Overview
Robert’s chamber exercise is a guided exercise used by Robert on Emily in Screwdriver. It takes place in the study of Robert and Melissa’s house and gives Emily a symbolic framework for understanding herself, Sean, Melissa, and the screwdriver that later appears in the bathroom.
Structure
In the first session, Robert asks Emily to imagine a large round chamber, a door to the south, a smaller white-stone room, and a cigarette that asks for the strongest number in the universe. Emily answers twenty, which Robert says is wrong, so she is not allowed to ask the cigarette a question.
Robert then moves her into a darker room with a reddish-blonde cat with glass eyes. The cat says it is a messenger of Him and warns that Emily has twenty-four hours before He comes to tempt her.
In the second session, Emily answers three and is allowed to ask why Melissa is uptight. Robert uses the cigarette to tell her about Melissa’s stored eggs and then leads her into a deeper white room where a screwdriver rests on a pedestal. He says Emily sees herself on the other side of it and tells her that God hates her, that she can be her own god, and that she must stay with Robert and Melissa.
Role in the Film
The exercise changes how Emily interprets later events. When Sean comes to the house, Emily treats him as the predicted tempter and drives him away. After the celebration breaks down, the bathroom repeats the exercise’s deepest-room structure: Emily sees the screwdriver on the counter, sees herself in the mirror, wounds her palm, and opens the locked medicine cabinet.