Lost in the Movies: September 2024 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Films in Focus podcast #5: Safe + ADVANCE - Script for Journey Through Twin Peaks narration

In July, my $5/month tier patrons chose a podcast subject which echoed the previous episode in May: two Jonathan Glazer films back-to-back. Now the bimonthly poll has chosen to bookend that directorial double feature with another auteurist pair. Following March's selection of Todd Haynes' latest film May December, the September episode rolls back three decades for Haynes' second film Safe (also starring Julianne Moore as a fragile housewife, albeit a more sympathetic character in this case). The portrait of Southern Californian woman collapsing under the weight of environmental illness, struggling to forge her own identity only to be sucked into a manipulative self-help cult, the movie was marketed inaccurately as some kind of sci-fi thriller, has been characterized unusually but not inaccurately as a horror movie, and resonates even more strongly in an age grappling with the aftermath of Covid-19 and the uneasy anticipation of a chemically induced apocalypse. From its first half delivered in Kubrickian wide shots of modernist interiors to its second half absorbed in loneliness- and desperation-inducing western exteriors, Safe provides a fascinating challenge to viewers. How much of this ailment is in Carol White's surroundings, and how much is in her own head? Along with this question, I explore the nineties film's relationship to the eighties it depicts, the influence of Douglas Sirk's fifties melodramas, the correspondences and differences with Jeanne Dielman, and several connections to Lynch works (although, surprisingly in retrospect, I don't mention Lost Highway which was shot the year Safe came out and also depicts a character's disintegration in two very distinct halves, one involving a modernist L.A. home while the other features a breakdown in the desert).

Meanwhile I shared with all patrons the script for my narration of an upcoming Journey Through Twin Peaks chapter. Tomorrow I'll discuss my shifting approach to this project (something I hinted at back in July, in this Patreon update I forgot to include in that month's cross-post, though I've gone back to add it now). For now, from the $1/month tier up, you can read a draft covering the post-Return period in all of its melancholically hopeful and disappointed flavor.

What are the September rewards?

$5/MONTH TIER

Exclusive to this tier...