Panic Room Research Articles

Closed-Circuit Anthropocene: Natural Security and the Home(land) in David Fincher's Panic Room

Closed-Circuit Anthropocene: Natural Security and the Home(land) in David Fincher's Panic Room

En passant pécho réal. par Julien Hollande

Reviewed by: En passant pécho réal. par Julien Hollande Ann Marie Moore Hollande, Julien, réal. En passant pécho. Int. Hedi Bouchenafa, Nassim Lyes, Nina Kepekian. Netflix, 2021. Hedi and Cokeman make their living peddling drywall dust and dog poop in lieu of drugs to the rich and unsuspecting, which frequently leads to physical confrontations. Early in the film, Hedi's sister marries a supposedly successful drug lord. This presents Hedi and Cokeman with the opportunity to sell high-end cocaine in their neighborhood. En passant pécho is the story of their inability to do so and their trials and failures along the way. The film is full of grotesque humor meant to entertain and shock the spectator. One of their neighbors has his head blown off in a misunderstanding and Cokeman picks up the body to play with it as one would a doll. Later, in a fight with police, an eyeball is dislodged and shown flying across the screen. This 'shock and awe' factor serves to distance the spectator from the characters and storyline, making it difficult for the spectator to engage. There are many things the director does to counteract this disengagement, leaving the spectator feeling a constant flux between enjoying the film and being horrified. The protagonists are physically aggressive toward one another and constantly fight, but they always stand up for each other. They have a close and deep friendship that allows the spectator to follow the storyline despite the horrific moments. The humor, while dark, comes from the mishaps that Cokeman and Hedi face during their adventures. Everything they undertake turns out poorly. The money from the first batch of cocaine they sell is stolen and the man they hire to help sell gets his head blown off with a bazooka. In addition, they get caught at the border and have to blow up the SUV they were given to transport the coke. Later, the woman helping Hedi hide his money turns out to be a lesbian and steals the money from his subsequent batches of coke. She leaves Hedi and Cokeman chained to a radiator heater and calls the police. The film ends with the two protagonists on their way to jail, but happy and laughing as they now get to live out Hedi's dream reality game of escaping from prison. This moment is a throwback to a conversation early in the film where Hedi describes his version of a reality game about escaping from a panic room. Cokeman's reaction to their impending imprisonment is typical of his behavior throughout the film (dressed in a fur coat and underwear for the duration of the film, he always laughs dramatically before he speaks). Despite the dark and shocking nature of the film, the spectator continually reengages in the storyline and remains curious about the outcome for the two protagonists. Based on a web series <http://www.youtube.com/user/enpassantpecho>, this film was directed by the younger son of François Hollande and Ségolène Royal. [End Page 219] Ann Marie Moore New Manchester High School (GA) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Fish at the spa: too relaxed to care

![Graphic][1] If there was a monstrous night-time thunderstorm and the power went out in your home, all during a zombie apocalypse, you would probably freak out at the slightest unusual noise and flee to your panic room. However, if you’d just got back from a relaxing hot stone massage at

Chronic Tomboys: Feminism, Survival, and Paranoia in Jodie Foster’s Body of Work

From Freaky Friday (1976) to Flightplan (2005), Jodie Foster has made a career of defying gender norms, a defiance predicated largely upon her characteristically tomboyish embodiment and a mode of being that combines activeness, visual agency, and a distinctively resistant demeanor that spans her body of work to the extent that one can hardly watch any one of her films without involuntary recourse to her earlier and later movies. This essay takes up David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002), which unites tomboy figures of two generations in Foster and Kristen Stewart and works, in light of the former’s corpus and its feminist bent, to refuse the trope that sees tomboyism capitulate to heteronormative strictures in adolescence. Instead, Panic Room reproduces that embodied resistance in an adult through interactions with her daughter. The essay then proceeds further into the films of an iconic tomboy actress to posit a mode of queer feminist reproductivity enacted through Foster’s star image and a recuperation of f...

The mutual encouragement of the fear of crime and the security industry: The example of film narratives and electronic home security systems

In a culture of fear, everyday life is experienced through the feeling of safety, part of which can be secured through certain electronic home security systems. Three films – Unlawful Entry (1992), Panic Room (2002) and When a Stranger Calls (2006) – will be used as examples in the attempt to consider the relationship between the fear of criminal activity – in this case break ins – and electronic home security systems. The basic premise of the research is that the culturally manufactured fear encourages the electronic home security system industry, the presence of which can, in turn, exasperate one’s fear of the risk of falling victim to violent crime.

From Computational Emotional Models to HRI

During the previous stage of our research we developed a computer simulation (called ‘The Panic Room’ or, more simply, ‘TPR’) dealing with synthetic emotions. The authors were developing the first steps towards an evolutionary machine, defining the key elements involved in the development of complex actions (that is, creating a physical intuitive ontology, from a bottom-up approach). After the successful initial results of TPR, the authors considered that it would be necessary to develop a new simulation (which the authors will call “TPR 2.0.”), more complex and with better visualisation characteristics. After this, the authors created a simulation on emotions evolution with genetic algorithms (Game Of Emotions, GOE) which results on the value of specific emotions into social domains were applied to HRI real robotic environments at Nishidalab (Japan), focused into the notions of empathy and proxemics. There the authors performed an experiment that involved humans from two different native-speaking cultures and one robot introduced as three different machines. The final HRI obtained data was analyzed under several research field perspectives: psychology, philosophy, robotic sciences and anthropology.

Metaphoric Architecture: Race and Real Estate in Panic Room and The People Under The Stairs

Metaphoric Architecture: Race and Real Estate in Panic Room and The People Under The Stairs

Shlomo Sand's &lt;em&gt;The Invention of the Jewish People&lt;/em&gt; and the End of the New History

Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People and the End of the New History Derek J. Penslar (bio) Israel’s “New History” has itself become history. What in the late 1980s and 1990s appeared to be shocking revelations about Israeli policy in 1948 have become anodyne. In Israeli academia, many of the New Historians’ arguments have become mainstream, as they have been debated, examined, and found to be by and large accurate. What is more, the New Historians’ findings now spur little controversy in Israeli society as a whole. Some Israelis outside of academia have developed a more critical approach to their country’s past, but many more have responded to the nearly constant Israeli-Arab strife of the past decade by forming a jaundiced view of the country’s historical record and justifying Israeli aggression and brutality as unfortunate but necessary measures in an endless war against an unappeasable foe. Thus recent revisionist accounts of the 1967 war have received far less press and been far less controversial than their predecessors on 1948 and 1956. So what, Israelis may ask, if, as Tom Segev’s massive tome on 1967 argues, Israel hankered for war in order to pull the country out of the funk induced by the 1966 recession?1 Assuming, as many Israeli Jews do, that the Arab foe is implacable, it does not matter to them if Israel was the aggressor in this or any other circumstance, as the only alternative to aggression is destruction. (The most prominent of the New Historians, Benny Morris, has himself come to espouse this view.) The decline of the New History is part of a general crisis of historical consciousness in contemporary Israel. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Israelis took umbrage at the New Historians’ criticisms of their country’s behaviour in 1948 because they felt an intimate connection with the state and a need to defend its virtue. By the noughts of the twenty first century, however, Israel had completed a longstanding process of transformation into a highly [End Page 156] individualistic consumer society, and with the exception of the radical right, it had lost the sense participating in a heroic political venture. Israelis are increasingly alienated from their own history, seeing a chasm between their world and that of the first generations of the state. In the midst of this historical anomie, however, lies one certainty. Ongoing conflict with the Palestinians and hostile global public opinion encourage retreat into the panic room of Jewish peoplehood. The State of Israel, which its founders hoped would be fundamentally different from the diaspora, is now seen as its extension—no less threatened, no less unjustly maligned. Thus it is no surprise that in our own day the most notorious critique of Israel generated by one of its own intellectuals does not offer, as did New Historians like Benny Morris or Avi Shlaim, an archive-based, carefully documented counter-narrative of Israel’s political and military history, but rather a polemical attack against the very concept of Jewish peoplehood. Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People became a cause celèbre almost immediately upon its publication four years ago. The book’s arguments are by now well known—that the Jews of the Common Era were mostly descended from converts or converts themselves, and therefore not tied in any genetic or historical manner to Eretz-Israel; that Zionist scholarship has cleverly obscured this fact by acknowledging the extent of Jewish conversion over time but inventing a Jewish demographic as well as spiritual origin in the land of Israel; that Jews comprise a religious civilization, not a people, because they lack a secular literary culture; that the State of Israel anxiously seeks to compensate for its own lack of ethnic integrity by employing its scientists to obsessively search for unique Jewish genetic material over the ages; and that the bankruptcy of Zionist assertions of Jewish peoplehood is apparent from the Jewish state’s reliance upon religious law, symbols and concepts in its government and public culture. I would like to evaluate these arguments and speculate why this book has enjoyed such popularity, in Israel and...

Home(land) Invasion: Poe, Panic Rooms, and 9/11

Early in director David Fincher's film Panic Room, the character Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) comments that the hidden safe room in the house she is thinking of buying makes me nervous. When asked why, she responds, Ever read any Poe? Later, when she and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) are trapped in the panic room by three thieves, Sarah tries to comfort her mother by saying, People don't get buried alive anymore. When her mother questions that information, the teenager responds, heard it used to happen all the time, twenty or thirty years ago. Besides the telling observation on students' ahistorical sense of cultural referents, these moments of literary allusion acknowledge the gothic tradition of writers like Poe that provides a context and style for a thriller like Panic Room. It does seem ironic, of course, that the fear of being buried alive has metamorphosed into the desire to be entombed within one's own home, and this change may lead us to ask what, if any, are the similarities and differences between Poe's stories of being buried alive (as in Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeia, and Premature Burial) written in the 184Os, and the situation in this contemporary film? This article will briefly explore the idea that in both text and cinema, the protagonist unconsciously calls for his or her own confrontation with fear so that it might be overcome, and that this overcoming is accomplished through experiencing the fear. In both cases, the reader/viewer is invited into the tomb with the protagonist, so that he too might feel like he can control his anxieties by visualizing the terrain of death. However, I will argue that the story and film fail to convey the requisite vicarious experience, perhaps because the idea of experiencing one's mortality, one's personal death, is not something that can be symbolized in the language of a short story or poem. The two texts suggest, however, that this failure to confront their own themes - much as the government's response to the terrorist attack on America - suggests the impossibility of providing a secure home(land). Although many of Poe's stories concern a premature burial, the one entitled Premature Burial presents the experience of being buried alive from the first-person point of view, from the narrator's perspective. In other tales, like Fall of the House of Usher or A Cask of Amontillado, the narrator describes someone else's unnatural burial, or as in Ligeia, someone coming back from the dead. But only in Premature Burial do we get the horror of being buried alive from the point of view of the sufferer. It is also the most atypical of these stories in that it mixes pseudo-factual accounts of premature burial with the firsthand, subjective experience. In fact, this mixture, I will argue, creates a kind of ambivalence or dissatisfaction with the tale that reenforces the problem Poe sets up in the story of how we are able to confront our own mortality. Do we learn how to face death by reading news accounts, or do we simulate our own death experience? Or do we rely on both methods? This problem is developed early on. The narrator in Premature Burial tells us at the very beginning that human beings are morbidly fascinated with reading stories of human suffering: he states that we thrill . . . with the most intense of 'pleasurable pain' over accounts of earthquakes, plagues, and massacres (258). This discussion of human perversity, of the paradoxical painful/pleasure we feel staring at a wreck or watching the devastation from a tornado, for example, effectively sets the stage for other problems mentioned in the story, including the difficulty of where to draw the line between life and death, dream and waking, soul and body, symptom and disease, fiction and truth, and finally, between reading and not reading this very story. But the primary problem that these others relate to concerns the individual's confrontation with his own mortality in the course of a premature burial. …

Video Surveillance in Hollywood Movies

This paper examines the representations of CCTV in contemporary popular culture, namely Hollywood film from the perspective of culture and film studies. It starts from the observation that a growing number of Hollywood films are not only using (fake) CCTV images within their narrative, but are actually developing 'rhetorics of surveillance'. Following the argument of Thomas Y. Levin, contemporary Hollywood film is increasingly fascinated with (the images of) video surveillance. This fascination can be explained with the use of 'real time' and a shift from spatial to temporal indexicality in these movies. The paper then takes a closer look at three recent films: Tony Scott's Enemy of the State, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report and David Fincher's Panic Room. The role and uses of CCTV imagery in these films are analyzed; the role of the heroine under surveillance is examined; modes of (im-)possible resistance against CCTV are discussed.