from observation to judgment, that structures many films and documentaries about environmental degradation. The sounds of intersubjectivity Just as the slowness of Safe decenters and decelerates conventional narratives of progress and resolution, thus enabling viewers to attend to minute but important visual details, the film also creates aural spaces that invite audiences to attune to the sounds of ecological interconnection. Though several scholars have listened closely to and commented upon the role of the film score, mostly composed of synthesizers that routinely create a sense of suspense or tension (e.g., Potter, 2004), other diegetic and nondiegetic sounds in the film contribute to the audience's capacity to think ecologically. These sounds—of airplanes and helicopters overhead, of voices from afar on televisions and radios, of chemicals moving about, of barely perceptible human dialogue, of cars passing by—shift attunement from the subjective to the intersubjective, an “intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles” (Abram, 1996, p. 39). From an ecological perspective, sounds can be said to connect and attune individuals to the “elsewhere” of the “here,” that is, to the ways in which we are always already impinged upon by others, objects, practices, and flows from elsewhere. By featuring the sounds of intersubjectivity, Safe attunes audiences to relations that exceed the merely personal. Dialogue between humans is relatively sparse in Safe. Although Carol does speak occasionally, her speech is typically shaky, often incoherent, broken, and exceedingly quiet. In many scenes that focus on Carol, she either speaks only momentarily or not at all. In other scenes, when Carol talks to others, the conversations are typically short-lived or barely comprehensible. Rather than following a storyline narrated primarily by dialogue, then, audiences are invited to hear the ambient soundscape, to listen to the sounds of Carol's material embodiment and her enmeshment in broader ecosystems. Communication scholars are increasingly attuned to sound itself, though primarily still within a humanist framework (e.g., Booth & Spencer, 2016). Within the field of environmental communication, Carbaugh (1999) demonstrated that culturally specific forms of “listening” can enable people to appreciate the ways they are connected to the land. In the case of Safe, the film forces audiences to listen to the sounds of more-than-human beings as they traverse and even interrupt the narrative on screen. One of the key aural tropes in Safe connects Carol's body to the wider world by intensifying more-than-human sounds, which occasionally make the human dialogue barely audible. Early in the film, for example, Carol visits a friend at her home. When the scene begins, Carol stands outside the house at the front door talking to her host. Visually, Carol and her friend are dwarfed by the large suburban home; aurally, however, their dialogue is clearly audible. The dissonance between space and sound gives way once the film cuts to the inside of the home, where the two women sit and chat at the kitchen table. Suddenly an aural perturbation from the outside penetrates the quiet domestic interior: The sound of a plane flying overheard is as loud, if not louder, than the pair's conversation. The incursion of the outside, figured in this scene as an invisible-but-heard emblem of global transit and pollution, breaks up the human dialogue on the inside. In fact, as the sound of the plane overhead becomes more prominent, the camera angle cuts to a slightly wider shot and the women's voices become harder to hear. This aural infiltration dramatizes the interconnectivity of Carol and the other characters in the film, for even their voices are at risk of being drowned out by other actants. Occasionally in the film, the sounds of chemicals themselves surge forth into aural space. In one scene, Carol visits a beauty salon and chooses, spontaneously, to get a permanent. After a brief preamble in which the protagonist chats with her stylist about what she would like, the scene cuts to a closeup of Carol's hair while the chemical solution empties out of a plastic bottle onto her scalp. Throughout the closeup, the sound of the chemical solution gurgling out of the bottle is amplified such that it briefly dominates the aural field. For a moment, that is, the chemical itself can be heard. In “giving voice” to the chemical solution, Safe underlines the agency of chemicals. A few seconds later, as Carol admires her new hairdo, her nose begins to bleed. By intensifying the sounds of the chemical solution, the film aurally articulates a connection between the liquid and Carol's corporeal health. At other times, Safe's soundscape could be better characterized as a cacophony of noises, each of which points to other actors within Carol's ecological surrounds. In the previously mentioned scene where Carol sits in her living room for a protracted period of time, we hear many sounds overlapping at once. For instance, we hear a radio show in which two disembodied speakers debate the practice of physician-assisted suicide, a dialogue that rather explicitly brings questions of subjectivity, agency, relationality, and mortality to the fore. We also hear the sounds of domestic laborers in the background painting the walls, cleaning silverware, and chatting among themselves. The visual and aural presence of the domestic laborers, as Seymour (2011) suggested, draws attention to those others who labor on the margins and, in particular, those brown bodies that daily are exposed (because of economic and material demands) to the very chemicals that threaten the well-being of Carol's white body. We also hear the sounds of Carol gulping the milk that her maid, Fulvia, brings to her. As the noise of Carol's swallow emerges in the soundscape, the cacophony begins to subside somewhat: Momentarily, we hear the literal transgression of bodily boundaries as something from the outside moves to the inside. Yet, even this moment of transgression is sonically eclipsed by the cycling, pulsing sounds of what might be a helicopter overhead. This cacophony unsettles the distinction between the near and the far, the personal and the impersonal, by bringing overlapping sounds to bear on a specific moment. As these examples demonstrate, the human voice is not privileged in Safe. Rather, the human voice is but one of many sounds amid an ambient soundscape that constantly points to the characters' ecological enmeshment. Carol White's deep surfaces When Safe was first released in 1995, many critics commented on Carol White's strangeness. Viewers struggled to identify with her. Maslin's (1995) review in The New York Times is appropriately titled “Life of a Hollow Woman,” for example, and suggests that Carol hopelessly floats through a life not her own: “There's no corner of this world in which Carol belongs.” Similarly, writing in the Chicago Reader, Rosenbaum (1995) depicted Carol as “lost […] like a loose cog.” And Ebert (1995) characterized Carol “as the kind of woman whom you feel like assisting to a nearby chair. Carol is not very bright.” Hence, many of the early critical commentaries notice the flatness of Carol's character as a form of ambivalence within the film. Numerous scholars have also pointed out that the film makes identification with Carol difficult (Christian, 2004; Potter, 2004; Reid, 1998). These critiques align nicely with what both Haynes and Moore hoped to accomplish. In an interview included with the Criterion Collection's rerelease of Safe, the auteur and actor describe their deliberate attempts to make Carol strange, both in the way she speaks (softly, without much confidence) and in the way she relates to other people, places, and objects. Yet, this strangeness produces another significant effect in the film. Through a play of flatness and depth, Carol becomes a nodal point in her ecological networks, a product of the relationships that (de)compose her body. Rather than assuming that the strangeness of Carol White simply makes identification more difficult, I am inclined to read her character's peculiar qualities as productive incitements to see and hear the world differently. In this regard, I am not alone. Reid (1998, p. 33) argued that the distancing effect “offers an experience of spectatorship that entails a peculiar regime of viewership on the one hand and of knowledge, health, and illness on the other,” which means that “viewers are invited to feel and think ‘differently’ about matters of health, chronic disease, and the environment.” The film works both from Carol's embodied perspective and from an omniscient standpoint. The movement between Carol's strange personal experiences and the banality of everyday life enables audiences to think ecologically about the protagonist's weakening health and the postindustrial landscapes she moves through. By oscillating between Carol's deadpan exterior, figured as affectless and nearly speechless, and the depths of her ecological enmeshment, the film makes possible important forms of attention and attunement to “the cause-and-effect relationship between environmental toxins and Carol's condition” (Hosey, 2011, p. 88). In one sense, Carol is all surface—everything audiences need to know about her can be found easily by scanning the screen. Carol remains primarily unobtrusive: seen but barely heard. In the first part of the film, we watch Carol move through the motions—cycles of sleeping and waking, running errands, participating in social gatherings, having sex—of everyday life. There is nothing particularly remarkable about these practices. It is worth noting, though, that for much of the film Carol engages in stereotypically feminine practices. Carol's mundane movements are gendered through and through, and it is in part her gender that enrolls her in toxic circumstances. By focusing so acutely on the flatness of Carol's daily life, Safe de-dramatizes her character and invites viewers to focus less on her psychological “interior” or to her relationships with other human beings and more to her movement through various kinds of scenes. In other words, because Carol is fairly generic, audiences are encouraged to notice the strangeness of the everyday, the ways in which female bodies transit in and through toxic landscapes, and how the banal and the benign are not necessarily equivalent. Yet, Carol's surfaces are also deep because Carol is decentered within the film both visually and aurally. Who she is makes sense only in relation to the scenes and soundscapes within which she moves. Whereas a typical film centers on particular characters—as heroines, villains, sympathetic others—Safe refuses to make Carol-the-person a centerpiece. Instead, Carol traverses the film as a surrogate body that metonymically stands in for the any-body (but especially any female body) of 20th-century suburban life. She is a moving target, impossible to pin down within the conventional logics of character development. In refusing to supply an interesting subtext or narrative background that might lend Carol more intrigue, the film forces audiences to grapple with only what they can see and hear, that is, with the surface appearances of her everyday life. This de-dramatization shifts attention onto the material relationships that constitute each scene, enabling audiences to notice that which normally goes unobserved in film—the settings, the ecosystems, the built environments. In sum, since Carol demands so little attention, other details (like the presence of chemicals) emerge with greater salience than they might in a film with a protagonist who herself carries the narrative. It is precisely this sense of flatness that enables audiences to appreciate Carol's depths. Because she is narratively understated, because she rarely imposes her own subjective wishes in the plot, because her body is the scene of constant intrusions, Carol draws attention to the ways in which humans are intimately interconnected and interdependent with the broader ecosystems they find themselves in. The flatness of Carol's personality enables us to witness the depths of her ecological enmeshment. These are deep surfaces. Less distracted by conventional modes of character development, audiences are able to reckon with the strange forms of relationality that constitute Carol White. Key among these relations in the film is those between humans and environmental toxins. As Morton (2010, p. 36) wrote, “The surfaces of living beings are envelopes and filters, thick regions where complex chemical transfers and reactions take place.” The surfaces of living things (e.g., skin) obscure their permeability and malleability while simultaneously opening onto the kinds of encounters that both sustain and threaten their integrity. Perceiving this surface enclosure that is also a deep opening depends upon the atmospheric rhetoric at work in Safe: Carol's “trans-corporeality” becomes sensible as a result of the shift from her subjective experiences, wishes, and thoughts to her intersubjective relations with her ecological cohabitants. Inhabiting impurity In an impure world, a world in which humans cannot help but comingle with potentially toxic chemicals, the question of coexistence remains open. How we will relate to such chemicals in the future depends upon our capacity to apprehend the various ways in which they impinge upon our bodies and the ecosystems to which we belong. Through formal and narrative techniques, Safe rhetorically induces an atmosphere from within which audiences can visually and aurally take stock of their ecological enmeshment. The film's atmospheric rhetoric works less through language, dialogue, and reason than through sensual, visceral, and embodied incitements to think and feel the world differently. By heightening our ability to see and hear the chemicals that compose our worlds, as well as how they might nefariously impact our lives and the lives of others, Safe transforms human trans-corporeality into something we can synesthetically grapple with as we move through everyday life. From an ecological perspective, everyday life hinges on this question of coexistence. How to live and die well with others, however, is not always (or even usually) immediately transparent. Such lessons are, on the contrary, always already mediated in myriad ways. Ecological art, as Morton argued, offers insights and incitements to ponder the kinds of interconnection and interdependency that both sustain and threaten life. Communication and critical cultural scholars are well poised to take up the task of unearthing and rigorously reading instances of ecological art, not in order to expose their hidden or veiled meanings but, rather, to trace the forces they exert on audiences. Instead of asking what a film like Safe means, we should ask what it does: What does it enable audiences to perceive and how? What does it goad audiences to think and how? What does it provoke audiences to feel and how? These are questions that take media seriously, that look at form as well as content, and that are invested in understanding how texts capacitate audiences to live in this impure world. One way of approaching ecological art is through the concept of atmospheric rhetoric. Within the burgeoning scholarship on what might be called “toxic rhetorics” (Barnett, 2015; Kelly, 2016; Peeples, 2011, 2013; Pezzullo, 2007; Spencer & Barnett, 2013), this concept sheds light on how media function not simply to convey meanings or to establish logical relationships, but also to cultivate modes of perception that exceed any particular sensory apparatus. For example, the “toxic screen” does more than build strong inferences to the insidiousness of toxins; it can also produce powerful modes of perception that enable audiences to discern connections between their bodies and the ecosystems within which they are enmeshed even in the absence of obvious or transparent indications. By considering the atmospheric attentions and attunements evoked by particular texts, scholars are better positioned to make sense of precisely what audiences might glean from their encounters with toxic discourse—a stronger sense of how their own bodies are always already trans-corporeal. Nonlinguistic, more-than-human, and affective forces incessantly impinge upon human audiences, whether they are watching a film, visiting a zoo, strolling through a mall, or listening to a speech. Rhetoric never arrives in pure form; rather, it conjures scenes in which audiences are able to think, move, and act differently. Attention to atmospheric rhetoric promises to bolster our understanding of how ecological enmeshment itself shapes how humans perceive the world. The intellectual and practical upshot of the atmospheric rhetorics at work in texts like Safe is that they enable audiences to think ecologically. Unlike its environmentalist counterpart, ecological thought eschews the possibility of purity in favor of the much more realistic, though perhaps less satisfying, fact of immanent impurity in earthly coexistence. “Thinking the ecological thought,” Morton (2010, p. 8) argued, “is difficult” because “it involves becoming open, radically open—open forever without the possibility of closing again.” Being open to impurity is at stake in atmospheric rhetorics, in the modes by which audiences are permitted and encouraged to notice the very real and pressing forms of ecological relationality that compose the everyday lives of the characters on screen, as well as their own. Like Carol White, each and every one of us is entangled in a world of strange strangers, a world we can neither fully understand, nor purify, nor abandon. Acknowledgments For their intellectual support in the writing of this essay, I owe a debt of gratitude to Stephen Tatum, Kevin DeLuca, Leland Spencer, and Brandon Killen. 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TI - Impurities: Thinking Ecologically With Safe
JF - Communication Culture and Critique
DO - 10.1111/cccr.12162
DA - 2017-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/impurities-thinking-ecologically-with-safe-x0tcYN0SRT
SP - 203
VL - 10
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -