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 form of disorientation and its resultant existential anxiety also may occur, however, when worldly 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.
