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
