Night. Lowering my feet to the floor made me feel the shiver of bony fingers beneath the bed, extending toward me in the dark. But what terrifies me isn’t the monster, it’s that it’s being grabbed, dragged into the Underbedworld, because that stuffy space is the source of my nightmares. I’m one of those people who breathe fast in an elevator if floors take too long. I understand why the worst punishment our society suffers is incarceration.
Experts say between 5 and 10% of people have claustrophobia. Before, I was glued to the tight spaces of TV by news: war, terrorist attack, trapped miners (Beaconsfield) or caving (Thai football player). I’m not alone. Before their deaths were known, the fact that 5 men chased the Titanic imprisoned in a submarine terrified me. Connecting the arrogance of the doomed ship with the extreme wealth of the Titan’s passengers is irresistible. James Cameron, film director Titanic ship, told ABC News of America that he was “impressed by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was warned several times”.
James Caan in a different kind of trap in the 1990 movie anguished.
But the entanglement of the passengers caught our attention, more than their wealth. Titanic was submerged in water so deep, its pressure was not only psychological, but also beyond human endurance. Our worst nightmares and most compulsive diversions are stifling. And often related to water. Recently by Hannah Kent conscientious and by Kate Grenville Secret River both take readers on disease-ridden ships to Australia. For most of Phillip Noyce’s films Calm death, Sam Neill’s character is trapped in a sinking boat, unsure if Nicole Kidman, cast to play his wife, can survive. Claustrophobia is part of our cultural heritage, it’s as scary as being locked in a bathroom trying to escape a wildfire.
But it’s not just in Australia. IN early burial Edgar Allen Poe’s narrator fears being buried alive. He redesigned his family vault so he could unlock it from the inside. He ordered a “warm and soft cushioned” coffin. When I was checking that quote, I came across an 1896 book by Dr. Tebb and Colonel Vollum called Early burial and how it can be prevented. They don’t believe in hearing heartbeats with novelty stethoscopes. Instead, they asked us to make sure that our dead could not be recovered. For example, toxic embalming liquid or cremation. The oblivion of death is better than imprisonment. But only fiction can get us there. In the 1988 Dutch film by George Sluizer disappearanceRex wants to know what happened to his missing wife. I hope it won’t be too revealing in saying that in the end, he found out, in the worst possible way.
We all leave our most primitive limits when we are born. Miki, in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s recent TV series barbarian river, returned from prison to her hometown. After her bus emerges from a tunnel-like bridge, she finds a job in a meat processing plant. In one horrifying scene, a colleague laughs as she locks her in a cold storage room filled with strung corpses. Miki escapes, only to face death again, trapped beneath the collapsed body of a murdered victim.
Similarly, Emma Donoghue’s five-year-old narrator Room must learn what it means to be free and live. Outside of the confinement he shares with the kidnapped Ma, he really longs for Bed’s safety, not understanding that this safety can never be real. We cannot perceive everything correctly in captivity. We become how others want to see us. “We are people in a book,” Ma told Jack, and their captor “wouldn’t let anyone else read it.”
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Writer Paul Sheldon, in Stephen King’s anguished, “locked” in a bed of darkness and anguish. King admits himself anguished Warder is a substitute for cocaine and certainly not only kidnappers can imprison us. In Fiona McFarlane Night guestMrs. Ruth’s back pain made her “too unpredictable”. Her only escape from her home is into her memories of her younger self. An intruder in Ruth’s life, but Ruth is mostly trapped by her age, overactive imagination, and dwindling cognitive skills. We’re all on our way there, if we live long enough.
According to the Australian Psychological Association, claustrophobia is a “situational phobia” that can be treated with exposure therapy. Do movies and novels count as exposure? Internet keyboard heroes have strong opinions on whether horror movies are useful or not. Maybe they desensitize us? With phobias, we want to be desensitized.
