World in One City: Surrealist Geography and Time–Space Compression in Alex Cox’s Liverpool - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 222

of Liverpool: World in One City . Mapping
ostensibly the same space (or confi guration of
spaces), Cox's Liverpool embraces this surreal-
ity but allows it to manifest itself in different,
more subversive ways. Whereas the surrealism
of Liverpool: World in One City is functionally
predicated on the marketing of Liverpool as a
consumer paradise, Cox's surrealism - pared
down and nurtured in real time (and real
space) - is altogether more radically and tacti-
cally deployed. Allowing the spatial logic of global
corporate capitalism to unravel itself, Three
Businessmen 's surrealist aesthetics reframe the
idea of 'world in one city' as a spatial expression
of, to paraphrase Jameson, the visual and spec-
tacular logic of late capitalism (1984).
In this regard, Three Businessmen may itself
be read as a critical exercise in cognitive map-
ping, contributing to wider debates on the politics
of globalization and multinational capitalism,
and furnishing a cultural space that allows us to
secure positionality, both spatially and politically,
within the everyday consumerscapes that domi-
nate global urban environments. As a cognitive
map, therefore, Three Businessmen plays its part
in instilling a critical spatial imagination in which
we can 'begin to grasp our position as individual
and collective subjects and regain a capacity to
act and struggle which is at present neutralized by
our spatial as well as our social confusion' (Jame-
son, 1995, in Cairns, 2006, p. 199).
As I have argued, the rhythmanalytical dis-
section of media texts and consumer spaces
reveals the underlying structures and tensions

shaping the representation of cities, and, by
extension, the increasingly dissonant spatialities
underpinning many contemporary urban for-
mations. The glitzy sheen and HD cinematogra-
phy of the neo-liberal city symphony has never
been more out of step with our times. After all,
why travel to Liverpool unless to shop? And if
the act of shopping - conceived in terms of con-
sumption for the sake of consumption - has
proved to be not quite the urban panacea that
the regeneration industry had foretold, then
why travel at all?
Yet if the aesthetics and pace of these rep-
resentations seems out of synch with the experi-
ential fabric of everyday urban living, then the
critical observance of such is not to argue for a
counter 'realist' aesthetic of fi lm, or to necessar-
ily posit the case for a more 'authentic' form of
spatio-visual engagement. That is not to say
that these represent arguments that should not
be made, but rather that my more immediate
focus of analysis has been the ways in which
specifi c cinematic geographies shape cognitive
understandings of post-industrial global city-
scapes, and to refl ect on some of the urgent
spatio-political considerations prompted by the
virtual domination of everyday social spaces.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the UK Arts and Humanities
Research Council who funded the research on
which this article draws.

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