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

David Fincher's Panic Room (Columbia Pictures, 2001) tells the story of Meg Altman (played by Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) as they struggle to adapt to life in their new home, a mansion in New York, amid the fallout of Meg's recent divorce from a wealthy pharmaceutical executive. When three intruders arrive during the night (played by Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam), Meg and Sarah take refuge in the mansion's panic room, only to discover that they have become the unwitting guardians of a vast fortune hidden inside the room by the home's previous owner. Making use of the room's closed-circuit surveillance system and a variety of survival resources, the mother-daughter duo resists the intruders' assault, transforming the spacious mansion into a suffocating tactical battleground with millions on the line. I contend that examining Panic Room from an ecocritical perspective reveals a startling cinematic commentary on American environmental consciousness in the post-9/11 world.

Written and produced before but released to audiences only several months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Panic Room does not fit tidily into the category of post-9/11 narratives. However, as Jonathan Markowitz,¹ Rebecca Bell-Metereau,² and John Kitterman³ have argued, the film's thematization of security, surveillance, and home invasion both presaged and amplified nationwide concern with personal security emerging from the US government's War on Terror and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security—indeed, Fincher was one of several Hollywood directors whose imaginative talents were called in by US intelligence agencies in an effort to prevent future terrorist attacks.⁴ Panic Room, if taken as a domestic allegory for national-security concerns in the wake of 9/11, may at first seem to fall in with other post-9/11 narratives that, according to Richard Grey, simply "retreat into domestic detail" while obfuscating a wider ethnogeographic field of trauma surrounding 9/11.⁵ But reading Panic Room only in the context of 9/11 misses the film's artistry in capturing the anxieties associated more closely with Robert Marzec's notion of "natural security," or the extension of national-security concerns into the frame of global environmental risks—namely, climate change and its impacts. Marzec explains that "in the age of climate change, the environment is both a source of concern (found in various struggles to implement new forms of environmental care and sustainability) and, understandably, an object of growing fear (in terms of diminishing resources, rising sea levels, growing food and water scarcity, etc.). These concerns, bound up with post-9/11 fears of terrorism, are in the process of being recast according to the parameters of risk and security—generating an environmental politics that extends the restrictive measures of homeland security into the domain of ecological security."⁶ I argue that the "panic" of Panic Room emanates not only from its basic plot points of invasion, surveillance, and assault and their symbiosis with the post-9/11 sociocultural upheaval in the United States but also from questions and anxieties associated with mediated environmental perception, resource scarcity, and confronting the nonhuman magnitudes of the Anthropocene. From this point of view, Panic Room's domestic allegory is less a discursive limitation than it is an asset for situating human-scale daily life in a broader ecological context. The film, beyond its apparent interest in bringing national-security concerns into the space of the home, is also a story about Western dwelling habits and their absorption into the conceptual space of ecological security in an urban environment. Although, as wealthy New Yorkers, the protagonists are hardly representative of those most impacted by climate change, reading Panic Room through this ecocritical lens brings to the fore this massive disjuncture between the ultrawealthy and climatologically subaltern populations.

First, drawing on Stacy Alaimo's work on the concept of (environmental) homeland security in her book Exposed, I explore how the film uses the play between interiority and exteriority alongside a gambit of visual metaphors...