Tourism and Anachronistic Space

“…being frightened is paradoxically a sign of empowerment.”
- Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai*

Although I certainly think that there is some truth to Ritzer and Liska’s contention that contemporary tourism thrives on sameness rather than difference (I tend to lean more towards Bauman’s notion of “extraterritorialization” in which there is a more nuanced blending of the two), I definitely think that there is something to be said about the persistent, yet ambivalent search for “authentically different” experiences in the American popular imaginary. To me, this is an important aspect of what touristic horror films like Turistas (as well as Hostel/Hostel 2 and The Descent, among others) are all about.

In her essay “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism,”** Anne McClintock employs the very useful notion of “anachronistic space” to help explain the relationship between perceptions of time and space in the colonial imaginary. In her conceptualization, she argues that the modern adventurer’s journey involves not only a traversal of space, but also a traversal back through time to the “pre-industrial past.” Such a double movement allows for the emergence of contradictions from both psychoanalytic and historical perspectives: to the adventurer hailing from the modern, repressive society, the pre-Oedipal, colonial space comes to signify both a nostalgic return to a romanticized “natural” or “real” world, but also an anxiety surrounding the dangerous and savage unknown. And as many feminist, psychoanalytic critics have pointed out, this simultaneously idyllic and “terrible place” is often coded as feminine. (References are often made to dark, cavernous spaces, bleeding/crying, feminized monsters, etc.)

This historical and analytic framework is useful in helping to explain the impetus behind Turistas’ group of horny, twentysomething tourists and their love-hate relationship with their vacation space. On the one hand, it is a tropical paradise in which encounters with difference amount to consuming exotic food and having intercourse with Brazillian prostitutes. On the other hand, these tourists pay for their infatuation with more “authentic experiences” by encountering the dangers of the other’s uncivilized space: poverty, drug and human trafficking, violence, irrationalism, and a (very strange) third world revenge fantasy. More along the lines of Bauman, I would argue that a touristic conception of space strikes a “balance between the security of the familiar and the adventure of the strange,” and that global capitalism and its ubiquitous branding practices help to ensure much of this “security.” Maybe we can read this film as a cautionary tale that plays on colonial fantasies of the authentically different experience within the safe space of the screen, while simultaneously suggesting that straying beyond the boundaries of the souvenir-laden, guided tour is a dangerous prospect.

Footnotes:
*Briefel, Aviva and Sianne Ngai. “How much did you pay for this place?: Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose’s Candyman” in Horror Film Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. Limelight Editions, 1991, p. 281.

**McClintock, Anne. “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, Inc., 1995, pp.40-42.