{"id":104270,"date":"2016-10-28T10:30:30","date_gmt":"2016-10-28T14:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=104270"},"modified":"2016-10-28T11:00:30","modified_gmt":"2016-10-28T15:00:30","slug":"breastfeeding-noir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/28\/breastfeeding-noir\/","title":{"rendered":"Breast-feeding Noir"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome our newest correspondent, Amy Gentry. This is the first in her\u00a0series about domestic thrillers. \u201cIn the midst of our current post\u2013<\/em>Gone Girl renaissance in domestic suspense,\u201d she writes, \u201cthese films look more prescient than ever.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

A still from Cradle<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

When the director and screenwriter Curtis Hanson passed away last month, at the age of seventy-one<\/a>, obituary writers agreed he\u2019d be remembered longest for his 1997 James Ellroy adaptation, L.A. Confidential<\/em>. It\u2019s easy to see why L.A. Confidential<\/em> gets all the love, with its balletic rhythms, its crafted-yet-earnest performances from Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe, and the beatific fatalism of its third-act plot twist reflected in the eyes of a dying Kevin Spacey. But my favorite Curtis Hanson moment comes from a film he made five years earlier, barely mentioned in his obits: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

In it, a stay-at-home mom played by Annabella Sciorra barges into the nursery of a house for sale and gasps in horrified recognition at something she sees on the shelf. \u201cThat\u2019s a strange-looking toy,\u201d says the male real-estate agent showing her the house. It\u2019s not a toy at all, of course. It\u2019s a breast pump\u2014the perfect third-act reveal for what is perhaps Hollywood\u2019s only entry in the subgenre of breast-feeding noir.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle<\/em> was Hanson\u2019s first hit<\/a>, pulling him from the kiddie-flick-and-exploitation doldrums of his early career into the big league. A low-budget thriller with no stars based on a film-school script by the first-time screenwriter Amanda Silver, it features Rebecca De Mornay as a revenge-crazed nanny named Peyton who terrorizes the picket-fence-perfect family of Sciorra\u2019s Claire Bartel. A showcase for the low-key auteurism and deft balancing of dualities that would later define L.A. Confidential<\/em>, it remains Hanson\u2019s most underrated film, probably at least in part because of its association with the chronically underrated \u201cwomen\u2019s genre\u201d of domestic suspense.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the box-office success of Fatal Attraction<\/em> in 1987, the early nineties saw a tidal wave of domestic thrillers, many with top-billed female leads. An entire cohort of powerhouse actresses\u2014Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon\u2014took early roles in these films dealing with the intimate perils of family life. In the midst of our current post\u2013Gone Girl <\/em>renaissance in domestic suspense, these films look more prescient than ever. While they often depict an unstable outsider who threatens the fundamental primacy of the family unit, they do\u00a0so in a way that undercuts the stability of family life itself, especially for women. After all, if the stakes of a domestic thriller lie in the uncanny realization that the person you trust most is actually a homicidal stranger, it\u2019s a paranoia that is especially trenchant for women, a third of whose murders are committed by romantic partners.<\/p>\n

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle<\/em>, with its dedication to the intimate horror of women\u2019s lives, is the perfect place to launch an investigation of the genre. In its first fifteen minutes, one pregnant woman is molested by her gynecologist and another undergoes a bloody, late-term miscarriage and hysterectomy. There\u2019s a weak causal link between the two female traumas\u2014the gynecologist, faced with Claire\u2019s charges of sexual assault, shoots himself, and his grief-stricken widow, Peyton, now reduced to poverty, goes into early labor. But the two women\u2019s stories are aggressively crosscut in a way that emphasizes their similarities over than their differences, a nod to Hitchcock from the classicist Hanson, and not the last.<\/p>\n

Focusing his attention on the women\u2019s subjective experiences of trauma, Hanson draws out both moments to the point of discomfort. Close-ups of Claire\u2019s face as the sleazy gynecologist massages her breast show her cycling through feelings intimately familiar to women who\u2019ve been sexually touched without consent: shock, horror, self-doubt at her own interpretation of what\u2019s happening, nervous appeasement, and, finally, sickened resignation. De Mornay\u2019s emergency-delivery scene, though pitched at a much higher key, is equally focused on her character\u2019s loss of control. As she screams in pain and terror, her doctor never addresses or even acknowledges her. A point-of-view shot from a panicked De Mornay craning to see her dying baby in the incubator is pointedly obstructed by hospital staff, who eventually inform the doctor\u2014not her\u2014that her baby is dead. I can\u2019t think of a film that better illustrates certain brutally casual truths about women\u2019s loss of agency and control in their reproductive role.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

From the poster for Cradle<\/i>\u2019s theatrical release.<\/p><\/div>\n

These twinned moments of molestation and miscarriage kick off a screenplay that spends as much time with Peyton\u2019s point of view as it does with Claire\u2019s. Because we know her motivations from the start, Peyton is more than a villain. She\u2019s almost a second protagonist: Claire\u2019s chilly, shell-shocked twin in trauma. It\u2019s the same splitting that characterizes Hanson\u2019s best work, and he knew it. \u201cPeople discover who they are and what they\u2019re all about by meeting their doppelgangers,\u201d he once said, pointing out similarities between the dual protagonists of In Her Shoes <\/em>and L.A. Confidential<\/em> that even sympathetic reviewers of the Jennifer Weiner adaptation missed.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s rigorous production design underlines the split by constantly juxtaposing two colors seemingly suggested by the Seattle shooting location: lush, fecund green and cold, oceanic blue. Claire makes her first appearance in a green plaid shirt, and is constantly shown puttering in greenhouses (her husband is a biotech researcher); the Bartel family and friends are costumed almost exclusively in green with gold and orange accents. Meanwhile, Peyton wears navy-blue suits and crisp, gray-blue tailored skirts to match her icy-blue eyes. She sleeps on striped-blue sheets and dons a perfectly tailored blue pencil skirt for a long, slow stroll away from Claire\u2019s husband, Michael, that he seemingly can\u2019t help himself from watching. As Peyton wins the family over one by one, the lighting in the white-walled house takes on a bluish cast, and, at a crucial moment in the film, Peyton makes the baby\u2019s room over in her signature color. These careful schematics\u2014framed by the cinematographer Robert Elswit in long shots by Seattle\u2019s emerald forests and the bleak, steely Pacific\u2014underscore a balancing act between the promise of fertility and the prison of biology.<\/p>\n

Moreover, De Mornay never lets you forget Peyton\u2019s backstory on the operating table. She plays Peyton in a dissociative trance of grief rather than a psychopathic rage, her icy calm only punctured by visible reminders of Claire\u2019s fertility. Upon first seeing Claire\u2019s infant son\u2014the same age hers would have been\u2014she gasps as if struck and puts a hand to her abdomen. Later, in the first of her many breastfeeding scenes, Peyton melts into a maternal smile over a temporarily sweetened score. Sure, by the final showdown, she\u2019s whacking Claire with a shovel (useful for gardening as well as grave-digging); but ultimately, the film invites us to see Peyton and Claire as symmetrical losers in a game no woman can win.<\/p>\n

Women responded strongly to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, <\/em>reportedly yelling \u201cKill the bitch!\u201d<\/a> during test screenings. While Susan Faludi clucked her tongue<\/a> at this, I\u2019d like to imagine it was the double bind that was the real bitch. Claire\u2019s working-girl bestie, Marlene, played by Julianne Moore in code-breaking black, says it best over dinner early in the film: \u201cA woman can feel like a failure if she doesn\u2019t bring in fifty grand a year and still make time for blowjobs and homemade lasagna.\u201d In the twenty-five years since it was written, has that line lost any of its sting? At least Marlene dies with her eyes open\u2014literally. Murder weapon? The glass ceiling.<\/p>\n

Amy Gentry is the author of the debut thriller <\/em>Good as Gone<\/a>, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in July 2016. Her writing on books and culture has appeared in <\/em>Electric Literature,\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles\u00a0Review of Books, <\/em>The Rumpus, <\/em>Salon, <\/em>Fusion, and the <\/em>Chicago Tribune, among others. Amy holds a doctorate in English and lives in Austin, Texas.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome our newest correspondent, Amy Gentry. This is the first in her\u00a0series about domestic thrillers. \u201cIn the midst of our current post\u2013Gone Girl renaissance in domestic suspense,\u201d she writes, \u201cthese films look more prescient than ever.\u201d When the director and screenwriter Curtis Hanson passed away last month, at the age of seventy-one, obituary writers agreed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[16426,25438,25431,25436,14644,25440,25428,25433,25432,25437,79,15550,25434,25443,25429,25441,81,25435,25439,25442,25430,10401],"class_list":["post-104270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-1990s","tag-amanda-silver","tag-annabelle-sciorra","tag-babysitters","tag-breastfeeding","tag-consent","tag-curtis-hanson","tag-domestic-suspense","tag-domestic-thrillers","tag-fatal-attraction","tag-film","tag-gone-girl","tag-gynecology","tag-julianne-moore","tag-l-a-confidential","tag-miscarriage","tag-movies","tag-nannies","tag-rebecca-de-mornay","tag-susan-faludi","tag-the-hand-that-rocks-the-cradle","tag-the-nineties"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBreast-feeding Noir: On \u201cThe Hand That Rocks the Cradle\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I can\u2019t think of a film that better illustrates certain brutally casual truths about women\u2019s loss of agency and control in their reproductive role.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/28\/breastfeeding-noir\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Breast-feeding Noir by Amy Gentry\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 28, 2016 \u2013 Welcome our newest correspondent, Amy Gentry. 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