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Breadcrumbs in the Forest
Three Meditations on Being Lost in Space
It was dark night when they woke up, and Hansel comforted his little sister. “Gretel,” he said, “just wait till the moon rises; then we'll see the breadcrumbs I strewed and they'll show us the way home.” When the moon rose, they started out, but they didn't find any breadcrumbs, because the thousands of birds that fly around in the forests and fields had eaten them all up. Hansel said to GretelI: “Don't worry, we'll find the way,” but they didn't find it.—”HANSEL AND GRETEL,” Grimms' Tales
What does it mean to be embodied in the multiple and shifting spaces of the world—not only the familiar spaces that seem of our own making and whose meanings we take up and live as “given” but also those spaces that seem to us strange or “foreign” in their shape and value?
When I was a child, I always thought north was the way I was facing. Sure then in my purposeful direction, there was a compelling logic to this phenomenological assumption. Bringing into convergence flesh and sign, north conflated in my child's consciousness the design of my body and the design of an atlas page. Except when I was dancing or, as a child will, walking backwards, I moved in the direction my eyes were looking—in front and ahead of me. Although I was aware of the space behind and to the sides of me, it was the space in front of me—the space I could see—that was clearly privileged, my whole body directed toward it in the accomplishment of my childish projects. I realize now, of course, that printed maps were also responsible for confusing me. The little compass on every atlas page was composed so that north enjoyed a larger or bolder arrow than did the other directional markers, and this was always pointed in a similar direction as the forward-looking trajectory of my eyes as I read. Maps were positioned on the page so that the important spaces of the world were read “in front” and “ahead” of my body just as they were in my child's world. As a directional concept, an orientational point, north thus resonated with the naive faith I had in my own sure direction, in the confidence I had that I would eventually encompass and conquer the world that lay before me. Indeed, this arbitrary and culturally determined semiologic echoed and confirmed my carnal phenomenologic and gave it an (im)proper name: north. As I got a little older and less confident, however, north became increasingly unstable. As I began to recognize it as all-encompassing, it became disorienting and useless. Everywhere I turned and looked was north, and I started to feel that something was dreadfully wrong.1
When I was a child, before north became strange to me—or, more precisely, estranged from me—because of the carnal logic that grounded and guided me, I almost never felt lost in the world, even if I often felt lost among directional signs. Occupying the sure and selfish ground of my own interests in the world, existing as the center of my own universe, I nearly always knew where I was and where I was going. With north as the way I was facing, the world radiated out not merely around me but from me.2 Others might think I was lost, but—as I, at the age of four, hotly told my mother, who once called the police because she couldn't find me—“I knew where I was all the time!”3 Such absolute confidence seems a far cry from my confusion now as an adult when I stand before the floor map in the University Research Library and try to figure out where I am relative to its signal pronouncement: “You are here.”4 Distrustful after north betrayed me, I never developed a sure sense of direction or geography, far too aware that both are arbitrary systems of locating oneself in the world. Negotiating unfamiliar worldly space is, for me, frequently an anxious state, always mutable and potentially threatening. Thus, the “being lost” I want to explore here is not equivalent to the pleasurable and aimless meandering of the flaneur, whose very lack of a specific destination enables him always to get there.5
What follows, then, is a palimpsest of three phenomenological meditations on “being lost” that draws data from personal experience and a variety of secondary sources to thematize the “lived geography” of being disoriented in worldly space. Less exhaustive than suggestive, these meditations are meant to foreground (each differently) the spatiotemporal and affective shape of experience and to demonstrate that both our normative systems of spatial orientation and their descriptive vocabularies tend to be extremely limited, however practically useful. There is much more to be said about losing oneself in worldly space than can be referenced—or remedied—by recourse to the abstract objectivity of a map.
BEING (DIS)ORIENTED
“Omar!” the old man croaked. “Do you know the way? Are you a guide?…There are jinns in Ténéré, Omar, bad spirits. If a jinn gets into your head, you don't know east from west. The jinn spins your head around. They make you think you know the way when you don't”—MICHAEL ASHER, Impossible Journey
In Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science Patrick Heelan describes what he calls the “hyperbolic” curved space of our lived and embodied experience and shows how it is incommensurable with the spaces “engineered” by the Euclidean geometry and Cartesian perceptions of perspectival space that have dominated Western culture since the Renaissance.6 According to Heelan we perceive and navigate both kinds of space, although never at once—even if, in the near mid-distance, the “shape” of both spaces is isomorphic. (Hence, perhaps, my childish mistake about north as simultaneously grounded in my body and motivating a Cartesian sign system.) Exploring the hermeneutic and context-dependent character of embodied visual perception, Heelan's project is to “show that, despite the fact that we perceive a visual Cartesian world, our natural mode of unaided visual perception is hyperbolic: mediating our everyday perception of a Cartesian world is the carpentered environment that we have learned to ‘read' like a ‘text'” (xiii). In this regard, as James BarryJr. points out, it is important to realize that “as the latest of post-Renaissance perceivers,” our quotidian perception is “not so much in what we take it to be as in what we overlook or deny in it” and that the “geometrical approach of Renaissance perspective” was once a “new form of revelation, a new world possibility.”7 Thus, he reminds us (quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty) that Renaissance perspective
is “not an ‘infallible' device; it is only a particular case, a date, a moment in a poetic investigation of the world which continues after it.”…The fact that we continue to follow the historical lines drawn by this perceptual form, continue to take it as at least potentially infallible and currently applicable, is not a recognition of its historical truth and power, but rather a diminution of the same…. The transformation of perception by technology holds as its most negative, historical possibility, the danger of entirely forgetting itself as perception and appearance.8
Against this normative “forgetting,” against this culturally dominant experience of “the” (rather than “our”) physical environment as Cartesian and Euclidean in visual arrangement, Heelan notes that “from time to time we actually experience it as laid out before us in a non-Euclidean visual space, in one belonging to the family known as ‘finite hyperbolic spaces.'” Unlike Euclidean visual space, the geometrical structure of visual hyperbolic space is essentially curved; thus, “scenes—real scenes—construed in such visual spaces will appear to be distorted in specific ways” (28). Heelan broadly characterizes this sense of distortion in relation to the appearance of objects in various divisions of space as they are proximate to the embodied subject viewing them. In the “near zone” directly in front of the viewer “visual shapes are clearly defined and differ little from their familiar physical shapes,” but on the periphery of this “Newtonian oasis, depth appears to be dilated,” and “frontal surfaces appear to bulge convexly.” Furthermore, “parallel lines appear to diverge, as if seen in reverse perspective” (29). Other distortions appear in the “distant zone.” Rather than appearing to extend infinitely, space seems “finite, shallow in depth, and slightly concave,” and “distant phenomena are experienced visually as if seen through a telephoto lens”; that is, they appear to be “closer, flatter, and with their surface planes turned to face the viewer.” In addition, parallel lines “bend upward and come together to meet at a point in front of the viewer on the horizon and at a finite distance” (29). Looking at an extended horizon below eye level “such as the sea seen from the top of a cliff,” the viewer “seems to be at the center of a great bowl with its rim on the horizon.” An extended horizon above eye level, such as the sky, is experienced as “a vaulted structure.” Finally, the “apparent size of very distant objects” in hyperbolic space is mutable and “depends on whether there are local cues and how these are construed” (31).9
Because Euclidean visual space is culturally normative, the terms used to describe hyperbolic space (“distortion,” “optical illusion”) connote aberrance from the norm—yet it is hyperbolic visual space that is grounded in the human body, its phenomeno-logic informed not only by external material forces but also by the intentional directedness of consciousness toward its objects. As Heelan puts it: “A Body defines the human subject functionally in relation to a World as the ground for an interlocking set of environing horizons. Being-in-the-World implies being now related to one horizon, now to another” (13). Which horizon, which system of orientation and coordination one lives, depends ultimately on what “makes sense” in a specific context. For a situation to provide “a Euclidean perceptual opportunity,…it must…be virtually populated with familiar (stationary) standards of length and distance, and be equipped with instantaneous means for communicating information about coincidences from all parts of space to the localized visual observer, wherever he/she happens to be” (51). A situation that provides “a hyperbolic perceptual opportunity” is incommensurable with the Euclidean situation in that its sense emerges precisely from the localized visual observer, wherever he/she happens to be. The visual observer making sense in hyperbolic space, rather than relying on abstract, standardized, and stationary measures, “must…use the rule of congruence which…is embodied in the capacity of the unaided visual system to order the sizes, depths and distances of all objects in the unified spatial field of vision.” What is involved on these perceptual occasions is a “purely visual estimation” of size and distance and a reliance on “a significant local standard of length relative to which the surrounding environment could be spatially structured” (51).
Without either an abstract or local standard of measure, worldly space and the objects within it lose their meaning and become hermeneutically ambiguous, indeterminate, and disorienting. Furthermore, one begins to doubt one's own body. Phenomenological geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes the spatial and bodily effects of one such situation of “being lost” when neither Euclidean nor hyperbolic standards of measure are at first available:
What does it mean to be lost? I follow a path into the forest, stray from the path, and all of a sudden feel completely disoriented. Space is still organized in conformity with the sides of my body. There are regions to my front and back, to my right and left, but they are not geared to any external reference points and hence are quite useless. Front and back regions suddenly feel arbitrary, since I have no better reason to go forward than to go back. Let a flickering light appear behind a distant clump of trees. I remain lost in the sense that I still do not know where I am in the forest, but space has dramatically regained its structure. The flickering light has established a goal. As I move toward that goal, front and back, right and left, have resumed their meaning: I stride forward, am glad to have left dark space, and make sure that I do not veer to the right or left.10
Reading this passage, making sense of it with our bodies and recalling some similarly anxious disorientation, we can understand quite carnally how Hansel and Gretel, lost in the forest and darkness, must have hurried ahead—eagerly, indeed gratefully—toward the light shining from the window of the house of the wicked witch.
Similar spatial ambiguity and its permutations and resolutions are dramatically recounted by Michael Asher, a Westerner and travel writer, who became briefly lost with companions in the Sahara desert. In response to the problem of people becoming spatially disoriented and dying in the desert, he tells us that “the government had put up a series of markers” without which “it was almost impossible to travel in a straight line.” And he continues:
I soon understood the need for markers. The desert we walked out into the next day was utterly featureless…. There was nothing at all to attract the eye but the metal flags spaced out every kilometre. It was like walking on a cloud, an unreal nebula that might cave in at any moment. Sometimes its dappling ripples looked like water, a still, untided ocean undulating to every horizon. In all that vastness there was not a tree, not a rock, not a single blade of grass.11
For a solitary human being (like Tuan in the forest before he saw the flickering light), the space of this featureless desert without objects would be neither hyperbolic (with some known thing or someone else to provide local measure in terms of one's own body) nor Euclidean (with given objects known to be spaced, as were the markers, at an abstract measure of one kilometer apart). In such a contextless context “one” (the pronoun chosen precisely here) would be truly “lost in space.”
Asher is not solitary, however; his companions provide him “local measure” relative to his own body, and, suddenly lost and without markers in the desert, he and they live the Sahara hyperbolically. That is, close to him, others have “intelligible” shapes and sizes, but objects, shapes, distances, and motion that are not in the “near zone” are grossly distorted:
In the afternoon we passed [a] caravan…. From afar the columns of [camels] seemed to stand still. They appeared to remain motionless until we came abreast of them, then they sprang out suddenly into three dimensions. It was a strange phenomenon caused by the lack of anything to mark the distance between us…. Then we heard the boom of engines and pinpointed two trucks in the sand. Like the…caravan earlier, they appeared not to be moving. Not until we passed them did they seem to accelerate into action, roaring by a mile away. Or was it 2 miles? Or even 10? There was no way to judge distance or scale in Ténéré.12
Asher also remarks on the difficulties of orienting oneself and moving against the featureless landscape:
I watched Marinetta once as she ran away from our caravan…. She zig-zagged crazily over the sand…. When I tried it myself I realized that without anything to fix on, it was impossible to run in a direct line. Any ripples or shadows on the surface gave the impression of relief. We found ourselves moving towards what appeared to be a mass of dunes only to find them dissolving into sandy waves a few inches high. A piece of discarded firewood could be mistaken for a camel or a tent, a blackened sardine can for an abandoned car.13
Everything in Asher's vision is measurable only locally, in terms of the human body and the meaningful size and order it confers on known things. Hyperbolic space, then, is primordial and subjectively lived—and, in terms of human sense-making, it precedes Euclidean abstraction and Cartesian objectivity. As Dorothea Olkowski puts it: “Lived space is not linear, it is a field and an environment…. [T]he primordial space of our existence is ‘topological'; it corresponds to the diacritical oppositions of our perception.…[I]t is a ‘milieu in which are circumscribed relations of proximity, of envelopment,'…[relations] which are not merely geometrical or cultural but are lived.”.14
Indeed, this topological space is precisely the space of a child's world before it and the child have been properly “disciplined” and “sized.” Here it is illuminating to point to the lived difference between Euclidean and hyperbolic geometries by contrasting the model of Renaissance perspective with a child's survey of the subject/horizon/world relationship. As those of us in film studies know, much has been made of the subject's “mastery” of the world according to Renaissance perspective: the representation sets up a triangulated relationship with the unseen spectator positioned at the apex in relation to a flat horizon line (at which parallel lines converge). For the child, however, and for adults put in a situation with no Euclidean markers (as elaborated above), one's lived relationship to the world is body based. In this system the body is positioned in the center of a surrounding world; thus the horizon is not flat but radially curved (with parallel lines diverging in the distance).15
This is a world in which the abstraction north lies (purposefully, but deceptively) in any—and every—direction one looks. Thus, for a young child whose universe is hyperbolically curved to the radiating space of her embodied purpose, north, when it is named, becomes the direction of intent and, within this phenomeno-logic, its motility and shiftiness comprehensible. Later, of course, north's shiftiness—its “lie”—is recognized in its inherent abstraction from one's body, its arbitrary designation as a fixed and standardized direction meant to guide that body, but no longer emergent from its purpose. Thus, for an adult whose world is normatively Euclidean and organized and directed abstractly, a return to hyperbolic space in which the measure of things is generated primordially by his or her own body and his or her contingent tasks can be disorienting, unsettling, even perilous.
LOST IN SPACE
“I don't know where we are or where we are going”—The Lost Patrol
[C]ertain circumstances…awaken an uncanny feeling, which recalls that sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams…. As, for instance, when one is lost in a forest in high altitudes, caught…by the mountain mist, and when every endeavor to find the marked or familiar path ends again and again in a return to one and the same spot, recognizable by some particular landmark.—SIGMUND FREUD, “The Uncanny”
What is the “shape” and “temporality” of being lost in worldly space? Every human experience has a phenomenological structure that emerges as a meaningful spatial and temporal form. Thus, one might well expect to find an extensive morphology of the worldly spaces in which one loses oneself articulated concretely in at least two significant “imaginary geographies”: namely, American movies and Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.16 However, in both the American cinema and the most famous collection of dreamscapes, scenes and dramatizations of being lost in the world literally are few and far between. With the exception of cinematic adaptations of children's fairy tales and fantasies such as “Hansel and Gretel” or travel or exploration narratives (like Asher's above), it would seem that the literal experience of “being lost” is itself generally displaced into allegory and metaphor.
Given the relative dearth of ready-to-hand representations of “being lost” in both film and Freud and wanting to find relevant data for a phenomenological “reduction” (or thematization) of sorts, I decided to try an Internet list. There I posted an inquiry asking for figurations in American cinema of being lost—with the caveat that I was not interested in accounts of the “incredible journeys” of lost dogs and cats or in allegorical or metaphorical treatments (that is, science fiction films about being lost in “outer” or “inner” space or dramas in which characters were identified or read as “existentially” or “morally” lost). Responses confirmed my intuition that, oddly (given the great interest and libidinal investment in the topic evidenced by colleagues and friends), literal and relatively sustained depictions of being lost in the cinema were scarce. Some were located in films set in non-Euclidean, “uncivilized,” or “exotic” places, such as The Lost Patrol (John Ford, 1934), in which a British military unit gets lost in the Mesopotamian desert, and The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1991), in which a tourist couple becomes disoriented by and lost in the non-Euclidean geometry of Venice. A few others mark disorientation against an American landscape of vast empty spaces and featureless freeways: Marion Crane losing her way in the rain on the interstate until she stops forever at the Bates Motel in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960); amnesiac Travis wandering aimlessly in the desert looking for home in Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984); narcoleptic Mike awakening from his seizures “on the road” and unsure of his bearings or how he got there in My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991); a host of characters appearing and disappearing in the spatially and temporally uncoordinated road trip on Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997); and, most recently, two young men named “Gerry” who get fatally lost in Death Valley in the eponymous Gerry (also Gus Van Sant, 2003). There have also been a small but significant number of relatively contemporary films in which central characters become literally lost in the “wilds” of the urban ‘jungles” of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where they encounter hostile “natives” as they try to find their way home: saying something about the phenomenology of white male urban experience in the late 1980s and early 1990s are After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985), Bonfire of the Vanities (Brian DePalma, 1990), Quick Change (Howard Franklin and Bill Murray, 1990), Grand Canyon (Lawrence Kasdan, 1991), and Judgment Night (Stephen Hopkins, 1993).17 And, of course, there is The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999), which returns us to the “lost in the woods” scenario—albeit its hyperbolic spatial disorientation takes place not in Grimm's fairy tales but in Burkittsville, Maryland. All in all, however, in terms of sustained narrative focus, the filmography of being lost in worldly space is startlingly small.
As mentioned previously, Freud was not initially helpful either. For all its emphasis on scenarios involving losing objects or missing trains or falling, to my surprise The Interpretation of Dreams glossed not a single one about being lost in the real spaces of the world—or, for that matter, in phantasmatic spaces. Rather, it was Freud's famous essay “The Uncanny” that ultimately provided a recounting of at least one major scenario (and form) of being lost—and it did so not through the dreamwork of a neurotic patient but through a concrete event experienced by an anxious Freud himself. In the context of introducing the notion of “involuntary repetition” as a constituent quality of the uncanny, Freud recalls a personal situation that evoked in him the “sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams”:
Once, as I was walking through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot summer afternoon, I found myself in a quarter the character of which could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the plaza I had left a short while before.18
Freud's experience suggests one shape to being lost—and it is round. Indeed, in the vernacular we call it “going round in circles.” Informed with a specific temporal dimension, the experience of going round in circles is oriented toward the past since one finds oneself continually revisiting and relocating there. The present seems pale in comparison, and the future extremely remote, its achievement arrested and forestalled. In this regard Freud's tale of getting lost in and returning several times to a street of “painted women” can be read not only as a tale of sexual anxiety but also as a tale that displaces anxiety of another kind: anxiety about being spatially and temporally “arrested” and stuck in place in a present become the past, about the future's foreclosure, about the literal prohibition of forward movement literally intended by “red lights.” (Yes, sometimes a cigar is significantly just a cigar—and a red light, a red light.)19
With its round and hermetic shape and a present tense always chasing its own tail (and tale), “going round in circles” produces a context in which purposive activity and forward momentum are sensed as futile and, in response, become increasingly desperate and frenetic in quality. Here, the comically painful—and male—nightmare of Scorsese's After Hours elaborates on Freud's experience.20 Also fraught with “painted women” as objects of both male desire and fear, the film is structured as a perverse “la ronde” in which spatial disorientation and “arrest,” increasing anxiety, and the futility of frenetic activity are the keynotes. Paul Hackett, a midlevel office worker with a dull life who longs for an amorous adventure, meets a young woman in a coffee shop who invites him to hook up with her in Soho later that night. The victim of various mishaps that leave him moneyless and stranded in unfamiliar space, Paul goes “round in circles” in Soho, where streets and lives and objects interconnect, forming a hermetic space-time in which he seems desperately trapped and doomed to uncanny repetition. Indeed, the film's structuring joke and its eventual resolution is that, in the larger scale of the narrative and the rounded and repetitive nature of his normal life, Paul ends up the next morning at the mundane office building where he (and the film) began. Like Freud, after finally finding the adventure he seeks, all Paul wants to do is go home, but—just as in Freud's experience on the street of painted women—the comic anxiety of the film derives from the idea of being hopelessly lost “after hours” not only in space but also in the dangerous and hermetic world of one's latent desire.
There are other shapes to being lost than round, however, and other modalities of spatial disorientation that do not necessarily entail temporal recurrence and the past. Perhaps the most fearsome of all forms of being lost is “not knowing where you are.” Not knowing where you are is not about the loss of a future destination or the return to a previous one; rather, spatially it is about a loss of present grounding and temporally about being lost in the present. This form of being lost seems an existential condition rather than a hermeneutic problem. Its structure is perilously open rather than hermetic, its horizons indefinite, its ground unstable, and its emphasis on the vertical axis (“forward” and “backward” are not the problem, but “here” most certainly is). The shape of “not knowing where you are” is elastic, shifting, telescopic, spatially and temporally elongated; one is orientationally imperiled not so much on the horizontal plane as on the vertical. (Vertigo is often described as “the bottom falling out.”) The primary temporal dimension of this form of being lost is the present—but a present into which past and future have collapsed and that is stretched endlessly. Not knowing where you are is, in effect, the “black hole” of being lost: the experience of the unmarked Mesopotamian desert and sandstorms of The Lost Patrol or of the vast landscape of Death Valley in Gerry.
This form of disorientation and its resultant existential anxiety also may occur, however, when worldly space and time are “overmarked”—that is, when one's present spatial and temporal orientation are overlaid and conflated with other (and equally compelling and vivid) space-times. After the great French novelist who described an unusual condition he experienced while traveling, Florentine psychiatrist Graziella Magherini points to what she has called “Stendhal's Syndrome”: a temporary set of symptoms that feature disorientation, panic, heart palpitations, loss of identity, fear and dizziness, and beset certain foreign tourists in cities like Florence and Venice, where centuries of intensely vivid art and architecture overwhelm them and destabilize both the grounded space on which they stand and their temporal mooring in the present.21 “Afflicted tourists,” we are told, “usually snap back after two or three days of rest,” but “[t]he best cure is to go home.”22 Clinically, then, not knowing where you are seems to be experienced as more vertiginous than uncanny, more existentially dangerous than exotically strange, a “fugue state” that, akin to the polyphonic, interwoven, and multivalenced themes and orientational demands of its musical namesake, psychiatry describes as “a flight from or loss of the awareness of one's own identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home, and often occurring as a reaction to shock or emotional stress.”23
In the cinema, too, we can find similar, if scarce, examples of losing one's orientational moorings in a vertically elongated and polyphonic space-time that collapses and conflates past and future in and with what becomes a vertiginous and all-consuming present. Indeed, noted Italian horror film director Dario Argento has made a movie called La Syndrome di Stendhal (1996)24—although the syndrome is used as little more than an inaugural device in a plot about a woman police detective who suffers from dizziness and hallucinations when exposed to “masterpieces” of art and her attempts to capture a serial rapist and murderer. At the film's beginning we see the detective (who is from Rome) “inexorably drawn to a painting in the Uffizi gallery in Florence,” where “swooning, she collapses to the floor and dreams of actually entering the oceanic painting to swim (and caress) the fish within.”25 Perhaps, however, Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers is more apposite, for the film not only evokes but also sustains the vertigo and existential peril of not knowing where you are, the dissolution of the very spatial and temporal grounding necessary to placing and securing one's self-identity. Two tourists, a British couple trying to reanimate their romantic relationship by going abroad, get lost one night in the non-Euclidean, hyperbolic streets of Venice—where there seem to be no right angles, only oblique curves and indirections. After a night of wandering they are eventually “rescued” by a wealthy Venetian who, with his wife, systematically (if insanely) dislocate and dissolve the couple's grounding and identity on a much larger, more vertiginous, and ultimately fatal scale. All about not knowing where you are, The Comfort of Strangers resonates in both theme and mood with echoes of Stendhal's Syndrome. (Magherini says of her tourist patients in Florence, “the complaint is most often one of confusion and panic,” whereas in Venice, “it is depression with suicidal tendencies.”)26
The spatial ungrounding and elongation of a present distended by its consumption of the past and future, the threat to the very moorings of identity itself, that characterize not knowing where you are and cause it to generate panic and vertigo can be located closer to home, however—its disorientation and distended present informed by the terrors of the American urban context and historical moment. Indeed, in several American films of the late 1980s and early 1990s the terrors of being ungrounded have been enacted not only in spatial and temporal terms but also in terms of race. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Grand Canyon, and Judgment Night all link the disorientational panic generated by “not knowing where you are” with the disorientational panic generated by the perceived threat posed by a suddenly “disadvantaged” white male confrontation with the racialized male other.27 In this regard, although its dramatization of not knowing where you are is not as temporally distended as in Judgment Night (where an elongated present structures and consumes the entire narrative),28 Bonfire of the Vanities is particularly telling. Not only does the simple wrong turn that gets upper-class, white, “Master of the Universe” Sherman McCoy and his mistress lost in the South Bronx motivate the entire plot, turning Sherman's world and existential orientational system completely “topsy-turvy,” but it also begins what is perhaps the failed satire's only scathingly satiric—and compelling—scene. Mistakenly getting off the freeway somewhere north of Manhattan in their expensive car (a screeching announcement of radical class difference in all these films), Sherman's mistress becomes more and more agitated in the unfamiliar streets: “Where are all the white people?” she frets. Comic bewilderment turns into something else, however, when the fearful couple in their car encounter two black youths walking on an empty street under the freeway and mistakenly believe they are going to be attacked. The scene of their confrontation is affectively charged with a vertigo and panic that leads ultimately to both the death of one of the young men and the complete collapse and dissolution of those structures and things that grounded Sherman's complacent arrogance and warranted his supposed “mastery” of the universe. It is in this scene of literal spatial disorientation that we see—both concretely and culturally—“the bottom fall out” of Sherman's “here” and his life. Suddenly, without warning, no longer knowing where he is, Sherman becomes lost forever.
There is yet a third form of being lost, a more mundane and less threatening form of spatial disorientation we tend to call “not knowing how to get to where you're going.” Unlike the other two forms of being lost, its spatial structure is linear and forward-directed toward a reachable distant point—even if both the direction that is “forward” and its intended destination cannot be precisely located. As well, and isomorphic with its spatial orientation, the temporal structure of this form is shaped by the future. Not knowing how to get to where you're going tends to be experienced as neither uncanny nor vertiginous; rather, its effects seem much more mundane. This form of being lost is focused on the real possibility of pragmatic resolution. It presents itself as a hermeneutic problem rather than as a recurrent nightmare or an existential crisis, and its major affective charge tends to be frustration rather than desperation or panic. Because it is a problem that invites resolution, it is future oriented—with the future at an intentionally near but presently unreachable temporal distance. Although, as in the experience of going round in circles, this future is forestalled, unlike that experience, the past has little purchase here. Instead, temporal movement streams forward in a directed manner against an ambiguous landscape, seeking purposive release from a definite present and resolution in a determinate arrival at a specified future.
Here the comedy Quick Change is exemplary. Two men and a woman successfully rob a bank and, for most of the film, attempt to get to Kennedy Airport and out of the country before the police can identify and catch them. They, like Sherman McCoy, make a wrong turn in their car and end up in an unfamiliar part of the city; unlike Sherman, however, the narrative on which they embark is less one marked by panic and the dissolution of identity than it is by frustration. They are lost but not completely ungrounded; even though, at the beginning of their forestalled getaway, they don't know where they are, their problems are experienced as primarily practical ones. Indeed, looking for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, first they unsuccessfully ask for help from some workmen who are in the process of changing critical directional markers at an intersection; next, in a Spanish neighborhood, they ask for directions and are not understood. When they then spot a man standing near his car looking at a roadmap and stop to ask him for directions, he robs them—although he does leave the map (and their undiscovered heist money) behind. Later, and for various reasons now without a car, they hail a taxicab whose driver neither speaks English nor understands where they want to go. Finally, they end up on a public bus—where they are again forestalled by having to adhere to the inflexible rules and logic of an overly precise bus driver if they are to get anywhere; and, as Roger Ebert puts it, “when they do, it's not where they're going (‘I didn't say the bus went to the airport. I said the bus went to near the airport’).”29 This particular form of being lost, then, is intensely directed toward a specific endpoint, and it has an entirely possible if presently unrealized future. Until the film's very satisfying resolution, where narrative and destination converge on a plane bound for the tropics, being lost in Quick Change is an exercise not in existential desperation or dissolution but in comic frustration.
I've drawn out here a very quick sketch of the spatial and temporal morphology, the “imaginary geography,” of three primary forms of being lost in worldly space. There are surely other variants with their own phenomenology. What this brief elaboration demonstrates, however, is that the experience of being lost calls for something more than the only partial descriptions provided by recourse to the traditional coordinates of cartography or geography.30 Being lost in space has a phenomeno logic that exceeds such descriptions, even as it may normatively depend on them for both its generation and resolution.
BEING DIRECTED
After about twenty minutes and going around the same block a few times, it was clear to Mary that Tom was lost. She finally suggested that he call for help. Tom became very silent. They eventually arrived at the party, but the tension…persisted the whole evening. Mary had no idea of why he was so upset.—JOHN GRAY, PH.D., Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
“They're making a Lost in Space movie. The Robinson family is still lost. Even after thirty years, the dad still refuses to pull over and ask for directions”—ROSIE O'DONNELL, The Rosie O'DonnellShow
When Freud was lost in Italy, going round in circles in the street of painted women, did he eventually ask for directions? He makes a point in his account to tell us that, once he determined its unsavory character, he “hastened to leave the narrow street” and “wandered about for a while without being directed,” only to find himself returned to the same spot. He is less forthcoming about the denouement of his anxious adventure, and all he tells us is that he “was glad enough to abandon [his] exploratory walk and get straight back to the plaza [he] had left a short while before.” It is a truism among American women (and pop psychology books about relationships between the sexes) that men almost never ask for directions.31 Indeed, their whole identity seems to depend on the sense that they can get about the world on their own. Hansel takes charge of finding the way home from the forest, and Freud tells us (in passing) that he wandered “without being directed” but manages to say not a word about how he managed to find his way back to known territory. Women laugh among themselves about what seems to us a libidinal overinvestment in men's negotiation of worldly space. We think it childish that the very idea of being lost (let alone the act of asking for directions) so threatens men's identity that they tend to evidence what seems disproportionate defensiveness, anger, or even hysteria when they are—what must seem to them—“caught out” in a “shameful” instance of—what seems to us—minor spatial disorientation.32
Although it has real and critical consequences in people's actual relationships, this gender difference is so familiar as to seem comic or banal.33 It is apposite, then, that getting lost provides a key scenario of gender conflict in many best-selling pop psychology books, among them John Gray, Ph.D.'s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and Deborah Tannen, Ph.D.'s slightly less condescending (and less sexist) You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.34 For Gray, if a woman acknowledges a man is lost by casually suggesting he ask for directions, she is heard by the man as saying, “I don't trust you to get us there. You are incompetent!” Better for her, he suggests, to indulge in benevolent tolerance—and silence: “Tom greatly appreciated her warm acceptance and trust.”35 For Tannen, the conflict engendered in this scenario can be attributed to the fact that women in our culture see the exchange of information as an acknowledgment of community, whereas men see it as an articulation of unequal power relations: “To the extent that giving information, directions, or help is of use to another, it reinforces bonds between people. But to the extent that it is asymmetrical, it creates hierarchy.”36 Although these analyses of the different psychic investments of men and women in getting—and appearing—lost don't seem untrue, they do seem somewhat superficial. They are, quite literally, not yet fleshed out, their truth not substantiated at the deeper, carnal levels of our existence.
Being a “master of the universe” presumes an existential relationship and reciprocity with space that is centered in, tethered to, and organized contiguously around one's embodied intentionality and its perceived possibility of realizing projects in the world. This is a relationship informed by the confidence that one is immanently and transcendently, as both a body and a consciousness, the constitutive source of meaningful space—that one is, indeed, the compass of the world. And space, thus constituted, is a space in which one should not be able to really get lost, a space in which one should never need guidance. This is the existential space of the young world-making child—and, in our culture, also the presumed (and assumed) existential space of the adult man. It is very rarely the space of the adult woman.
In a phenomenological description of the reciprocity between culturally informed, engendered bodies and the morphology of worldly space, philosopher Iris Marion Young has distinguished the general forms through which men and women differently perceive and live space in our culture.37 This difference is less a function of sexual difference than it is of situational difference. All human beings experience their existence as embodied and therefore immanent, that is, as materially situated in a specific “here” at a specific “now.” All human beings also experience their existence as conscious and therefore as transcendent, that is, as able to transcend their material immanence through intentional projection to a “where” and “when” they are not but might be. However, given this universal condition of human existence as both immanent and transcendent, the ratio—or rationality—of their relationship each to the other is often different for men and women in our culture. More often than men, women are the objects of gazes that locate and invite their bodies to live as merely material “things” immanently positioned in space rather than as conscious subjects with the capacity to transcend their immanence and posit space. Thus, according to Young, there is a dominant tendency for “feminine spatial existence” to be “positioned by a system of coordinates that does not have its origins in [women's] intentional capacities” (152).38 Certainly, women also exist as intentional subjects who can and do transcend their immanence, but, because of their prominent objectification, they do so ambivalently and with greater difficulty. That is, feminine spatial experience in our culture, Young suggests, exhibits “an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings. A source of these contradictory modalities is the bodily self-reference of feminine comportment, which derives from the woman's experience of her body as a thing at the same time she experiences it as a capacity” (147). Women, therefore, tend to inhabit space tentatively, in a structure of self-contradiction that is inhibiting and self-distancing and that makes their bodies—as related to their intentionality—less a transparent capacity for action and movement than a hermeneutic problem. As a consequence, women in our culture tend not to enjoy the synthetic, transparent, and unreflective unity of immanence and transcendence that is a common experience among men.
Although “any” body lives worldly space as encounters with both “opacities and resistances correlative to [the body's] own limits and frustrations” and with a horizon of open possibilities for action, to women, for whom “feminine bodily existence is an inhibited intentionality,…the same set of possibilities that appears to be correlative to [their] intentions also appears to be a system of frustrations correlative to [their] hesitancies.” A woman's possibilities for action and self-realization of her projects—even mundane ones like finding her own way from here to there—are certainly perceived as possibilities but, more often than not, “as the possibilities of ‘someone,' and not truly her possibilities” (149). Correlative to this ambiguous transcendence and inhibited intentionality, Young also stresses the “discontinuous unity” experienced by women—both in relation to themselves and to their surroundings. There is an intentional gap between the space of “here” that is the spatial “position” I can and do occupy and the spatial “positing” of a “yonder” that I grasp in its possibilities but, as a woman in our culture, do not quite comprehend as potentially mine. Examining this sense of “double spatiality” (152), Young glosses various psychological studies that show women as more “field-dependent” than men. Males demonstrate “a greater capacity for lifting a figure out of its spatial surroundings and viewing relations in space as fluid and interchangeable, whereas females have a greater tendency to regard figures as embedded within and fixed by their surroundings.” Young suggests that women's field dependence is hardly surprising, however, in a cultural context in which women tend to live space in a structure and mode of partial estrangement: the space of her “here” is substantial and rooted in her objective carnality, but it is discontiguous with the space of a “yonder” that seems the unfamiliar and abstract province of others. Thus, as Young puts it, for feminine existence “objects in visual [that is, projected] space do not stand in a fluid system of potentially alterable and interchangeable relations correlative to the body's various intentions and projected capacities. Rather, they too have their own places and are anchored in immanence” (153).
Materially embedded and positioned in a worldly space usually experienced as discontinuous and not of their own making, women find asking for directions from others a familiar, mundane, and reassuring activity that provokes no existential crisis. Rather, it creates social continuity as a substitute for fragmented spatial contiguity. Furthermore, asking for directions is also consistent with regularly living one's body in the world as a hermeneutic problem. Men, however, cannot generally accept negotiating space as a hermeneutic problem. They disavow the possibility of being lost, even if they sometimes do admit to being spatially “mistaken.”39 Unlike women, who often view maps as arbitrary in relation to their own bodies (the “You are here” on the library map, to me, the confusing equivalent of Magritte's painting about representation, This Is Not a Pipe [1926]), men see maps as confirmations of and continuous with their spatial location. Thus, maps, for men, do not offer “solutions” to a present disorientation; rather, they are taken up as potential and future extensions of a bodily being that always knows (or should) where it stands in the world. For a man in our culture to acknowledge being lost in worldly space would be to generate an existential crisis—for he would be admitting he was lost in the very intentional spaces his agency had supposedly posited. He would be admitting also to an experience in which he perceived the ground beneath his feet (here) as discontiguous with the projected space of his intentions (yonder). Given the threat it poses to the literal grounding of male identity, being lost is an experience of space that men struggle to repress. Refusal, denial, disavowal, displaced anger thus both manifestly affirm this experience and fend off the existential vertigo, panic, and loss of identity it provokes. (In this regard it is particularly telling that in the aforementioned film The Blair Witch Project, there is a significant scene in which one of the lost male filmmakers rages at the uselessness of their map and throws it away in a nearby stream.)
Among the three different forms of being lost we have seen that “not knowing where you are” is the most global and existentially threatening and “not knowing how to get to where you want to go” the most local and mundane. In the scenario about Tom and Mary recounted in the epigraph that began this section, given his assumed “mastery of the universe,” Tom hears Mary interrogate the very subjective ground of his existence and identity when she suggests that he ask for directions, and he is defensive and coldly furious at the implication that he doesn't know where he is. Mary, however, used to moving herself about as an object in unfamiliar spaces not of her own making, makes reference to that other much more mundane, localized, and, to her, familiar form of being lost—“not knowing how to get to where you want to go”—and, both consciously and somatically, she cannot comprehend either Tom's excessive reaction or the shape of the cosmos he is presently in danger of losing. In a culture where Tom and Mary posit and are positioned in space differently, in which they live and value their embodied relations with space differently, is it any wonder that they don't understand each other, the space of being lost (or mistaken) now become the shape of the distance between them?
After north betrayed my body and my forward-looking purposiveness to become an abstract sign, after I lost my child's confidence that I was the compass of the world and became a girl, I never developed a really sure sense of direction or geography. Both “direction” and “geography” seemed to me the discontiguous and arbitrary systems of others rather than projected possibilities for the fluid orientation of my own being. Now definitely field-dependent, I have to walk through a space and have it become a concrete and contiguous here for me if I am to later remember it as coherent. I also feel more secure locating an unknown place if I follow a narrative trajectory involving a series of grounded landmarks rather than the abstract schematic orientations of a map. Even then, however, sometimes I experience the metallic taste of fear when I try to follow someone's directions to somewhere new and an anticipated McDonald's on a corner or the carwash to follow on the left don't appear quite soon enough to assure me that I am, indeed, going the right way. It is at these moments that I force myself to remember what I've disclosed here, take a deep breath, and attempt to posit the world before me as a set of possibilities that are not inherently terrifying. What really dissipates my anxiety, however (and also makes me smile), is remembering that, despite the fact it was Hansel who had “a sense of direction,” Gretel was the one who killed the wicked witch, sprung her brother, and found the way out of the forest and safely back home.
1. As a child I also had a problem with “right” and “left” since my “sides” didn't enjoy the hierarchical privilege of my “front.” Although it seemed clear that north was always in front of—and never in back of—me, the designations “right” and “left” (as well as east and west) seemed arbitrary, directions one had to remember rather than orientations one lived. So, regularly, I wore mnemonic Band-Aids on the fingers of my left hand to guide me through the tasks of my childish life—like putting my right hand over my heart (on the left side) to say the Pledge of Allegiance at school. See, for elaboration of this typical phenomenon, Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), esp. chap. 4, “Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values,” 34-50. Tuan writes that regardless of their culture or spatial schemas, “[p]eople do not mistake prone for upright, nor front for back, but the right and left sides of the body as well as the spaces extrapolated from them are easily confused. In our experience as mobile animals, front and back are primary, right and left are secondary” (42).
2. On this anthropocentric and carnal logic see Tuan, Space and Place, who writes: “In a literal sense, the human body is the measure of direction, location, and distance” (44). He further points out that “spatial prepositions are necessarily anthropocentric, whether they are nouns derived from parts of the human body or not,” that “folk measures of length are derived from parts of the body,” as in “an arm's length” or “feet,” as are measures of capacity such as “a handful” or “an armful” (45-47).
3. Certainly, children get lost and, more important, feel lost. But, if they're independent and confident, they may often feel it's their parent or caretaker who has gotten lost rather than themselves. This latter experience (which marks both a child's confidence in his or her own location and a displacement of his or her fear of getting lost) is wonderfully expressed in “Disobedience,” a poem in A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young (London: Methuen, 1924; Puffin Edition, 1992), 32-35. The poem tells of a three-year-old who warns his mother “never to go down to the end of town” without him—and, when she does, she gets “lost, or stolen or strayed!”
4. As an adult woman (and getting ever older), apparently I am not alone in feeling disoriented in front of such maps. Age and gender and the perceived relation of objective markers to one's body emerge as significant variables in spatial processing according to Jocelyn B. Aubrey, Karen Z. H. Li, and Allen R. Dobbs, “Age Differences in the Interpretation of Misaligned ‘You-Are-Here' Maps,” Journal of Gerontology 49 (1994): 29-31. Their essay abstract reads: “ ‘You-Are-Here' (YAH) maps, common in shopping malls and office buildings, are difficult to interpret if not aligned with their surroundings. Younger and older adults made direction decisions after viewing simple maps representing a university campus. YAH arrows were either upright and coordinated with viewer position or contra-aligned 180°. Contra-alignment caused subjects, especially older adults, to take more time and be less accurate. Women were slower on contra-aligned maps, although no less accurate, than men. The need to mentally realign such incongruent maps in order to make correct direction decisions can cause serious difficulty for older adults trying to navigate through large, complex environments” (29).
5. My gender selection here is purposeful and references the flâneur of the nineteenth century, described thus by Anke Gleber: “Surrounded by visual stimuli and relying on the encompassing power of his perception, the flâneur moves freely in the streets, intent solely on pursuing [a] seemingly unique and individual experience of reality” (“Women on the Screens and Streets of Modernity: In Search of the Female Flaneur,” in The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, ed. Dudley Andrew [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997], 55). Certainly, there is a history of the flaneuse, but it seems to me much more literally “grounded”; see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). A more postmodern and still male form of flânerie is expressed in a line used in not one but two contemporary science fiction films—The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai: Across the 8th Dimension (W. D. Richter, 1984); and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller, 1985): “Wherever you go, there you are.”
6. Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
7. James Barry Jr., “The Technical Body: Incorporating Technology and Flesh,” Philosophy Today (winter 1991): 399.
8. Ibid. Barry is translating and quoting from the French edition of Merleau-Ponty's “Eye and Mind,” in L'Oeil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 51.
9. Perceptual shifts such as Heelan points to are precisely solicited by artist James Turrell's extraordinary earthwork, Roden Crater. For discussion of this work and excellent photos of the spatial phenomena see Calvin Tomkins, “Flying into the Light,” New Yorker, Jan. 13, 2003, 62-71.
10. Tuan, Space and Place, 36. For another—and visual—version of such spatial and bodily disorientation in a forest see Tamás Waliczky's video The Forest (Karlsruhe: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 1993), in which there is no flickering light to stabilize space and orient the viewer.
11. Michael Asher, Impossible Journey: Two against the Sahara (London: Viking, 1988), 164-65. (The epigraph for this section is located on 169.)
12. Ibid., 165.
13. Ibid., 166.
14. Dorothea Olkowski, “Merleau-Ponty's Freudianism: From the Body of Consciousness to the Body of Flesh,” Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry 18, nos. 1-3 (1982-83): 111. Olkowski's interior quotation comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 210.
15. See also, in relation to the child's non-Cartesian spatial perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Expression and the Child's Drawing,” in The Prose of the World, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. John O'Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 147-52. A wonderful and precise visual expression of the child's non-Cartesian spatial perception can be found in Tamás Waliczky's video The Garden (Karlsruhe: Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, 1992).
16. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965).
17. I thank all those colleagues on H-Film who responded to my query. Many films suggested were relevant (directly or indirectly), although most veered off into science fiction allegory, many into less concrete and spatial modes of being lost, and several were not American (my focus here). Two not mentioned in the text that are resonant in relation to my discussion are The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles, 1984), an SF film but one in which there's a scene of two tourists from Indiana literally lost in Harlem; and Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989), which deals with being lost both literally and metaphorically. If one begins to speculate as to why there are fewer scenes of people literally getting lost in cinema than one might expect and why such scenes tend to be displaced into the fantastic space of SF, a primary reason might be that since the cinema, itself, is made up of bits and pieces of discontinuous and discontiguous time and space, the goal of both the cinematic apparatus and the traditional narrative is to make these fragments cohere into a coordinated geography the viewer can navigate. Evoking literal disorientation reminds cinema and the spectator to varying degrees of the cinema's initial premises, which are incoherent. Thus, unless displaced into allegory or metaphor, long sequences of being lost in a narrative might well threaten to undo narrative and take us into the realm of a more materially reflexive, nonnarrative, “experimental” cinema. “Getting lost” in narrative cinema, then, tends to be a rare occurrence, marked out against our—and the character's—“familiar”—orientation as “unusual.”
18. Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Studies in Parapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 42. (The epigraph for this section can be found on 42-43.)
19. There is an illuminating bit of text that gives us a “mirror image” of Freud's recurrent—and unwanted—return to the street of painted women and also involves spatial directions, brothels, and famous men. In his essay “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), Walter Benjamin reveals not only his ostensible subject but also himself when, discussing Proust's “love of ceremony” and his resourcefulness in “creating complications,” he writes:
Once, late at night, he dropped in on Princess Clermont-Tonnerre and made his staying dependent on someone bringing him his medicine from his house. He sent a valet for it, giving him a lengthy description of the neighborhood and of the house. Finally, he said: “You cannot miss it. It is the only window on the Boulevard Haussmann in which there still is a light burning!” Everything but the house number! Anyone who has tried to get the address of a brothel in a strange city and has received the most long-winded directions, everything but the name of the street and the house number, will understand what is meant here. (207)
My gratitude to Marc Siegel for bringing this passage to my attention.
20. Also informed by male desire and its frustration in the comic mode, a provocative companion film relating the spatial disorientation of going round in circles to its literal counterpart in temporal disorientation is Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993).
21. Graziella Magherini, La sindrome di Stendhal (Firenze: Ponte Alle Grazie, 1989). For brief accounts in English of Stendhal's Syndrome see “Prey to Stendhal Syndrome,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 21, 1987, sec. 1, pp. 1-2; and “Tourists Turn Up Artsick in Florence,” Los Angeles Times (Orange County edition), Sep. 15, 1988, sec. 6, p. 6.
22. “Prey to Stendhal Syndrome,” Los Angeles Times, 2.
23. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fugue” (emphasis added).
24. The film was given limited release in the United States in 1999 under the English title The Stendhal Syndrome.
25. Marc Savlov, review of The Stendhal Syndrome, dir. Dario Argento, Austin Chronicle, Oct. 25 999.
26. “Prey to Stendhal Syndrome,” Los Angeles Times, 1.
27. This triadic relation of being lost, being male, and being white played out in terms of race appears earlier in a sequence in the comedy/satire National Lampoon's Vacation (Harold Ramis, 1983; the film is also known as National Lampoon's Summer Vacation); here, the bumbling father of a vacationing family driving across country gets lost in the inner city of St. Louis and pays a “racial other” five dollars for directions but is given for his money only directions to another “racial other” who will supposedly give him directions.
28. Not a satire, Judgment Night attempts to be “politically correct” about urban terrors. It displaces and inverts its barely latent fear of the racial other by providing a manifest racial mix of four suburban buddies who get lost in a “tough” section of Chicago, where, in their fancy RV, they accidentally run over the victim of a shooting and are chased by a racial mix of gangbangers, the film's real heavies foregrounded as Caucasian.
29. Roger Ebert, review of Quick Change, dir. Howard Franklin and Bill Murray, Cinemania ‘94, CD-ROM (Microsoft, 1993) (emphasis added).
30. There is a subfield of geography called “behavioral geography” that uses cognitive psychology to explicate and understand human orientation in worldly space. Although many of its experiments are useful in tracing “cognitive maps” of space and the strategies and choice making used in human navigation, as well as forms of spatial disorientation, its insights do not illuminate the values and affects that inform navigation and spatial disorientation. In “Experiments in Way finding: Cognitive Mapping and Human Cognition” (a lecture presented to the UCLA Marschak Colloquium, Jan. 31, 1997), Reginald G. Golledge, professor of geography and director of the Research Unit on Spatial Cognition and Choice at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studied blind adults and children to explore “how route following strategies can build up a cognitive map [to] explain why cognitive maps may be fragmented, distorted, and irregular” (lecture abstract). Golledge identifies the types of “errors” that can occur in relation to navigation and thus cause spatial disorientation: “sequencing of places or route segments; route versus configural understanding; interpoint distance comprehension; locational displacement; variable place recognition; directional misunderstandings; misaligned landmarks (anchors); poor spatial integration; angle generalization; changing perspective; incorrect orientation; incorrect directional comprehension” (lecture handout). My thanks to Louise Krasniewicz for bringing this lecture to my attention.
31. There is evidence that, as a cultural phenomenon, male reluctance to ask for directions is not limited to the United States. Sociologist Bernd Jurgen Warneken of the University of Tubingen, in southwest Germany, and his colleagues Franziska Roller and Christiane Pyka have noted the same phenomenon in the German context. See “Of Course I'm Sure,” People, Sep. 6, 1999, 135-36.
32. The gendered connection of shame to this kind of being lost or having to ask for directions is illuminated by the phenomenological sociology of shame wonderfully explicated by Jack Katz, How Emotions Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Katz speaks not only of the feelings of social vulnerability, moral incompetence, fear, and chaos that attach to and constitute shame but also of shame's humbling effect: “When put to shame, one is cut down, forced to abandon a prior, arrogant posture” (166). Insofar as the space of the world is seen by men in a given culture as “posited” and “mastered” by them, they are socially and morally shamed by “not knowing where they are” and by having to further display this lack of knowledge by asking for directions. The humbling here is felt ontologically as it is exposed socially and emerges as “the shame of discrepancy arising from the sudden loss of all known landmarks in oneself and in the world” (167; Katz is quoting Helen Merrill Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958], 39). Katz also makes the point that, given its passive nature, shame can only be “gotten rid of” through its transformation into other more active emotions (very often resentment and anger) or through engaging in certain “ordinary” but “ritual practices” that honor “the congruence of one's nature and an order—any order—that is clearly moral” (167).
33. Indeed, although almost all the men I know say that they don't have a problem asking for directions (at the same time acknowledging that most other men won't), the phenomenon is enough of a commonplace to be a frequent subject not only of comedy (see the Rosie O'Donnell joke that is epigraph to this section) but also of advertising. Ford Motor Company published a full page ad aimed at women announcing a free copy of a booklet called “Car & Truck Buying Made Easier.” The large ad headline read: “Because women aren't afraid to ask directions.” Similarly, a garment tag on a brand of “Activewear for Women Only” reads: “And while it is not specifically forbidden for men to wear these garments, such misappropriation may result in a svelter form, a secure feeling of support, and an uncanny ability to ask for directions.” There are also many cartoons on the subject. One shows a man saying to his male companion: “Do you realize that if Columbus was a woman we'd never have been discovered? She would have been willing to ask directions to Asia!” Another shows Moses leading his people through the desert as a woman behind him says: “We've been wandering in the desert for forty years. But he's a man—would he ever ask for directions?” A joke in a similar vein asks the question: “Why does it take one million sperm to fertilize one egg?” The answer: “Because they refuse to stop and ask for directions.” Two more recent cartoons are inflected by new scientific and technological developments. Both show a couple in a car; in one, the male driver says to the woman beside him: “Because my genetic programming prevents me from stopping to ask directions—that's why!” In the other a woman says to her grim-looking male companion: “Are you telling me you won't even ask the computerized navigational system for directions?” The joke has even turned up in the recent children's film Finding Nemo (Disney/Pixar, 2003), when its lost CGI animated male and female fish protagonists, Marlin and Dory, find themselves in nihilistically dark waters; faced with the possibility of being able to ask directions from a single lurking but suspicious fishy figure, Marlin keeps shushing Dory, saying they'll find the way themselves, until Dory, exasperated, asks, “What is it with men and asking for directions?” (My gratitude to Victoria Duckett, Chen Mei, Louise Krasniewicz, and Kate Lawrie for sending me some of these materials.)
34. John Gray, PhD, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 20-21; and Deborah Tannen, PhD, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: Ballantine, 1990), 61-64. (I use the uncharacteristic “PhD” designation here and in the text since, it seems, psychologists and sociologists need such manifest warranting in popular trade book publication.)
35. Gray, Men Are from Mars, 21.
36. Tannen, You Just Don't Understand, 63.
37. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing like a Girl,” in Throwinglike a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 141-59. Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
38. It might be added that although there would be certain variations in the structure, ratio, and experience of the immanent/transcendent relationship to worldly space, the same might be said of human beings objectified as other on different bases than gender. In our present culture it would be predominantly persons of color, the disabled, the aged, the diseased, and the homeless. Insofar as it was made visible to others through manifest codes of behavior and dress, one could include homosexuals and lesbians—and the poor. For further discussion of this issue see the section “Whose Body? A Brief Meditation on Sexual Difference and Other Bodily Discriminations,” in my The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 143-63.
39. This telling distinction was revealed to me through an intense personal experience. After playing out a typical, very lengthy, and very hostile “lost couple” scenario, when I and my male companion arrived at our restaurant destination extremely late and were asked what happened by our hungry friends, I responded, “We got lost.” My companion, furious and clearly in denial, countered, “I was not lost; I made a wrong turn.” Note, along with the variance in interpretation of and cathexis to the event of our spatial disorientation, my plural attribution (less of guilt than of condition) and my companion's singular assumption of both agency and responsibility.
