ABSTRACT
In his recent neo-noir films, Drive and Only God Forgives, the Danish-American director Nicholas Winding Refn has captured and distilled the dystopia of the contemporary city through his cinematic construction of two imaginary urban deserts, Los Angeles and Bangkok. In both Drive and Only God Forgives, Winding Refn makes use of what Alain Silver and James Ursini (2004) call the noir style in order to establish the Platonic connection between man and city. For Plato the truth of man, and his temper, could be observed in the city, which was an architectural representation of the psychological state of man. As Silver and Ursini note in their book on noir style, the objective of noir stylisation was to capture the psychological state of man in the representation of his environment. For Georg Simmel the contrast between the over-proximity and alienation of the modern city led to the emergence of the psychological condition of loneliness.
