Looking At Chloe Essay

The function of a film of the erotic thriller genre is to provide both thrills and titillation for the audience. It is obvious how the erotic thriller provides titillation for its viewers: it is renowned for graphically depicting sexual scenes. How it provides the suspense, and therefore the thrills, is by having a central theme of violence, “yet deferring that violence” (Thompson 72). However, both of theses functions, to create suspense and to appeal to voyeurism, are accomplished by negative portrayals of women in an erotic thriller, often reflecting the cultural anxieties surrounding women’s political and sexual liberation. The 2009 Atom Egoyan film Chloe is no different. Looking at Chloe through the lens of genre analysis reveals how it is emblematic of the erotic thriller’s problems with women; the character of Chloe falls neatly into the category of femme fatale, which is a trope created by cultural fears about sexually-confident women, and the unusual

Their sexual confidence provides much of the eroticism, but their deceitfulness and independence from male characters provide much of the suspense (72). They serve as a morality tale for the, usually male, protagonist that sexual desire is dangerous, and given the chance, women will hurt them. Like most femmes fatales, Chloe is a sexual character; her profession is that of sex worker, but because unlike most erotic thrillers, the affair is a homosexual one, the film portrays homosexual desire as either dangerous, in the character of Chloe, or inexistent and a sublimation of heterosexual desire for the character of Catherine. Homosexual desire is also portrayed as threat to the nuclear family; because of desire, Chloe inserts herself into Catherine’s family and endangers it. Visually, shots of Chloe putting her fingers through a wire fence serve to reinforce the idea that she is inserting herself somewhere she should not