Crimes against urbanity: The concrete soul of michael mann

The relationship between crime narratives and generic urban space is the central concern of this article, which will attempt to pose some tentative answers to a set of mysteries that lie at the heart of the contemporary crime movie---what are the aesthetics of detection? How do criminal fictions negotiate the postmodern city? Why do hotels, airports and railway stations make such evocative crime scenes? And what can the genre teach us about the way we engage with our own urban spaces? The films of Michael Mann are, I will suggest, exemplary of a tendency which is present, if unevenly distributed, across a large number of criminal fictions. The crime genre, particularly in its police-procedural and heist-movie variations, is in this sense a lens through which we can examine the mutually constitutive relationship between city-image and self-image. It aestheticizes the infrastructure of late capitalism through a dialectic of enchantment and defacement, providing a vantage point from which generic urban space can be reimagined as a site of fantasy. I focus here on a selection of Mann's crime films which, like all his work, exhibit a pronounced tendency towards spatial abstraction. My intention here is not to offer an appreciation of Mann's work so much as to make a case for the crime genre's capacity to function as a staging ground for spatial politics, a capacity which has implications for the way we visualize city space at the level of the everyday.