Panic Room

“This is a very… emotional property.”

That’s how Evan (Ian Buchanan) describes the enormous brownstone that Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) is about to buy in Panic Room (2002) — a thriller about home invasion that hardly spends any time outside said brownstone, or said home. The movie begins with Meg and her daughter, Sarah (an eleven-year-old Kristen Stewart) receiving a tour of the place; they are joined by their realtor, Lydia (Ann Magnuson) — and this guy, Evan, who the movie never really troubles itself to properly identify. Even David Koepp’s screenplay skips a precise identification: he is merely described as “sour-looking,” though Buchanan is far suaver than the sort of face such a description calls to mind. This is not just Hollywood superficiality at work: Evan’s attractiveness only further serves to cloak his identity.

It can be assumed that he’s another realtor, or perhaps he’s lawyer to the family that’s selling the property. But the ambiguity that shrouds his authority — as tour guide to a space that will become a battleground for the Altmans’ survival — casts “Evan” with an almost invisible menace.

While he’s showing her the master bedroom, Meg notices that something’s off. She stands close to the wall. “Shouldn’t the room be larger than it is?,” she asks.

Evan smirks, satisfied. “You’re the first person to notice,” he drawls.

With a couple neat touches — some abstract slights of hand — he removes a mirror from the wall and opens a hidden door to reveal a small, concrete-and-florescent-light walk-in. “It’s called a panic room,” he explains. The previous owner had it built in a fit of paranoia: you can seal yourself inside and watch activity in the house through several surveillance monitors. There’s a supply of oxygen and a separate phone line; the door has motion detectors and is reinforced with three inches of steel.

“You couldn’t be safer,” Evan breathes. Yet are such precautions necessary? Should Meg’s safety really be of such intense concern? Well, just sit tight, the movie practically whispers at us. You’re soon to find out.

If Evan’s identity is to be understood at all, it should be as an onscreen avatar for David Fincher, the film’s director — who, by giving Meg and, by extension, his audience, this tour, is effectively setting the stage, preparing us for the action that’s yet to come. By establishing the parameters of the given world, i.e., the brownstone, Fincher deepens his audience’s knowledge and therefore our capacity for feeling suspense. It’s a technique that Alfred Hitchcock used often, notably in Rear Window (1954) — a movie that, like Panic Room, severely restricts the motions of its protagonists and, therefore, the minds of its audience. When your imagination has fewer directions to turn, it becomes trapped as surely as the mouse is trapped by its proverbial cat.

Limited as it is, however, and already overcast with imminent danger, the relationship Meg shares with the house is deeply ambiguous. Inherited by a fragile woman from a paranoid, rich old man, the House as a “possessed” thing is a fundamentally Gothic conceit: an archetype of Victorian literature and ghost stories in which a female protagonist’s inner life is amplified and projected onto her domestic environment. It’s an old trope that’s experienced a significant afterlife in film, from Deborah Kerr’s unhinged governess in The Innocents (1961) to Nicole Kidman’s haunted mother in The Others (2001). In both instances, the woman’s arrival in a new house launches her descent into madness or hysteria — though these two films hint at the supernatural, whereas Panic Room keeps matters pragmatically human.

Also unlike the women in those films, it seems that Meg is not so much at the mercy of this strange new place as she is in league with it. Her recognition of the peculiar floor plan implies that she is attuned to the house’s design in a way that most people aren’t. “This whole thing makes me nervous,” Meg claims after Evan has shown her the interior (i.e., the deepest recess of her psyche), yet she also understands the building, relates to it. The panic room, hidden behind a mirror, becomes a reflection of her own, anxious mind: as a recently-divorced woman about to go back to college, trying to raise her daughter on her own — understandably, Meg feels a bit claustrophobic. An emotional property, indeed.

And things are only about to get more emotional. The night they move in, Meg and Sarah are intruded upon by three burglars: Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Junior (Jared Leto) and Raoul (David Yoakam). The crooks are after millions of dollars’ worth of bonds hidden in (where of all places?) the panic room. Inconveniently for them, that is precisely the spot to which Meg and Sarah retreat as soon as they detect danger, and the rest of the film consists of everyone’s efforts to get what they want: in the men’s case, the money; in the women’s case, their escape.

It’s not a little ironic that Meg’s instinct to flee takes her even more aggressively into the clutches of precarity. As film scholar John Kitterman has observed, as soon as Meg discovers and develops a psychic relationship to the panic room, it’s as if she unconsciously calls the home invasion upon herself: “the fear of being buried alive has metamorphosed into the desire to be entombed in one’s own home.” (p 237) This is like James Stewart’s bedridden photographer in Rear Window, who’s convinced that he’s witnessed a murder in an apartment across the way: logically speaking, neither of these characters’ paranoid concerns should prove to be founded in fact — how often in life are we proved right when fearing the worst? But this is the movies: under the auspices of a screenwriter, director and full creative team, Meg’s and the photographer’s fantasies are granted alarming reality.

So it turns out the answer is “yes,” it is only right that such absurd precautions have been taken to ensure Meg’s safety. The home invasion conveniently justifies the “need” for protection — just as a drunken punch justifies a barroom brawl, or a plane crashing into a building calls for full-blown warfare. Filming of Panic Room began in early 2001, but had to be delayed when Jodie Foster became pregnant; it wasn’t until November of that year that production wrapped in New York City — two months after 9/11 and one month after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. John Kitterman links Panic Room’s themes to the concerns that plagued Americans in the wake of those events: because the U.S. government was so blindsided by Al-Qaeda, it “[attempted] to conceal this truth from the American people by maintaining a state of ‘perpetual war’ against an undefined enemy.” (242)

The existence of the panic room is comparable to this attitude: we must increase the protection of our home, it suggests, in order to prevent bad things from ever happening again.

Thus the panic room is not simply valuable, but necessary to Meg and Sarah’s survival. It would appear, therefore, that Panic Room may be tied to other movies released after 9/11 which featured themes that echoed the U.S. government’s reactionary politics (i.e, Spider-Man, Man on Fire). Yet there’s another, sneaky detail in this film’s arrangement of events that complicates such an association: the bonds which the robbers are after were not placed in the panic room by Meg, but were left there by the home’s previous owner. Not only do they not belong to Meg — she doesn’t even know about them. Thus when she and Sarah use the room for protection from the intruders, they turn into unwitting defenders of the bonds.

This is not unlike the position in which American civilians found themselves after the trauma of 9/11: vulnerable and subject to the corrupt legacies of wealthy men. In other words, much in the way that Americans have faced the threat of terrorism due to their leaders’ geopolitical irresponsibility, greed creates the circumstances from which Meg and Sarah need to extricate themselves.

There are racial implications to these events as well. Of the three men robbing the house, Burnham comes across as the most sympathetic: he worked on the house’s security system and was convinced by Junior to join the heist due to his need for money. The reason why he needs the cash is never discussed — but as played by Whitaker, Burnham comes across as a sensible, compassionate man who increasingly regrets his involvement in the crime. It’s clear that he only goes through with the job out of desperation; as the only person of color in this movie, Burnham represents socioeconomic disparities that routinely employ black men to maintain elaborate systems of defense (militaristic or otherwise) while leaving them to face financial insecurity in their own lives.

And, of course, Panic Room is also distinguished in its appeal to feminism. It would be easy to categorize Meg’s helplessness as a typically misogynistic trope: the house-as-woman’s-psyche allegory is linked to the sexist precept of “hysteria,” and takes on another dimension when we realize how intrinsically a “home” — and a woman’s traditional place in it — is dependent upon the influence of a patronizing man. Indeed, while hiding from the invaders, Meg tries to convince herself that her ex-husband will come to save her. “He’ll do something,” she assures Sarah. (Her daughter remains unconvinced.) In fact, he does come, but is immediately incapacitated by the burglars. Thus Meg is called upon to resolve the situation herself; when the house proves to be built upon failed, masculine desperation, Meg must utilize whatever she finds at her disposal to save not only her daughter, but her Self.

Her intrinsic rapport with the house — with the “emotional property” — becomes her source of resilience and power. In a quiet moment, when Burnham and Sarah briefly come face to face, her remarks that her mom must be rich for owning such a nice house.

“Dad’s rich,” the girl responds. “Mom’s just mad.”

Panic Room asserts itself as an unusually subversive post-9/11 movie: while tapping into the public’s fear of terrorism, it ultimately articulates a worldview that implicates men who foster precarious environments as the ones to fault for collective danger. Yet even as I’ve attempted to designate this movie as “feminist” and “racially conscious,” Panic Room doesn’t come across as an empowering piece of entertainment. In truth, it’s too caught up in the slick machinations of plot and visual effects to be grounded in the psychic journey of its characters. Even though she overcomes insecurity in order to save the day, Meg’s self-determination doesn’t strike me as agentive so much as it feels preordained. She may subconsciously call the home invasion upon herself, as Kitterman suggests — but because Meg remains unconscious of her own drive, it’s as if she’s also acting within a consciousness that surpasses her own.

This possibility — of an ambiguous, omniscient perspective — is central to the atmospheric tension of Panic Room, and is best evidenced through cinematographers Conrad W. Hall and Darius Khondji’s camerawork. For example, the movie’s opening credits feature computer-generated text that hovers over an unusually motionless Manhattan; the juxtaposition of synthetic titles against real footage creates the impression that the city is synthetic as well. Such artificiality is felt all the more potently when Fincher, echoing Evan’s tour at the beginning of the film, directs his camera to take us on a second trip through the house: at night, as the burglars are breaking in. The camera floats through space, following the men’s efforts to enter — moving through walls, floors and even the space in between a coffee pot’s handle and its glass body. No human could be operating the camera; the point of view is an impossible one.

It’s uncomfortable and disconcerting to witness. It makes us feel like intruders, too.

These cinematic choices call attention to themselves and give the audience the impression of being not only voyeuristic, but out of control. Even though every shot is modulated with care, such precision ultimately lends an impersonal tone to Panic Room, and invites a sense of helplessness. It’s as if the movie itself is aware of its characters’ fates: this is especially noticeable in a few shots which focus on the crucial placement of key objects, foreshadowing their significance later in the film (i.e., Meg’s cell phone or a hazardous basketball). Neither Meg nor Burnham ever feels confident in their ability to control events, yet everything that they experience and that we witness is entirely deliberate. Such a dynamic emphasizes the barriers that keep audiences and characters equally subservient to the movie in which they find themselves. Nothing happens in Panic Room that doesn’t amount to some predestined outcome — and it’s beyond anyone’s power to find a means of controlling it.

In his essay on the film, Kitterman argues that, through its visual omniscience, Panic Room presents its audience with a false sense of power over mortality: “we can enter the panic room of a house with Jodie Foster, but we cannot evade death by seeing it.” (241) In fact, by using camerawork that robs the audience of its ability to too completely identify with any of the characters — and which emphasizes everyone’s lack of control — Panic Room is nothing more or less than a dramatization of anxiety in the face of death. As a film of post-9/11 America, it illustrates the circumstantial conditions which led to a real-world terrorist attack and evokes the immediate sense of helplessness that left citizens at the mercy of reactionary impulses. It encourages an understanding of how corruption alienates people — how personal isolation fosters paranoia, or an urge to have irrational fears proved right.

And it expounds how such fears can be inherited. Or moved into — just as one moves into a house.

The movie ends with Meg and Sarah lounging on a bench in Central Park, looking through real estate ads in the paper. Aside from a few minor bruises on their faces, they don’t look as though they’d just come out of hell; it could be that nothing’s actually happened to them. In fact, the manner in which we enter the scene — fading in from black to a shot of Meg’s face, calmed in a reflective expression — suggests that it all could have been a figment of her imagination.

At any rate, the psychic work has been done: death may be inescapable, but Meg no longer fears it. She’s discovered real power — not the kind that strives to cheat death, but the kind that faces it.

Property enables us to hide from danger; it’s vulnerability, or emotion, that sets us free.