Art of Space
Our homes, our selves: The house in American film
“The detached, single-family home is one of the most powerful metonymic signifiers of American cultural life — of the dreams of privacy, enclosure, freedom, autonomy, independence, stability, and prosperity that animate national life in the United States,” writes John David Rhodes in his introduction to Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film. The new book from University of Minnesota Press details how we enjoy viewing private property in the movies — that in buying a movie ticket, “spectatortenants pay for the right to occupy a space in order to gaze up at a space they can never occupy.” Rhodes examines the ways in which gender, race, security, isolation, and issues of property and ownership are treated in cinematic portrayals of the house. A Louisiana native, the author teaches at the University of Cambridge, where he is director of the Centre for Film and Screen.
An early example of the author’s analytical treatment relates to the 1909 D.W. Griffith film The Lonely Villa. “As a fable of property,” he writes, “the film reveals that what is peculiar about modernity is its newly intensified unequal distribution of wealth across a developing landscape.” He elaborated on that idea in a recent phone conversation: “I confess that I’m completely in love with a number of the architectural forms that I write about. I wasn’t really sure what kind of book I was going to write when I set out. Perhaps it would be a love letter to the house. But the more I got into it, I found that all of these beautiful, interesting, compelling constructions also participate in some very damaging tendencies in American life.”
In Spectacle of Property, he discusses the idea that both houses and women have long been objects of possession. He said, “There’s a strong connection between the place where women are expected to live and women’s bodies themselves. For the greater span of historical experience, women were treated as objects of dominion in the way that private property was.” He addresses slavery and the historically imposed low status of African Americans in this country, as seen in The Birth of a Nation and in Gone
With the Wind, a film he writes is “fascinated with the loss, acquisition, and consolidation of private property.” And he updates the topic of the marginalization of African Americans and their property circumstances in his last chapter, about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The first chapter of Spectacle of Property is titled “Cinema’s Short-Term Tenancy: A Materialist Theory of Film Spectatorship.” Therein he burst a film-fantasy bubble regarding one of my favorite movies, To Kill a
Mockingbird. Much of the 1962 film is set on the street where Atticus Finch and his children live. Based on the movie’s opening narration — “Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932, when I first knew it” — the small houses along the street seem to fit so perfectly. The depressing truth is that the filmmakers were not able to find locations in author Harper Lee’s Alabama hometown that had not been modernized beyond the period of the story, so the street was constructed on a Universal Studios backlot, apparently using nearly a dozen early-20th-century houses that were moved from a poor Latino neighborhood to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. “The way the film uses those houses is actually pretty brilliant, but the historical record of how the whole thing came to be is pretty awful,” Rhodes said.
In Rhodes’ hands, we find that the 1960 film Psycho holds an assortment of focuses on property and living situations and living spaces. Both the main two residential settings, the horizontal circa-1930 Bates Motel and the vertical, looming Bates house, he writes, “share the condition of having been discarded.” Asked about the iconic old home, he said, “So much ink has been spilled on that house, but if we just stop saying it’s spooky or it’s Victorian or it’s Gothic, there is something more to be said by getting closer to the actual architecture it references, because of course it’s a totally fake house. It’s a prop. But it’s trying to embody a certain kind of architecture that is itself trying to say what it is to be American. The way I