The worst tourists in the world: Gangsters, heterotopia and the space of global capital In Bruges

Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2008) has generated a substantive body of literature that investigates the collision it stages between the conventions of the travelogue and the conventions of the crime narrative. This criticism, however, does not address the way in which Bruges itself is produced and positioned as socio-economic space. This article argues that In Bruges first constructs and then deconstructs the eponymous city as a heterotopia and, in doing so, sheds light on the common heterotopic qualities of both touristic and illegal spaces. More important, the operations of the narrative produce Bruges as a node in an undifferentiated space of global capital, whose primary characteristic is that of criminality.