Problems of the Rich and Famous

While I do take your point, I think the film indicts middle class suburbia, the American everyman/woman rather than the rich. Haynes has called Safe a horror movie and it's perhaps not too farfetched to see Carol as a naturalistic rendering of a zombie. Many of the zombie films themselves critiqued the deadening, toxic effects of suburbia, in which people travel from house to car to work and home again, cut off from true connections to others, alienated from themselves. We see this, for example, in Carol's detachment from her husband during sex, the offhanded way she treats her maid, and of course, in the fact that she spends her days secluded in a big house in an exclusive community. The fact that she has a stepson, rather than a natural son, is just another dramatic device pointing to her total estrangement.

Haynes himself indicates in the notes accompanying the DVD's release that Carol is suffering from a "sudden catastrophe of identity." Emotionally, she's not in charge of herself and completely unaware of what her self might be.

As her pathology reaches critical proportions, she becomes acquainted with a "deep ecology" movement which promises a return to the "oneness" of life. But as I'm sure you'll agree, in her quest to find wholeness and integrity, Carol encounters a cure as bad as the disease, or even very similar to the disease. In moving to Wrenwood, she's trading one hermetically sealed environment for another. Wrenwood is a place where newspaper reading is discouraged because it promotes negativity. Like American suburbia, and the American myth of noble individualism, Wrenwood proclaims that individuals have total control. If they are sick, it's because they're weak.

Even in this "community" Carol has a hard time making real connections. Instead she regurgitates the cliches and bromides of others. In the last scene we see Carol alone once again, looking into a mirror, saying "I love you so much", exactly what Wrenwood's director had recommended earlier in the film.

Carol's alienation and inauthenticity is as severe at the end of the film as it was in the beginning.

With all this, I think Haynes is telling us that not just the natural environment, but America's social environment, is a toxic trap, a wasteland.