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
