Anxious Latitudes: Heterotopias, Subduction Zones, and the Historico-Spatial Configurations within Dead Man

Abstract

This article uses the film Dead Man to explore Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia through two particular historico-spatial configurations that are created by the western film genre and the myths that support it. In so doing we come to understand that the predicted shift from the heterotopia of crisis to the heterotopia of deviation results in both anxiety and exteriority. I label the position between these two heterotopic spaces the subduction zone and note that this can be a space of critical inquiry.

Keywords:

• space
• heterotopia
• history
• westerns
• the West
• Dead Man

Acknowledgements

An early version of this essay was presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the National Communication Association in Chicago, IL. The author would like to thank Donovan Conley, Greg Dickinson, Gregory Goodale, James Hay, and two anonymous reviewers for their insights and suggestions during the preparation of the manuscript.

Notes

1. I have borrowed the term anxious latitudes from the poet Ralph Angel (1986). Both his poem of this name and the book that shares the title inhabit that difficult locale between space, individual, and history with which I have concerned myself.

2. This is only a short list of some of the more interesting and influential studies of space. Granted, my preference for a particular type of study are on display, but the limits of this format do not permit listing the full range of criticisms and analyses that have been conducted in the last 18 years since the foundational article by Blair et al. (1991).

3. Clearly I am employing a pun based on the film's title, but what else could be done with a movie named Dead Man? Ironically, the French word Foucault uses in his original text-fatal-is exactly the same as that given in most English translations I have read. Such a correspondence required an acknowledgement of sorts.

4. See Hetherington (1997, 1998), for a different and equally rich treatment of heterotopia.

5. Upon taking an unbidden seat next to the protagonist, a smoke stained train fireman remarks, “Look out the window. And doesn't this remind you of when you were in the boat? And then later that night, you were lying, looking up at the ceiling. And the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, 'Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?' And also, where is it that you're from?” (Jarmusch, 1995, 5:45).

6. I am grateful to James Hay for pointing out this element of the film, or what he might term the televisual aspect of the train windows.

7. I would like to point out that these are not the only sorts of spaces to be found in Dead Man. In fact, one of the implications of my position is that we can consider the emplacement of space in multiple ways, and those on offer here are but one example.

8. My playful use of terms is intentional. In so doing I am attempting to enliven my work through the notion of pleasure as suggested by Brian Ott (2004).

9. I have marked the term family because all of the trappers are men. This is not a pejorative judgment, but a straightforward acknowledgement that the character played by punk rocker Iggy Pop is wearing drag and acts as the matron of her (his?) small group. Hence, the mark serves to highlight the subversive humor on display in Dead Man.

10. Bearing in mind the work of Kevin Hetherington (1997), I want to be careful that a distinction is made between the type of ordering that is offered in machinic space and the concept of order that exists in all space. For Hetherington, and following from the work of Michel Foucault (1973), heterotopias are always about ordering, and romantic distinctions between the freedom of the margin and regimentation of the center miss the ordering aspect of all socially constructed spaces. Given the foregoing, machinic space privileges a Fordist sense of order; nobody's space has an underlying order as well, although one less derived from patriarchal and factory practices.