Between the dirty and the pretty

Abstract

•This article demonstrates how Stephen Frears’ 2002 British film Dirty Pretty Things can further our understanding of the paradoxical structures of globalized space. In examining the interdisciplinary relationship between geography and film, it will examine the ways in which a contemporary, globalized London is constructed of two conflicting, but mutually reinforcing geographical imaginations. Western political parties have often been quick to proclaim the boundless, utopian freedom that the economic process of globalization brings to bear. However, as Dirty Pretty Things demonstrates, this powerful geographical imaginary of utopia is in fact sustained by the exploitation of migrant bodies, who service the lifestyle of the city’s burgeoning tourists and professional classes. These two contradictory geographical imaginations are, in turn, examined through Michel Foucault’s well known notion of ‘heterotopia’ and the geographer Doreen Massey’s writing on the ‘double imaginary’ of globalization. In doing so, the article will show how illegal migrants, whose bodies are exploited and commodified, inhabit a ‘placeless place’ between the two geographical imaginations: between London as a utopian ‘pretty’ place on the one hand, and a ‘dirty’ hidden place of surveillance and exclusion on the other. •