Panic Room

On my (continuing) walk across China, I have occasionally come across the kind of construction featured in the attached image — a farmhouse with a door half way up the wall, no stairs attached. I have previously assumed the house was still under construction, or perhaps they ran out of money before doing the stairs. But as I passed his one, in Guang’an county in the middle of Sichuan, last Saturday, it struck me that this is in fact a “panic room”, a way to seal off and protect the family and its assets in the top room, safe from marauders. A man I met on the road asked me how the law and order situation is in England compared to China. I replied: “I really have no idea.” — Graham Earnshaw, author of The Great Walk of China: Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet To read an excerpt from The Great Walk of China, click the link above; to listen to Graham Earnshaw in dialogue with Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Zhang Lijia in Shanghai last month, check out this podcast at Popup Chinese

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 feminist “paranoia” through the consistent critique of heteronormativity that her aggregate body of work performs. Moreover, it addresses debates within queer theory about time, refuting antisocial currents—the push against “for-the-child” sentiments predominant in contemporary political rhetoric—and proposing an alternative, recursive temporality, and within the field of feminist film studies, demonstrating a subversive potential within commercial narrative film across the span of one Hollywood star’s career

Apparat, Raum, Angst\ud Stichworte zum weiblichen Blick im Anschluss an\ud David Finchers Film Panic Room

Sie blickt ihn sanft aus einem geöffneten Spalt der Eingangstür an, lächelt verschlafen\ud und fragt wie beiläufig: »What do you want?« Der Polizist reagiert\ud umsichtig. Sie möge mit den Augen blinzeln, falls sie sich in irgendeiner Weise\ud unter Druck fühle und deshalb nicht antworten könne. Aber die Frau schaut ihn\ud lediglich verständnislos an. Nicht einmal ein leises Zucken findet sich an ihren\ud Augenlidern.\ud Diese Szene aus David Finchers Film Panic Room (2002) eignet sich sehr gut als\ud Vorspann für eine Diskussion um die Souveränität des weiblichen Blicks im\ud Kino. Mag, die Hauptfigur des Films, bedient sich in diesem Ausschnitt eines\ud machtvollen Blicks, der dem Polizisten jede Möglichkeit nimmt, in das Geschehen\ud einzugreifen. Mag befürchtet, ein Einschreiten der Polizei würde ihre Tochter,\ud welche sich hinter der nur einen Spalt weit geöffneten Tür in der Gewalt\ud von Einbrechern befindet, gefährden. Sie setzt eine Strategie ein, die seit Joan\ud Riviere1 als Option für typisch weibliches Verhalten gilt: Sie tut so, als ob. Sie\ud schaut und spricht, als wäre nichts geschehen, als sei sie durch das nächtliche\ud Anläuten der Polizisten lediglich aus einem tiefen und zufriedenen Schlaf\ud geweckt worden und als sei ihr einziger Wunsch der, möglichst rasch wieder\ud unter eine warme Decke zu kriechen. Die ZuschauerInnen hingegen wissen,\ud dass sich Mag hinter einer Maske verbirgt. Sie verführt den Polizisten ähnlich wie\ud die Frauen, von denen Riviere erzählt, die ihre technischen Kenntnisse verbergen,\ud wenn sie vor einem Arbeiter stehen, oder die sich töricht, unschuldig und\ud naiv stellen, sobald sie irgendeinen Mann zu irgendetwas bewegen wollen

From Agasa Cristie to Group Image Play-Analysis of Horror Survival Game Panic Room : Escaping from the Den on Emotional Elements Development

A maniac computer game genre called "Survival Horror Games‟ is aimed for making gamers feel cathartic feeling when they escaped from the designed horror successfully. The degree of gaming quality, however, is not easy to measure. In this paper, we apply Caillois‟ game playing categories and other standards to measure how a game induces the feeling of fear and other emotional experience to players. Once dominated horror survival game series called Panic Room: Escaping from the Den was chosen to analyze and evaluate with those standards as well as its narratives and subsystems. Especially the 2nd version was most welcomed to users among 4 versions thus we focused on the difference between the version 1 and the version 2 in terms of game playing and fear elements in the game content and story structure. In result, version 2 showed much more Agon and Mimicry and all other fear elements than version 1. The group image playing structure and conference/collection subsystem that were newly provided to version 2 were attributed to its success

Containment and nuclear memory in contemporary climate change fiction

Confronted with the global existential threat of climate change, human subjects in the Anthropocene must grapple with a parallel teleological crisis: how do we direct ourselves as individuals and collectives in the face of an ongoing global catastrophe? To answer this question, this thesis seeks to understand the material, cultural, and psychological mechanisms that authenticate meaningful action toward large-scale, systemic changes that might forestall the worst effects of climate change. This thesis names these mechanisms containment, exploring how contemporary climate change fiction, or “cli-fi,” uses the metaphorically flexible figure of the fallout shelter to help negotiate a relationship to the scale, complexity, and horror of climate change. The fallout shelter is inflected with the legacies of Cold-War containment culture, which developed in response to the similar existential threat of nuclear annihilation. Originally, containment culture was associated with resistance to the perceived threat of communism, but its ideological principle of defensive exclusion replicated throughout society, creating racially exclusive suburban localities that came to stand in for the space and place of the American nation. Contemporary cli-fi featuring the fallout shelter necessarily grapples with containment culture in its efforts to capture and manage global-scale problems, often in hyperlocal contexts. Such fictions position readers and spectators as "contained subjects," converting pleasurable literary and cinematic escapism into a psychological survival tactic against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. This thesis also aims to broaden ecocriticism’s understanding of what cli-fi can be, selecting texts from a variety of narrative media that center the fallout shelter space as their primary dramatic fulcrum. While many of the texts examined in this thesis appear to have little to do with climate change, understanding them through the lens of containment demonstrates how climate change can be rendered in modalities beyond the apocalyptic imaginary. This thesis concludes by examining recent real-world deployments and imaginings of the fallout shelter, suggesting that containment culture persists in a more globally-conscious (but potentially more dangerous) fashion