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“The Erasure of Traces:”

Non-Urban Spatial Influence upon Investigation and the Investigative-Figure in

Postwar American Cinema

Master’s Candidate: Jesse Woodcock

Supervisor: Lee Grieveson

Course: UCL MA Film Studies (2010-2011)

Date Submitted: 7 Sept 2011

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Contents

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………............................2

A sub-genre (re)considered……………………………………………………………..……..7

CHAPTER 1 – the Investigative Figure……………………………………………………………..…9

The urban-imprint………………………………………………..………………………….……12

On origins and otherness………………………………………………………………….……14

The detective-story: more than the sum of its parts……………………………..17

Spatial perception/conception…………………………………………………………..….19

CHAPTER 2 – Extra-Urban Territories: Space, Place, and Contexts……..………….23

The divided corners of a united nation………………………………………………….25

Investigating territories………………………………………………………………….……..26

The challenges of undefined/unbounded space……………………………………28

Regional history, contemporary consequences…………………………………….30

CHAPTER 3 – Controlling Space and Spacing Control……………………………………….38

The investigative reach……………………………………………………………………….…40

Governance and the governed………………………………………………………….…..43

REFERENCES

Footnotes………………………………………………………………………………………………………..46

Filmography…………………………………………………………………………………………………….49

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………….52

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INTRODUCTION: the spaces of investigation

A man whom I was shadowing went out into the country for a walk one Sunday

afternoon and lost his bearing completely. I had to direct him back to the city.

—DASHIELL HAMMETT, From the Memoirs of a Private Detective

I can catch a criminal faster just walking down Main Street than I can with a pack of

bloodhounds.

—SHERIFF CLEM OTIS, Moonrise (1948, Frank Borzage)

There is a telling moment in the 1974 Dan Curtis cult-gem Scream of the Wolf in which we

witness the absolute mystification of the local sheriff—as well as his arsenal of well-educated

forensic personnel—concerning his inability to solve a string of grisly rural murders for which

the forensic evidence is inconclusive at best. Compelled by mounting pressure from the area’s

local residents, the sheriff is faced with calling upon a less traditional investigative asset in the

form of a local hunter cum adventure writer whom, it is believed, will be able to shed some

light on the animalistic nature of the murders. As a mounting anxiety pervades the disposition

of both the nearby populace and law enforcement branches alike, both of which are increasingly

(and incorrectly) convinced that supernatural forces are at play in the murders, we become

acutely aware that the investigative narrative that is unfolding in this rural space is a far cry

from that of the urban-bound mysteries which found favour amongst American audiences upon

the conclusion of World War II onward. In those films, which can predominantly be filed under

the ever-expanding—and decreasingly useful—designation of film-noir, the steely detective

figure (almost always male) navigates the “mean streets”1 of the city in search of clues and/or

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suspect(s) in the interest of futilely mending a diminutive fragment of the fraying moral

makeup of modern urban America. The positivist archetype of the prewar detective who

laboured in the interest of effectively containing moral disorder2 was displaced by this more

existentially embroiled postwar breed who, in spite of the spiritual toxicity of urban existence, is

more or less effective at navigating the city and deciphering/anticipating the behaviour of its

inhabitants. But as the centripetal3 attributes of the prewar American metropolis diminished in

the years both preceding and immediately following the war, the centrifugal conditions of

modernity took hold, and Hollywood narratives—those profit-inspired expositors of cultural

transition—became noticeably littered with themes concerning the spatial dichotomy of urban

versus rural and the politics contrasted politics therein. Prevailing notions of the Edenic virtues

of extra-urban American space—notions which themselves echo the American Transcendentalist

reverence for pastoral landscapes, as well as an evocation of the expansionist spirit inherent to

the American psyche since the nation’s inception—are challenged by a myriad of postwar

detective, mystery, and crime films whose narratives unfold exclusive of an urban environment.

“As the huge upheavals of the 1960s were worked through in the cinematic medium, small

towns and the countryside were increasingly portrayed as sites of contestation and decay.”4

Rather than providing the respite of shrouded anonymity sought by the countless criminal anti-

heroes of postwar Hollywood cinema, rural locales were increasingly imagined as a site of

ultimate destruction—a repository for those who skew from the moral or legal straight-and-

narrow (see Gun Crazy [1950, Joseph Lewis], Bonnie and Clyde [1967, Arthur Penn], High Sierra

[1941, Raoul Walsh], The Asphalt Jungle [1950, John Huston], Se7en [1995, David Fincher], They

Live by Night [1949, Nicholas Ray], and Out of the Past [1947, Jacques Tourneur]).

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Likewise, filmic detective figures—often drawn as invasive urban outsiders who find

themselves operating in an unfamiliar rural landscape, or are (less frequently) a native of this

space—are presented with a set of challenges unique to an extra-urban environment whilst

carrying out their quest. This scenario frequently results in the demise of the investigator if

they are not aptly prepared or fail to compensate for the unique challenges posed by this brand

of space (see Border Incident [1949, Anthony Mann], Electra Glide in Blue [1973, James Guercio],

Insomnia [2002, Christopher Nolan], and Psycho [1960, Alfred Hitchcock]). While many of these

investigative narratives find their pedigree in the likes of the “outsider comes-to-town” motif

inherent to a large swath of the Western genre (see Unforgiven [1992, Clint Eastwood], Shane

[1953, George Stevens], The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962, John Ford], Warlock [1959,

Edward Dmytryk], and A Fistful of Dollars [1964, Sergio Leone]), the investigator who operates

in rural space—echoing the Western hero by “mediating the forces of order and anarchy, yet

somehow remaining separate from each,”5—frequently finds his quest transmuted into an

exercise in utter survival within that rural space, which echoes with the resonant savagery

employed by pioneers to “tame” such landscapes during the nation’s infancy. Even if the

investigator somehow manages to “get his man,” the quest often leaves the detective scarred (in

oedipal fashion)6 or otherwise fundamentally altered by his experience amidst the uncertain

wilds of an extra-urban locale.

Also a key facet of this discussion will be the nature of terrestrial space, territory, and

landscape in the context of a bordered nation that was once—and is perhaps still—impelled by

a pioneering impulse and the resonant shadow of manifest-destiny upon the fabric of the

American psyche. The inherent contradictions in idealizing the unsettled landscape as an

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emblematic proxy for a nation of souls living—as the United States national anthem declares—

“in the land of the free” (an idiom that refers as much to a spirit of expansionism as it does to an

assortment of civil or constitutional rights) should at once be apparent when one considers that

in embracing a space by settling it is to render it void of its status as “free” space. In this

scenario, space becomes place, and place is bound up with the politics of borders, ownership,

purpose, and sundry other “subjective and qualitative concepts underpinned by ideas such as

sense of belonging, shared values and images, and [the] common concerns”7 held by inhabitants

of that locale.

We should keep in mind that a “space” is never exclusive in and of itself and must

always be contrasted and contextualized against other varieties or sections of space—otherwise

the space in question will remain vague and indistinct from other spaces. The three “formants”8

of space, as defined by Henri Lefebvre: geometric (Euclidian), optical (as perceived visually), and

phallic (space as it relates to power), are all equally weighted as crucial influences upon the

investigative quest. The investigative figure, to whom the audience is customarily reliant upon

for the advancement and resolution of the mystery narrative, “customarily finds himself

situated in a physical environment whose latent moral significance may be explicit or implicit,

apparent from the beginning or uncovered only at a later date.”9 In this way, location is not

simply an incidental stage upon which the events of the film unfold, but is rather a key agent in

rendering the vocabulary of the overarching themes and purpose of the film, or, more

specifically, the textual and subtextual (and often metaphorical) significance of the investigative

quest. Not unlike the idealistic travellers who inadvertently stumble upon their doom at the

end of an unfamiliar road in countless films of the journey-horror variety (see The Texas

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Chainsaw Massacre [1974, Tobe Hooper], The Last House on the Left [1972, Wes Craven], and The

Hills Have Eyes [1977, Wes Craven]), the urban detective who finds himself injected into a non-

urban territory often “meets an alien culture where the norms of their own society count for

nothing.”10 The “semiotician”11 detective will find that the “system” he has devised in the

interest of reading, cataloguing, quantifying, and investigating his urban surroundings is voided

when applied to a non-urban format. The “signifying chain” (to appropriate and adapt the

Jamesonian term) ceases to function, as the readable nature of the clue is altered by the

illegibility of the usually anti-modern (natural?) landscape. Certainly, the motif of the hero who

enters a world that he simply cannot understand is one familiar to acolytes of the crime-film

genre (see Chinatown [1974, Roman Polanski], Point Blank [1967, John Boorman], Alphaville [1965,

Jean-Luc Godard], and I Walk Alone [1948, Byron Haskin]), and the detective no less risks being

marginalized or destroyed by existing as an (often unwelcomed) outsider within the “foreign”

territory of extra-urban space. Studio vaults abound with less-than-subtle films which imagine

the xenophobic response that awaits any unwanted external entity—military, cultural, or

otherwise—that may manage to permeate the integrity of the national character or borders (see

Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956, Don Siegel], Alien Nation [1988, Graham Baker], Red Dawn

[1984, John Milius], The Thing [1982, John Carpenter], Dr. Strangelove [1964, Stanley Kubrick], V

[Kenneth Johnson, 1983], They Live [1988, John Carpenter], Battle: Los Angeles [2011, Jonathan

Liebesman], and War of the Worlds [1953, Byron Haskin]). In many of the films that will be

discussed in this study, we find related themes of suspicion and resistance on the part of a non-

urban community who may be ideologically opposed to the influence or presence of a

mobilized representative of State control; as the detective is often configured to be.

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A sub-genre (re)considered

After examining an extensive corpus of films that could be defined as being of the non-

urban investigative variety, I have concluded that these works are hardly the incidental genre-

offshoots or pastiche renditions of the more prevalent urban mystery and detective films with

which they are often bundled. Rather, I find that the films housed under the heading of this

specialized sub-genre are replete with an array of subtextual themes relating to geo-spatial

influence upon the investigative quest. As I believe these themes to be worthy of greater

academic inquiry than has been previously afforded them, this study is concerned with the

following aspects of the non-urban investigative film:

1.) The investigator is a direct or figurative representative of legal (often

State-sanctioned) and/or moral order and enforcement, and can historically be

traced as bearing an essentially urban pedigree. It is thus that the non-urban

spatial politics at play within the films of our corpus often stand in direct

opposition to the efficacy and legitimacy of the detective and his quest to

“establish” order within a space or population that fundamentally resists—by

their very natures—such efforts.

2.) The investigative framework of these films is utilized as a means to

acknowledge and explore themes pertaining to the socio-cultural and socio-

economic history of various regions within the United States, as well as the

country’s eventual maturation into a vanguard urban-industrial nation. As such,

the regional-specificity of these films often serves to call-to-attention the

prevailing cultural, racial, and economic politics of that region.

3.) These films draw into focus themes pertaining to the efficacy of a

centralized federal power as it endeavours to govern the array of

contradistinctive non-urban populations of the United States, as well as the

challenges posed to the feasibility (or legitimacy) of such enforcement within

non-urban space. From these themes arise inquiries into the utopian/dystopian

nature of the modern American landscape and the cultural anxieties that are

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evoked when a space is unable—or unwilling—to sustain or accommodate a

panoptic gaze.

If we agree with Foucault that “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with

space,”12 then we might conclude that films depicting the investigation of non-urban territories

are more thematically relevant than the sparse amount of prior scholarly inquiry into the matter

would indicate. The study of the investigative figure in postwar American cinema is

nonetheless beleaguered by a lack of meaningful discourse pertaining to the detective—who is

almost singularly discussed as a creature and product of urban modernity—functioning outside

the realm of an urban environment. Though the reasons for this lack of attention being paid to

films depicting the investigation of extra-urban territories would be largely speculative, I would

argue that a new channel of discussion is warranted concerning spatial influence upon the

detective figure and their quest, as well as a fresh look into the themes of space and place that

operate within the sub-genre of the non-urban investigative film. Though this study will by no

means constitute an exhaustive study on the spatial politics at play within this genre, I hope it

will serve as a seminal examination from which a more comprehensive discourse might arise in

the future.

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CHAPTER 1: The investigative figure

WILSON: What kind of a job is this anyway? Garbage. That’s all we handle.

DALY: Didn’t you know? That’s the kind of job it is.

—ON DANGEROUS GROUND (1952, Nicholas Ray)

Just look at the two of us: an old sheriff and a bounty-hunter here in all this

modern turmoil. We were just born a century too late.

—THE HUNTER (1980, Buzz Kulik)

Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) provides an ideal point of reference from which we

can begin an examination of the evolution of the detective as an emblem of urban modernity—

not strictly because of the film’s overall relationship to the investigation of both urban and rural

brands of space (though, these elements are relevant to this study as well), but because the

pathos-evoking demise of Welles’ Quinlan stands as a pivotal moment between two distinctive

epochs of the detective figure as a cultural icon. If we subscribe to the belief—as most historians

do—that Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue singlehandedly ignited the enduring

genre that we have come to know as the modern detective story, likewise establishing the

formulized detective figure in the process, it would be fascinating to know exactly how Poe

might have felt about the multitude of revisions experienced by his creation during the past

century and a half. One might be especially curious to watch Poe’s reaction as he initially

witnesses Touch of Evil’s Quinlan—who is the antipodal-offshoot of Poe’s ratiocinative C.

Auguste Dupin—meet his demise at the behest of his own hubris; floating dead amongst the

refuse of that iconic chiaroscuro oil-field. The oil-field itself, as an explicit emblem of the

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combustion-fueled inertia of modernity, allows for a poignant end to the antiquated Quinlan

and his detective’s “intuition.” In a tidy one-hundred years, the detective had been born, had

lived and flourished in fiction and in film, in both sun and in shadow, and was now dead,

awaiting to rise again as the enduring cultural phoenix the figure has proven to be; ever

“[evolving] over time [while] processing society’s fears about crime and articulating debates

about law enforcement and justice.”13

But where Dupin and Quinlan might represent variant poles on the spectrum of the

detective archetype, we can trace the rise of the American filmic investigative-figure as bearing

urban roots, in addition to having been “trained in the recognition of the social and physical

space of the metropolis and its interiors.”14 The sleuthing flâneurs pioneered by Poe and Arthur

Conan Doyle gave way—by virtue of the incalculable innovations set forth by the gritty Black

Mask tales of Dashiell Hammett and his literary progeny—to the “hard-boiled” variety of

investigator whose stilted poetics, overt cynicism, and embrace of instinct functioned as the

solitary glow by which this noir(ish) figure could guide himself through an increasingly

enigmatic (and decreasingly moral) urban universe. Though audience preference for this brand

of detective narrative was fulfilled primarily by purveyors of dime-rack pulp fiction during the

inter-war years,15 the appetite for cinematic representations of the hard-boiled investigator

reached a fever-pitch during years immediately following World War II and continued-on into

the better part of the 1950s.

In spite of American “frontier and pastoral myths [having] never been matched by an

equally generous, countervailing urban myth,”16 the postwar noir detective can be perceived as

a partial reconfiguration of the prototypical sheriff of the classical Hollywood Western and his

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dedication to the maintenance of moral order within the otherwise lawless arena of the sparsely

settled Old American West. As William Ruehlmann has fittingly observed, “America

transformed the detective hero by supplying him with the accoutrements of an ethnic past. The

private eye [story] was a Western that took place somewhere else.”17 And, akin to the

widespread popular conception of the mythic American West as a space of opportunity and

danger, the native habitat of the urban detective is sketched as exhibiting both dystopian and

utopian qualities in equal measure. The “universal transparency”18 afforded by the modern city

offsets the notion that the utopian opportunities and conveniences of modernity are supplied at

the cost of one’s capacity for personal anonymity under the thumb of State-sanctioned legal

enforcement. The scene in The Asphalt Jungle, in which Commissioner Hardy (John McIntire)

silences his array of police-scanners in the interest of evoking anxiety at the very possibility of

panoptic blindness, proposes this scenario as the ultimate vulnerability that stands to threaten

civilized society. Consciously or not, Hardy’s demonstration concurrently emphasises the

counterbalance exhibited by the dystopian/utopian qualities of the technologically modern

urban universe by declaring: in the event of such silence, “the jungle wins.” In contrast, the Western

imagines the unenforced, unwatched expanses of the American West to bookended by the

forces of personal liberty and the liability of existing outside the reach of the panoptic gaze.

It should be reiterated that this discussion of the inverse parallels shared between the

unsettled West and the modern urban city are put forth in the interest of illustrating that the

postwar detective figure, much like the gun-slinging sheriff of the classical Western, “is a

cultural middle-man. His individual talents and street-wise savvy enable him to survive within

a sordid, crime-infested city, but his moral sensibilities and deep-rooted idealism align him with

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the forces of social order.”19 This pedigree also establishes the foundation upon which many of

the underlying themes inherent to the general makeup of the non-urban investigative film are

based, and not unlike his law-enforcement ancestors, the detective is most often characterized

as “isolated and unappreciated by the society he [serves]…often portrayed as the sole protector

of society from the forces of evil and meanness.”20

The urban imprint: you can take the detective out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of

the detective

I will go further to insist that the detective is no less interlaced into this lineage of legal

or moral enforcement when presented as part of a scenario in which they are configured as a

non-professional investigative figure. Consider John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy), an ex-

military veteran searching for the father of a fallen soldier in John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock

(1955), or, in an example of the profoundly rare investigative film in which a female is assigned

the role of the detective, Ree Dolly’s (Jennifer Lawrence) endeavour to uncover the whereabouts

of her missing father in Winter’s Bone (2010, Debra Granik). These “unofficial” detectives are

impelled by the same agenda to restore order to a world that has somehow suffered disorder as

a result of the villainous actions of an antagonistic entity. This filmic world is not required to

extend textually outside that of the microcosmic experience of the detective (such departures

are usually a hindrance to narrative pacing), but as filmic space is representational space,21 the

filmic detective’s world is nevertheless always evocative of the recognizable parallels to our own

non-cinematic world. As detectives are posed as the figurative guardians of an ideally ordered

universe which has come morally or legally unbound, we can accept these individuals as “go-

between[s] between society’s two halves,”22 the half that has transgressed and the half that has

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suffered. “The quest for truth and justice”23 is the unifying thread that runs between filmic

investigators of every stripe, fictional or not, regardless of any badge they may or may not

carry, or by whom their pay-check might be endorsed.

The centrifugal ejection of the detective from the city and into an extra-urban territory—

as frequently occurs within many of these investigative films—at once reinforces the notion of

the otherness of the detective (in that he is not a native of this non-urban environment), but is

also demonstrative of the detective being influenced by the same centrifugal forces that have

likewise imparted themselves upon the urban-industrial American metropolis, vis-à-vis his

being thrown outward from the city by the socio-economic and socio-cultural inertia that

emanate from the postwar urban habitat. At the very least, these non-urban investigative

narratives are often thematically mimetic of the decompressive qualities besetting American

cities following New Deal legislation, relating in part to an expansion of interstate

transportation opportunities, as well as the associated “white-flight” phenomenon which

materialized upon the conclusion of World War II. In this way, “the fictional detective emerges

in response to a pointillist universe in which people, actions, and things are like disparate

molecules spreading apart in a post-Newtonian cosmos.”24 And, just as “cities always have [sic]

baffled the stranger with their labyrinths of streets and lanes [and] moving crowds,”25—

elements for which the urban detective is suitably programed to overcome—the resistance of

non-urban space to semiotic interpretation, and the obfuscation of the purposes or relevance of

its various geographical configurations, presents a unique set of challenges to the investigative

process. This ‘mobility cum vulnerability’ is not an exclusive phenomenon affecting only the

detective figure that originates from urban space, but is shown to prevail upon investigators

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who are native to non-urban space as well. I would argue that this universal influence upon the

investigator in such films occurs (in large part) as a result of the detective’s figurative standing

as a representative of urban, State-sanctioned legal enforcement; a State that situates itself and

draws power from the dense populations and economic clout inherent to urban modernity (a

topic that will be discussed further in chapter 3). For now it will be useful to examine the

processes by which the literal or figurative origins of the American postwar investigative figure

are contested upon his entrance and operation within a non-urban territory.

From here to out-there: on origins and otherness

Jeff Bailey/Markham (Robert Mitchum), the self-proclaimed former private-investigator

of Out of the Past who has, in an attempt to abandon the entanglements of allegiance that

plagued his existence as a creature of urban space, reconfigured his very identity in favour of a

simplified and uncluttered existence as a service-station owner in Bridgeport, California; a small

pit-stop settlement that is nestled upon the pastoral doorstep of the Sierra Nevada mountain

range. The film’s title, which at once evokes an image of escape from a location within time and

space, also functions as an idiomatic declaration of the futility of such endeavours in the face of

the inescapable (and sometimes insidious) consequences of one’s past. The corrupted state of

domesticity within the postwar urban sphere—a concept that has been well noted amongst

discourses pertaining to both gender and urban themes within cinema (especially those of film

noir)—leaves Bailey marked for death, despite his well-intentioned flight into an idealized and

normalized domestic space. Regardless of Bailey’s attempts at self-reinvention, the

fundamental difficulties posed by unplugging from one’s origins menacingly impart themselves

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upon his fate, all while summarily reinforcing Jeff’s otherness as an outsider who pollutes the

idyllic and unchanging simplicity of his new surroundings.

The associative relationship between place and the efficacy of one’s authority over one’s

fate is of supreme importance here, as the toxicity and tidal-influence of a tempestuous urban

modernity are painted as fundamentally dystopian in this context. “The appeal of the country

in opposition to the city is mythic in origin; its forms and order are easily mistaken for those of

nature itself […] The country comes to stand not only for nature but also for permanence in a

world where so much else is threatened by undesirable change.”26 Much like the embattled

protagonists of Ida Lupino’s tautly woven psychological thriller, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), the

‘paradise’ Bailey seeks to inhabit “is host to the same threats as the ‘modern wasteland’ [he has]

left behind.”27 He has, in fact, infected his new surroundings by dint of his urban origins; a

theme regularly at work within the bulk of films concerning the exploits of the detective figure

within extra-urban space. Bailey’s passive embrace of his impending demise speak of a “loss of

faith in the regenerative possibilities to be derived from immersion in nature,”28 and regardless

of whether the discovery of his whereabouts in Bridgeport could be attributed to chance

(Waitress: “it’s a small world…”) or fate (Joe: “…or a big sign”), it is clear that the consequential

traces of one’s urban origins are impossible to shroud.

The theme of the incompatible or problematic otherness of the detective figure within

non-urban space can be found at play within a number of other films as well. As prefigured by

the hugely popular British “puzzle tradition of the inter-war period [that] often displayed a

preference for non-urban milieu, exemplified in the country house murder,”29 and the “Oriental”

detective franchises of Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto which functioned as early cinematic

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precedents that featured scenarios of non-urban investigation, which served as the foundation

for explorative inquiries into the relationship between national origins and allegiances,

criminality, and the concept of the USA as an open-bordered nation, as well as the nation’s

complicated aura of prestige within an increasingly globalized world. These prewar sleuths—

who were often rendered as having been dislodged from their native habitat in a manner akin

to the flâneurs Dupin and Sherlock Holmes being themselves unseated from their contemporary

social moorings—can perhaps be regarded as the antecedents to the brand of postwar detective

who found themselves operating in an unfamiliar physical landscape. But where the practice of

“analytic”30 investigative methodology was shown to compensate for the symptoms of

displacement felt by the prewar Oriental investigator, the postwar urban detective (who “was

perfectly suited to his environment”)31 often finds little or no advantage in the use of such

methods within a non-urban format.

In James Guercio’s Electra Glide in Blue, we are introduced to John Wintergreen (Robert

Blake), a motorcycle cop in rural Arizona who has designs on transcending the unfulfilling

nature of his current position by relocating to Los Angeles and earning his detective’s shield.

However, rather than his tenure in the small-town of Stockman functioning a stepping-stone

toward a more desirable vocation, Wintergreen discovers only too late the physical and

existential dangers of miscalculating the nature of his environment; an environment the film

posits as being ultimately “restricted,”32 in its quality, as opposed to the limitless freedoms

ascribed to this same landscape by John Ford’s Monument Valley epics. The enigmatic

“training” Wintergreen receives from detective Poole (Mitchell Ryan) is rendered ineffective by

Wintergreen’s increasingly problematic reverence for the freedoms he perceives to be

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characteristic of the hippie lifestyle. But the existential freedoms thought to await one following

a physical relocation are usually an impossible mirage, as is demonstrated by Bailey’s inability

to escape his previous exploits in Out of the Past, with similar outcomes haunting the exploits of

detective Black (Jack Nicholson) in The Pledge (2001, Sean Penn), detective Book (Harrison Ford)

in Witness (1985, Peter Weir), and sundry other non-urban detective films.

If a series of increasingly ill-advised 20th century military exploits had impressed

anything upon the psyche of the fundamentally insular USA, such lessons undoubtedly

pertained to the horrors that exist “out there,” beyond the reach of one’s own native space. In

this way, physical geographies become moral ones as well; each place and space carrying with it

the burdens and dangers of its own socio-political temperature and past. “Crossing boundaries,

from a familiar space to an alien one…can provide anxious moments; in some circumstances it

could be fatal.”33 The investigative quests at the heart of such films as Apocalypse Now (1979,

Francis Ford Coppola), Insomnia, Bad Day at Black Rock, and In the Valley of Elah (2007, Paul

Haggis) speak not only to the effect of the investigator upon his environment, but also to the

consequences imposed by a foreign environment upon its non-native trespassers. The

transcendental “retreats” imagined by Thoreau and Emerson34 has been, by these films,

perversely reconfigured as allegories for the enigmatic and potentially terrifying hazards that

may await one when moving from one space to another.

The detective story: more than the sum of its parts

The quest undertaken by the detective figure can be broadly defined as an attempt to

identify an unknown exponent (usually a person) that has been involved in a crime, and

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pinpoint that individual as having been in an exact location within space and time as it pertains

to the execution of the crime in question. The corporeal limitations that hinder the detective in

his search—he cannot, of course, simply travel backwards in time to witness a crime being

committed—are cleverly minimized by the detective’s training, insight, and experience in the

interest of establishing (beyond the shadow of a doubt) whether or not a suspect was indeed

present at the crime scene as opposed to anywhere else in the universe. In this way, the

detective simultaneously whittles away alternative possibilities that may come to bear upon the

execution of the crime (in the manner that a sculptor removes bits of stone until a figure

remains), but the detective also assembles a narrative (to borrow Baudrillard’s well-known

analogy) by collecting an assortment of relevant clues in the interest of constructing an accurate

picture of the crime’s occurrence. While not specifically alluding to Baudrillard’s assessment of

the mystery narrative, we can discern a conceptual parallel in Frederick Jameson’s proposal

which holds that audiences of the mystery narrative are themselves on a quest in seeking

“consumption satisfaction,”35 a concept which, as does Baudrillard’s, ultimately “values” the

solution of the mystery over the composite assemblage of the narrative as a whole. Both of

these proposals stress the importance of the resolution of the mystery narrative, but as I have

argued thus far within this study, the setting in which a mystery quest unfolds is as

fundamentally important to the inertia, purpose, and textual or subtextual ambitions of the film

as any other distinctive element. While it is true that there is a cathartic comfort found in riding

a mystery narrative to its conclusion, I believe such conclusions have a muted value when

removed from the greater context of their component elements. “Detectives investigating a

crime do not simply compile the facts of the case from a range of sources, rather…investigative

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work can be conceptualized as being involved in the social construction of meaning;”36 the

setting of the narrative functioning as an integral facet of this ultimate quest for meaning

“which is [both] literal and symbolic.”37

Spatial perception/conception

With this reiteration of the importance of setting as it bears upon the purpose and

resonance of the investigative narrative in toto, we can begin to effectively analyse the specific

locales in which the detective is found to operate (which will be discussed at length in chapter

2), as well as the territorial mobility of the investigative figure, and the consequences that may

arise in relation to this mobility. “Setting provides an arena for conflicts, which are themselves

determined by the actions and attitudes of the participants.”38 While the city is most often

posited as an unclean space that is absent of physical or moral “hygiene,”39a perspective in the

arts which perhaps originated with Jacob Riis’ landmark work of photojournalism, How the

Other Half Lives (1890), venerated conceptions of extra-urban space are often assumed to

function as a convenient antithesis to these notions of the diseased nature of the urban milieu,

and Hollywood has certainly found no shortage of opportunities to proliferate such a reverence

for non-urban settings (see Days of Heaven [1978, Terrence Malick], Jeremiah Johnson [1972,

Sydney Pollack], The Sound of Music [1965, Robert Wise], Legends of the Fall [1994, Edward

Zwick], Field of Dreams [1989, Phil Alden Robinson], The Quiet Man [1952, John Ford], and

Koyannisqatsi [1982, Godfrey Reggio]). “From Roman times to the present day, the oppositional

relationship that is assumed to exist between the rural and urban has been predicated upon

dystopian models of the city or pastoral-idyllic models of country life and form.”40 However,

20

the non-urban investigative film calls into question the appropriateness of the

city=bad/country=good dichotomy, preferring instead to imagine non-urban spaces as

potentially dystopic and resistant to the inertia of modernity, thus problematizing the quest of

the detective in ways exclusive to such territories.

Let us once again turn our attention to Bad Day at Black Rock and John MacReedy’s

attempt to bring-to-light the truth behind the murder of a man living near the remote desert

hamlet of Black Rock, a fictional town in an unspecified area of the American southwest.41 I

find this film to be particularly useful to this study in light of its amalgamation of both

investigative and Western tropes, the latter of which serve as a reminder that “the hard-boiled

detective story began as an abstraction of essential elements of the Frontier Myth.”42 The

residents of Black Rock—led by local bully Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), whose “Americanness” is

exemplified not only by his name, but by his adornment of a bright red baseball cap and

cowboy boots—are at best indignant toward MacReedy’s presence, and at most, overtly hostile

to it. The train by which MacReedy has arrived from Los Angeles—a nod to the modernity that

has mostly overlooked Black Rock, or has perhaps been resisted by the town’s residents—will

not be returning to collect the investigator for at least a full day after his arrival. Whilst all other

means of transportation (and escape) are summarily sabotaged, the mortal risk of the

investigator is amplified as a result of his being “unplugged” from modernity. Akin to the

themes previously discussed pertaining to Electra Glide in Blue, the restrictive nature of this

space becomes abundantly clear to MacReedy, whose quest to pay homage to a fallen friend has

turned into an exercise in survival. Komoko, the local Japanese emigree sought by MacReedy,

suffered mortal ruin at the hands of the xenophobic residents of Black Rock; an event not likely

21

to reach the attention of the outside world if not for the dogged efforts of this outsider detective.

MacReedy’s worldly experience as a veteran of World War II—the proximate history of which

is spotlighted within the film by the inclusion of such conspicuous wartime signifiers as an

olive-green Jeep, a “woody” station wagon, and an advertisement for war-bonds—is actually

shown (despite his physical handicap, another earmark of the war) to have tempered the

detective in such a way as to allow him to escape his captivity and restore moral and legal-order

to the town, though not without a degree of cautious cynicism upon his departure. In this way,

the aforementioned horrors “out there” are aligned with the horrors of the homeland, further

disavowing a utopian appraisal of the rural pockets of postwar America.

Various configurations of the investigative problematics at work in Bad Day at Black Rock

can be detected across a wide selection of non-urban investigative films, and though I am not

afforded the space to dissect all of these films at length, it is worth glancing at a few noteworthy

examples in the interest of establishing a more well-rounded context from which the rest of the

study can proceed. We might first turn our attention to films such as Sleepy Hollow (1999, Tim

Burton), Dead and Buried (1981, Gary Sherman), and Psycho, all of which are shown to

complicate the investigative process by not only distancing their setting from the immediate

reach of urban modernity, but also propose these extra-urban locales as being ideally suited for

the cultivation of psychological and metaphysical perversions amongst their inhabitants. Sleepy

Hollow’s Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp), who has—in Burton’s rendition of the tale—been

effectively reconfigured from the overly-superstitious schoolteacher of Washington Irving’s

story into an enlightened and fastidious detective charged with solving the mystery pertaining

to a series of beheadings in the film’s eponymous borough. As in Scream of the Wolf, the events

22

of Sleepy Hollow are resistant to ratiocinative analysis and instead present the investigator with

the challenge of restoring metaphysical (in addition to legal) order to this dystopic non-urban

space. A similar call for the restoration of both legal and figurative order (psychological in this

case) can be found in both Psycho and Dead and Buried; each film being concerned with the

exploits of a madman who has become mentally unseated as a result (at least in part) of their

psycho-social isolation within a non-urban landscape. The investigative figures in these films

are faced with acknowledging that “[the] law governs no only all natural phenomena, but also

the working of the human mind,”43 and as we will come to discover in the following chapter,

setting is uniquely utilized by the investigative-narrative as both a modifier of human

behaviour and as a device that serves to contextualize the investigation as being directly or

indirectly influenced by a region’s broader historical and political reverberations.

23

CHAPTER 2: “What the hell is going on in this town?”

Extra-urban territories: space, place, and contexts

Space, one might say, is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening

in the same place.

—MICHAEL DEAR, Between Architecture and Film

A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world.

But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a

stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a

lost homeland as much as he lacks of hope of a promised land to come.

—ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus

The early 20th century shift by the United States away from an agrarian economic format

in favour of its development as an increasingly industrialized nation, propelled by the interests

of urban-centred commerce, did more than simply alter the means by which much of the

nation’s inhabitants earned their living. Rather, this shift impressed heavily upon the very self-

image of the American populace as a nation defined, in part, by the wide array of vocational

and economic opportunities afforded to them. If the 19th century “experience of the rural

landscape was through labour,”44 then this sea-change toward a largely urban-industrial

economic infrastructure should be acknowledged to contribute to our understanding of how the

comprehension of American rural space has experienced fundamental alterations during the

past one-hundred years. Urban space had become “the key form of spatial organisation for

bringing together capital and labour and organising the circulation of commodities.”45 Fading

24

were the agricultural ideals held by previous generations of the American people, in favour of

“the greater number of employment opportunities in the cities.”46

An additional force contributing to these changes in the economic fabric of the

American nation would be found in the aftermath of The Great Depression and its

consequential destabilization of the country’s populace. The fallout from this “event” left the

landscape of the American west strewn with pockets of disenfranchised individuals whose

struggles to survive were largely ignored by a political administration more concerned with

stabilizing the faltering equilibrium of the burgeoning urban-capitalist production interests

based primarily in the upper-Midwest and Northeast regions of the country. Hollywood

narratives—from the classical period and beyond—are littered with explorations of the

Depression and its aftermath, which (it has been thoroughly argued) was largely responsible for

Tinseltown’s meteoric rise into prosperity (see The Grapes of Wrath [1940, John Ford], Heroes for

Sale [1933, William Wellman], Sullivan’s Travels [1941, Preston Sturges], and After Tomorrow

[1932, Frank Borzage] for a few noteworthy examples of these themes). So too did the postwar

narratives of Hollywood crime-films become populated with characters whose deviant exploits

could be traced back to their economic embattlement in the face of the Depression (Davey

Gordon [Jamie Smith] in Killer’s Kiss [1955, Stanley Kubrick], Dix Handley [Sterling Hayden] in

The Asphalt Jungle, Emmett Myers [William Talman] in The Hitch-Hiker, and Roy Earle

[Humphrey Bogart] in High-Sierra). In this way, Hollywood’s exploration of the aftereffects of

the economic turmoil that haunted the United States during the early half of the 20th century at

once serves to call to our attention the ideological evolution that has affected the makeup of the

25

American national identity, but also provides a more well-rendered context by which we can

dissect and interpret the themes at-work within the non-urban investigative film.

“Hiding from the world” – the divided segments of a united nation

The expansive geographical layout of the United States—a remarkable amount of which

still sits unpopulated and unused for any recognizable purpose—provides a diverse array of

settings upon which the sundry variants of the investigative narrative can be found to unfold.

Whether these narratives take place within a space that has been overtly sidestepped by the

advancements of modernity (the motels in Touch of Evil and Psycho, for example) or a landscape

that is resistant to any such attempts by modernity to “settle” it (for example, the Amish

farmland in Witness), I would argue that two themes are (to varying degrees) always at work

within the non-urban investigative film: that of the socio-cultural and socio-political resonance

inherent to the particular region in which the film is set (as it bears upon the formulation and

resolution of the investigation), and that of the historical evolution of the United States into a

nation largely dominated and propelled by capitalist interests pertaining to urban development

and exchange. Though “geography has always been a crucial element of crime and detective

fiction,”47 the thematic importance of such has been, by most scholars, “largely treated

symbolically, to highlight the contrast (for instance) between the rural country houses of an

Agatha Christie and the urban ‘mean streets’ of a Dashiell Hammett.” But rather than simply

discounting a film’s setting as being an incidental facet of the narrative, it is the interest of this

chapter to examine the ways in which these films “look back” at the influences of regional and

national history as they pertain to the investigative quest unfolding within its rural format,

26

whilst also being “attentive to the spatial dimensions”48 at work within the film. Not unlike

R.N. Davidson’s proposal that differing spatial-formats serve to contextualize acts of violence in

different ways49 (for example, the killing of a man who is reading quietly in a library will be

evaluated differently than the killing of the same man on a battlefield), the landscape upon

which an investigation unfolds is carefully rendered in the interest of calling-to-the-fore the

sundry spatial-political conflicts through which the film will ultimately achieve its meaning.

Space invaders: investigating territories

Though the exact nature of the relationship between space and deviant behaviour has

yet to be unanimously agreed upon by criminological experts, most of these experts would

agree that space both affects and is affected by its inhabitants to some degree. While the

longstanding approach of classical criminology “had been concerned with the legal definition of

criminal acts,”50 the 20th century witnessed a shift in the study of deviance toward an

environmental perspective and its attempt to render a comprehensive understanding of the

ways in which “the characteristics of place are central to an understanding of why a specific

event occurs.”51 The position of this dissertation specifically relies on the argument that

“criminal behaviour is significantly influenced by the nature of the immediate environment in

which it occurs,” and that “the distribution of crime in time and space is non-random.”52 If we

accept the assertion by these experts that particular environmental forces are at work in

influencing the behaviour of individuals within space, then we would also have to assume that

the environment is so too imparting its influence upon the detective figure as he carries-out the

investigative quest. This is not to say that the behaviour of the detective operating in rural

27

space is thus ruled by “unconscious” inertia, but instead I believe the environment imparts

influence on an investigation in two discernable ways: first, in its requirement of a differing

investigative skillset or methodology than might normally be employed by the detective within

an urban setting, and second, the manner in which the response of inhabitants to the surveillance

and investigation of their territory will be mediated by their perception of the socio-political

history of that region (as it relates to State-sanctioned governance, civil rights, economic

stability, and various other influences).

The recurrent urban-mystery motif of a “foreign” malefactor who infiltrates the city is

inverted by the rural-mystery film in its tendency to cast the investigative figure in the role of

the outsider/invader. Even when presented with a scenario in which the detective is configured

as a native of non-urban space, his role as an enforcer of legal and moral authority sets him in

league with the interests of the urban-centred State as its endeavours to maintain stable

governance over a rural populace. As we have likewise discussed, these films at once serve to

foreground the dichotomy of otherness that constitutes the axis between urban and non-urban

American space,53 while concurrently calling into question the various assumptions that pertain

to the dystopian and utopian qualities of either configuration of space. In light of these

observations, we might duly examine the brands of challenges that are seen to arise in these

films as a result of the investigative agent’s operation within non-urban space. Additionally, if

we accept that “human behaviour is both enabled and constrained by a complex set of

sociocultural, political, and economic processes acting across time and space,”54 then it will be

worth making an inquiry into how the regional specificity of a film’s setting might play a role in

dictating the ultimate complexion or outcome of the investigative quest.

28

The challenges of undefined/unbounded space

It would seem that the sheer magnitude of the spaces involved in many of these films is

the primary agent seen to impede the execution of an investigation within a non-urban format,

but this would only partially explain the forces at work through which the mission of the

investigator is challenged. It is true that in such films as Border Incident, the demise of detective

Bearnes (George Murphy), who has gone undercover to investigate and dismantle an illegal

labour-trafficking ring near the California/Mexico border, stems from the inability of his fellow

agents to reach his location in time to prevent his death. We find another example spatial

disadvantage in the massive state-wide journey undertaken by Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones)

in No Country for Old Men (2007, Joel & Ethan Coen) who, despite reading virtually the same

“clues” as the unflinchingly murderous Chigurh (Javier Bardem) as they both pursue Llewelyn

Moss (Josh Brolin) and his bagful of cash, cannot seem to close the gap of distance between

himself and his suspect. The complicating attributes of distance are further expounded upon in

films such as In Cold Blood (1967, Richard Brooks), On Dangerous Ground, and even in John

Ford’s The Searchers (1956), all of which concern the difficulties of engaging in a manhunt across

expansive tracts of space. However, far from distance merely posing an inconvenience to the

efficiency of the searches in question we might also discern varying degrees of resistance

directed toward the investigator(s) by natives of the space in question, and, more broadly, a

fundamental deterioration in the effectiveness of the investigator’s methods within a non-urban

context. Those these expansive locations might well instill within the investigator “a feeling of

power, a grasp of totality through visual surveillance,” such impressions are only an offshoot of

the “delusional sense that they can encompass and control such space.”55 The vulnerability and

29

decreased efficacy of the investigator—as a result of their being “unplugged” from an urban

format (and thus, modernity)—thus casts the essence of non-urban space in a particularly

dystopian light, while alerting us to the overtly derogatory tone by which the phrase “the

middle of nowhere” has been deployed within our idiomatic lexicon.

At the heart of this non-urban dystopian model we find an increased resistance by the

landscape to being interpreted or “read” by the detective, especially as it concerns the

segregation of variant spaces and the intended uses of those spaces. Despite theorizations of

spatial anxiety being most often applied to the experience of the city (more specifically, as these

anxieties relate to the phenomenon of “the crowd”56), I believe that spatial anxieties can just as

accurately be attributed to the experience of the non-urban landscape as well. Such anxiety can

be discerned to afflict visitors to non-urban space primarily as a result of their being deprived of

“a clear map of how the major trajectories, borders, and districts stand in relation to each

other.”57 While Jane Jacobs has argued that urban landscapes should be physically configured

in such a way as to minimize the rookeries in which criminal activity could flourish,58 no such

configuration is possible within an expansive, non-urban space, thus providing an excellent

context in which the anonymity provided by such space functions as an ideal bedfellow to

deviancy. Rural spaces (and their inhabitants) have intrinsically resisted the development or

“building-up” of the landscape that exists as a symptom of urban modernity; the Spartan

simplicity of the landscape being at once vast and unknowable. As such, the investigation of

rural-space is analogous to examining a pre-industrial, pre-modern society—in other words:

our past. The “potent mixture of the very limited real possibility of harm and a much more

generalized fear of the unknown other” that marks the modern psyche, “reminds us that the

30

kinds of fears that we have about living in the contemporary city…were matched by other or

similar terrors in the past.”59 The detective—whose operation within an urban format

contextualizes such a landscape as “a dangerous but fascinating network of often subterranean

relationships in need of decipherment”60 —often finds the effectiveness of his endeavour to

figuratively deconstruct a rural environment to be dampened as a result of there being fewer

“deconstructable” facets of such spaces. The unmodern/unreadable/unmappable qualities of

non-urban space are a primary factor in disorienting the detective on his quest, a concept that

applies equally to the inhabitants of that space as well as its geographical composition. The

Ozark natives of Winter’s Bone, or the collective of oddball residents who populate the sleepy

mountain-town of Twin Peaks, are rendered as the byproducts of their fundamentally insular

gemeinschaft communities; of which the detective is—figuratively or literally—not a part. In this

way, the investigator is not only required to compensate for the challenges posed to him by the

physical nature of the space in which he is investigating, but the human-element often proves to

likewise impart its own unique burdens upon the investigative process.

Regional history, contemporary consequences

Perhaps the greatest influence upon an investigator working within non-urban space

can be found in the socio-historical influence of the specific region in which the detective is

operating. Having examined an extensive corpus of non-urban investigative films, I have

encountered what I would define as thematic patterns within groupings of films that share in

common a regional locality as their setting. If we interpret the detective figure as a

representative of American “individualism,” with the postwar investigative narrative

31

functioning as “a fantasy which compensates for the widespread feeling that larger, more

impersonal forces now dominate the destiny of individuals,”61 then it becomes clear that such

narratives offer subtextual possibilities that extend far beyond the tidy

crime→investigation→solution formula, thus allowing us to explore these films in a manner

that transcends their rudimentary puzzle schema, and allowing them to furnish “a more

extensive understanding of a represented reality.”62

In order to gain a better understanding of how this phenomenon manifests itself within

the extra-urban investigation subgenre, we should endeavour to examine a selection of

regionally-grouped films; ones that are set within the American South being an ideal point-of-

entry by which to do so. We encounter in such films as In the Heat of the Night (1967, Norman

Jewison), Mississippi Burning (1988, Alan Parker), One False Move (1992, Carl Franklin), and

Intruder in the Dust (1949, Clarence Brown) a shared thematic thread regarding racial

problematics and the manner by which this facet of the socio-historical pedigree of the Southern

past is seen to pervade the attitudinal disposition of its contemporary inhabitants. At the most

cursory of levels, the investigative quest at the centre of these films serves at once to provide a

platform for the exploration of the social temperature of that region as it pertains to race and

segregation—i.e. a mimetic representation of that region’s historical makeup—but more

importantly the quest functions as an entity upon which these themes are shown to exert their

own socio-cultural force. In other words, the investigation is both an active and passive

participant at work in rendering the ultimate meaning or purpose of the films in question. The

myopic racial bias that undeniably pervades the social fabric of life in this region—both in the

form of contrasted racial polarity and the dichotomy of rational Northern intellect vs. Southern

32

pride—simultaneously plays itself out upon the canvas of these generalized detective-narratives

while also being contrasted and challenged by the ideological concerns of that same narrative.

The investigation conducted by Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) in In the Heat of the Night is thus not

only posited in racial terms, but utilizes the investigative process as a platform by which a

larger field of socio-historical considerations can be contextualized, more specifically “the

confirmation that the urban North and the civilization it represents are beginning to intrude

upon the ways of the rural South.”63

We see a similar interlinking of racial-bias and resistance to Northern interests in

Mississippi Burning, a story that is centred primarily upon the search for a group of missing

civil-rights activists (presumed murdered) as it is conducted by a pair of Washington-based FBI

agents. As contention between the meddlesome Northern agents and the insular Southern

natives intensifies, the FBI systematically increases the number of agents on the case; a potent

reminder that ideological wars, like physical ones, are often waged in numerical terms. The

moral supremacy assumed by Agent Ward (Willem Dafoe) as an agent of Federal

enforcement—demonstrated by his declaration: “we are the law,” which is swiftly negated by

the claim of a local youth: “not around here you ain’t”—is disputed even by those whom the

FBI is seeking to avenge. As the physical geography of the space being investigated presents its

own challenges to the forensically inclined (and implicitly urban) Federal agents, the supreme

inhibitor of justice stems from the chasm that lies between two prevailing ideologies, and the

socio-historical baggage with which those ideologies are linked. This theme is likewise present

in the Hollywood rendition of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, in which a loosely populated

plantation town is offered as the setting of an investigation involving the murder of a white

33

man at the hands of a black farmer named Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez). When Gavin

Stevens (David Brian), a prominent local (white) lawyer—who we might perceive as a less-

altruistic, bourgeois precursor to Atticus Finch, the righteous hero of Harper Lee’s To Kill a

Mockingbird—initially declines to represent the case, instead leaving the task of proving

Beauchamp’s innocence in the hands of a group of marginalized non-professionals: two

teenagers (one black, one white) and an aging spinster. As an investigative film, the merit of

Intruder in the Dust—or Mississippi Burning, for that matter—comes not from the tidy resolution

of an otherwise by-the-numbers judicial narrative, but rather from the gravity of the politic at

the core of the tale, which we might conclude to be this: justice can prevail in this particular

“space” when (and perhaps only when) such a quest for justice is assisted by the efforts of

parties who exist exclusive of the official matrix of legal enforcement. The non-neutrality of the

narratives toward the cause of their respective investigative heroes at once serves to champion

the altruistic mission with which these films are concerned, but also stands as a thought-

provoking inquiry into the complexion of the justice system within a particular region; the

investigator being a component of the system at large.

We can detect shared themes amongst various other regionally grouped investigative

films as well. In films of this genre that are set in the American Midwest, though less socio-

politically charged than those set within the South, we find a common theme of “class

transcendence” at the core of many narratives that feature a non-urban investigative

framework. Titles such as Fargo (1996, Joel Coen), The Hunter, Winter’s Bone, No Country for Old

Men, and In Cold Blood set the detective(s) against an individual or individuals whose exploits—

mostly in the form of theft—could all be interpreted as a side-stepping of the traditional

34

American capitalist maxim64 which assumes that with diligence and hard-work comes

opportunity and financial reward. It is not difficult to discern why this region, which general

prevailing sentiment would accredit as being populated by blue-collar, “salt of the Earth” type

peoples, is one ideally suited to host these theft-based serie noir narratives (i.e. the

crime→investigation→order-restored formula). As we have likewise observed in films set

within the South, the resolution of the narrative is of secondary importance to value-system that

the detective figure is configured to represent. I would argue that within all of these Midwest

films there lies an interest in positioning the investigator as a paladin of regional values, whose

primary role is as the defender of those who participate in this value-system according to its

“rules” (hard-work, the valuation of community, etc.), and as the castigator of those who fail to

do so. Likewise, it is worth nothing that each of these films features an investigative-figure

who is native to the region being investigated, thus inverting the condemnation of the

gemeinschaft phenomenon as it occurs in films such as In the Heat of the Night and Mississippi

Burning, and instead posturing this phenomenon as an admirable cornerstone of life in the

Midwest.

An examination of other regional groupings reveals a similar relationship between the

investigative-quest and the regional-space being investigated. In films set within the

Southwest, we can detect echoes of the classical Western, in which the seemingly unfettered

landscape at once beckons the possibility of boundless psychic freedoms within its inhabitants,

while also rendering the West as a space of dangerous physical and/or existential isolation. As

opposed to urban detective characters, which are often cast as “the lonely and alienated

guardian of the failed city, the hero of last resort in a milieu where all other institutions have

35

broken down (emphasis mine),”65 investigators operating in the rural West are labouring in a

space that was never built up to begin with. These narratives are less about “a basic conflict

between the hero’s value system and that of his corrupt social environment,”66 and more

interested in posturing the detective as a mediator between the rugged iconoclasts that dot the

Western landscape, the interests of federal governance, and the indiscriminate will of a hostile

natural landscape seemingly bent on ridding itself of life altogether; in other words, “someone

capable of maintaining the line between society and barbarism.”67 In the rural American West,

“the law [is] carried in holsters rather than books,”68 and seeks to foster the growth of

communities within this space, as opposed to the “decay”69 being battled by the urban detective

figure. Bad Day at Black Rock, Border Incident, Out of the Past, Scream of the Wolf, Electra Glide in

Blue, Insomnia, The Pledge, The Minus Man (1999, Hampton Fancher), and Warlock all deal to

some degree with the notion of the West as a land rife with possibility, but imminently

dangerous as well. It is not surprising that such a space becomes a deadly proving-ground for

those who choose to participate in the role of society’s protector (the detective, sheriff, marshal,

etc.). Once again, the socio-historical reverberations of a region are proven to impact the

investigator and his quest.

We might lastly (albeit briefly) consider how the filmic investigation of non-urban

space—which is, perhaps, consumed by audiences as an exercise in catharsis—articulates an

awareness of various strands of socio-cultural anxiety. Let us consider the quests undertaken in

such vérité horror pictures as The Last Broadcast (1998, Avalos and Weiler), The Blair Witch Project

(1999, Myrick and Sánchez), and Apollo 18 (2011, Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego) which all (probably

unconsciously) acknowledge the condition of Sartrean nausea70 that imprints the contemporary

36

human-experience. Perhaps more broadly, these films serve as an effort to propose some

relationship between technology and its potential to affirm the ongoing physical vulnerability

of the human body within a decreasingly physical modern world. We find another set of

cultural anxieties explored within the genre of the investigative judicial documentary. The

miscarriage-of-justice theme at play in works such as Paradise Lost: the Child Murders at Robin

Hood Hills (1996, Berlinger and Sinofsky) and The Thin Blue Line (1988, Errol Morris)

concurrently serves to stoke fear in the psyche of the audience as it blows-the-whistle on the

proclaimed infallibility of the American judicial process, all the while taking every subtextual

opportunity to infer that justice is possible, despite the occasional instance of legal misfire. Even

the investigative facets of such space-bound71 films as Outland (1981, Peter Hyams), Solaris

(2002, Steven Soderbergh), Event Horizon (1997, Paul W.S. Anderson), and Alien (1979, Ridley

Scott)—each existing as inquiries into the modern phenomenon of favouring corporate interests

over the sanctity of mankind—can be interpreted as emitting an awareness of how spatial

influence can come to bear upon the psyche of the audience. We might lastly consider the

specialized group of non-investigative, non-urban “invasion” films such as Straw Dogs (1971,

Sam Peckinpah), Funny Games (2008, Michael Haneke), and The Strangers (2008, Bryan Bertino)

where we find a certain penchant of filmmakers to explore the implications of setting as it

pertains to the physical and psychic safety of the individual; the non-urban landscape often

serving as a mimesis for the post-Freud psychological landscape. Though a thorough

deconstruction of the plots of these films will not be necessary, even cursory familiarity with

their plots should serve to act in support of the claim that the effects of spatial causality are

always at work in films of an investigative nature; never merely existing as an incidental

37

platform upon which the action of the film unfolds, but instead serving to advocate the notion

of space and place as integral components utilized in evoking the underlying thematic ambition

and meaning of the films.

38

CHAPTER 3: Controlling space and spacing control

People generally begin to resent me. I don’t mind it when it happens; it’s part of

the job. It will happen. I come here as your salvation with a very high wage. I

establish order, ride roughshod over offenders. At first you’re pleased because

there’s a good deal less trouble. Then a very strange thing happens: you begin to

feel I’m too powerful. You begin to fear me. Not me, but what I am. When that

happens…it’ll be time for me to leave.

—CLAY BLAISEDELL, Warlock

They do say knowledge is power.

—DR. KARL SORENSON, The Cosmic Man (1959, Herbert Greene)

In Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood reworking of the 1997 Norwegian film Insomnia (Erik

Skjoldbjærg), the Alaskan setting to which the film’s narrative has been relocated could be

argued as ranking amongst the least urban landscapes in all of the United States. Upon the

arrival Will Dormer (Al Pacino), a Los Angeles based detective on loan to assist in the

investigation of the murder of a local student (whilst himself dodging an Internal Affairs

Bureau inquiry into his connection to a series of incidents reminiscent of Touch of Evil’s Hank

Quinlan), the local police chief makes the claim that Dormer will “find things a little more

straightforward up here: good guys, bad guys, and a lot less public relations.” In addition to

the film serving as a reminder that individuals involved in the enforcement of legal and moral

order are always a mere component of a larger hierarchy of power, I find the aforementioned

quote useful in launching our pending examination of spatial governance. As we also discern

39

from the events that transpire in Touch of Evil, detectives are nearly always configured as a

representative and extension of State-sanctioned control over space and its inhabitants.

Any space to which a nation stakes a claim will be subject to the compulsory legal and

moral ideologies of that nation—abstract as those ideologies may often be—which serve as the

framework by which a government sustains its constancy. Whether an investigator is perceived

in Freudian terms as a masculine figure tasked with the penetration of an otherwise closed

space, or in medical terms as a doctor whose surgical investigation is performed in the interest

of restoring healthy balance to a diseased body, the detective is always personified as an entity

and representative of power;72 one who is granted privileged access to each of the four

sociological territories: public, home, interactional, and body.73 Though instances in which the

investigator may be granted access to these various territories will vary upon the circumstances

involved, and also assuming that we find validity in the notion that knowledge is bound-up

with power,74 these privileges of spatial access elevate the investigator to a distinctly

authoritative position—either literally or representatively—over a governed body that, it is

assumed, will be prone to disorder if not properly governed. However, many investigative

films task themselves with the inquiry of how effectively or justly the “law” or its channels of

enforcement maintain this position of sovereign governance. As an extension of the “legal-

positivist” position which argues that “laws and rights are created by human action,”75 the

abstract and intangible character of the law as a concept (or construct, perhaps) thus requires the

implementation and utilization of an array of concretized representative entities by which the

law can be decisively exercised and understood by those parties whom the law presumes to

govern, as well as those concerned with its enforcement. In light of these concepts, this chapter

40

will endeavour to explore the status of the filmic investigative figure as a mobilized

representative of an urban-based matrix of governance and, whereupon the investigator is faced

with the task of operating within a non-urban territory, his efforts are summarily challenged by

the lack of “conscious and permanent visibility”76 afforded by the panoptic advantages of an

urban locale. In addition to the various additional influences of spatial inertia upon the

investigative process, it will be worth examining how these films operate as critiques of the

feasibility to engage in “spatial control” within non-urban areas, whilst additionally functioning

to reinforce the notion “that ineffective territoriality means, simply, incomplete state power.”77

The investigative reach

The development of a nationwide network of federally-sanctioned governance and

criminal enforcement that began in its infancy with the figure of the mobilized federal marshal

during the expansionist period of United States history, reached a newly maturated form with

the establishment of the FBI, which “became the model of the modern crime fighting

organization.”78 It has been argued that the phasing out of the prevailing “local justice”

standard for governance was due, at least in part, to the belief that this method acted as “an

impediment to the development of a more effective system of national justice.”79 This

nationalized, regularized system of enforcement—which can be perceived as exhibiting curious

parallels to the early 20th century rise of Fordist industrial production—would presumably

streamline the processes and procedures employed by entities of governance in the interest of

ultimate investigational and judicial efficiency, thereby amplifying the potentiality for gapless

federal control of the national populace. As technological sophistication advanced over the

41

course of the century—resulting in an increased capacity for both ocular and informational

surveillance of the public, as well as in the potential for gathering and indexing of evidence—so

too did the burden upon the investigative figure also increase. The sheer volume of information

requiring “translation” by the detective, who “converts the random into the connected, the

circumstantial into the consequential…and signified into signifier,”80 became increasingly

unmanageable without the assistance of the various supplementary assets of enforcement

afforded to him by the technological advantages maintained by the State. However, while

much of the cinema of investigation seems to operate according to the premise that while crime is

more prevalent in urban localities than in non-urban ones,81 the authoritarian efficacy of the

State—and its tools of enforcement—are more heavily concentrated in the urban realm. We see

a prime example of this premise in Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), in which the

technological and organizational complexity of the forces deployed in the interest in

apprehending the film’s speeding hero are shown to increase as he nears the urban metropolis

of San Francisco. Kowalski’s (Barry Newman) film-ending collision with a pair of bulldozers,

which themselves loom over the audience as the stalwart embodiment of man’s ability to

reconfigure the natural landscape, could perhaps serve as a critique of the manner by which the

State is shown to trumpet its authority by “[using] the law as a control device.”82 But more

broadly I believe Kowalski’s inability to fulfil his quest by gaining access to his urban

destination alerts us to the ways in which “the built environment constitutes a landscape of

domination,”83 the boundary for which will ideally pose resistance to being penetrated by rogue

elements such as Kowalski.

42

While the physical and ideological qualities of urban space clearly share a bidirectional

affiliation and are thus bound to the politics of governance, non-urban space exhibits a less

distinct and thornier relationship to such management of a population within space. The

criminological management of non-urban space is, by the expansive and untamed nature of

such territories, antithetical to the ambitions of the panoptic ideal. While much of the discourse

pertaining to the management of urban populations revolves around the idea that these

populations are earmarked by a diametric opposition between socioeconomic classes within the

landscape of the city, we should not forget that the boundary between the city and the country

is itself a figurative signifier of an unceasing effort by the privileged classes to “control the

dangerous elements in the…population by keeping them out of sight;”84 a concept that by its

very verbiage alludes to the deflated efficiency of the panoptic gaze within non-urban space.

We might then inquire as to exactly how non-urban investigative films imagine the

relationship between space and power to be, the manner by which subsets of the population are

characterized as criminal (this phenomenon being related to power), and what variety of

dystopian anxieties are aroused when these films are set within non-urban space. Of course,

there is no single formula at work within our corpus of films pertaining to these issues, but we

can generally detect a sentiment of mistrust and resistance toward investigative authority

amongst the many of the characters and communities in these films. Whether it be the

corporate employees in Outland, the Rhode Island natives in Dead and Buried, the exploited coal

miners in The Molly Maguires (1970, Martin Ritt), the distraught father in On Dangerous Ground,

or the racist Southerners in Mississippi Burning, there is some degree of resistance or resentment

directed toward the investigative figure in every film we have discussed. Being that the

43

detective is either literally or figuratively an individual operating in the interest of “the judicio-

moral imperatives of the state,”85 it should be no surprise that the de-centred, disparate

populations living outside the boundaries of the city are often doing so in the effort to escape

the convenient reach of federal “control and surveillance.”86 The management of populations

through legal imperatives, “identity formation,”87 and unceasing surveillance would seem to

break down outside the context of an urban locality. In this way, non-urban space can be

discerned to exhibit a less rigorous set of “constraints on criminal spatial behaviour,”88 and

while these films do not necessarily seek to affirm that the particular qualities of a spatial format

encourage deviant behaviour per se, there is oftentimes a prevailing internal deviance at work in

the psyche of these non-urban populations, as is indicated by the varying degrees of resistance

aimed toward the labouring investigator.

“This land is your land, this land is my land” — governance and the governed

Being that “social action always occurs in place (italics mine), and thus is shaped by

spatial contexts,”89 the locality of any film becomes of paramount importance to the subtextual

themes at work within the films. At the forefront of any such thematic considerations within

the sub-genre of the non-urban investigative film will be the manner by which “place expresses

how a spatially connected group of people mediate the demands of…state power.”90 This

dichotomy of us versus them—the very model of otherness at work within many of these

films91—marks the relational fabric that binds entities of urban-based governance to those who

choose to exist outside the boundaries of an urban location, thus functioning as a nod to

Foucauldian penal theory as it pertains to the “confinement and silencing”92 of the marginalized

44

sectors of the social body. However, in addition to this dichotomy existing as a form of

segregation or repression, it has been reconstituted by those it seeks to manage as a tool of

resistance. We might look to the example provided by the human-traffickers in Border Incident,

who have embraced their identity as legal deviants by exploiting the spatial advantages

afforded to them by their rural domain. Likewise, the familial community of

methamphetamine makers/users in Winter’s Bone, having been placed at an economic

disadvantage by their geographical segregation from modern urban commerce, similarly

reconfigure their spatial isolation into a scenario that is advantageous to the pursuit of their

illicit activities. And, perhaps more blatantly than any other film we have thus far examined,

the bigoted community of Mississippi Burning embraces a particular pride in their belief that

regional locality is intrinsically bound to the ideological makeup of a community, which

reminds us that “spatial boundaries are, in part, moral boundaries.”93 As geography is thus

perceived (in the modern world) to reflect and impose the will of the powerful as it seeks to

govern the impoverished or disenfranchised divisions of the social-body,94 we see in these films

an upending of this paradigm on the part of the governed body as they endeavour to reclaim

the freedoms thought to be intrinsically manifested within non-urban space.

As an emissary of the governing body—or, as has been phrased, a “janissary of the

powerful,”95 —the investigator is afforded unique access to otherwise privileged pieces of

information or spaces, and thereby “catalyses” the “crisis”96 that underpins the nature of the

space being investigated. Thus, the setting of the film not only functions as a stage upon which

the events of the narrative can unfold, but additionally “represents a cultural realm in which

fundamental values are in a state of sustained conflict.”97 I have argued that the crisis which

45

afflicts the essence of non-urban space originates from a struggle between resistance and control

as waged by entities of governance and those whom it seeks to govern. While the presence of

the investigator in non-urban space brings to our attention the desire of these entities of

governance to implement total social “transparency”98 within all territories over which such

powers may preside, we also become acutely aware that such spaces may actually be in need of

governance. Taking Lockean philosophy into consideration—which holds to the maxim that

“without government, individuals [lack] adequate protection of their ‘lives, liberties, and

estates,”99—we might discern an undercurrent of anxiety dwelling within such dystopian

renderings of non-urban space. Perhaps this anxiety seeks to tap into a latent audience fear

relating to the possibility of being unplugged from modernity, or, in other words, “the terror of

the collapse of a formally constituted society.”100 But more broadly I believe the non-urban

investigative film is itself a passenger riding the centrifugal inertia of postwar America into the

wild and opaque obscurity of the non-urban landscape. These films propose scenarios in which

such spaces are scrutinized, dissected, and judged, all while questioning the virtue and

practicality of such endeavours when undertaken within this spatial context. The social forces

against which the detective is pitted in the traditional urban investigative film are replaced with

the entropic, unconscious inertia at work within contemporary non-urban space. But even

should we subscribe to the notion that “truth is hidden from view and that the investigative

gaze alone will reveal this truth,”101 the spatial politic at work against the detective in these

films rarely allows for a simple, tidy restoration of order upon the film’s ending. Instead, as is

evident in works such as Psycho or Electra Glide in Blue, these films often conclude with an

uncertain shrug toward the judicial manageability of such a seemingly untameable landscape,

46

which is itself a figurative reflection of the psychic landscape of those individuals who might

call it home.

1 Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, New York: Knopf/Doubleday, 2002, p. 7.

2 Alison Young, Imagining Crime, London: Sage, 1996, p. 84.

3 Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004, p. 6.

4 David Bell, ‘Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror,’ in Paul Cloke and Jo Little (eds), Contested Countryside Cultures, London:

Routledge, 1997, p. 102. 5 Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres, New York: McGraw/Hill, 1981, p. 26.

6 Peter Ibarra, ‘Dislocating Moral Order and Social Identity in Cinematic Space,’ The Sociological Quarterly, 39/3

(Summer 1998), p. 415. 7 David Herbert, ‘Crime and Place: an Introduction,’ in Herbert and Evans (eds), The Geography of Crime, London:

Routledge, 1989, p. 4. 8 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 285.

9 Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1981, p. 189.

10 David Bell, 99.

11 Mariana Valverde, Law and Order: Images, Meanings and Myths, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 83.

12 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Diacritics, 16/1 (Spring 1986), p. 23.

13 Philippa Gates, Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film, Albany, NY: State University of NY

Press, 2006, p. 3. 14

David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001, p. 92. 15

Non-serialized detective characters appeared rather infrequently on cinema screens during this period, with

some notable exceptions being Stranger on the Third Floor (1940, Boris Ingster), Satan Met a Lady (1936, William

Dieterle), and The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston). Recurring detective franchises such as Philo Vance and

Charlie Chan provided the bulk of the remainder of the interwar Hollywood mystery-film output. 16

Porter, 200. 17

William Ruehlmann, Saint with a Gun, New York: NY University Press, 1974, p. 5. 18

Jeremy Bentham, ‘Outline of a work entitled Pauper Management Improved’ in Bentham and Bowring (authors)

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 8, Edinburgh: William Tait Printing, 1843, p. 375. 19

Schatz, 123. 20

Robert Baker & Michael Nietzel, Private Eyes: One Hundred and One Knights, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green

State University Press, 1985, p. 7. 21

Lefebvre, 39. 22

Valverde, 79. 23

David Wilt, ‘Hollywood’s Detective,’ in Peter Rollins (ed), The Columbia Companion to American History on Film,

New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 583. 24

Kenneth Calhoon, ‘The Detective and the Witch: Local Knowledge and the Aesthetic Pre-history of Detection,’

Comparative Literature, 47/4 (Autumn 1995), p. 326. 25

Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Experiments in Another Country,’ in Eric Sundquist (ed), American Realism, Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, p. 138. 26

Porter, 193. 27

Jonathan Bell, ‘Shadows in the Hinterland,’ in Mark Lamster (ed), Architecture in Film, New York: Princeton

Architectural Press, 2000, p. 222. 28

Porter, 201. 29

Frisby, 60. 30

John Irwin, ‘Mysteries we Reread,’ in Patricia Merivale (ed), Detecting Texts, Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1999, p. 27. 31

Schatz, 238. 32

Mark Shiel, ‘Banal and Magnificent Space in Electra Glide in Blue (1973),’ Cinema Journal 46/2 (Winter 2007), p.

94.

47

33

David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 32. 34

Ray B. Browne, Heroes and Humanities, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1987, p. 9. 35

Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 16. 36

Martin Innes, Investigating Murder, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 6. 37

Ralph Willett, The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996,

p. 11. 38

Schatz, 24. 39

Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992, p. 23. 40

Kerry Kidd, ‘The Child in the Cinema,’ in Catherine Fowler (ed), Representing the Rural, Detroit: Wayne State

University Press, 2006, p. 213. 41

Black Rock is presumably located in California, given its implied proximity to Los Angeles. 42

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: the Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, New York: Harper

Perennial, 1993, p. 217. 43

Lawrence Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence, Hampshire, NY: Palgrave/MacMillan,

2003, p. 32. 44

Simone Abram, ‘The Rural Gaze,’ in Paul Cloke (ed), Country Visions, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003, p. 32. 45

John Lea, Crime and Modernity: Continuities in Left Realist Criminology, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,

2002, p. 114. 46

Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 16. 47

Simon Joyce, Capital Offences: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London, Charlottesville, VA:

University of Virginia Press, 2003, p. 7. 48

Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: the Killer and the American Gothic Imagination, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1998, p. 121. 49

R.N. Davidson, ‘The Micro-Environments of Violence,’ in Herbert and Evans (eds), The Geography of Crime,

London: Routledge, 1989, p. 59. 50

Paul Brantingham and Ray Jeffery, ‘Crime, Space, and Criminological Theory,’ in Brantingham (ed),

Environmental Criminology, London: Sage Publications, 1981, p. 233. 51

Herbert, 4. 52

Richard Wortley and Lorraine Mazerolle, ‘Situating the Theory, Analytic Approach, and Application, in Wortley

and Mazerolle (eds), Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis, Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing, 2008, p. 2. 53

It might be useful to consider the suburbs as the intermediary space between the polarized pairing of non-urban

and urban space. 54

Michael Dear, ‘Between Architecture and Film,’ Architectural Design, 64/11-12 (1994), p. 13. 55

Jonathan Bell, 225. 56

Young, 86. 57

Joyce, 2. 58

Jane Jacobs, ‘The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety,’ in Bridge and Watson (eds), The Blackwell City Reader, Oxford:

Blackwell Publishing, 2002, p. 351. 59

Mary Evans, The Imagination of Evil: Detective Fiction and the Modern World, London: Continuum Publishing,

2009, p. 42. 60

James Donald, Imagining the Modern City, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 70. 61

Cyrus Patell, ‘Screen Memory,’ (quoting Morris Dickstein), Harvard Review, No. 4 (Spring 1993), p. 27. 62

Jon Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism, Urbana, IL: University of

Illinois Press, 1993, p. 120. 63

Philippa Gates, ‘Getting Away With It: Villainy in the Contemporary Hollywood Detective Film,’ in Gillis and Gates

(eds), The Devil Himself, Westport: Greenwood, 2001, p. 195. 64

At least as I understand it, though I make no claim to the legitimacy of this axiom. 65

Porter, 200. 66

Schatz, 125. 67

Nicole Rafter, Shots in the Mirror, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 176. 68

Ray Billington, The Far Western Frontier, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, p. 251.

48

69

Gates, in The Devil Himself, p. 192. 70

Here I am referencing the Jameson interpretation of Sartre’s theory — Jameson, 7. 71

Outer-space being perhaps the ultimate example of non-urban space. 72

Power in this case being defined in the Foucauldian sense as “a mobile, non-personal series of techniques of

regulation, supervision, and control of bodies in space.” — Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time & Perversion, London:

Routledge, 1995, p. 126. 73

Stanford Lyman and Marvin Scott, A Sociology of the Absurd, Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1989, p. 90. 74

Sibley, 122. 75

Timothy Lenz, Changing Images of Law in Film and Television Crime Stories, Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang

Publishing, 2003, p. 37. 76

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 201. 77

Herbert, 15. 78

Lenz, 33. 79

Ibid. 80

Young, 89. 81

Harold Winter, The Economics of Crime, London: Routledge, 2008, p. 107. 82

Michael McConville, The Case for the Prosecution, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 16. 83

Sibley, 76. 84

Willett, 5. 85

Linnie Blake, ‘Whoever Fights Monsters,’ in Gillis and Gates (eds), The Devil Himself, Westport: Greenwood,

2002, p. 202. 86

Bryan Turner, ‘The Rationalization of the Body,’ in Lash and Whimster (eds), Max Weber, Rationality, and

Modernity, London: Unwin Hyman, 1987, p. 235. 87

Lea, 128. 88

G.F. Rengert, ‘Behavioral Geography and Criminal Behavior,’ in Herbert and Evans (eds), The Geography of

Crime, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 169. 89

Herbert, 21. 90

Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: from Detroit to Disneyworld, Berkeley, CA: UC Berkeley Press, 1991, p. 12. 91

Sumiko Higashi, ‘The American Origins of Film Noir,’ in Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (eds), Looking Past the

Screen, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, p. 355. 92

Martin Kayman, From Bow Street to Baker Street, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, p. 9. 93

Sibley, 39. 94

Zukin, 19. 95

Steve Greenfield, Guy Osborn, and Peter Robson, Film and the Law: the Cinema of Justice, London: Cavendish,

2001, p. 169. 96

Kenneth MacKinnon, Hollywood’s Small Towns, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984, p. 166. 97

Schatz, 27. 98

Donald, 72. 99

Lenz, 39. 100

David Frisby, ‘Between the Spheres: Kracauer and the Detective Novel,’ Theory, Culture, Society 9/1 (1992), p.

12. 101

Ken Morrison, ‘The Technology of Homicide,’ in Christopher Sharrett (ed), Mythologies of Violence in

Postmodern Media, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999, p. 305.

49

FILMOGRAPHY

After Tomorrow (Frank Borzage, USA, 1932)

Alien (Ridley Scott, USA, 1979)

Alien Nation (Graham Baker, USA, 1988)

Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1965)

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1979)

Apollo 18 (Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, USA/Canada, 2011)

The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, USA, 1950)

Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, USA, 1955)

Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, USA, 2011)

The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez, USA, 1999)

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, USA, 1967)

Border Incident (Anthony Mann, USA 1949)

Chinatown (Roman Polanski, USA, 1974)

The Cosmic Man (Herbert Greene, USA, 1959)

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, USA, 1978)

Dead and Buried (Gary Sherman, USA, 1981)

Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1964)

Electra Glide in Blue (James Guercio, USA, 1973)

Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, USA, 1997), and

Fargo (Joel Coen, USA, 1996)

Field of Dreams (Phil Alden Robinson, USA, 1989)

A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, Italy, 1964)

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, USA/France/UK, 2008)

The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, USA, 1940)

Gun Crazy (Joseph Lewis, USA, 1950)

Heroes for Sale (William Wellman, USA, 1933)

High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, USA, 1941)

The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, USA, 1977)

The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, USA, 1953)

The Hunter (Buzz Kulik, USA, 1980)

I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, USA, 1948)

In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, USA, 1967)

In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, USA, 1967)

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, USA, 2007)

50

Insomnia (Christopher Nolan, USA, 2002)

Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, USA, 1949)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, USA, 1956)

Jeremiah Johnson (Sydney Pollack, USA, 1972)

Killer’s Kiss (Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1955)

Koyannisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, USA, 1982)

The Last Broadcast (Avalos and Weiler, USA, 1998)

The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, USA, 1972)

Legends of the Fall (Edward Zwick, USA, 1994)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, USA, 1962)

The Minus Man (Hampton Fancher, USA, 1999)

Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, USA, 1988)

The Molly Maguires (Martin Ritt, USA, 1970)

Moonrise (Frank Borzage, USA, 1948)

No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2007)

On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, USA, 1952)

One False Move (Carl Franklin, USA, 1992)

Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1947)

Outland (Peter Hyams, USA, 1981),

Paradise Lost (Berlinger and Sinofsky, USA, 1996)

The Pledge (Sean Penn, USA, 2001)

Point Blank (John Boorman, USA, 1967)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1960)

The Quiet Man (John Ford, USA, 1952)

Red Dawn (John Milius, USA, 1984)

Scream of the Wolf (Dan Curtis, USA, 1974)

The Searchers (John Ford, USA, 1956)

Se7en (David Fincher, USA, 1995)

Shane (George Stevens, USA, 1953)

Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton, USA, 1999)

Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2002),

The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, USA, 1965)

The Strangers (Bryan Bertino, USA, 2008)

Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, USA, 1971)

Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, USA, 1941)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, USA, 1974)

51

They Live (John Carpenter, USA, 1988)

They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, USA, 1949)

The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, USA, 1988)

The Thing (John Carpenter, USA, 1982)

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, USA, 1958)

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, USA, 1992)

V (Kenneth Johnson, USA, 1983)

Vanishing Point (Richard Sarafian, USA, 1971)

War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, USA, 1953).

Warlock (Edward Dmytryk, USA, 1959)

Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, USA, 2010)

Witness (Peter Weir, USA, 1985)

52

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Baudrillard, Jean. America, London: Verso Publishing, 1988.

Beauregard, Robert. Voices of Decline, London: Routledge, 2002.

Bell, David. ‘Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror,’ in Paul Cloke and Jo Little (eds), Contested Countryside

Cultures, London: Routledge, 1997.

Bell, Jonathan. ‘Shadows in the Hinterland,’ in Mark Lamster (ed), Architecture in Film, New

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Bentham, Jeremy. ‘Outline of a work entitled Pauper Management Improved’ in Bentham and

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Printing, 1843.

Billington, Ray. The Far Western Frontier, New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Binyon, T.J. Murder Will Out, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Blake, Linnie. ‘Whoever Fights Monsters,’ in Gillis and Gates (eds), The Devil Himself, Westport:

Greenwood, 2002.

Brantingham, Paul and Jeffery, Ray. ‘Crime, Space, and Criminological Theory,’ in Brantingham

(ed), Environmental Criminology, London: Sage Publications, 1981.

Browne, Ray B. Heroes and Humanities, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University

Press, 1987.

Calhoon, Kenneth. ‘The Detective and the Witch: Local Knowledge and the Aesthetic Pre-

History of Detection,’ Comparative Literature, 47/4 (Autumn 1995).

Clover, Carol. ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” in Donald, James (ed), Fantasy

and Cinema, London: BFI Publishing, 1989.

Cooper, Stephen. ‘Sex/Knowledge/Power in the Detective Genre,’ Film Quarterly, 42/3 (Spring

1989).

Cosgrove, Denis. ‘Power and Place in Venetian Territories,’ in Agnew, John (ed), The Power of

Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations, London: Unwin

Hyman, 1989.

Davidson, R.N. ‘The Micro-Environments of Violence,’ in Herbert and Evans (eds), The

Geography of Crime, London: Routledge, 1989.

Dear, Michael. ‘Between Architecture and Film,’ Architectural Design, 64/11-12 (1994).

53

Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.

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