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
