ABSTRACT
Urban phantasmagorias addressed to terrestrial and virtual tourists, web surfers and cinematic audiences enclose the horror of the unknown, the ‘stranger’ who traverses their domains and destabilizes fi xities of tradition (Bauman 1991 : 56). The stranger is a mirage of a being ‘without a home’, always ‘multiplying masks and “false selves” … never completely true or completely false’ (Kristeva 1991 : 8) – but always present in narratives of belonging. Just as in horror fi lms, the stranger is constitutive of social ‘monstering’, at once an object of fear, revulsion (as in monsters) and fascination (Latin monstrate = to show) (Wood 1986 ). This chapter explores the psychodynamics of feminized strangerhood as a tourist and cinematic phenomenon, capable of raising objections both in literary and ecclesiastical domains. Focusing on The Da Vinci Code ( DVC , 2006, dir. Ron Howard), Angels and Demons ( AD , 2009, dir. Ron Howard,) and Silent Hill: Homecoming ( SHH , 2006, dir. Cordy Rierson) as well as their popular cultures (websites, computer game and tourist itineraries), it explores the reproduction of some pervasive themes of strangerhood across popular and elite artistic registers. Following closely Massey’s (1993) call for a consideration of power geometries, I examine the temporal and spatial mobilities of gender and ethnicity as ideal types in consumption induced by cinema.
