creak, creak, we exist in all zones: Flightplan (2005)

In Flightplan, motherly love is expressed not through the familiar tropes of maternal sacrifice or revenge, but through maternal paranoia. The mother and child bonding scenes early in the film that establish Jodie Foster's character Kyle Pratt as the mother-hero carry their emotional weight in the barely suppressed panic that flickers across Foster's worried face whenever she observes her daughter, a panic that escalates into a fierce and full-blown conspiracy theory when the little girl disappears.

It's almost intoxicatingly pleasurable to watch Jodie Foster stride wild-eyed and twitchy-faced through the plane, shoving passengers and stewardesses out of her way and spouting out technically dazzling demands for a full aircraft search. Because her over-the-top egocentrism is disguised as maternal devotion, Kyle is the ultimate validation of our forbidden desire for unrestrained megalomania. Apparently, any and all obnoxious behaviour, including racism, is not only forgivable but truly righteous if it's in the name of protecting your child. Thus the moral low road of selfish individualism becomes the moral high road of selfless concern for another. The film is so intent on legitimizing Kyle's monstrous behaviour toward everyone on the plane from children to the captain that it goes out of its way to end the film with a series of punishments for all those who doubted her. It not only forces the grave flight captain to apologize for not ceding to Kyle's demands over his concern for the well-being of the 400 or so other passengers, but most absurdly, it actually ends with an Arab fellow passenger deferentially helping her with her bags. This is the same man who Kyle had savagely and wrongfully accused of kidnapping her daughter and plotting to hijack the plane. Being a white mother not only means never having to say you're sorry, it also means that dark-skinned people will carry your baggage for you even after you brand them as terrorists. --Irene