![]() ![]() The radio is a wash of AM-band evangelical blood and thunder and prosaically dire traffic updates. She’s breathy and passive and somehow all the more indistinct for being so beautiful her friends from aerobics class notice, with playful envy, that she doesn’t ever sweat. The comforts of home close in on her.Ĭarol, played by Julianne Moore in one of the great performances of her career, fits into all these luxe California rooms like a luminous furnishing or abstruse piece of art. And yet Carol seems not just lost in all those lovely rooms but surrounded by them. The casual lies and happy-talking denial and leering qualification of the crises gathering outside the gates by the people in power, the blithe cutting of bait when it came to the vulnerable people and politically useful cities that those crises came to claim-these are all invisible and absent in these tasteful interiors. The camera, in a series of queasily patient zooms, stands in for the oppressive moment in which Carol finds herself increasingly trapped and lost. We first see her face, impassive and absent, under the convulsive rutting body of her husband, in bleakest missionary position. Once Carol is safely inside the home she’s made with her husband and the son from his first marriage, she is on her own, stuck fast at the shrinking center of one deep long shot after another. Then, as now, those in power have disclaimed any responsibility and elected to wait and see how things play out the President is once again posturing and chuckling through a crisis that he can’t quite bring himself to take seriously. Then, as now, there is a plague haunting the premises and trying the locks. Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. When Haynes’s camera finally arrives at the home of Carol White, the film’s blankly afflicted heroine, it pauses while an electronic gate yields to admit the Mercedes-Benz that is carrying her back to the gracious modern living space and comfortable life that will, in short order, begin trying to kill her. The houses lining the road are white and proud and modern and ensconced behind tall gates there are no pedestrians to be seen. Joe Biden is somehow still running for President, if only he could figure out why he deserves or even wants the gig. A lower-rung celebrity that no one ever really held in terribly high regard, and whom everyone had lately figured out was a crook, is somehow in charge. It is a specific moment that Haynes chose for a specific reason, but it is also a moment to which, in the culture’s grim and farcical process of lapping itself, everything seems to have returned. Todd Haynes’s 1995 masterpiece, “Safe,” begins with the camera crawling at something like the speed limit through a meticulous stretch of twilit upscale suburbia that a credit somewhat redundantly identifies as California’s San Fernando Valley, and much more helpfully as 1987. Under that kind of pressure, everything just comes to look more and more uncomfortably like itself. But metaphors tend to fail in the face of a plague. The image of a President and his wife, surrounded by swells and supplicants, roaring with laughter in the face of all that suffering, at the prompting of a fossilized icon of showbiz convention and at a celebration dedicated to a monument of the nation’s greathearted inclusiveness-honestly, it is a bit much. The numbers of sick and dead would spike in the years that followed. More than fifty thousand Americans were diagnosed with AIDS between 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 95.5 per cent of those people died from it. “Nobody knows,” Hope continued, “if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island ‘fairy.’ ” Cameras caught the Mitterrands cringing and the Reagans laughing. Those donors, as well as President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, and the French President, François Mitterrand, and his wife, Danielle, were celebrating the rededication of the Statue of Liberty aboard a yacht named Princess. It was the setup to a joke in a routine that three hundred and sixty people had paid a thousand dollars each to hear. “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS,” Bob Hope said, on July 4, 1986. ![]()
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