ABSTRACT
Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, billed as an “Iranian vampire spaghetti Western,” features an unconventional protagonist: a vampire who is both a femme fatale and a flâneuse. Set in the fictional Iranian dystopia Badabad, the film draws on a rich mélange of cinematic tropes that also includes elements from film noir to feminism, Nosferatu to New Wave. On her nightly strolls around the city, the Girl encounters other streetwalkers: a prostitute, a drunken boy on his way home from a party, a drug dealer. In her quest to rid Badabad of its boorish bad guys, she must face a dilemma typical of flâneurs from Baudelaire to Breton—and of vampires from Carmilla to Lestat: that of being either a detached voyeur or an active participant who, like Baudelaire’s Monsieur C. G., feeds on the crowd (but in this case, literally). In its exploration of an unlikely heroine—the skateboarding, bloodsucking, black-cloaked beauty of Badabad—this chapter explores the ways in which flânerie remains a useful concept beyond its traditional borders.
