Autoimmunity and Sexual Difference in Todd Haynes’s Films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Poison, and Safe

Militantly Queer

‘I have never been interested in solid identity.’ This is how Todd Haynes answered a question put to him about his position on same-sex marriage at a podium discussion held in 2011.11Todd Haynes Mezipatra — Midpoint Masterclass, YouTube video, 2:24:44, posted by ‘rumaleable’, 17 November 2011 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip45rpbSpqA> [accessed 20 February 2024]. The question was addressed to him after the screening of an excerpt from his film Poison, in which we find an adaptation of the famous wedding scene in Jean Genet’s novel The Miracle of the Rose.22Jean Genet, The Miracle of the Rose (New York: Grove Press, 1971). The film was shown for the first time at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, at a time when the legalization of same-sex marriage was not yet in sight. The scene itself appears even more transgressive when we consider that Genet’s novel was published in 1946 — the novel itself is a romantic fantasy about a marriage ceremony held among inmates in a penitentiary and, as it were, outside of the law. Haynes underlines this transgressive character through the aesthetic realization of the film. The scene follows John Broom’s incarceration in prison and opens with a close-up of a blossoming, orange-coloured rose. Oriental flute music accompanies a pastoral landscape bathed in pink light, which frames the enraptured face of the young Broom, who is adorned with a bridal veil for the ceremony (Fig. 1). The veil over Broom’s face is superimposed with wild pink and white field flowers growing on a rocky outcrop. The camera frame then floats upwards to show the scene from an angelic perspective. Seven or eight young, brightly dressed prisoners lead the lovers to one another. The ceremony concludes with a voiceover that is used to quote Genet. Invoking ‘God and the oppressor’, the lovers exchange rings, and the groom lifts his veil and kisses the young Broom. It is a carefully composed, queer performance. The scene bears a promise of love beyond the normalizing moment inscribed in institutionalized wedding ceremonies. It transgresses not only the prison system, but also the masculinities that this system reproduces. It shows the inmates in their vulnerability.

In his answer Haynes does not state that he is against same-sex marriage. He stresses instead that Poison is a militant film and was inspired by Genet’s own militancy around queerness. For Genet homosexuality undermines normality in existential, aesthetic, and political terms. As a political project, queerness, for Genet — and also for Haynes — is part of a coalition of struggles against sexism, racism, and Western colonialism.

Made between 1989 and 1990, Poison was financed through a mixture of art funding and private investment. As Haynes emphasizes in interviews, Zeitgeist Films, a then newly founded arthouse distributor, was involved from the very beginning. The production was thus more like an art project than a film shoot. The film itself, which could only be shown in a few cinemas in the US, was released on DVD in 1999. To mark the twentieth anniversary of its release, a re-edited digital edition was made that included as bonus material the short film Dottie Gets Spanked from 1993. These digital distribution channels allowed the film to find an audience beyond traditional distribution, surpassing the boundaries of the relevant film festivals.

In the 1980s, a panicked and homophobic mainstream reaction to AIDS sought the causes of the disease in sexuality and in the misconduct of those affected. In his film, Haynes tackles the speculative and affective charge of HIV and AIDS.33HIV is the acronym for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. AIDS stands for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. However, rather than simply devising an alternative, opposing narrative, he goes a decisive step further and problematizes the way that the illness itself is laden with meaning. As an experimental film, Poison examines the normalizing effects associated with the discourse of immunity, in which, paradoxically, immunodeficiency and immune system overactivity are described as equally dangerous and as bearing the same potential for danger. With its thematic of a cinematic exploration of the discourse on immunity, Poison thus follows on from his 1987 short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, as well as from his 1995 independent feature film Safe. Unlike in Poison, however, both Superstar and Safe feature main characters who are female and heterosexual. Superstar depicts Karen Carpenter, a singer who had died of anorexia, and who here is played by a Barbie doll. Safe revolves around Carol White, a housewife played by Julianne Moore, who suffers from a strange autoimmune disease. The fact that the main characters in Superstar and Safe are female and heterosexual is no coincidence, but central to the film-aesthetic concept of traversing autoimmunity with sexual difference and sexual difference with autoimmunity.

Poison

Poison is comprised of three independently shot 35mm films that were segmented and edited together. Its collision of the images is reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s procedure of intellectual montage. At the same time, however, the scenes assembled resist Eisenstein’s demand that there be a superordinate conclusion that could rule over all other forms. The film is not governed by any idea of a historical dialectic. Instead, it works with ambivalences, differentiations, breaks, and bricolages. The three films are titled Horror, Hero, and Homo. Like Superstar, they take up different popular US genres: Horror is shot in black and white, and adopts the shrill aesthetic of a B-movie thriller from the 1950s, replete with wide-angle camera shots, stark shadows, dissonant music, and loud noises. A young scientist, Dr Thomas Graves, succeeds in isolating the sex drive hormone in his laboratory. There is a moment when a young colleague called Nancy Olsen, who has applied to be his assistant, becomes sexually attracted to him, and he accidentally drinks the serum, subsequently developing AIDS-like symptoms. The serum turns him into a ‘monster’, but that does not stop Nancy Olsen from declaring her love for him.

Hero tells the story of a young boy, Richie Beacon, who has killed his father and then, as his mother testifies, escapes from the window into the sky. The story is shot as a sort of investigative report, such as we might see in the series Unsolved Mysteries. Using a reality TV aesthetic, the life of the seven-year-old boy is recounted through a sequence of interviews with teachers, neighbours, classmates, and his mother. The testimonies contradict each other and paint a picture of a child who has been bullied and hurt countless times. Some describe the boy as a liar, while others depict him as a gifted storyteller; he appears both as victim and as manipulative masochist. Only after his disappearance does his mother come to recognize him as her saving angel — a gift from God. Richie Beacon is one who ‘suffers beatings’; he is in Freud’s sense a child who is ‘being beaten’. Within his narrow, petit-bourgeois surroundings, his queer desire appears perverse. And yet he wins over his mother’s affections and, after killing his father, emerges as a hero from the story that he has himself invented. He exits the scene by flying out the window and into the sky.

Homo, lastly, consists of free adaptations of scenes from Genet’s novels The Thief’s Journal, Miracle of the Rose, and Our Lady of the Flowers.44Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal (New York: Grove Press, 1987) and Our Lady of the Flowers (New York: Grove Press, 1991). See Sam Ishii-Gonzales, ‘To Appear, to Disappear: Jean Genet and Poison’, in The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All that Heaven Allows, ed. by James Morrison (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), pp. 32–41. As a prison romance Homo is told from the perspective of inmate John Broom, and revolves around Broom’s growing passion for a fellow prisoner, John Bolton, whom Broom knows from their days at the reform school of Fontanelle. The scenes alternate between the prison and memories of Fontanelle, and the love story is cast in the form of a generic melodrama. The eroticism, the strong sexual tension, builds steadily between the prisoners, and is evoked through close-ups and the close proximity of the camera to the character’s bodies — such as when the camera traces the scar on the lover’s torso — a technique inspired by the filmic aesthetic and cinematography of Genet’s short and only film, Un chant d’amour (A Song of Love) (France, 1956).

All three stories share an obsession with wounds, the exchange of fluids, boundary violations, and contagion. As boundaries between inside and outside are not respected, the bodies in them get perforated. Physical excretions flow across the canvas. Many scenes present Dr Graves’s body in particular, with its leprous wounds, as downright grotesque. However, in Poison the protagonists’ bodies are not the only things that appear vulnerable; owing to the cuts and segments of the three stories that are edited into one another, the film itself also appears as a sort of vulnerable body. This impression is reinforced by the correspondences between individual scenes from Horror, Hero, and Homo, as well as the references they make to scenes from other films. For example, at one point in Horror, Nancy Olsen and Graves, the latter with pus flowing uncontrollably from a rash on his face, are sitting at a restaurant table eating hot dogs while the people surrounding them stare at and ostracize them. This scene is a quote of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) (1974) about an impossible love between an older German woman and a younger guest worker from Morocco.

On the way to the restaurant, Dr Graves and Nancy Olsen pass two little girls who stop in front of Dr Graves and spit in his face with contempt. This scene is taken up and transformed in a scene in Homo that takes place in the reformatory in Fontanelle: in it, Broom remembers watching the weaker Bolton being forced by seven or eight juvenile inmates to catch saliva as his mouth is held open and they spit into it from a distance. Here, too, disgust and shame prevail at first. But a transgression also takes place in this scene: disgust and shame are transcended and transformed into sexual pleasure. This transgression is introduced cinematically by the camera’s moving upwards. In the reverse cut, the spit becomes a shimmering golden rain. A point of view shot shows us, through Bolton’s eyes, rose petals falling from the sky (Fig. 2).

The obsessive staging of border-crossings and the exchange of bodily secretions, both connoting poison, contagion, and danger in the prevalent discourse on AIDS and immunity at the time, betrays the existence of a connection between enjoyment, vulnerability, and sexuality on the level of form and content. Poison thereby transgresses the correlation between homosexuality, shame, and guilt. This transgression betrays a vulnerability indicative of an autoimmunization process, one that, as Derrida might say, rather than attacking the organism, attacks the self and the self’s self-referentiality. Which is to say that the discourse on immunity both addresses and produces this self.55Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). As the beginning of the film depicts, in a situation where the whole world seems to be suffocating from panic and fear, Poison risks this self precisely in the aesthetic staging of vulnerability and enjoyment — a self that is trained by the immune system to take form as ‘a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other’.66Donna Haraway, ‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse’, in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: Free Association Books, 1991), pp. 203–30 (p. 204). In a similar vein, in their 2012 film installation Toxic, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz pose the question of whether media and technologies that are harmful and toxic can also be healing. Their starting point is the early history of mug shots. Mug shots show people frontally and in profile, and were used by state and scientific institutions to identify groups of people and to involve the population in searching for wanted persons. Not only were people who were deemed criminals marked in this way, so too were prostitutes, homosexuals, transvestites, Black people, and colonial subjects. In their cinematic installation, Boudry/Lorenz show how these toxic media agendas can also give rise to images that affect and ignite an uncontrollable desire that is not only conservative, but that can also unfold a transformative power. See Antke Engel and Renate Lorenz, ‘Toxic Assemblages, Queer Socialities: A Dialogue of Mutual Poisoning’, e-flux Journal, 44 (2013) <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/toxic-assemblages-queer-socialities-a-dialogue-of-mutual-poisoning/> [accessed 16 February 2024].

Immunity

The word immunity derives from the Latin adjective immunis, which means exempt, immune, protected, or tax-free. In ancient times, the authorities could grant various forms of immunity, exempting individuals, authorities, cities, or communities within a given polity from certain taxes or services.77For a detailed account of these aspects, see Isabell Lorey, Figuren des Immunen: Elemente einer politischen Theorie (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2011). As the historian of science Johannes Türk has pointed out, immunity was conceived as an ‘exception to the norm’.88Johannes Türk, ‘Zur Begriffsgeschichte von Immunität’, in Kulturen der Epigenetik: Vererbt, codiert, übertragen, ed. by Vanessa Lux and Jörg Thomas Richter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 107–16 (p. 107). With the transfer of the term from the legal domain to the life sciences, ‘structures from the law were consequently also transferred to the life sciences, so that the form in which life is conceived in the modern age inherits the form of a legal exception’.99Ibid. Immunitas is linked to the Latin word munus, which means duty, office, gift, obligation, and is also connected to the Latin word for community, communitas. This twofold etymology persists in the English word community as well as in the French communauté. While in a juridical sense immunity means exemption from a service, and those who are immune are singled out from the community of others, the shared obligation in communitas is community-building. The concept of immunity therefore transcends the boundary not only between law and life, but also between community and self, the singular and the other, inclusion and exclusion.

However, where the transfer of immunity from the legal to the medical and bioscientific field was accompanied by an emphasis on the positive significance of protection, the significance of exemption from obligations to the community receded into the background; and yet, following the invention of the smallpox vaccination at the end of the eighteenth century, immunity became the paradigm of a logic of enhancement: it became associated with increasing the body’s resistance to risks and to harmful external influences through the controlled containment of evil. The concept of acquired immunity, which was developed in connection with vaccination, thus distinguished between self and other, but simultaneously made this distinction dubious.1010Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), p. 7. At the end of the nineteenth century, renowned German immunologist Paul Ehrlich, seeking to control the ambivalence of this immunological concept, postulated a basic biological principle that ruled out any self-aggression on the part of the immune system. It stated that the organism was unable to produce antibodies that might work against the body’s own antigens. Ehrlich gave this principle, intended to rule out the possibility of autoimmunization, the eloquent name of Horror Autotoxicus, literally rendered as fear of self-poisoning. This principle was replaced in the 1950s by the concept of self-tolerance as research into autoimmune diseases was getting underway. Since this time, the word autoimmunity has been used to refer to an immune reaction that occurs against the body’s own antigens and is able to trigger an autoimmune disease. Today, contrary to Ehrlich’s principle, autoimmunity thus refers to this precise possibility of immune system self-aggression.1111Arthur M. Silverstein, ‘Autoimmunity versus Horror Autotoxicus: The Struggle for Recognition’, Nature Immunology, 2 (2001), pp. 279–81. On the paradoxes of the concept of autoimmunity, see also Ed Cohen, ‘My Self as an Other: On Autoimmunity and “Other” Paradoxes’, Medical Humanities, 30 (2004), pp. 7–11 <https://doi.org/10.1136/jmh.2004.000162>. My appreciation goes to Bettina Wahrig for pointing out this reference.

As a biological model, the immune system — as Donna Haraway underscores in her influential essay from 1989 ‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse’ — was ‘pre-eminently a twentieth-century object’.1212Donna Haraway, ‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies’, p. 162. Haraway was in agreement with the activists from Act Up, for whom AIDS, as an acquired autoimmune sickness with all the attendant controversial meanings, amounted to an ‘epidemic of signification’.1313Paula A. Treichler, ‘AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification’, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. by Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). As a consequence, the task at hand involved adding new meanings to already existing ones and analysing AIDS as a form of signification.

Haynes’s films inquire into the life and survival programmes that form part of this model of the immune system. What does it mean to live in an environment that, as it says at one point in Safe, suddenly turns out to be totally toxic, to be totally poisoned? In which the immune system turns against the self it is supposed to protect? In which every detail can become significant, can be curative and nefarious at the same time? Symptomatic of this crisis-ridden immunity discourse is the phenomenon of the total allergy syndrome, also known as twentieth-century disease or eco-syndrome, which also emerged in the 1980s. This syndrome concerns the hypersensitivity to their environment of those affected and is similar to the uncanny and mysterious illness from which Carol White suffers in Safe.

Haynes’s films are militant in Genet’s sense. In other words, they refer to queerness as a political and aesthetic project that does not seek to connect with normality. At the same time, they are very precisely situated historically.1414See Larry Gross, ‘Antibodies: Larry Gross talks with Safe’s Todd Haynes’, in Todd Haynes: Interviews, ed. by Julia Leyda (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), pp. 60–72 <https://www.filmmakermagazine.com/archives/issues/summer1995/antibodies.php> [accessed 9 March 2024]. In times when the anti-AIDS drugs were few and ineffective, people infected with HIV took to identifying with the politics associated with the concept of the immune system: they strove to regain control over their own bodies by looking for the cause of the illness in their own behaviour. Since, by definition, AIDS is an immune deficiency disorder, methods for strengthening the immune system and thus for fortifying the self were high in demand. Spiritual self-healing methods like those advocated by the New Thought and New Age movements were quite popular in the community. Physical illnesses could be cured through mental training — such was the credo. One of the most prominent representatives of this new spiritual movement was Louise L. Hay, the author of How You Can Heal Your Life,1515Louise L. Hay, You Can Heal Your Life (Santa Monica, CA: Hay House, 1984). which, published in 1984, went on to sell more than fifty million copies in thirty languages. In 1988, Hay was invited to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show to talk about her work with AIDS patients in West Hollywood, an affluent neighbourhood in Los Angeles similar to the one in which Safe is set. After her appearance on the show, Hay’s book on the art of self-healing was propelled onto the New York Times bestseller list. The book’s message basically states that the illness is caused by self-hatred, something she promises can be cured through self-love and forgiveness. Safe uses the example of its main character, the vulnerable and fragile Carol White, who suffers from a mysterious immune deficiency, to examine how these therapies of the self actually work, what the effects of the New Age and spiritualist New Thought movements are, how they relate to the immunity discourse, and how the question of gender and sexuality is to be situated within it.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

Haynes is not interested in stable identities. Rather, he focusses on processes of identification and disidentification. For his theoretical inspiration, he draws on feminist theories from the 1970s and 1980s. In the introduction to the screenplays for Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Safe, and the melodrama Far from Heaven (2002), Haynes pays the following tribute to feminist theory: ‘From my first encounter with the invigorating notion of gender as a product of ideology, feminist theory has left an indelible mark on my own — critical and creative — thinking.’1616Todd Haynes, Far from Heaven, Safe, and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story; Three Screenplays (New York: Grove Press, 2003), p. viii. Haynes identifies with the feminist interest in processes of disidentification, the feminist critique of normative gender systems, its focus on precarious sexual identities, and he identifies with women who have revolted against the patriarchal middle-class family. In this vein, he continues,

Identification, to all three of these films, is critical. Not merely my own identification — with Karen, or Carol, or Cathy — but identification itself: that compulsive narrative drive to inhabit what we see (which always seems to function best when we’re not noticing).1717Ibid.

Karen is the main character in Superstar. She is modelled on the singer of the hugely successful pop duo The Carpenters, made up of Karen Carpenter and her brother Richard Carpenter. Karen Carpenter’s soft yet dark voice reconciled generations across the abyss of the Vietnam War, but she died of anorexia nervosa in 1983 at the young age of 32. In this film, shot on 16mm, Haynes recreates Karen’s career and life using Barbie and Ken dolls by adopting the ‘Rise and Fall of a Star’ genre. The film is accompanied by original songs from the Carpenters, however as Haynes and his co-producer and co-writer Cynthia Schneider neglected to secure the rights to the music during production, the film is still not allowed to be shown in public. Nevertheless, it quickly achieved cult film status and is now readily accessible on YouTube. Although only Barbie and Ken dolls can be seen in the film, the immersion effect works brilliantly: the viewer is drawn into the story from the very first shot, so much so that one forgets they are dolls and identifies with them. One important reason for the immersive effect is the power of the original Carpenters’ songs, and especially of Karen’s voice. It’s hard not to be seized by her melodic, lulling rhythm.

On the other hand, the generic form of the biopic is skillfully transferred to give the dolls life, using camera work, tracking shots, cuts, and counter-cuts to Barbie doll size, all of which invite an empathy with Karen’s fate.

The film superimposes Karen Carpenter’s personal story over the then popular and controversial discourse on anorexia. The film focuses on feminist interpretations of anorexia, in which the refusal to eat is seen as a refusal by anorexic women to identify with the normative ideal of femininity. At one point in the film, controversial statements on the meaning of anorexia are presented in blocks of text mounted over a tracking shot along supermarket shelves (Fig. 3). They are countered by a voiceover that tells the story of supermarkets and of the economic boom in post-war USA. One of these blocks of text reads:

In a culture that continues to control women through the commoditization of their bodies, the anorexic body excludes itself rejecting the doctrines of femininity, driven by a vision of complete mastery and control.1818Safe, 00:22:31.

This quote suggests an understanding of anorexia as a kind of autoimmune sickness. In her 1985 study Nicht Ich (Not Me), Christina von Braun emphatically points out that the anorexic woman’s refusal should not be misunderstood as a refusal to become a woman but that, on the contrary, the anorexic woman is concerned with ‘preserving the woman as a sexual being, if not physically, then at least as an idea’.1919Christina von Braun, Nicht Ich. Logik, Lüge, Libido (Frankfurt a.M.: Neue Kritik, 1985), p. 462. Von Braun interprets anorexia as the refusal to embody a principle in which ‘ambiguity, the sexual being, psychic bisexuality have no place’.2020Ibid., p. 464. Accordingly, anorexia nervosa figures as an autoimmune reaction to heteronormativity and to the ideal of the middle-class family.

Through its play with the generic form of the biopic, its use of puppets instead of actors, its formal experiments with the camera (which is constantly moving), its frequent use of the subjective camera, its use of music, and its simultaneous superimposition of the star’s story with anorexia discourse that appears in blocks of text, Superstar not only exposes the moment of resistance in Karen’s anorexia, but also reflects the audience’s desire to identify with the fate of the characters on a further level.

How can you identify with a Barbie doll? And what does it mean to be able to identify with one? The film invites us to identify with Karen’s refusal to embody a gender ideal that requires the renunciation of life as a sexual being and that permits of neither ambivalence nor transgression. On the level of its extraordinarily clever formal composition, it plays out the ambivalence and ambiguity that, according to von Braun, refers to a psychological bisexuality2121Ibid. and that Derrida links to the concept of sexual difference, to the ‘not two yet or no longer?’2222Jacques Derrida, ‘Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’, Research in Phenomenology, 13 (1983), pp. 65–83 (p. 83). Sexual difference is prior to any possible sexual identity and opens up an ever incomplete multiplication of sexual differences.

Haynes writes at one point that all his ‘women’s films’ inflict dangerous shocks on the heroines, thus jeopardizing the process of the audience’s identification with the story itself. In every film, there is some sticking point between the main characters and the audience that puts identification at risk.2323Haynes, Three Screenplays, p. ix. All three films — Superstar, Poison, and Safe — variously problematize the biopolitics of the self that refer to and emanate from this model of the immune system. They intervene in the discourse on the immune system by confronting it with a vulnerability that refers not only to the organism but also to the self in its self-referentiality, as it is addressed in the discourse of immunity. And they link the self’s vulnerability with the transgression of sexual identity. Derrida similarly discusses the concept of autoimmunity in his texts after 11 September 2001. Using the example of democracy, he shows that the same dynamics of autoimmunity also unfold in the case of community. Understood as such autoimmunity refers, according to Derrida, to the sexual difference as that which is ‘not two yet or no longer’.2424Derrida, ‘Geschlecht’, p. 83.

Autoimmunity

In the aftermath of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Derrida turned to the model of autoimmunity in order to warn against employing a totalizing policy of security and self-protection, which he claimed would endanger democracy. Derrida premisses his argument on the idea that democracy is vulnerable by definition. For democracy is precisely that which can never completely rule out the prospect of antidemocratic forces coming to power through its own democratic procedures, that is, through the holding of democratic elections. Still, the transition to democracy, or

democratization, will have always been associated with license, with taking too many liberties […], with the dissoluteness of the libertine, with liberalism, indeed perversion and delinquency, with malfeasance, with failing to live according to the law.2525Derrida, Rogues, pp. 20–21.

While Derrida refers to the discourse on the immune system and takes the biological model of autoimmunity as his starting point, he does not transfer the model of the immune system to politics; on the contrary, he underscores the crucial differences between biology and politics. Thus, unlike biological autoimmunity, which leads to the organism’s destruction, the political autoimmunity of which Derrida speaks is not destructive, but rather constitutive of the very survival of democracy. Derrida traces political autoimmunity back from its transfer to the realm of the biosciences to the Latin word munus — gift, task — a term in which the juridical concept of immunitas is linked with communitas. At the same time, however, he goes beyond this by linking the concept of autoimmunization with three ideas: the unconditionality of the gift; the unconditionality of hospitality; and the unconditionality of the event. In this association autoimmunity transgresses the realm of the political and the juridical. Selfhood is set between the unconditionality of singularity and the universality of rationality. In the tension between them, selfhood opens up to an ‘exposed vulnerability, one without absolute immunity, without indemnity; it must touch this vulnerability in its finitude and in a nonhorizontal fashion’.2626Ibid., p. 152. From this perspective, autoimmunity no longer seems to be pure evil. ‘It enables’, as Derrida writes, ‘an exposure to the other, to what and to who comes’, and must therefore ‘remain incalculable’. Without autoimmunity there would be no future, only a present projected into the future. There would be nothing, no one, no event to wait for or to expect.2727Ibid. Derrida underscores that the unconditionality of the event does not indicate its being beyond technology, the political, or the psychic, but rather that it should be thought of as prior to the differentiation between the technical, the political, the psychic, and the ethical, as well as prior to gender differentiation, prior even to the differentiation between space and time. He brings into play a thinking of sexual difference that is not dyadic, but that rather sets itself the task of thinking difference as difference.2828See Derrida, ‘Geschlecht’, pp. 82–83.

Safe

Safe was made in 1994 and is set in 1987. The DVD edition in The Criterion Collection is equipped with many special features such as an audio commentary by the director together with the producer, Christine Vachon, and the lead actress, Julianne Moore. Unlike Poison, the feature film, which was also shot in 35mm, presents itself as a flat-mirror surface. The images are distanced and have a strict geometry; the colours are carefully coordinated. A central long shot is used to present the interiors of the house, which is located in the wealthy, white suburban neighbourhood of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles where Carol White lives with her husband, stepson, and Mexican housekeeper. The first half of the film takes place in this house and in its surrounding neighbourhood. Carol White, played magnificently by Julianne Moore, is seen in almost every shot of the film.

Haynes has pointed to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) as an inspiration. You can sense this inspiration in the relationship between the camera and the characters: the camera is direct, often static, and placed at a distance. The complete exteriority of Carol’s character is also reminiscent of Jeanne Dielman: Jeanne and Carol seem to have no inner life. Both lead an insignificant existence as housewives, both merge with the background of their general surroundings and everyday domestic life. Jeanne Dielman shows three days in the life of a middle-aged widow who lives in an apartment with her son and earns her living through prostitution. Devoid of emotion, she receives her clients in the afternoons according to a strict schedule. This alienation from her own body also characterizes Carol White. There is a scene at the beginning of Safe in which marital intercourse is shown. It is shot from an aerial perspective; we see Carol’s face and her husband’s back (Fig. 4). Carol remains friendly and completely numb while her husband orgasms. In its formal arrangement, the scene quotes the famous scene from Jeanne Dielman, which shows the latter having intercourse with her third client of the day (Fig. 5). However, where Carol remains friendly, if numb, Jeanne Dielman is shown to be unintentionally surprised by a sexual desire and then moved to stab her client with a pair of scissors. Although Carol, like Jeanne Dielman, develops affective symptoms that indicate a crisis state, she is neither surprised by any sexual desire nor does she fight back. As said, Carol always remains friendly, even when she throws up as her husband makes his next advances. In Safe, as in Jeanne Dielman, the surface of the images remain undisturbed except by sounds: the vacuum cleaner, traffic noise, background music from the radio. Then, later, there are the sounds of airplanes heard in the Wrenswood Recreation Center, where Carol tries to heal herself under the professional guidance of an activist from the New Age Environmental Illness movement. The eeriness that runs through the film is supported by electronic music by Brendan Dolan and Ed Tomney that is reminiscent of Brian Eno.

As he does in Superstar, in Safe Haynes builds on the feminist interpretation of female self-aggression as a complex dispositive where resistance, self-destruction, disidentification, and self-discovery overlap. However, while in Superstar it is clear what it is that Karen’s anorexia is directed against, in Safe it remains unclear what illness Carol’s symptoms point to right to the end. Carol White is very thin, very perfect, very white, carefully dressed, and made up of an ethereal beauty. She spends her time doing aerobics, talking with friends, and doing a little gardening and home improvement. One day, a sofa she had ordered in a light teak is delivered in black. Carol is horrified and in a high-pitched voice calls for Fulvia, her Mexican housekeeper, to come and collect the sofa as quickly as possible, as it appears like some foreign object in the large, bright living room. This scene in which Carol sees the black sofa in her living room is an allusion to the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (USA, 1968). The meaning of the sofa, like that of the monolith, remains undefined. As in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the audience of Safe is also confronted with an elliptical narrative structure that keeps the cause and the context obscure. The viewer is thus forced to speculate. Objects such as the black sofa become oracles and evoke a climate of uncertainty, eeriness, and omnipresent threat. It’s as if one is watching a horror movie.

Amber Jacob and Catherine Grant have pointed out that the whiteness in Safe is constitutive of uncanniness and that it plays a central role in Carol White’s inner emptiness.2929Amber Jacob and Catherine Grant, White [Mater]ial: Milk and [Maternity] in Todd Haynes’s Safe, video essay, Film Studies for Free, 17 June 2013 <https://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.de/2013/06/study-of-single-film-todd-haynes-safe.html> [accessed 20 February 2024]. As an indication of this inner void, they note the ‘gusto’ and ‘urgency’ with which Carol White asks her Mexican housekeeper Fulvia, played by Martha Velez-Johnson, for a glass of milk, and the seemingly desperate thirst with which she gulps it down as if her life depends on it. This moment, in which the racialized housekeeper provides Carol with milk as if she were mother, brings about an intensification of affects and an aliveness that Carol otherwise lacks. Here whiteness is interrogated with regard to the effects that racist hierarchies, the politics of exclusion, and vulnerability have on the non-white subjects of this racism.3030See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 11. Carol White’s inner emptiness also depicts, as Haynes further specifies, the racist romanticization in which ideas of being Black are associated with both evil and protection, rebelliousness and forgiveness, fear and desire. As Toni Morrison puts it: ‘Whiteness alone is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable.’3131Ibid., p. 59.

Carol’s crisis comes to a head. Her seizures become suffocating. She becomes visibly weaker and thinner. Her general practitioner refers her to a psychiatrist and then to an immunologist. No one can locate a psychological reason for her condition and no one takes her seriously. Carol herself no longer knows who or where she is. After reaching a disastrously low point, she turns to the New Age environmental-illness movement. She goes on diets, changes her living habits, wears breathing protection, and starts wheeling an oxygen tank behind her wherever she goes. Another seizure finally sends her to hospital, where she sees a television advertisement for the Wrenwood rehabilitation centre, which is located in the desert far from civilization and is run by Peter Dunning, a gay and HIV-positive activist from the New Thought movement. Upon arriving at Wrenwood, everything indicates that Carol will get over her illness and find her way to a new, fortified self with the help of her group and its emphasis on nature, spiritual cleansing, and positive thinking. No matter how much we want her to get better, though, we cannot ignore the fact that Carol’s health is steadily declining; despite her learning to repeat the sentences of self-healing discourse, despite her joining in the group at every opportunity, her condition only deteriorates. Her immune system continues its collapse. Finally we see her at Wrenwood readying herself for bed in an igloo-like, all-white, and air-conditioned mobile safety-cell with no windows. She turns to the mirror and says to her mirror image — directly into the camera — the magical sentences that linger with a sense of emptiness in the ears of cinema audiences: ‘I love you. I love you. I really love you.’

Safe is a sad, disturbing, and deeply immersive film. It follows the conventions of medical drama television series, conventions that overlap, as Safe shows, with those of narratives of self-therapy through mental training and discourses on immunology. While the genre is designed to have a happy ending, Safe denies both Carol and the audience the happy, safe, desired outcome. Instead, we are confronted with Carol’s vulnerability, which, initially repressed, transforms, and returns as a horror autotoxicus.

These three films, Poison, Superstar, and Safe all examine and problematize in different ways the biopolitics of the self insofar as they relate to and emanate from the model of the immune system. While Poison exposes and transgresses the immunity politics of self-control and horror autotoxicus through the aesthetic staging of vulnerability and pleasure, Safe explores the implications and effects of practices of self-healing through positive thinking and self-love. Both films focus on the ambivalence of autoimmunization precisely as Derrida describes it, namely as a pharmakon against the Western thinking of totalizing security and self-protection and as essential to democracy. Superstar analyses the thanatopolitics of the white bourgeois family living in the prosperity of post-war American society against the backdrop of feminist theory from the 1980s. Shot in a private apartment and using Barbie dolls because of its miniscule budget, the film identifies Karen Carpenter’s anorexia as a moment of resistance against the erasure of women as sexual beings and against the politics of death, which, as Haynes shows, had existed long before it took on a new dimension with the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic.

All three films refer aesthetically, formally, and in terms of content to a sexual difference that is ‘not two yet or no longer’, and it is from this that they draw their considerable militancy.