| As an artistic image, metro space has appeared in numerous recent movies and TV series, which is increasingly emerging as an important symbol of modern city in the world of images.Metro space often plays various roles in movies and TV series. It can act as the scene of characters and incidents, the background of times, as well as the symbol of character's identity. Sometimes it is necessary for the development of plot, bearing narrative functions too. Metro is not only a transportation mean, but also a sign of metropolis. Moreover, as metro includes globalization, residence and body, it becomes an aggregate of space.This thesis employs theories of the"spatial turn"emerging in latter half of the 20th century as the theoretical background and chooses case study in cultural studies as the methods, aiming at interpreting the cultural meaning of the metro space in movies and TV series, analyzing the root of the reflected issues of modern society, and trying to put forward some valuable conclusions and solutions.The thesis comprises three chapters as follow:The first chapter focuses on the various psychological problems that urbanite are suffering from and their origins. Owing to the orderly city planning and construction, urbanite's spatial cognition was broken into fragments, which causes great disturbances to their lives and leads to the trend that people show apathy towards everything.In the second chapter, it shows that metro space, in the context of globalization, is becoming a special mode of space reproduced in different cities, which was exaggerated to be a homogeneous world in movies and series. There are a number of bodies with similar thoughts and behavior in that space too, which causes increasingly serious and common mental health problems. So the image of metro was used as a way to get rid of the problems in some movies.The objects in the last chapter are crowd and wanderers in city. Office workers, disappointed people and homeless men are the three components of the wanderers. The relationship between them and the metro expresses a change that modern people take drifting instead of inhabitation. One result is that the metro image is regarded as a temporary home for them. In a sense, the wanderers, the"flaneur"especially, are a kind of power to rebel the pressure coming from modern urban life.Both in real life and in movies, the metro has become a typical mode of space from which many social problems have been reflected. With the perspective of theories of the"spatial turn"in philosophy, sociology and cultural geography, the study on the cultural meaning of metro will find origins and solutions for the problems. |
