Crip Melodrama: She's Hysterical - 30 years of "Safe" (1995)
A transcript of my introduction to Todd Haynes' "Safe" (1995) which screened at the Barbican on Monday 10th November 2025, as part of the ICO's touring season Crip Melodrama: She's Hysterical
Georgia Kumari Bradburn, September 2025
The popular definition of Melodrama is a dramatic work that exaggerates real life, emphasising emotions over action - more often than not these works revolve around the lives and experiences of women. Though the genre is popular, it is often dismissed by critics as distasteful and not to be taken seriously - the word melodramatic itself is often used to dismiss someone or something as not necessitating serious attention. The ‘hysterical’ woman is a staple of melodrama. She is emotional, unstable, defiant, and often, disabled. This familiar character reflects our culture’s understanding of sick women.
For disabled and neurodivergent women, it is a daily reality to be accused of being hysterical, or lacking rational thoughts. Here in the West, gone are the days where a slight emotional imbalance would mean being dismissed and hidden away in a psychiatric institution, but ever present are the ideas that led to them - this season explores the melodrama of disability, or perhaps the reality of being disabled in a world that categorises disability itself as melodrama.
Placing the stereotype of the hysterical woman under the microscope, there is no better film with which to examine disabled women in melodrama than Todd Haynes’ sophomore feature, Safe, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. In preparation for this introduction, I rewatched Safe on Halloween, and it made me think about whether it can be classed as an appropriate film to watch on Halloween, given that Wes Craven himself has been quoted saying Safe was the scariest film of 1995. In many ways, Safe ticks more horror boxes than melodrama in terms of genre.
A totally ordinary woman, Carol White, living a privileged life with a beautiful house and a rich husband and lots of friends, suddenly starts to cough. A sense of uneasiness permeates the film, extended silences, distance from characters, desaturated colours, lines spoken softly like whispers. What once seemed perfect starts to look a little off. A nosebleed, shortness of breath, and yet the doctor says she is fine.
This is the initial horror of Safe - the threat of unexplained, unprecedented illness that disturbs the natural order of post-industrial living. And the horror resides not just in the way it changes your body and mind, but the way it changes those around you. There’s the trope of the non-believers, the characters that call the protagonist a fool for believing that the monster is real - as Carol becomes ill, the world around her becomes more difficult to reach. Perhaps the monster is not the illness, but the reality that illness throws you into - a reality of isolation, mask wearing, inaccessible buildings, perpetual sensory overload, disapproving looks, being made to feel that you are an impairment to society, rather than it being society that is impaired.
I’ve talked about both disability and sickness so far, at times interchangeably, even though both can be regarded as different things, with one having perhaps more negative connotations than the other. I use the term “sick person” not to describe someone who is less worthy, or someone who is condemned, or whose existence inherently creates fear. I use both terms to refer to a collective whole, a minority group who face a reality of pain and isolation in the absence of proper understanding and active support.
The social model of disability, a concept born from the disability rights movement, the phrase itself coined 12 years before the film’s release, tells us that disability is imposed upon people who do not fit into the tight constraints of a society optimised for labour, those whose bodies and minds are not compatible with rapid modernisation. Isolation and exclusion are products of a system that refuses to accommodate difference - and as a result, difference becomes something to be feared. In this sense, Safe is a film that explores not just the fear of sickness, or disability that comes with it, but the intricacies of what it means to be sick, who you become, and the pathway to reframing sickness as a rallying cry for change. And rather than playing into the ableist misogyny that invented the idea of hysteria, Safe exposes it, deconstructs it, and encourages us to empathise with the experience of being a disabled woman.
This is not the first film in which Todd Haynes expresses an interest in sickness. His first feature film, the experimental triptych Poison, is an exploration of ideas and subversions in the era of the AIDS crisis. Haynes does not hide the fact that the shadow of AIDS runs throughout his work, being himself a gay man who entered adulthood in the early 80s. In an interview with Sight and Sound in 1996, he says that
“It’s too easy for people to separate themselves from AIDS, to compartmentalise it as a gay disease. So I wanted to make films about these end-of-the-twentieth-century diseases without limiting those vulnerable to gay men and junkies. Instead, I located them in the safest, most protected places on the planet.”
In his experimental short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was Haynes’ first work to catch public attention, the story of Karen Carpenter and her battle with anorexia is told using Barbie dolls. Like Karen Carpenter, and in fact like Haynes himself, Carol White comes from the sheltered world of middle class LA. And yet, neither Carol nor Karen were immune to these mysterious, under-researched illnesses, often dismissed as fads, and the women suffering from them often labelled hysterical. With this in mind, it’s tempting to go straight to questioning what causes illness. Was Karen Carpenter responsible for her anorexia? Is Carol a victim of something she could have controlled? How do people who seemingly come from comfortable lives get sick? People may ask, what did they do wrong?
This is the narrative of responsibility and individualism that Haynes resists throughout his work, and he doesn’t allow the question to be answered easily. The emerging idea in the late 20th Century of “environmental illness”, a group of afflictions caused by environmental factors, implies that the chemically complex and increasingly polluted landscape of the century is making people sick regardless of their background. Environmental illness is the only name given to Carol’s condition in the film, and yet environmental illness is not a singular condition, rather it is an umbrella term that includes any illness that can be directly attributed to environmental factors. Could Karen Carpenter’s anorexia therefore be labelled as an environmental illness, given the pressures that were put on her as a young girl in the music industry? Could Carol’s illness similarly be attributed to the pressures of being a woman in Reagan-era suburbia? Are all kinds of illness somewhat caused by, or rather facilitated by, by the world we live in?
For many of us who experience illness and disability, we know all too well the perpetual limbo that it leaves you in, of not being dead yet, but also not being offered ways to live by our governments. This is where alternative pathways towards recovery are sought out, a phenomenon that Haynes offers as the potential answer to Carol’s dilemma. When the establishment doesn’t offer protection, many people turn to wellness and the concept of self-care as self-liberation, which emerged in the 60s from counter-cultural and anticapitalist movements. Although Haynes does initially offer these philosophies as an escape from the oppressive patriarchal post-industrial world, incentivised by communities fostered by people who become marginalised through illness, they are also scrutinised as not providing the safety that those affected by illness need, as they claim to.
Haynes’ interest in New Age wellness culture likely harkens back to the 80s and early 90s, when self-help books by motivational speakers like Louise Hay convinced those affected by AIDS that they could be miraculously healed with self-therapy and self-love. The result of this was many believing that the responsibility for recovery fell solely upon the sufferer, and not the society that facilitated the spread of the disease, invigorating the already rampant homophobia that led to AIDS being so stigmatised.
Today, we see even more of an emphasis on turning inwards, especially with diet culture, pseudoscientific wellness fads and self-help books - all especially geared towards women. Through these trends, we see a wave of individualism and solo-responsibility that when embraced beyond moderation dismisses the mutual aid and community care that many disabled people’s lives depend on.
Though these New Age remedies adopted by the West are originally rooted in Eastern cultures and Buddhist practices rooted in social and bodily liberation, Haynes exposes this evolved culture of “wellness” in Western society as a trojan horse - the philosophies of capitalist conformity disguised as leftist nonconformity, to make us more isolated from each other, more at odds with our own bodies. After all, you have to buy a self-help book in order to read it. Haynes’ depiction of both traditional suburbanites and New Age practitioners presents a passivity in the face of crises that stems from this very same individualism, this every-man-for-himself-ism. Carol’s world is a passive world of people with no collective responsibility - the ideal breeding ground for labour exploitation, patriarchy, and the weaning out of the weak.
And yet, despite the cultural emphasis on self-reliance and illness as something to be feared, Safe hypothesises that it illness can also bring one a sense of self, and a sense of purpose. This idea that illness can be the thing that motivates you to look around, to take action, to be a person in the world, to transcend the traditional roles of women in society and look further. This is not to say that being ill or disabled is always a positive experience, but in the context of disability it speaks to the empowerment that can be found in seeing yourself not as the problem, but as the product of a problematic world. Haynes suggests that illness is the best thing that happens to Carol. In the same Sight and Sound interview, he says
“It’s the thing that kicks her out of unconsciousness, out of this unexamined life, and makes her begin to think about things in a completely different way and take some steps toward changing her life. And I’m interested in how disease can do that, can force you to look at things in a completely different way.”
Even when telling Karen Carpenter’s story in Superstar, Haynes speaks about approaching Carpenter’s anorexia as “a kind of unconscious resistance. Disease as a kind of resistance to notions of healthy identities and selves”. What does it mean to say disease as a kind of resistance? A glorification of suffering? In some cases, maybe. But perhaps in this case, it means to reclaim bodies and minds that don’t conform, that aren’t “normal”, that are hindered by a fast moving post-industrial capitalist landscape, as alternative ways of being in the world, as bodies that reject restrictive norms whilst condemning the systems that disabled them.
Although under its quiet surface Safe is simmering with this rage, there’s a baseline of resistance that has ignited inspiration in its audiences for decades. 30 years later, acclaim for Safe is higher than ever, and it’s perhaps unsurprising as to why. In 2025, HIV is not only less stigmatised but also easily managed thanks to extensive research and education. And yet, even as breakthrough developments towards a cure for HIV unfold, we live in the wake of another pandemic that has left one in ten people with disabling chronic illness, according to the BBC.
Despite COVID-19 continually surging and putting lives at risk to this day, it has become invisible to the majority. Those with pre-existing conditions who are more likely to catch the virus are pushed into margins, into segregated communities for the sick, into mindsets that sick lives are not worthy. Those who continue to mask are branded as paranoid, hysterical. Told, as Carol is by the people in her life, that it’s likely in their heads. Perhaps, 30 years on, a connection can be made between Carol’s mysterious illness unknown to doctors, and the rise in prevalence of illnesses with no strict diagnostic pattern, critically under-researched and lacking pathways to support. Chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, migraines, MS, anxiety, depression, long COVID - conditions that can often leave you with more questions than answers, and as a result more isolated, like a stranger in your own life.
But as Haynes suggests, many of us find purpose and empowerment in this state of insecurity. Without reinforcing the redundant rhetoric of disability as superpower, it does force you to see the world differently, awakening to a new consciousness that is no longer passive in its place in the world, but actively seeking answers and true liberation. Safe is an affirmation of this new consciousness, an antidote to the misogynistic rhetoric that used to keep sick women locked away in institutions and undermined to this day, a call to resistance, a breath of fresh polluted, chemically saturated air that makes us more alive than ever before.
