Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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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