In Defense of Chloe (2009)
In what feels like a hangover from the 90s erotic thriller, Chloe (2009) is Fatal Attraction (1987) meets Carol (2015).
Pulling from a pool of genre influences, Chloe had two mainstays of sleaze cinema at its helm. Toronto-based new-wave director Atom Egoyan, who made his career breakthrough with the psychosexual cult classic Exotica (1994), and Secretary (2002) screenwriter, Erin Cressida Wilson.
The film follows Catherine, a middle-aged gynecologist (Julianne Moore) who suspects her flirtatious husband (Liam Neeson) of cheating, so hires the eponymous escort Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to test his fidelity and report back. However, Chloe has ulterior motives.1
The film is a remake of Anne Fontaine’s 2003 French erotic drama Nathalie…that starred two (Emmanuelle Beart and Fanny Ardant) of the 8 Women (2002), who again, played ambiguously queer roles. However, unlike Egoyan’s remake, their relationship does not progress beyond unresolved sexual tension.
According to queer film scholar Clara Bradley-Rance, the lesbian cinematic image is a reproduction of the tropes and stereotypes that preceded it (2022, 2). Chloe is no different, falling into the cinematic trappings of the pathological lesbian and ‘bury your gays’ trope(s).
In Chloe:
lesbian desire is conflated with obsession.
there is an intersection between violence and queerness.
the lesbian sex worker is punished (via death) for her transgressions of the patriarchal order.
To read more about the origins of the bisexual femme fatale archetype in the erotic thriller genre, I have a Basic Instinct (1992) essay available to read on my Subtack.
No one plays the sexually repressed housewife like Julianne Moore
Paranoid that her husband will cheat on her with a younger woman, Catherine projects her anxieties and contempt of youth (that reeks of internalised misogyny) onto the younger women around her; namely, the waitress her husband flirts with, her son’s girlfriend and Chloe. In a 2010 interview for The Rumpus, Egoyan revealed Catherine to be the real villain of Chloe. While I agree to an extent, Egoyan’s equation of Catherine’s villainry to her “need to control” those around her overlooks a core (and at times, a heavy-handed) aspect of Catherine’s characterisation; her relationship to aging and male validation. Catherine is written as an accomplished middle-aged woman who grapples with feeling “invisible” and “old” under the scrupulous male gaze. When one of her clients is unable to orgasm, Catherine removes female pleasure from the equation and clinically equates it to a muscle contraction (which feels applicable to her own sex life). I would go as far as to argue that many of Catherine’s questionable actions stem not from a need to “control” others, but from the male attention (from her husband and son) she revolves her life around.2
Sex, lies and sublimation
The act of sublimation forms the very basis of the women’s transactional client-worker relationship. Catherine pays Chloe to recount her sexual encounters with David in vivid detail, which Catherine becomes increasingly engrossed and even aroused by.
Catherine later reconstructs these sexual fantasies in a steamy (literally) masturbation scene that visually evokes Angie Dickinson’s shower rape fantasy in the opening sequence of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980).
This erotic triangulation culminates in a lesbian sex scene steeped in softcore sensibilities, where Chloe acts as a sexual surrogate for Catherine to assume her husband’s point of view. After their sexual encounter, Catherine tries to pay Chloe off by insisting that their relationship is strictly professional. Before admitting to David that it was only by having sex with Chloe that she could feel close to him. Chloe’s lesbian sex scene has therefore received criticism for propelling the straight, female character towards a journey of self-discovery that reunites her with her husband.
“This turns you on”
Having discussed mirrors and narcissistic doubling at length in other queer texts, I’m redirecting my focus towards the function of windows and Narratophilia in Chloe.3
Narratophilia is a sexual paraphilia where individuals derive sexual pleasure from pornographic words and stories. Salo (1975), Variety (1983), Bitter Moon (1992), and Crash (1996) all explore themes of Narratophilia.
As Chloe’s narrative unfolds, Catherine and Chloe’s erotic transference (via Narratophilia) begins to blur the boundaries between the professional/ personal, client/worker, and fantasy/ reality. The film’s unreliable narration and skewed subjectivity come to fruition when Chloe’s sexual encounters are revealed to be a work of fiction. When met with the prospect of not seeing Catherine again, Chloe lies about sleeping with David in order to get closer to Catherine. Catherine on the other hand, uses Chloe as a sexual surrogate for David. Regardless of their motives, Chloe and Catherine’s erotic fantasies are fused by the object of David (who becomes somewhat of a placeholder). Such erotic triangulations, not only leave room for queer potentialities but bring into question who is actually being seduced in this scenario.
Pictured: Catherine is titillated by the sexual encounters James narrates to her in Crash (1996)
Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones4
Chloe not only explores voyeurism thematically but stylistically. According to Chloe's production designer Phillip Barker, Catherine’s modern glass palace (in suburban Toronto) sought to capture the “erotic voyeuristic nature of glass and windows” in genre staples like Rear Window (1954) and Body Double (1984). However, I’d argue that the reflective surfaces in Catherine’s house are equally stifling in their evocation of Sirk, whose 50s melodramas used windows/ glass to signify domestic entrapment and isolation in gilded cages (the home).
Chloe falls to her death through a glass window in Catherine’s bedroom, a fate similar to that of the queer-coded villain, Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940). A character who is inevitably killed by Manderly (the mansion of her former lover)5 when it burns to the ground. Despite the existence of a deleted scene that reveals Chloe to have committed suicide, her death is left ambiguous as to whether it was accidental or deliberate in the final film. However, this doesn’t detract from the fact that, in the end, Chloe is killed by the nuclear homestead for her domestic disturbance.
Brief Encounters
After reading the top Letterboxd review that poked fun at the fact that “Julianne Moore walks out of like twenty restaurants without paying in this movie”, my friend and I partook in a drinking game; drink every time Julianne Moore walks out of a restaurant or cafe. In short, we got plastered.
But why do a majority of the scenes in Chloe take place in restaurants, cafes and hotel rooms?
Upon rewatching the film, I was reminded of a paper I’d read by Victoria Smith where she applied Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias (“other space”) to the film Carol. Foucault identified heterotopias as sites that evoke normalcy whilst bringing them into question, such as cemeteries, brothels, and prisons. In Carol, bleak urban environments are positioned against “disruptive” heterotopic spaces (car rides and hotel rooms) that are free from domestic and social expectations. In addition to the hotel rooms and cab rides in Chloe, cafes and restaurants also become heterotopias. In these spaces, the warm brown hues of hotel rooms and restaurants serve to starkly contrast the repressive greys of Catherine’s house. These counter-publics not only straddle the line between the public and private but become liminal spaces where erotic exchanges/ transactions take place outside the hegemonic home.
Homoerotic hairpins
Chloe’s hairpin is a visual motif laden with pre-oedipal underpinnings. Originally her mother’s, Chloe pretends to have found her hairpin in a cubicle when she first meets the older Catherine (in a hotel bathroom). Chloe proceeds to gift the hairpin and, by extension, the role of a replacement mother to Catherine who initially declines. Only to accept the hairpin (and its binding implications) after the two women have sex.
Catherine and Chloe’s intergenerational relationship oscillates between the maternal and sexual in the erotic scenarios that play out between the two women where Catherine embodies the maternal. For instance, when Chloe deliberately falls off her bike, Catherine motherly tends to her wound until Chloe sensually slips off her stockings, and a fetishistic close-up of Chloe’s legs reveals Catherine to be aroused.
Overt expressions of desire are therefore displaced onto objects with symbolic weight. The scene where Chloe kisses the hairpin after stumbling across it in Catherine’s room is in turn, mirrored earlier when Catherine sips from a wineglass that Chloe had left the reminences of her red lipstick. These tactile moments of indirect intimacy that the women share are undeniably queer and resist the dominant reading that Chloe’s erotic obsession is strictly one-sided.
By Chloe’s final act, the film veers into Fatal Attraction territory when Chloe stalks, seduces, and sleeps with Catherine’s son, Max (who acts as a substitute for his mother).
Freud would have had a field day watching Chloe have sex with Max in his mother’s bed whilst she orgasms at the sight of his mother’s shoes.
Side note: shoes are seen as either fetish objects or class signifiers on-screen. Their ambivalence thus brings into question whether Chloe was motivated by class mobility or her romantic pursuit of Catherine.
In a final act of desperation, Chloe uses the hairpin as a weapon. Demanding that Catherine profess her love, Chloe caresses the hairpin along Catherine’s neck until blood is drawn and she kisses her. However, unlike the violent declarations of love in other “psycho-lesbian” entries like Windows (1980) and High Tension (2003), this scene can be read as more erotically charged than menacing (of the Killing Eve and NBC Hannibal variety).
While Egoyan has discussed the film’s final close-up at length, I have an alternative reading of Chloe’s ambiguous ending. In the same Rumpus interview, Egoyan explained that Chloe’s final shot; a zoom-in on Chloe’s pin in Catherine’s hair, symbolized Catherine’s final “assertion of control” over Chloe.
Whereas, I felt Chloe’s hairpin to be reminiscent of Catherine Tramell’s vaginal ice-pick in Basic Instinct (1992). Another erotic thriller that features a bisexual femme fatale who uses a sharp, pointed object as a weapon of seduction. Not to mention, both Basic Instinct and Chloe’s endings suggest that compulsory heterosexuality prevails until the very last frame.
In Basic Instinct, Nick’s monosexist belief that his ongoing sexual relationship with Catherine is a “switch” to heterosexuality is usurped when the camera pans down to reveal that the vaginal icepick is very much intact under the couple’s bed. Therefore, despite “hiding” from plain sight, Catherine is still bisexually active.
The same can be said for the reunification of the family unit in Chloe’s final scene. Catherine (not Tramell) locks eyes with David and Max across the crowded room, only to turn away and reveal Chloe’s hairpin and dormant desires.
Reference List:
Bradbury-Rance, Clara. 2022. Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory. Edinburgh University Press. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=4a21dd2f-f7df-37a5-9e7d-338efaf92ed3.
Smith, Victoria L. 2018. “The Heterotopias of Todd Haynes: Creating Space for Same Sex Desire in Carol.” Film Criticism 42 (1): 46–59. doi:10.3998/fc.13761232.0042.102.
Totaro, Donato. 2011. “Atom Egoyan’s Chloe: Filtering Bergman’s Persona.” Offscreen 15 (9). https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=83ad22d6-d246-34dc-84d1-8f371efaefb6.
Chloe is part of, what I have dubbed the ‘stranger seduces all the members of a bourgeoise family’ canon. This subgenre can be traced back to Passolin’s Theorem (1968) and has seen countless iterations ever since, most recently Saltburn (2023).
upon its release, the film was hounded by critics for being anti-feminist and from a decidedly male point of view, often overlooking the fact that the film was written by a woman.
Chloe’s costume designer Debra Hansen said “you’ll notice too, though it’s very subtle, that outfits for Catherine and Chloe begin to echo one another.”
Catherine’s house of glass windows plays on the hyperbolic saying “Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”, poking fun at her hypocrisy when it comes to fidelity.
Like Manderlay in Rebecca (1940), Catherine’s glass palace becomes somewhat of a character in itself.