But there exists further evidence. Since it is the cloaking of the enunciative instance, its marked retreat from the phenomenal field, that defines the very space of classical detection, we would expect the surfacing of the enunciation to produce within film noir a wholly different sort of space. This is exactly what happens; the infinite, inexhaustible space of the older model - exemplarily realized in the paradox of the locked room - gives way in film noir to its inverse; the lonely room, such as the one in which Neff utters his confession. For Neff sits in one of those vacant office buildings, those plain and, for the moment, uninhabited spaces that constitute the characteristic architecture of film noir. Office buildings late at night, in the early hours of the morning; abandoned warehouses; hotels mysteriously untrafficked; eerily empty corridors: these are the spaces that supplant the locked room. One is struck first of all by the curious depopulation of these spaces, and then by their spareness. In The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), Debbie Marsh, looking around the woefully underdecorated hotel room in which Dave Bannion temporarily resides, delivers an accurate appraisal of this typically noir interior. 'Oh, early nothing!' she quips. But it would be wrong to stop at the observation that these lonely rooms are simply empty of people and decoration. More fundamentally, what film noir presents to us are spaces that have been emptied of desire. Or: the emptiness of the room indicates less that there is nothing in them than that nothing more can be got out of them. They are no longer interpretable. In the strict sense: that is, they will never yield anything new and cannot, therefore, hide anything.