Cincinnati as generi-city: cinematic gentrification in Anomalisa, The Killing of a Sacred Deer , and Carol

This article analyzes how three Cincinnati-based indie films from the 2010s illustrate the hidden costs of effacing the referential city in the pursuit of abstraction. Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa (2015), Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) aspire to abstraction in their theatrical style, genre, themes, and settings to critique the alienation and subsequent anomie of capitalist society, but their narrative focalization on the malaise of cosmopolitan elites, which surfaces in confrontations with lower-class counterparts, ignores the more profound alienations of urban renewal as a capital spatial fix. Fittingly, the artistic and allegorical integrity of these films entails the concomitant disintegration of Cincinnati. While Kaufman’s animated film reduces Cincinnati to nothing more than a comic signifier of a boring, standardized city, Cincinnati turns itself into a series of nondescript signifiers for Lanthimos’ and Haynes’ live action films. Unnamed despite its skyline being on full display in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and doubling as mid-century New York with its historical architecture on exhibit in Carol, Cincinnati trades its identity to play a generic metropolis – Generi-City. In disregarding Cincinnati as a particular urban place, specifically in terms of gentrification and race, these auteur productions unwittingly replicate the city’s own embrace of urban renewal. Even if their intentions are noble, e.g. to satirize capitalism in the case of the auteur or to generate local economic activity in the case of the city, the result is the same: a generic cosmopolitanism mired in neoliberal gentrification.