Todd Haynes’s 1995 film Safe depicts the demise of protagonist
Carol White as she suffers headaches, bloody noses, insomnia,
asthma, and seizures from environmental illness, which leads to
her social and marital demise and her taking refuge at Wrenwood,
a sanitarium retreat in the Albuquerque foothills. This article reads
Carol as a tragic archetype, and aligns the indices of COVID-19
pandemic life (face masks and social isolation for safety) with
Carol’s similar response to her illness. While the film has
previously been critiqued and interpreted from perspectives
including feminism, consumerism, environmentalism, suburbia,
race, heteronormativity, melodrama, plague, Whiteness, and AIDS
politics, this article performs a close reading based on Northrop
Frye’s archetypal definition of Aristotelian tragedy, and then
analyzes the differences in late-pandemic middle class American
perspectives from that of Carol White as she navigates her
situation. Late-pandemic middle class perspectives provide an
optimistic and alternate fate to the tragic pathos depicted in Carol’s
story.