Looking back at Altman's Film/Genre I can see now that the concept of genre--especially his idea of genre as less fixed, more in flux will in fact be useful as a way to situate the films I want to look at. I think that this will be much easier to do than, as I think I was doing before, trying to argue that my films are somehow *outside* genre. In terms of an ongoing process of genrification, my films are certainly a descendant of film noir, though to what degree they are "neo-noir" is questionable, and Altman provides ways of distinguishing my films from films that nostalgically and self-consciously invoke noir (or have been subsequently claimed to be doing so by critics). So I think I am okay to provide a generic context and rationale for the films I want to study in my proposal, the only problem I think is in naming what these films are - "urban thriller," still seems a bit clunky. In terms of methodology, I have been thinking about invoking Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope as a way to make the argument about concrete locality/space (the American city) and specific forms of representation (the films I want to look at) that seems to have been eluding me so far. Vivian Sobchack's essay "Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir" has been extremely helpful for understanding how this might be done. Still a problem for me though is in trying to find what you've called the gestalt of the thing. I have been thinking about arguing that the city in the 1970s forms a sort of uncertain transitional space, apart and discontinuous from the suburbs that becomes a sort of repository of repressed energies that are put on multiple vectors--I'm thinking particularly of Klute, Hardcore, Cruising, Deathwish here. Shown by history, the city becomes renewed through more repressive forms of social control as place of business, and middle-class consumption and entertainment. But was there a point when it could have gone another way, towards a more liberatory, democratic, or collective form of living? I am apprehensive though about valorizing something like the "loss of identity" as a form of political awakening.

Read the first chapter of Mark Seltzers Serial Killers - it promises to be a useful source of information and analysis on the broader culture surrounding serial killing. He cites many films, novels, and journalistic reports, but does not necessarily attempt (so far) a thor0ugh formal analysis of the visual construction of serial murder/violent events. One of the concepts he develops is the idea of 'stranger-intimacy' - I'm not exactly sure what he means by it yet. The killer's anonymity, apparent selflessness, and desire to merge with the mass is something he discusses in the introduction and is pretty fascinating. Also, he mentions the circuit between criminological processes of profiling and crime fiction, recounting the writing of Thomas Harris's books and his research at the FBI, as well as FBI profiler John Douglas's book Mindhunter in which he admits: "Our antecedents actually go back to crime fiction more than crime fact" going on to cite Poe's detective stories as an inspiration! Amazing.

Paired with Mary Ann Lep's research in Apprehending the Criminal I can definitely make a case for criminology being largely a bogus science... Or, more seriously, a science which masquerades as a science, being in fact a product of a collective literary imagination (?)