Safe Spaces Analysis

Safe Spaces (2019)

Written & Directed by: Daniel Schechter

This film talks about morality, political righteousness and how it is being forcefully imposed on everyone to an extent that you have to think before every breath you take. You can't speak what you feel like, you have to censor your feelings before you put them out and see if it satisfies everyone's senses of morality. This isn't freedom of speech, I guess. An important part of the film's story lingers on how a professor in a class encourages a student to talk about a private moment in her sexual life in a creative writing class - this triggers another woman in the class because of her personal experiences and almost everyone in the class boycott his class in support for the woman who was triggered. When you are an adult, people trust you that you can take care of yourself - if everyone has somethings that would trigger them in a class - how could anyone speak anything? When a person has to double check something they say, for productivity and efficiency reasons, that is alright - but for moral reasons, especially when the intent is something else? In this film too, everyone knows his intent wasn't anything bad, and yet people hang on to what they seem to think is politically correct. The problem isn't about pointing out someone who's racist, sexist or homophobic - the film doesn't say that. The film says that when you accuse someone of these terms, be careful - you can't use these to win an argument or just to get the other person defensive. There is a scene where one of their students turn on his phone to record him and then starts talking, almost provoking him. This complex theme is dealt with a lot of humor, I was laughing out loud in a few scenes. A lot of times, people don't want to engage or listen to what others have to say - they are busy labelling them or psychoanalysing them with intellectual terms. It feels like we're slowly going towards a place where if someone takes a chance of saying something that might be politically incorrect, they might need extra empathy and love because of opening up honestly. It feels like a loop. In a scene, he says - all of this wouldn't have happened if I was a black, lesbian, muslim. Yet, the filmmaker doesn't take a rigid stance here - he doesn't judge the people who demand political correctness, he tells us where they are coming from too. It's just like if we know a flawed person and we have aversion towards them, but when we get to know the reason for their flaw, we tend to empathize with them.

The rest of the film deals with his family, which includes his siblings, their spouses, their father and her matriarch who is about to die soon. There are a lot of conflicts and tensions in the family, their father has married a woman and has a kid with her and the kid is rude towards the siblings. The wife hates the siblings, she thinks that they are the one who give him existential crisis and make him feel worthless. The siblings want their dad to be there with the matriarch and finally when they go and confront them - it felt like a showdown. That's a brilliant scene. Although I wasn't able to figure out how the themes, dysfunctional family and the political correctness fit together in this story. The performances were interesting too, Justin Long, who plays Josh has a sense of skepticism throughout in his dialogue and his body language, which properly manifests the theme of political correctness.