Home Invasion and Hollywood Cinema: David Fincher’s Panic Room

Abstract

The title of one of Hollywood’s top-grossing films for 2002, Panic Room, communicates the magnitude of the word “panic” in current Western cultural discourses. Panic Room further suggests its political relevance post-9/11 by depicting the failure of the eponymous room’s intended function as a sanctuary from the violence of a home invasion. Panic Room conveys contemporary concerns with personal and national security by representing the contradictions and tensions that exist during times of unrest. Filmed before but released after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Panic Room serves to critique both the security industry and the media’s “culture of fear.”³ By representing misplaced and confused fears concerning personal safety, Panic Room highlights connections between domestic and national security. As with director David Fincher’s other films, such as Fight Club (1999) and Se7en (1995), Panic Room depicts a dystopian urban space, imperfect institutions, and an individual’s struggle to formulate an independent identity. While Panic Room utilizes familiar narratives of terror to endear itself to spectators, it also undermines these conventions by providing resistive subtexts that are intertwined with the themes of Fincher’s other films.

Panic is part of American political discourse … both mainstream parties think they can best persuade us by scaring us.

—Jonathan Sterne and Zack Furness, “Panic: State of Mind or Mind of State?”¹

The price tag for our panic about overall crime has grown so monumental that even law-and-order zealots find it hard to defend. … Panic-driven public spending generates over the long term a pathology akin to one found in drug addicts. The more money and attention we fritter away on our compulsion, the less we have available for our real needs, which consequently grow larger. While fortunes are being spent to protect children from dangers that few ever encounter, approximately 11 million children lack health insurance, 12 million are malnourished, and rates of illiteracy are increasing.

—Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear.¹