Subtitled “What led James Dean to perish in the desert”, the book links personal artistic work (photographs, films, paintings and installations) with writings and films on the city. Filmmakers, sociologists, historians and philosophers are brought together around three themes (image, world and death) and a central thesis: the city, its architecture of movement, its industrial production of images, its political history - in a word, its myth - contain within themselves their flip side, the apocalypse.