Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack

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