Abstract
‘Anyway, I’m finally crossing over, into the Third World, where I’ve always known I’ve belonged. I don’t know why.’ So goes the interior monologue at the close of Donald Cammell’s last film Wild Side (1995) as the female lead Alex (Anne Heche) crosses the Mexican border in the arms of a woman, Virginia (Joan Chen). Having worked as a merchant banker and being confronted with the option of having to ‘turn tricks’ with her male clients in order to keep her job, Alex turns hooker of her own accord. She wants her lifestyle and, she says, a little integrity. But in so doing she falls into a web of criminal intrigue and she wants out. Succumbing to the wiles of Virginia, the money-laundering pawn of her gangster husband Bruno (Christopher Walken), Alex finds herself stitched into an elaborate scam from which, it appears, there is little chance of escape. But Alex and Virginia hatch a scam of their own, escaping to the margin Alex had always longed for. Casting a glance over her sleepy new Oriental lover as they escape over the border into Mexico, Alex comes to the realization that she belongs at the margin of her own existence, that she belongs in exile and she will write her own borders.
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Notes
As cited in Geoffrey MacNab, ‘Hooker’s Magic’, Sight and Sound 27 (1999): 26.
M.J. Levy in John G. Taylor, From Modernization to Modes of Production: A Critique of the Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan Press, 1976), 3.
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Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1988), 313.
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Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 99.
See James Roy MacBean, ‘Vent d’Est or Godard and Rocha at the Crossroads’ in Bill Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 91–111.
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Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Speech of the Red Indian’, in Munir Akash and Daniel Moore eds. The Adam of Two Edens (Syracuse: Jusoor and Syracuse University Press, 2000), 127–45.
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Peter Handke, Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 249.
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See Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1996), 64, 77.
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See Fouad Ajami, ‘Under Western Eyes: The Fate of Bosnia’, Survival 41(2) (Summer 1999): 36–7 for a more thorough analysis of this ethnic calamity.
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Etienne Balibar, ‘Is there a “Neo-Racism”?’in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 22.
Dušan I. Bjelić, ‘The Balkans: Europe’s Cesspool’, Cultural Critique 62 (Winter 2006): 34.
Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and Modern Conscience (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998), 36.
Sergei Medvedev and Peter van Ham, Mapping European Security after Kosovo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 39.
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© 2009 Peter McCarthy
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McCarthy, P. (2009). Of Home and Hearth: Maps, Histories and Territorial Claims. In: Writing Diaspora in the West. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230233843_2
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