Tom Sutcliffe: The parking lot in modern mythology

The Week In Culture

I've occasionally fantasised about compiling a book called 95 Theses – not a work of confrontational theology but a collection of the kind of cultural questions which occasionally flash across your mind in a cinema or an art gallery as promising leads, but which only a PhD student would have the time – or motivation – to pursue. I came up with what I thought was a good candidate the other day when I was watching State of Play – the movie remake of Paul Abbott's political thriller, which relocates the action to a Washington in which Woodwards and Bernsteins are beginning to find themselves edged out by Bloggers and Twitters. PhD theses can always do with a showily grandiose title, and my suggestion would be "The Persistence of the Chthonic", with an explanatory subtitle: "The Aesthetics of the Car park in Contemporary Cinema". Then I'd add an epigraph from J G Ballard, quoting from The Atrocity Exhibition about "the mysterious eroticism of the multi-storey car park". The impetus for this thought was the inclusion in State of Play of a classic trope of the modern thriller – a car-park stalk-out, in which a hero finds himself (or herself) under threat in the emptiness of an underground car park. I can't remember whether the television original featured one of these scenes – but in Kevin MacDonald's remake it sits very neatly, as an allusion to the rendezvous where Bob Woodward met Deep Throat, and as the location for a face-off between Russell Crowe and a killer. That's one of the points a competent thesis would have to draw out.

Underground car parks feature in a lot of thrillers because they are functionally helpful locations for a director. They feature a multitude of hiding places and a shortage of safe escape routes. They allow for the sudden and serendipitous arrival of third-parties but can also be plausibly deserted. And the repetitive architecture and murky shadows create a kind of concrete hall-of-mirrors which automatically increases our uncertainty and anxiety.

You'd have to go quite a bit further if you wanted to secure your doctorate, obviously. A couple of chapters at least could be taken up with the development of the car park in general and its steady, sometimes fugitive infiltration into high art. You'd want to mention the Guggenheim Museum, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's unbuilt scheme to build a ziggurat car-park-cum-observatory on the top of an American mountain. And I think the artist Ed Ruscha would get some space for his fine art book Thirtyfour Parking Lots, featuring aerial photographs of Los Angeles car parks. And you'd have to name-check Matthew Barney – whose video installation OttoShaft was conceived for screening in an underground car park in Kassel.

After that it would be time to try to pin down what it is about these unloved structures that makes them so seductive to film-makers. Owen Luder's Trinity Centre car park, the brutalist structure from which Michael Caine hurls a villain to his death in Get Carter would have to feature – offering a canonical example of the way in which the car park extends the pathetic fallacy into the most banal urban space.

Car parks are perceived as architecturally ruthless, indifferent to the niceties of human sentiment, so they make the perfect backdrop for pitiless actions. But it is underground car-parks that would be at the core of the work -– with their stealthy reconstruction of a mythical realm, the underworld, which had notionally become redundant in the 20th century. That's where car-parks take us I think – on a down-ramp to Hades, a place from which we're always grateful to emerge into sunlight. And remember, choose your examiner with care and the thesis need not be true, just sufficiently plausible.

More plague than novel

I've never read The Da Vinci Code – my one (admittedly desultory) attempt to find out what all the fuss was about faltering after a couple of pages. So I feel nothing but apprehension at the announcement that the sequel will be published later this year. I was reminded of the most depressing literary spectacle I've ever seen – on holiday at a Sicilian Club Med, when I noticed one morning that the variety of suntan lotions being used around the pool greatly exceeded the variety of books being read. On virtually every sunlounger perched a copy of Dan Brown's bestseller – as if some kind of pulp fiction locust plague had swept across the compound. Serves me right for signing up at this Guantanamo of leisure, you might say, and I wouldn't contradict you – but I still flinch from the idea of all that precious literacy being consumed by one bad book.

* I met JG Ballard twice – once for an interview for this paper and once to film a BBC4 programme in which we spent the best part of a day trawling round the landscape of ring roads, industrial parks and reservoirs which were to him what the Lake District was to Wordsworth. Both times he was patient, charming and courteous. Famously, a publisher's reader who saw the manuscript of Crash declared, "the author of this book is beyond psychiatric help"; a tribute to how unsettling that novel is. But I doubt the judgement would have survived a meeting with the author, who struck me as one of the sanest people I've met.