ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the representation of empty urban space in contemporary British cinema. Focusing on London, I am interested in the way Danny Boyle’s zombie-horror fi lm, 28 Days Later (2002), employs postapocalyptic panoramas of deserted cityscapes that reinforce an iconic image of the city. My argument is that, despite its deeply uncanny properties, the fi lm’s vision of an undead metropolis nonetheless plays to the aesthetic and commercial needs of the tourist and city-branding industries. To develop this line of thought, I want to begin by placing the motif of the empty city in the broader context of cinema culture, before addressing how 28 Days Later extends in innovative ways the sort of urban emptiness envisioned by lavish Hollywood productions such as Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001). Seeking to show how such re-imaginings of the city have been an enduring cultural fantasy since the rise of capitalist urbanization, the discussion then draws on Michel de Certeau’s thinking on the erotics of high-rise voyeurism to explore resonances between Boyle’s cinematic cityscape and two very different, yet interconnected, urban texts. The fi rst is William Wordsworth’s London sonnet “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” (1807), one of the fi rst great cityscape poems of urban modernity. The second is the revolving spectacle of the London Eye, the massive Ferris wheel installed
on the South Bank of the Thames and initially conceived as a temporary riverside amusement for the capital’s millennial celebrations.
