15 - Unlawful Entries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2020
Summary
Abstract
This 1993 essay looks at a specific trend, cycle or sub-genre within the thriller film genre – the 1990s trend labelled the “intimacy thriller”, which includes titles such as Cape Fear, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Poison Ivy, Guilty as Sin, Single White Female and Raising Cain. Cycles in cinema depend not only on the close proximity in time from one film to next, but also on their shared reference to a contemporaneous “social text” of problems and issues. In the case of the intimacy thriller, these social problems spin around vexed questions of trust and suspicion, keyed to issues of gender, class and race. Indeed, the cultural function of these films would seem to be to sharpen everyday paranoia.
Keywords: Genre, thriller, intimacy, social text, Camille Paglia
THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE (Curtis Hanson, 1992) is a contemporary thriller framed by a reassuring parable. At the start, yuppie housewife Claire (Annabella Sciorra) is scared by the sudden appearance at her kitchen window of a hooded, black intruder. Taken in hand by Michael (Matt Mc-Coy), the Sensitive New Age Guy of the house, the intruder turns out to be Solomon (Ernie Hudson), a mentally disabled person sent by the “Better Day” association to do helpful carpentry chores for the family. Solomon figures as the innocent, non-threatening Other of the story; Claire and Michael eventually learn to overcome their residual doubts and prejudices and, in the film's final moments, welcome him in as a nurturing and nurtured member of their happy family.
The more central intruder is the mirror opposite of Solomon in virtually every conceivable way. Peyton (Rebecca De Mornay) is white, female, a cultured bourgeois like Claire and Michael. Whereas Solomon's physical contact with the children of the household is cautiously restricted, Peyton is entrusted with unlimited access: she is to be their live-in nanny for the months that Claire builds an elaborate, backyard greenhouse. Where the parents are quick to suspect Solomon of grave misconduct, they realise almost too late that the real villain of the piece is in fact Peyton, seeking revenge for both the husband and child she lost as a result of legal action encouraged by Claire.
THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE proposes, in short, a social and moral lesson in how to distinguish truly threatening outsiders from only seemingly threatening ones.
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- Information
- Mysteries of CinemaReflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982–2016, pp. 265 - 276Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018