Mapping the movies

Mapping movies seems like a good idea. That's why I bought the book Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies by Andrew DeGraff and A.D. Jameson. The idea originated with DeGraff, an artist and illustrator, who thought it would be cool to draw maps illustrating the movement of characters in his favorite movies from his youth, which explains why the majority of films included are ones that drew teenage boys and young men from the late Seventies to the early Nineties. There are exceptions, such as North by Northwest and Fargo, but most of the movies are things like Star Wars, Star Trek, Ghostbusters and anything featuring Indiana Jones.

Yet while his maps are visually interesting, many of them wall worthy, they don't add much to one's appreciation of the movies. At one point he refers to his map of Clueless as "a big old mess," and it would be an apt description for most of the movies he illustrates. There are just too many characters who go back and forth, their paths intersecting, moving together until going off in separate directions. The various paths are color coded, but once DeGraff gets past the primary colors, distinguishing one character's path from another becomes difficult, if not impossible. The title of one of the movies he illustrates could serve as the title of each of these maps: Labyrinth.

His North by Northwest map works best because he follows just one character, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant). You can actually find where the path begins and where it ends, while reliving each harrowing stop along the way. As characters multiply, so does one's confusion. The Pulp Fiction map follows 17 characters. That includes at least six shades of blue.

But if DeGraff's maps disappoint, Jameson's essays about these movies do not. They give insights the maps fail to provide. Jameson suggests that Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest could be viewed as the first movie James Bond, that Monty Python and the Holy Grail could have been called Richard Nixon and the Holy Grail, and that Cher, the main character in Clueless, has much in common with Sherlock Holmes. He convinces us that, though most of these films may have been made to attract teenagers, they are each worth some mature thought.