This post contains spoilers for 10 Cloverfield Lane.
10 Cloverfield Lane features riveting performances from its three central characters, but its breakout star doesn’t speak a word: Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s bra. Throughout the movie, whether Winstead’s Michelle is scrambling across the bunker or anxiously eating dinner, her shirt seems to relentlessly insist on exposing her bra. In shot after shot, the plain, navy blue garment announces itself. It certainly gets more screen time in this movie than Bradley Cooper (who makes a cameo by voice). So what do those bra straps mean?
In horror movies, exposed bras generally signal a damsel in distress: take Marion Crane’s white bra at the beginning of Psycho, or Cassidy Gifford’s doomed character in the found-footage horror film The Gallows (red bra straps, turquoise tank top). At first, it seems like Michelle will follow in these footsteps when she wakes up in a basement, chained to a bed. As the movie goes on, however, Michelle gains autonomy and some control over her situation, maneuvering out of damsel territory. And yet, as she wanders around the bunker and sits down for board games and one-on-one conversations with her male bunker-mates, her bra continues to be her most prominent accessory.
As a woman stuck in a bunker with two men, Michelle’s exposed bra is a constant visual reminder of her vulnerability. Throughout the movie, the perils Michelle faces become more and more terrifying—and, if we’re being honest, comical in their over-the-top-ness. She shuffles through a claustrophobic air duct; she MacGyvers herself a biohazard suit using nothing but a shower curtain, some masking tape, and a couple water bottles; she gets threatened with a vat of body-melting acid. It’s good horror, but it’s also pretty funny. And through it all, there are her bra straps.
As the movie goes on, Howard becomes increasingly insistent in trying to assert himself as a patriarch, and Michelle’s bra, in turn, becomes an alarming visual cue of the irreconcilable difference between the child-like, virginal daughter Howard wants Michelle to play and the adult woman she actually is—a source of tension that promises to boil over at any moment. She’s never actually naked, so the bra straps aren’t a tease of future nudity so much as kind of un-fired Chekhov’s gun. Sure, it’s certainly possible that this could simply be another example of femininity written for the male gaze. But this bra seems different—namely, it feels like a sly, humorous jab at the trope itself.
