the exhorbitant city

There is a final point about the exhorbitant city that might be noted. As dream and idea the city projects a specific kind of eroticism. This eroticism has nothing to do with romantic cliches or, as Roland Barthes reminds us, with red-light districts. Rather, it relates to the kinds of uncertain sociality found in cities, where social relations with others are either changing or have broken down. The "erotic dimension" in the most general sense is the experience of these new forms of often painful sociality, which takes place always with a mix of desire and puzzlement, where eroticism vies with confusion. It is in this sense that the city is erotic and becomes "the site of our encounter with the other ... the privileged site where the other is and where we ourselves are the other, and the site where one plays". Barthes stresses play and the ludic, the pleasure of the spatial text; but there is also a darker side that he does not emphasize but that the best urban films made today do. In the cinematic city bizarre symptoms of the erotic include the sudden eruption of irrational impulses and obsessions coming apparently from nowhere to take possession of the individual, like the uncontrollable urge to steal motorcars and peacocks in Dervis Zaim's Somersault in a Coffin, a Turkish film set in Istanbul; or the spectacle of the disappointed lover gorging himself on cans of pineapples that have passed their use-by date in the Hong Kong film Chungking Express.

                    -Ackbar Abbas, 'Cinema, the City, and the Cinematic' in Global Cities (2003)