In the final evening of an archival research trip across France last September, I was thrilled to see that a cinema in Quartier Latin was screening Atlantic City (1980), one of the few films by Louis Malle that I had never watched on the big screen and was likely never going to be able to in the UK, where real cinemas are becoming rapidly extinct. The theatre quickly filled with people, eager to enjoy the unique interaction of Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster with a Michel Piccoli sidekick on the silver screen. It was only upon returning to my hotel room in Montparnasse that I realised it was not only humans who had been enjoying the show. Upon seeing the unmistakable marks of bedbug bites on my arm, I suddenly recalled articles mentioning that cinemas in Paris had been found to be infested and were subsequently fumigated over the summer. Having recently spent a few years studying the history of fumigation, and all too aware of the limitations of the method on terra firma, I was both amused and vexed at being the victim of one of the key pests in Euroamerican imaginations, and of the technoscientific failure to control them. Needless to say, upon returning to Scotland, I washed all my clothes at a high temperature, ruining several forever, and took my suitcase out to the garden, sprayed it with a powerful insecticide, and allowed it to be exposed for a day to an obliging sun, which had finally made its appearance after three summer months of cloud and rain. The anxiety of having brought bedbugs back home lingered for a few days and was then quickly forgotten.
