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, "I 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 "The 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 "The 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. …