Don’t count on the All Movie Guide to give you any hope explaining the film or this post either for that matter.
I appreciate the films of David Cronenberg. I enjoy the meditation on his subject matter, his sense of the science/society bond and the sense in the films of attendant, unexpected consequences run mad and life annihilating. I found this film, while exploring similar man-made environmental issues much quieter, not as physically sickening ( but enough so nevertheless ), the cinematography much better (very interesting use of long-shots in the early part ), but these differences with/from Cronenberg's films did nothing to lessen the similar dread I felt throughout this film ( and all of Cronenberg’s ) and at the film’s conclusion.
The beginning of the end came for me, a little after the film began, the return home from a forced convivial dinner with ‘friends’, a quick hop into the sack, and on to the scene of Carol's husband (I prefer to see him hanging, supported on his tippy-toes, with The Terminator 2’s Robert Patrick morphed into Jenette Goldstein’s pokey sword arm thing through the last grasped and gulped milk container and out the rear of his neck ) pumping away on her, she looking off into space, completely disassociated, gone, not having or seeming to want any part of it...but from that moment on it seems, she becomes very associated with her life, as it unravels to that horrible sequestered end, with her looking into the mirror, an emaciated, bloated, ghost, repeating a mantra of ‘love for herself’, because nothing else works for her malaise.
Is Haynes toying with our beliefs???; suggesting that Carol just might be imagining her sickness (after all, the rest of us are just fine, what the hell is with her??? Is she faking??? She has to be, because we cannot feel ‘it’. ), letting her and her sickness, after the doctor's reassurances, become a fringe/New Age belief/concern one moment, then moving in closer and letting the reality of hers and those of the other ‘unfortunates' daily existences make it a truth and the truth for Carol and finally for all of us???
He paints the woe, the physical destruction of her health and then, I think, the woe of the world ( the Gaia ) with the spewing blue/black smoke from the truck ahead of her while she drives somewhere and then she must stop to choke it all out or in, and his use of sights and sounds.
I really enjoyed the sounds, the ambient background of the machinery of civilization, effective like in David Lynch's Eraserhead, Blue Velvet. Here though, I think, the drone you hear in the background, is tolling for Carol and for us all, and it seems our death knell, our Requiem Mass. Perhaps, it seems, we just do not know it yet, but Carol certainly 'do'. She and the others are at the far end of the bell curve, the most highly sensitive range to the environmental poison; (they are the canary in the mine for us all )
In the background swirling above and around: Jets flying above spewing out contrails (Here is an interesting post from the Rigorous Intuition Site:http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2006/05/manifestations_13.htmlReferencing Morgellons Disease; that some have linked to Jet Contrails; note the reference to ‘Delusional Parasitosis’ in the post and how this fits the simple, unknowing view of Carol ). The traffic, the dust swirling, the destructive pollution everywhere, all inescapable (except, secured inside your own private clean room???), the clad and protected figure walking about the grounds of her Treatment Center ( by the way, the treatment center, although it was in 'Albuquerque' certainly the shots were not and it is too bad, real scenery here would have been more effective evocative to show the isolation and hardness ).
This seems like a real disaster movie to me, but at the moment, only to Carol and the others who exist like her, the hypersensitive, but not just yet, for the rest of us. To experience her nightmare, we just have to wait to get the appropriate dose of our own poison. Right now, our tolerance may be only just a little bit higher than hers ( but how much higher??? Are we Safe? ). We can ask ourselves how long do we have to wait to before we all become Carol, and how long before we get on with changing, correcting, and eliminating this mess for us all and those who will exist in the future.