Lights, Camera, Parking!

Today I was talking about CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) with Barry Davidson, Executive Director of the Canada-based International CPTED Association, and we both agreed that car parks have been subject to character assassination in the modern media.

Have you noticed that parking lots in the movies and on TV are often the scene of car chases, gun fights, abductions, murders and other nefarious activities? In addition, people always meet in car parks when they are conducting some sort of illegal or immoral transaction, which often goes very wrong. Car parks have replaced the back alley as Hollywood’s preferred locale fatale.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of many movies featuring parking lot mayhem – Back to the Future, Heat, Terminator 2, The Bourne Ultimatum, Thelma and Louise. I think every James Bond movie has a car park scene. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Pierce Brosnan drives a car through a parking lot, remotely from the back seat, under a hailstorm of bullets, of course. The scene where a helpless victim is hiding behind cars in a parking lot with a bad guy in a close pursuit – and the victim looks under the cars to see the bad guy’s shoes – is a classic cinema stereotype. And the TV episodes that situate danger in parking lots are too numerous to catalog.

“When is the last time you saw a movie scene in a parking lot or garage that didn’t have spooky music going on,” says Davidson. “These are some of the things that any crime prevention or social planner has to fight against constantly, to break down the barriers we create in media.”

I think it’s time Hollywood presented the public with some positive parking lot role models.