Urban Nightmares and Future Visions: Life Beneath New York

Abstract

At the same time, by promising a solution to the overarching cipher of script- writer Paul Dehn's cyclical vision, the subway partipates in a complex dialogue of visual and material metaphors that in New York of the seventies and eighties used the underground of the city to enunciate a series of questions about class, homelessness, and race. After all, the question for which Taylor and Brent are urgently seeking an answer is one of racial inversion transparently troped in time-honored social Darwinian language: how has a world evolved so that gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans have established a primitive regime of brutal domination of humans who have in consequence lost the power of speech? The answer proposed by the underground is striking in its pulp obviousness: it is their own fault. 1 Now, if the plot structures of popular fiction are often viciously circular in their logic, they are seldom so in the visual imagination of their settings. The force of such fictions, both cinematic and literary, lies in their manipulation of the spaces of everyday life and of the metaphorical power embedded in those spaces. The self-evident quality of pulp truth is equally the power of visual recognition: the conviction that what we (and Brent) see can only be the New York City subway. In this article, I explore the peculiarly [End Page 10] powerful sway of underground New York on the postwar American (and global) imagination, focusing on the flood of these underground myths in movies of the seventies and eighties, as...