Why parking garages? Films like Get Carter and Atlantic City show the parking garage as a perilous cliff—where incredible views are marred by the threat of great heights. Other films like M, All the President’s Men, and Point Blank, rely on its cave-like qualities—based largely on an illusory sense of privacy and protection. While both cave and cliff are apt psychological comparisons, perhaps the best physical parallel is a forest. Repetitive vertical and horizontal elements provide cover—columns replace trees, low ceilings echo a canopy of leaves, cars take the place of brush and boulders, and shadows trick the eye. The addition of cars and motion to this urban jungle makes for a near perfect film location for secret meetings and illicit activity—all of which lies buried or stacked in the heart of the city, without visual reference points, seemingly outside of time and human activity. You don’t stay in a garage, unless you really want or need to do so. A public space minus the public. So, if a bad guy gets bumped off in a parking garage, and no one is there to see it, did it really ever happen?

I had a shower thought about how nothing good ever happens in a parking garage in the movies (and in real life). It’s such an instinctual hellscape that it’s consistently portrayed as the scene of murders, kidnappings, arrests, etc. Fortunately I able to find this article which more or less nails it. I would just emphasize the noise, pollution, and danger from cars.