The Fetishization of Place and Space

In Luis Buñuel's film The Phantom of Liberty (1974), a Python-esque series of absurdist sketches, a French bourgeois couple flick through photographs which a creepy-looking man in a park had given to their daughter (with the instruction ‘do not show to grown ups’). We initially only see the parents’ reaction to the photographs and not the images themselves, yet from their evident disgust (and arousal) we naturally assume they are looking at pornographic imagery. However, it soon becomes apparent that the images are those we might typically expect to see on tourist postcards: a sunset scene; the Madeleine Church in Paris (‘sickening!’ – ‘What can you expect nowadays?’); L'Arc de Triomphe (‘obscene’); and, most outrageous of them all, the Taj Mahal (‘that's really going too far’). In Buñuel's surrealist take on the fetishization of place and spectacle in commodity capitalism, the tourist image becomes an erotically charged, slightly seedy object of lascivious consumption; the tourist brochure, by extension, a glossy wank mag. In its attempts to seduce the would-be consumer (enticing him or her to consummate their desire by visiting the places represented in the images), the tourist industry is of course heavily dependent on imagery of all shapes and sizes to distil, evoke or construct an essence or imaginary of place. Discourses of travel are replete with tropes of sexualization, especially in reference to ‘exotic’ places and cultures of the Western imperial imaginary (Shohat and Stam 1994: 141; Van den Abbeele 1992: xxv). In the political economy of seduction and enchantment (Selwyn 2007), the fetishization of architectural monuments and tourist site/sight-seeing locations instils a semiotics of attraction that reduces the plenitude of place, history and identity to the carnality of consumption.