Following a logic that is something more than historical coincidence, the current Technicolor film noir renaissance (Public Eye, The Two Jakes, even Barton Fink, etcetera) occurs exactly as the interior space of classic ( 1 945-55) films noirs is being excised from the American city. All but gone is the kind of hotel room in which Philip Marlowe once regained consciousness - the torn window shade, the single bare lightbulb hanging from a twisted wire, the iron bedstead, the water pitcher and basin used for shaving. There are no longer blocks of poor-but-respectable families living in faded tenements for the hero to wander through, looking for some undefined thing that he will recognize on first sight. There are no more characteristically appropriate offices for the hard-boiled detective; and no more by-the-week rooms for the femme fatale to rent, no questions asked.

Whilst the disappearance of the actual spaces offilm noir has been highly consequential for those forced into homelessness, it has not presented a problem to the makers of revivalist films noirs, who can reconstruct virtual gritty reality in the form of film sets. Now we have a fictional recuperation of the proletarian city just as the actual proletarian space is historically lost. This double movement, to the extent that it shapes the theoretical unconscious, stymies understanding of the homeless situation. Who could possibly want to save this abject, filthy, dangerous space, except as a kind of fictional forbidden territory habitable only by heroes, villains and fools? This space was created to serve as a place from which to flee, or to enter only as a matter of courage beyond reason. With jails, asylums, old folks' and foundling homes, charity hospitals and the like, this space defines the imaginary boundaries of urban misery. Yet the fact remains that the abject interior spaces of film noir, originally a nostalgic bourgeois phantasm of gamey or 'real' subproletarian existence, could, if preserved, serve as a sheltering haven for the homeless.