In “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” What’s With All the Oil Refineries and Power Plants?
To truly make an “Iranian vampire spaghetti western,” as A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) is regularly billed, it was filmed in California. Little imagery screams iconic of the American west more than oil refineries and power plants.
They are also dirty, big, pollutant pieces of industrial machinery. Their discharge fills up the sky with smoke. Their presence fills the evening sky, and their sound cannot be ignored. As the only apparent operating business we see aside from drug dens and rave clubs, they complete the disparate setting and compliment the identity of the odd, desolate, lawless, criminal town of Bad City where the characters reside.
The identity of Bad City is intently mish-mashed between Iranian and American culture, much like the director herself. Iranian by parentage, she grew up in Europe and America, absorbing the very different cultures within. The status of women in Muslim society is constantly in flux, and the film uses this intentional confusion of location, character, language and culture in developing Bad City as a means of representation.