Walk on the Wild Side

Abstract

This chapter considers various cinematic deployments of the stroll, promenade, and walkabout to consider how characters walk through their narratives, as well as if and how the cinematic camera walks with them. It examines how the practice of finding leisure in strolling, linked to the nineteenth century flâneur, gives shape, boundary, and social meaning to the organized act of walking. A reading of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002), in which mobility is linked to peril and mortality, is contrasted to a moment in Vertigo, in which characters stroll through sublimely pleasurable surroundings for the sake of the act itself, one which provides unique respite from the bleakness and hopelessness that otherwise largely engulfs the film.