Unhomely Cinema

ANTHEM GLOBAL MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES

Anthem Global Media and Communication Studies aims to advance

understanding of the continuously changing global media and communication

environment. The series publishes critical scholarly studies and high-quality edited

volumes on key issues and debates in the field (as well as the occasional trade book and

the more practical how-to guide) on all aspects of media, culture and communication

studies. We invite work that examines not only recent phenomena in this field but also

studies which theorize the continuities between different technologies, topics, eras and

methodologies. Saliently, building on the interdisciplinary strengths of this field,

we particularly welcome cutting-edge research in and at the intersection of

communication and media studies, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology,

telecommunications, public policy, migration and diasporic studies,

gender studies, transnational politics and international relations.

Series Editors
Shakuntala Banaji London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK

Terhi Rantanen London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON WORLD CINEMA

The New Perspectives on World Cinema series publishes engagingly written,

highly accessible and extremely useful books for the educated reader and the student

as well as the scholar. Volumes in this series fall under one of the following categories:

monographs on neglected films and filmmakers; classic as well as contemporary film

scripts; collections of the best previously published criticism (including substantial reviews

and interviews) on single films or filmmakers; translations into English of the best classic

and contemporary film theory; reference works on relatively neglected areas in film

studies, such as production design (including sets, costumes, and make-up), music, editing

and cinematography; and reference works on the relationship between film and the

other performing arts (including theatre, dance, opera, etc.). Many of our titles will be

suitable for use as primary or supplementary course texts at undergraduate and graduate

levels. The goal of the series is thus not only to address subject areas in which adequate

classroom texts are lacking, but also to open up additional avenues for film research,

theoretical speculation and practical criticism.

Series Editors
Wheeler Winston Dixon University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

Unhomely Cinema

Home and Place in

Global Cinema

Dwayne Avery
 Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2014

by ANTHEM PRESS

7576 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright 2014 Dwayne Avery

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Avery, Dwayne, 1977
Unhomely cinema : home and place in global cinema / Dwayne Avery.

pages cm. (Anthem global media and communication studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Home in motion pictures. 2. Families in motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1995.9.H54A94 2014

791.4375dc23

2014028891

Cover photograph by Clark James, www.clarkjamesdigital.com

ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 302 2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1 78308 302 6 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an ebook.

 CONTENTS

Introduction Unhomely Cinema 1

Chapter 1 An Unhomely Theory 9
Chapter 2 The Decline of the Family: Home and
Nation in Krzysztof Kielowskis The Decalogue 29
Chapter 3 The Future Is behind You: Global Gentrification
and the Unhomely Nature of Discarded Places 51
Chapter 4 No Place to Call Home: Work and Home in
Paul Thomas Andersons Punch Drunk Love
and Jason Reitmans Up in the Air 71
Chapter 5 The Terrible Lightness of Being Mobile:
Cell Phone and the Dislocation of Home 93
Chapter 6 Unhomely Revolt in Laurent Cantets Time Out 111
Conclusion 127

References 135
Index 139
 Introduction

UNHOMELY CINEMA

Going Home: The Problem of Dwelling in

Contemporary Film
District 9 is a politically charged science fiction film that was released in
2009. Set in the volatile world of Johannesburg, South Africa, the film tells
the story of a group of insectoid aliens (called Prawns) that get stranded
on Earth when their spacecraft loses an important command module. Like
most space invader films, District 9 utilizes a simple narrative opposition: as
a group of inexplicable outsiders, the aliens form an imminent danger that
must be excised immediately by the humans; however, while District 9 follows
this traditional narrative structure, its low-fi, even quotidian treatment of the
alien invasion distinguishes it from most contemporary science fiction films.
Unlike many high-octane sci-fi films, that all too often portray the aliens as a
formidable military force that is ready and willing to decimate the human race,
in District 9 the enthralling and sensationalistic powers of military technology
are permanently sidelined. In short, there are no impressive intergalactic battle
scenes; no explosive displays of military technology and violence. Neither
are there any awe-inspiring scientific breakthroughs that allow the humans
to vanquish the aliens and save humankind. Quite the contrary, instead of
cunning and intelligent creatures, the Prawns are portrayed as pathetic beings
that are barely able to sustain themselves, let alone wage a massive assault on
the human race. When the humans enter the Prawns suspended spacecraft
near the beginning of the film, for example, what they discover is not some
futuristic shrine to the might of high technology but a disorganized and
malnourished alien population that is on the brink of death.
As a film free of any threatening aliens, District 9 faces a narrative dilemma:
how can an alien invasion film function without any invading aliens? If the
shock and awe of an intergalactic war is not the driving force of the narrative,
what kind of extraterrestrial conflict will move the story forward? The answer
represents perhaps a first for the science fiction genre: instead of emphasizing
humanitys military and technological prowess, instead of decimation being
2 UNHOMELY CINEMA

the storys ultimate point of culmination, the film delves into the far from
futuristic matter of population control, namely, the issue of how to manage the
films political refugees. As the films voice-over narrator proclaims, since the
aliens were unable to mount any kind of resistance against the humans, their
status on Earth became highly precarious. Branded as homeless refugees, the
Prawns were forced to live as outcasts in the citys most violent urban slums.
Even worse, when the slums were no longer able to contain the aliens, District 9
(an extraterrestrial refugee camp located outside the city) was designed to
permanently house the undesirables. Subsequently, unlike many space invader
films that celebrate the sensationalism of war, in District 9 what is explored is
the solemn and all-too-familiar geopolitical reality of forced migration, the
fact that for many exiled peoples, home can be an incredibly alien experience.
Released in 2008, Summer Hours is a French melodrama that serenely
meditates on a sibling rivalry that ensues when Hlne, a passionate and
culturally sophisticated matriarch, dies and leaves her vast country estate to
her three children. As the viewer quickly learns, for Hlne, the estate is much
more than a home, much more than a family heirloom to be passed down to
future generations; most importantly, the house is a shrine to the cultural and
artistic life of France. Housing the artistic achievements of her late uncle (the
home is littered with his paintings, sculptures and furniture), the home is a
symbol of national pride, a testament to the greatness of French cultural life.
When Hlne dies, however, the fate of the home becomes uncertain. While
Frdric, the eldest son, wishes to keep the estate and use it as a summer home,
the other siblings propose to sell it on the open market. After all, since Adrienne
spends most of her time between New York and Japan and Jrmie has taken a
new job in China, neither of them feels that they would ever use the home. As
Adrienne comments, The house doesnt mean very much to me anymore
France either. Living and working all over the globe, Jrmie and Adrienne
represent a world of geographic promiscuity, a contemporary condition
wherein rapid mobility and transience has transformed the home from a local
and embedded place to a network of sites that are traversed in time. Hlnes
home, steeped in the rich heritage of its local surroundings, is simply too
cumbersome for their jet-setter lifestyles. Subsequently, while Frdric pleas
with his siblings to keep the home in the family, his plan is ultimately rejected.
The home will be sold. And while some of Hlnes domestic artefacts end up
in a French museum, where they provide some reference to the artistic legacy
of her uncle, her wishes are rejected, as the homes status as a space of cultural
memory is jeopardized by a world of transnational capital.
Clearly, District 9 and Summer Hours belong to very different film traditions.
However, while both films utilize different genre conventions (sci-fi vs.
melodrama, political satire vs. art house, etc.), they share this feature in
 INTRODUCTION 3

common: both films use the figure of the disrupted and precarious home to
depict a contemporary world where dislocation and homesickness are ever-
present. In short, both films evoke the contemporary unhomely, an experience
of dislocation and disorientation that can be traced back to Freuds seminal
writings on the uncanny. Like the Freudian uncanny, the unhomely refers to
the unnerving way in which the familiarity of home can quickly become alien,
precarious and foreboding. The unhomely refers to the ungrounded feeling
that no place is like home; no home is a place of settlement. In District 9,
the unhomely emerges through the films exploration of the problem of
forced migration, as the Prawns extraterrestrial dislocation echoes a perilous
geopolitical world wherein many must flee in order to escape the uncertainty
of war, natural disasters, famine and racial conflict. Like many victims of the
contemporary diaspora who must make a home on someone elses terms, the
film shows how for many exiled peoples home can be quite alien. Its not just
that the Prawns are subject to brutal surveillance techniques and forced to live
inside a state-sanctioned ghetto homesickness is not simply the product of
the geographic dispossession of home the unhomely is equally about lost
connections in time. Colonization, writes Pierre Bourdieu (1990), represents
a form of collective forgetting. Forced to occupy alien territory, severed from
their cultural roots, the Prawns are stripped of the homely comforts that come
from living in a shared past, from the collective habits that give meaning to
everyday life.
In Summer Hours the unhomely surrounds the way national cultures are
undermined by global motility. For Adrienne and Jrmie, Hlnes home
is simply too French, too provincial, too entrenched in the past to support
their exceptionally mobile lives. Unlike Hlnes conception of home, which
is firmly rooted in the cultural life of ones native land, home for Adrienne
and Jrmie is always elsewhere, always some unmoored place in todays
increasingly networked societies. But perhaps what is most striking about this
film about sibling rivalries is the serene way in which the process of globalization
dismantles and disunifies the home-land. The issue of globalization,
especially the unimportance of local art and culture, is not depicted through a
sentimental retreat into nostalgia. France is not painted as a lost cultural world
that is colonized by brute global processes. Everything seems destined to be
this way. The uncles artworks are merely remnants of a bygone age that has
been eclipsed by international products, like Jrmies prized Puma shoes or
Adriennes Japanese tea sets. Capitalistic change is simply the order of the day.
Indeed, while Frdric protests against his siblings plans, he hardly becomes
impassioned about the ordeal. Instead, the dismantling of the home seems
inevitable, as if abandoning the home were a passing event in the lives of the
family.
4 UNHOMELY CINEMA

This book explores the meaning of the cinematic unhomely. More

specifically, I argue that reading the cinematic unhomely is a multifaceted
experience that takes us into the heart of what it means to live in todays
global, technology-driven societies. Confronting a host of film genres and
narrative conventions, I hope to show that the home is not merely the
backdrop or container for so many unsettling film narratives, but is a vital
concept and place that can teach us much about living amidst the precarious
conditions of globalization. Indeed, as a concept that indicates the disruptive
and disorienting nature of contemporary space, the unhomely offers the
perfect trope for investigating the intersection of contemporary narratives
and the uncanniness associated with postindustrial, global societies. As Rob
Wilson writes, The uncanny all the more circulates in the global technologies
of postmodernity [] haunts them, gives them a new or exploratory efficacy
in the aesthetic mapping of the real, however broken or incomplete the
languages or frames. (2003, 38)
Wilsons observations about the return of the global uncanny are apt.
Within the past few decades, the uncanny has become a supercharged concept
within cultural studies, as the idea has been applied to anything from literary
criticism to architectural studies. However, despite this overflowing of uncanny
studies, very little has been written on uncanny or unhomely cinema, a strange
omission, given the way the cinema has a strong history of documenting and
producing disturbing places. In fact, one could easily compile a comprehensive
taxonomy of uncanny or unhomely films and their place within the history
of cinema. Just think of any horror film, for example, and what you will
encounter is some kind of disturbing, unnerving or eerie mode of residence.
The horror genre is built, if I may use this word, on a foundation of aberrant
modes of habitation. Then there is the melodrama. As a genre that focuses on
the conflicts, crimes and passions that exist within the archetypal middle-class
home, the melodrama is the cultural form par excellence that demonstrates the
homes vulnerability to an assortment of internal and external intrusions. One
could also call upon the dark and sinister places of the American noir films
of the 40s and 50s. The homes in these films are not only depicted as stark,
inhospitable places but their uncanniness speaks to the fallout of much larger
geographic spaces, like the city or even the nation.
The cinema is undoubtedly filled with a plethora of weird and uncanny
spaces. But what differentiates my work on the cinematic unhomely involves
my sociogeographic reading of cinematic unhomeliness. That is, instead
of looking at films that feature weird, strange and fantastical places, my
analysis excavates the unhomely nature of everyday life, the uncanny
practices, technologies and spatial environments that are associated with
contemporary postindustrial societies. Like Homi Bhabhas postcolonial
 INTRODUCTION 5

reading of the uncanny or Anthony Vidlers architectural assessment of

modern uncanniness, I am interested in how the Freudian uncanny can be
appropriately reformulated and extended in the wake of the new conditions
of globalization. As such, instead of exploring haunted houses, spectral forces,
ghosts or eerie monsters, in my analysis the unhomely is as much about the
shared anxieties that arise from living in a borderless world as it is about the
disappearance of the body in the fleshless spaces of information; to encounter
the unhomely is to witness the proper spaces of the nation unravel into the
multilateral flows of the network society. In the age of instant connectivity, the
unhomely arrives in the dissolution of the boundaries of work and leisure. In
short, the unhomely represents a crisis of spatial boundaries, a phenomenon
that is all too common in todays globalized, geopolitical environments.

Chapters
Chapter 1 provides a theoretical overview of the concept of the unhomely.
While the concept of home has been employed in numerous fashions, becoming
anything from a sign of the nation to the politicization of gender and the body,
I argue that images of disrupted and fragile homes offer poignant metaphors
and themes for assessing the geopolitical nature of contemporary societies,
especially the way global motility alters a place-based definition of home. To
contextualize my use of the unhomely, I begin with a brief overview of Freuds
notion of the uncanny a term that indicates the way the subject can suffer
from an attack from within, as the familiar spaces of the home become the site
for an unruly and indeterminate encounter with the return of the repressed.
I then go on to provide an overview of my sociogeographic reading of the
unhomely, especially the way precarious domestic spaces pertain to an analysis
of film genre and narrative.
In chapter 2 the unhomely will be explored in terms of Krzysztof
Kielowskis The Decalogue.1 Airing first in Poland during the late 1980s, The
Decalogue has gone on to receive critical acclaim, becoming one of Kielowskis
most important fictional works. Not only did the series initiate his move
away from the documentary film but it also became the first of a series of
international works that reflected the new globalized cinematic practises

1 For the most part, my analysis focuses on the unhomely nature of contemporary
cinema; however, at times, I include brief references to other kinds of media, like
advertisements and television. The Decalogue represents an exception to this rule, as it is
the subject of an entire chapter. While the series aired initially as a television miniseries,
it is most often treated as a cinematic event, especially since many of the episodes were
featured at various international film festivals. For this reason I have chosen to analyse
the series as a form of cinema.
6 UNHOMELY CINEMA

associated with video technology. But while The Decalogue has attained much of
its critical attention from the series explicit biblical themes and metaphysical
issues, I argue that what is really at stake in The Decalogue is a poignant social
critique of the geopolitical changes affecting modern Poland as it verged on
the brink of a capitalistic revolution. In short, I argue that The Decalogues
representation of home provides an extended metaphor for the nation and
its precarious place in a new global order. This reading can be found in
Kielowskis decision to set the entire series in a desolate apartment complex in
suburban Warsaw. Whereas in socialist times modern architecture represented
the glory of industrial technology and the ideological might of communism,
in The Decalogue this utopian dream has been replaced by an unhomely world
plagued by greed, crime, violence and uncertainty. At the same time, while
the apartment complex evokes the failed legacy of Polands socialist past, the
unhomely also points to a nation on the verge of change. This is revealed in
the form of various recurring material signs, such as passports, international
money orders, personal computers, airports, television screens, telephones,
Western consumer products and advertisements, which show how the solidarity
of Polands national identity is challenged by new geopolitical processes.
In chapter 3 the unhomely is tied to the process of global gentrification,
especially the effect urban beautification projects have on the development
of urban collectives and the public sphere. Specifically, the unhomely will
be analysed in terms of the role media (namely, architecture and old video
technologies) play in the construction of collective memories, especially the
stories people tell themselves to create a sense of belonging. My central film of
analysis will be Michel Gondrys comedy Be Kind Rewind. Set around a series
of decaying and abject spaces in Passaic, New Jersey, Gondrys film tells the
story of how two amateur film directors attempt to save a local, run-down
video store by creating lo-fi remakes of some of Hollywoods most successful
blockbusters. Interestingly, while Gondrys representation of gentrification
provides a fairly standard reading of the way the preservation of architecture is
tied to collective memories, it is his exploration of how outdated media can act
as the ground for new ways of dwelling together that offers new insight into the
role obsolescence plays in contemporary consumer societies. By resurrecting
the obsolete world of analog media (the film collective relies on outdated video
technologies to make their local masterpieces,) Gondry insists that public
participation in media production does not depend on the latest technological
gadgets; rather, community building can be created through the resurrection
of old media technologies and practises.
In chapter 4 I look at how the films Punch Drunk Love and Up in the Air
represent the changing nature of work in the mobile society, especially how the
rise of the twenty-four-hour worker blurs the boundaries between the spaces
 INTRODUCTION 7

of work and home. I begin by showing how under modern work conditions
the home represented a necessary safety zone that helped workers deal with
the burden and stress associated with industrial society. However, while a good
home life was seen as the reward or payoff for participating in capitalistic
work, in recent times the home has become contaminated by the ubiquity
of work. In short, both films explore what Brian Massumi (1993) refers to as
postmodern labour, a situation where the division between leisure time and
work dissolves. I argue that this breakdown leads to an encounter with the
unhomely. Two central themes will be explored that highlight the unhomely
nature of contemporary work. The first involves changes to consumption. In
both films, domestic consumption is no longer seen as a reward for work but
is depicted as a kind of work in itself. This is evidenced in the way both films
look at how ubiquitous consumer loyalty programs, like air miles promotions,
represent a new kind of labour, wherein leisure time is preoccupied with
searching for consumer deals. The second theme involves the notion of the
mobile home. By emphasizing protagonists that are obsessed with work and
have very little need for traditional domestic spaces, both films show how more
space-bound definitions of home are ill equipped for dealing with a world
of perpetual movement. In its place, the films insist that mobile homes a
transient form of home that is designed for people on the go are the best
alternatives for a society obsessed with speed and migration.
Chapter 5 explores the unhomely in terms of the melodramatic theme of
infidelity, especially the domestic hardship that comes about through cheating
husbands. Traditionally, films about infidelity are analysed in terms of the
melodramas sensationalistic and emotionally charged exploration of morality,
desire and repression. My analysis looks at how the unhomely provides an
allegorical map of the structural and spatial changes brought about by the
shift to a mobile technosociety. My principal film of analysis will be Feng
Xiaogangs Cell Phone, a family drama that looks at how the everyday usage of
mobile technologies alters the communicative dynamic of the home, especially
as cell phone practices emerge as sophisticated tools of surveillance that can
conceal and disclose pertinent information about the dweller. The primary
conceptual tools for this chapter come from Ned Schantzs (2003, 2008)
notion of the Ideal Hollywood Telephone an ideological apparatus that
envisions telephone technologies as providing perfect and transparent forms
of communication. The ideal phone, in brief, represents the patriarchal
desire to minimize uncertainty by controlling the circulation of information.
However, while Cell Phone will show how some men attempt to control their
mobile lives, the prospect of noiseless communication is shown to be an
impossible fantasy, as the disruptive figures of contingency and coincidence
destabilize the certainty and stability of home.
8 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Chapter 6 provides an analysis of Laurent Cantets eerie suspense thriller

Time Out, a film that conjoins the main themes of chapters 4 and 5. On the one
hand, the film explores the fragile nature of contemporary work, especially
the rampant fear of unemployment. This is evidenced in the desperate and
pathological measures Vincent, a middle-class, unemployed middle manager,
takes in order to retain his role as the patriarchal head of household. As the
viewer quickly learns, Vincent has not been promoted to a new prestigious job
in Switzerland, but has taken to an aimless life of driving recklessly around
the French countryside. Unable to deal with the monotony and dissatisfaction
of modern work, Vincents precarious life on the road is designed to provide
him with a much-needed time-out. I argue that Vincents detour away from
the home provides an evocative image of the risk society, especially the
ways in which permanent job insecurity threatens the safety of the domestic
sphere. On the other hand, the film explores the social ramifications brought
about by the push for greater forms of migration and mobility. Like the male
characters in Cell Phone, Vincents game of deception hinges on his ability to
remotely control the home from a distance. However, by unhinging himself
from the safety net of the family, Vincents mobile life ends up pushing him
further away from his family, to the point where the home is transformed by
an uncanny case of dj vu.
A concluding chapter will provide a summary of the main themes addressed
in the book.
 Chapter 1

AN UNHOMELY THEORY

The Uncanny 90s

In 1919, Freud published, The Uncanny, a brief essay that sheds light on the
meaning of the uncanny by analysing the short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann. In
many ways, The Uncanny represents an odd work within Freuds impressive
oeuvre. Though the essay focuses on Freuds new theory of psychoanalysis,
especially the castration complex, it is hard not to read the essay as a cipher
of the times, especially in light of important historical events, like the rise of
modern industrial society or the horrors witnessed during the First Great War.
This does not mean that the essay should be read exclusively as a cultural map
of the times or a historical allegory of the surrounding political, social and
technological environments (Castle 1995); nonetheless, Freuds exploration
of everyday uncanniness, especially his fascination with contemporary
technologies, like the robot-like automata featured in Hoffmanns story The
Sandman, provides a succinct glimpse into some of the dramatic social and
technological changes associated with the early twentieth century. Even more
fascinating is that, while the essay represented a minor work during Freuds time,
The Uncanny continues to resonate with, even haunt, the contemporary
imaginary, as the essay has become a monumental source of inspiration for
a wide range of social and cultural theorists, from the philosophical works of
Jacques Derrida to the literary criticism of Terry Castle. The importance of
the essay even prompted the historian Martin Jay to refer to the uncanny as the
master trope of the 1990s. Commenting on his personal experience with the
repetitive nature of the uncanny (Jay was surprised that the proposed title of
his essay on the uncanny had already been used by a New York Times reviewer),
he writes:

I then came to realize that there was something strangely fitting in the fact
that what I thought was an original idea was actually anticipated by someone
else. For it is precisely the issue of the uncertain status of originality and the
haunting of what is new in the present by the residues of the past that is my
theme. The term that best captures that feeling is, of course, the uncanny
10 UNHOMELY CINEMA

[] which has become one of the most supercharged words in our current
critical vocabulary. What, I want to ask, are the implications of its present
power? Why now in the 1990s has the uncanny become a master trope
available for appropriation in a wide variety of contexts? (Jay 1998, 157)

While Jays observations about the uncanny nineties formed a cautionary

tale about the overuse, even abuse, of the idea of the uncanny, especially within
deconstruction theory, discourses on the uncanny continue to flourish within
contemporary social and cultural theory. This is especially true for space-based
disciplines, like architecture and geography, as the spatial disorientation associated
with the uncanny has been used to explore critically the disjointed and jarring
experiences related to postmodern, global societies. As Nicholas Royle writes in his
highly influential book, The Uncanny, the uncanny is not only a common aesthetic
experience that can be felt in so many modern works of art but, as a concept
that shows how familiar and intimate places can suddenly become strange and
disconcerting, the uncanny speaks directly to the meaning of everyday life in
todays increasingly networked and technologically savvy societies:

The uncanny, then, is not merely an aesthetic or psychological

matter [] its critical elaboration is necessarily bound up with analyzing,
questioning and even transforming what is called everyday. This applies
not only in relation to issues of sexuality, class, race, age, imperialism and
colonialism so many issues of potentially uncanny otherness already
evident in the nineteenth century but also, for example, in relation to
notions of automation, technology and programming. There seems to be
a general acknowledgement that our lives, our experiences, the coming
and goings within and all around us are increasingly programmed. Such
is in part the very meaning of globalization. (2003, 23)

Much of this introduction is dedicated to navigating through this new social-

political understanding of the uncanny; however, before exploring the meaning
of the contemporary uncanny, and its relationship to my theory of the unhomely,
it is wise to return to Freud and his initial assessment of the uncanny. For while
Freuds psychoanalytic musings on the uncanny have been the principal source of
inspiration for most discussions of contemporary uncanniness, it is what he rejects
in his definition that matters most to my ideas on the contemporary unhomely.

The Freudian Uncanny

The Uncanny represents an early interdisciplinary encounter between
psychoanalysis and literary criticism. Indeed, while Freuds central aim
 AN UNHOMELY THEORY 11

was to show how the eerie and creepy feelings associated with the uncanny
could be explained through psychoanalysis, especially the subjects libidinal
economy, the essay can be viewed as an important mode of literary criticism.
Focusing on the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Freud observes that the authors
depiction of weird and uncertain situations (strange automata, waxwork
figures, mental illness, epileptic fits) brings the reader into direct contact with
the haunted spaces of modernity. Freud, of course, was not the first person to
align Hoffmanns stories with the uncertainty of the modern world. In 1906
Ernst Jentsch published Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen (translated as On
the Psychology of the Uncanny), an essay that, for Freud, mistakenly situates
the uncanniness of Hoffmanns stories in terms of intellectual uncertainty.
That is, whereas Heimlich, or the homely, represents a familiar world in which
the subject knows what to expect and is in command of their perceptions
and surroundings, the uncanny arrives when the subject is confronted by the
unfamiliar. As Freud (1919) writes, On the whole, Jentsch [] ascribes the
essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual
uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one
does not know ones way about in. The better orientated in his environment a
person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in
regard to the objects and events in it.
For Freud, Jentschs definition is unsatisfactory. Naturally not everything
that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, writes Freud. Something has
to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny.
Freud then sets out to provide his own detailed, albeit contradictory, definition
of the uncanny. In the first part of his definition, Freud turns to linguistics,
noting the rich and polyvalent ways in which the uncanny has been defined.
In Latin, French, English, Greek and Hebrew, Freud observes, the uncanny is
repeatedly associated with a wide range of meanings and associations from
ghoulish and frightening feelings to actual haunted houses and cannot be
reduced to a case of intellectual uncertainty. Furthermore, while numerous
languages provide vivid and eclectic accounts of the strange experience of the
uncanny, it is the German language that, for Freud, offers the most nuanced
account. Citing the entries for both Heimlich and Unheimlich in Daniel Sanders
Ergnzungs-wrterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, Freud writes:

Heimlich, adj. I. [B]elonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame,

intimate, friendly, etc. [] (b) Of animals: tame, companionable to man
[] (c) Intimate, friendly comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content,
etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within
the four walls of his house [] Note especially the negative un-: eerie,
weird, arousing, gruesome fear: Seeming quite unheimlich and ghostly
12 UNHOMELY CINEMA

to him. The unheimlich, fearful hours of night [] These pale

youths are unheimlich and are brewing heaven knows what mischief.
Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained
[] secret and hidden but has come to light. (1919)

As the densities of these two entries indicate, the uncanny is a multifaceted

term that is deeply connected to home. On the one hand, Heimlich, or
homeliness, refers to the capacity to create an intimate and cosy domestic
life; here, space is rendered meaningful through a bourgeois ideology that
emphasizes the privacy and security of the homes interior. This is the
tamed home, a mode of dwelling that differs sharply from some wild
exteriority. On the other hand, Unheimlich, or the uncanny, represents the
negation of comfort and security; it is the impossibility of finding home; the
uncanny home is a strange and eerie place where the supernatural haunts
the dweller; it is a place that abounds in unspeakable horrors and secrets.
But, most importantly, the uncanny home rests on repetition; the uncanny
is that which should have remained secret but returns when the dweller least
expects it.
Interestingly, though Freud begins his treatment of Jentschs definition by
evoking the diverse connotations connected with the Unheimlich, in the end he
betrays this complexity by reducing the uncanny to a single psychoanalytic
framework. This contradiction can be found in the way Freud reduces
everything related to the eerie world of the uncanny to the return of the
repressed. So while Freuds initial inductive method unleashes a plethora of
ideas, experiences and concepts, in the end he reduces the uncanny to the
castration complex, especially the subjects inability to keep at bay various
unconscious thoughts, memories or desires. This is evidenced explicitly in his
interpretation of Hoffmanns story, The Sandman. Whereas one might
contend that the creepiness of the story involves the protagonists inability to
determine the authenticity of a range of automata, for Freud, everything in
the story points to the same threatening possibility, to the subjects unconscious
fear of castration. We shall venture, Freud writes, therefore, to refer the
uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the anxiety belonging to the castration
complex of childhood. Thus, while Jentsch identifies the storys strangeness
with intellectual uncertainty, especially Nathaniels inability to determine
the veracity of the robot-like beings, Freud offers a more temporal reading of
the play between familiarity and unfamiliarity: the uncanny emerges in the
story when something that should have remained repressed (Oedipal desires)
returns to haunt the subject. The uncanny hinges on the possibility of the
return of those repressed desires contained within the interiority of the family
home. Subsequently, while the home is supposed to represent a safe haven
 AN UNHOMELY THEORY 13

that safeguards the dweller, in Freuds estimation it is the home itself that can
surprisingly become the dreadful site of an uncanny return of the repressed.

From the Uncanny to the Unhomely

Unlike Freud, who rejects the semantic polyvalence of the uncanny by
reducing it to a single psychoanalytic framework, my reading of the unhomely
uses the rich, symbolic landscape of home to navigate through a wide range
of uncanny territories. The symbolic reach of the unhomely is, quite simply,
too wide and complex to be tamed by reductive definitions. As Homi
Bhabha writes, the unhomely has a resonance that can be heard distinctly,
if erratically, in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a
range of historical conditions and social contradictions (1992, 142; emphasis
added). The unhomely, like Freud initially uncovered, represents a dense
terrain of connections and experiences that go well beyond the psychology
of the family hearth; it covers the emotional, political and cultural landscapes
of everyday life and in its complexity abounds in contradictions, becoming
anything from an actual place that haunts the dweller to a virtual space of
political change. In short, the unhomely relies on what Dowling and Blunt call
the multi-scalar.
In their book Home, Dowling and Blunt argue for a pluralistic, dispersed
and open conception of dwelling. The home does not embody a single setting
or emotional connection, but is a multifaceted territory that comes to exist
only through its connection to other social relationships, emotions, time
periods and places. In other words, domestic places are multi-scalar. As they
write, A second spatiality of home is that home is multi-scalar. Much of the
literature on home that we have reviewed [] focuses only on the dwelling
and/or household. In contrast, for us senses of belonging and alienation are
constructed across diverse scales, ranging from the body and the household
to the city, nation and globe (2006, 27). Incorporating many scales, the
unhomely is not simply a haunted space of repetition that takes us into the
family home but marks a series of interconnected territories: the home may
embody the interiority of the self or it may cut across the entire fabric of the
nation; it may cover the life of a neighbourhood or the history of a single
building. As Dowling and Blunt continue, Feelings of belonging and relations
with others could be [] stretched across transnational space, or located on a
park bench (2006, 28). From a multi-scalar perspective, then, no home is ever
an island, but an interconnected and porous territory that opens itself up to a
wide range of locations, connections, imaginaries and social relations.
To emphasize the multi-scalar nature of the unhomely, I have decided
to forgo a more linear or progressive line of argument. There is no single
14 UNHOMELY CINEMA

image, theme or location that is taken up by this book; rather, each chapter
anchors a set of separate, but loosely related issues and processes connected
to everyday life in contemporary global societies. As such, the unhomely will
be used as an umbrella concept that enables a number of distinct processes,
locations and emotions to be brought together under the same conceptual
roof. For example, whereas in chapter 2 the unhomely is used to explore the
way urban architecture has been used to represent the health and vitality of
the nation, in chapter 3, I look at the new realities of postmodern labour,
especially the way mobile forms of connectivity allow work to seep into the
domestic sphere. While the main themes explored in these chapters differ
dramatically, using the figure of the unhomely allows them to be seen as
different processes within a larger social dynamic. Furthermore, though my
corpus of films do not belong to a unifying tradition or genre, this multi-
scalar approach can help find common ground among an extensive range
of films that would, under traditional film analysis, be treated separately.

Unhomely Space
The unhomely is, undoubtedly, an eclectic experience. However, this does not
mean that there are no common threads or themes that weave together the many
scales of the unhomely. Quite the contrary, while the unhomely gives shape to
so many different experiences of contemporary inhospitality, one of its principal
characteristics involves the inability to clearly demarcate boundaries. The
unhomely, whatever form it may take, is a phenomenon that rests on problems in
spatial borders and boundaries. In Freuds analysis, this problem was expressed
poignantly through the idea of the uncanny interior. In the stories of Hoffmann,
the house, that supposed site of refuge or protection, a cure even against some
menacing outside, can suddenly become frightening and unnerving, as the dweller
comes face to face with the castration complex. Within the larger gothic tradition,
however, Freuds focus on the uncanny interior represented an exception rather
than the rule. As Anthony Vidler writes, in the gothic imaginary the interiority of
the house was more often viewed as a place of refuge than a threat, as the homes
private boundaries became the only viable way to excise an external intrusion
(1992, 3, 4). Writing about the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Vidler writes, [] the
house provided an especially favoured site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent
domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most
intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion
by alien spirits (17). According to Vidler, these alien spirits often referred to
an assortment of middle class anxieties, especially the bourgeoisie fear of the
rise of the new working classes and the modern industrial city. However, what
interests me here is not what the threat represents, but where the uncanny is
 AN UNHOMELY THEORY 15

located. While the Freudian uncanny centres around the dreadful qualities of
interior space, the unhomely for Vidler can be situated on the outside, as various
unwanted social groups or institutions come to represent those alien spirits that
aim to take possession of the private sphere.
What I find troubling about these earlier readings of the uncanny is that
it would appear that we have some choice in demarcating where a threat is
located: inside or outside. However, demarcating the uncanny in this way
potentially undermines its most important characteristic: its liminality, its
ability to dismantle the line between inside and outside. As Nicholas Royle
argues, the uncanny does not disrupt the border between inside and outside in
any straightforward way. It is not as if one were able to know precisely where a
threat came from as if one were always securely located inside or outside some
unwanted intrusion. The uncanny problematizes the ability to even know or
determine the distinction between external and internal space: The uncanny
has to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from an
apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret
and hidden but has come to light. But it is not out there in any simple sense:
as a crisis of the proper and natural, it disturbs any straightforward sense of
what is inside and what is outside. The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of
framing and borders, an experience of liminality (Royle 2003, 2).
Bordering what is inside and outside, standing in between what is known and
unknown, the unhomely questions the ability to order space through binary
demarcations; the unhomely is a hybrid experience, the feeling of never being
able to find a pure sense of identity or location. For some, what is commonly
perceived as homely may become unhomely, while for others, the unhomely
may form a liberating place of dwelling. There is simply no way to situate the
unhomely within opposing camps. As Homi Bhabha writes of the unhomely
nature of postcolonialism, You must permit me this awkward word
the unhomely because it captures something of the estranging sense of the
relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place. To be unhomed
is not to be homeless, nor can the unhomely be easily accommodated in
that familiar division of social life into private and the public spheres
(1992, 141). For Bhabha, the uncanny is neither the outcome of a direct,
external intrusion or the dismantling of the private sphere from within. The
unhomely moment occurs through a hybrid fusion of interior and exterior
space, as both private and public spheres become confusingly bound up with
each other:

The recesses of the domestic space become sites for historys most
intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home
and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public
16 UNHOMELY CINEMA

become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as

it is disorientating. (2004, 9)

For Bhabha, the hybrid nature of the unhomely requires a new category of space,
a third space, that undermines the binary constitution of self/other, public/
private and inside/outside. In the uncanny world of the third space, hybridity
does not mean the convergence of two separable and distinct identities or places;
on the contrary, hybrid experiences problematize the idea that there were ever two
distinct places or identities to begin with. The importance of hybridity, Bhabha
writes, is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third
emerges, rather hybridity to me is the third space which enables other positions
to emerge [] The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different,
something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and
representation (Rutherford 1990, 211). An example of the hybrid nature of the
unhomely can be seen in Bhabhas rejection of Benedict Andersons work on
imagined communities. In the early 1980s Anderson coined the phrase, the
imagined community, a unifying concept that referred to the way nationhood
is created through shared images, stories and cultural identities. Nationhood, for
Anderson, is not something that is naturally given but emerges when people come
together and celebrate a series of collective images and stories about the nation.
Subsequently, despite its expansive spatiality, the nation can always be reduced
to a series of collective icons and stories, which allow it to be differentiated from
other national identities, communities and stories.
For Bhabha, nationhood, especially when viewed from the perspective of
colonization, is never this straightforward. There is no static and pure national
culture that can be so neatly opposed to other national cultures. Rather, the
forging of the national home is much more akin to the strange and ambivalent
world of the uncanny. For Bhabha, the house of the nation is always hybrid, always
a complicated, disjointed and jarring experience in which other time periods,
peoples, stories and images merge with each other. How can the imaginary
community, Bhabha asks, accommodate a postcolonial world in which many
marginalized peoples are displaced, forcefully pushed outside the borders of the
national culture. Or better still, how does an imaginary community deal with the
unhomely reality of forced accommodation? As Bhabha writes in The World
and the Home, for many people who must endure a reality of forced migration
and forced accommodation, the home-land can be a painful reminder of the
inability to escape the hybrid nature of the world-in-the-home:

In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible. It has less
to do with forcible eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary and
social effects of enforced social accommodation, or historical migrations
 AN UNHOMELY THEORY 17

and cultural relocations. The home does not remain the domain of
domestic life, nor does the world simply become its social or historical
counterpart. The unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in
the home, the home-in-the-world. (Bhabha 1992, 141)

As most of the films discussed in this book will make clear, the hybrid nature of
the unhomely can result in some rather disorienting and conflicting experiences.
Disruption, segregation, erasure and forced accommodation these are just some
of the painful experiences associated with the unhomely. Yet, while the unhomely
can signify an uncanny world of displacement or alienation, it is never simply a
negative sign, a pejorative term that indicates ones abject place in the world. As
a liminal experience that constantly plays with and disrupts the poles between loss
and belonging, the unhomely equally reminds us of the positive, more hopeful
resources that come about through disruption. As Bhabha writes, What does it
mean to be at home in the world? Home may not be where the heart is, nor even
the hearth. Home may be a place of estrangement that becomes the necessary
space of engagement; it may represent a desire for accommodation marked by
an attitude of deep ambivalence toward ones location. Home may be a mode
of living made into a metaphor of survival (1992, 142). While the uncanny is
often treated as a dreadful experience, estrangement and alienation can be viewed
in a positive light. Through ones place of estrangement, through the occupation
of the third space, a new space can open up that allows for an intervention in
the present. By demonstrating to the powerless the unhomely territory which is
singularly their own, Rapport and Overing write, [Bhabhas] aim is to suggest a
way through which they could begin the process of self-empowerment. He calls for
the development of a literature of recognition, through which these peoples could
find the means to signify, negate and initiate their own historic desire (2000, 364).
As Bhabhas ethics of the unhomely demonstrates, even the most painful
experiences, like forced accommodation and displacement, can provide the
ground for an active engagement with the injustices of the world. It is this
blurring of boundaries that also makes the unhomely such a difficult concept
to manage. The unhomely is neither inside nor outside, neither positive nor
negative, neither public nor private. Indeed, while it may seem like the unhomely
is only ever about deciphering and controlling some dangerous and imminent
threat, its hybridity can always lead us to a hopeful elsewhere, a third space
where new dwelling places emerge from the uncertainty of the present.

Exile and Migration: Traversing the Unhomely

The unhomely is without doubt a spatial phenomenon. But while the
unhomely can be explained through a variety of spatial scales, it cannot
18 UNHOMELY CINEMA

be divorced from the transitory experiences of speed, migration and exile.

One might even be tempted to say that the precarious nature of constant
movement is a precondition for the ungrounded feeling of the unhomely; the
unhomely rests on the inability to embed in ones local surroundings. It is the
triumph of deterritorialization. Certainly, from a historical perspective, this
dualistic way of thinking is to be expected migration and rootedness are, so
we have been led to believe, polarizing, incompatible modes of experience. As
Stephen Cairns argues, the concepts of migration and settlement have been
so opposed in Western thought that we often think of both antithetically, as if
one could only ever be at home when one was at a state of rest:

This binary relation privileged such principles as settlement, stability,

and permanence over those of movement, flux, and fluidity. Migrancy,
in its various enforced and voluntary forms was aligned with the suspect
qualities of movement, and so came to be considered to be the unfortunate
exception to a more general principle of settlement. Within this logic, the
migrant was ascribed kinship with the nomad, the Scythian, the gypsy,
the wild man, and other figures that haunted the imagination of the
settled citizen. (2003, 1)

Interestingly, though we have grown accustomed to greater forms of speed

and migration, as we maintain lightning-fast access to information and are
calibrated to the disjointed rhythms of virtual space, many critics still valorize
visions of home that celebrate rootedness over speed and migration. As Cairns
writes, migration and speed haunts the grounded spaces of settlement; to
be at home requires that speed and migration be kept at bay. This preference
for grounded modes of dwelling is particularly evident in the works of French
theorists Paul Virilio and Marc Aug. For both Virilio and Aug, we are living
in a time of nomadic cultures, a time when new technologies, especially
information technologies, continue to wreak havoc on our connections to
local places. Focusing his entire oeuvre around the Greek word dromology,
or the logic of speed, Virilios historical exploration of how societies are
structured and reconfigured by new modes of transport has led him to claim
that we are living amidst an entirely new regime of time: absolute real
time. While contemporary societies continue to make improvements in their
transportation technologies (faster highways, newer jet technologies, etc.),
for Virilio, these developments merely represent relative changes, changes
in degree, in comparison to the radical and absolute transformation brought
about by information technologies. Since information travels at the speed of
light, the ultimate speed barrier, there are no further advances to be made to
the speed of communication. This leads to a state of absolute real time,
 AN UNHOMELY THEORY 19

a point of no return where every part of the globe is contained within the
same informatic time zone. As such, locality becomes irrelevant to the ways in
which people converse and communicate, since in a world governed by real
time there is no difference between communicating locally or globally. All
communication is instead played out in the same global space of information
technologies. For Virilio, a major drawback of real time is that, at the speed
of light, the embedded nature of local places disappears entirely. That is, as we
become fully immersed in the interspaces of virtual technologies, geographic
space no longer plays a defining role in the identity of local places. In place
of geographic space we now have what Virilio calls cinematic spaces, virtual
spaces that lead to the deterritorialization of reality. As Virilio writes,

Ours are cinematic societies. They are not only societies of movement,
but of the acceleration of that very movement [] We have become
deterritorialized. Our embedding in our native soil, that element of hic
et nunc, (here and now), in situ, that embedding belongs, now, in a
certain way, to the past. It has been overtaken by the acceleration of
history by the acceleration of reality itself by real time, and by
the live, all of which are in a stage beyond the hic et nunc, in situ
condition. (Armitage 2001, 17)

Like Virilios work, Marc Augs anthropological research also centres on

how new technologies alter our embedding in our native soil. In Non-Places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Aug defines contemporary
societies in terms of three figures of excess: excessive time, whereby history
is burdened with an overabundance of information; excessive space, which
involves the way local places are connected globally through interconnected
flows of information; and finally, excessive individualism, wherein places are
made meaningful through individuals rather than a shared sense of social
community (1995, 3036). For Aug, the interrelation of all these figures of
excess leads to a supermodern world that can be best described as the non
place.
Offering a general definition of the non-place, Aug (1995, 77, 78)
writes that if a place can be defined as that which is relational, historical
and concerned with identity, then a space that is not relational, historical
or concerned with identity is a non-place. Like Virilio, what Aug is getting
at in this definition of the non-place is that within a culture of excessive
speed (whether it is due to the instant access of telecommunications or the
creation of vast superhighways) places no longer mean the same thing as
they did in the past. In short, the native soil of a local place, the embedded
traditions that belong to a community, its particular customs, monuments
20 UNHOMELY CINEMA

and collective meaning, are no longer sustained; instead, the particularities

of the local are replaced by homogenous spaces that spread easily and evenly
across the globe. Stripped of local variance, we enter an unhomely phase of
monocultures, context-free places that no longer depend on local knowledge
or identities.
There is some truth to the claims made by Virilio and Aug. Undoubtedly,
the speed of contemporary life has altered our relationships to geographic
space. However, both Virilio and Aug end up providing a nostalgic image
of home, wherein the capacity to inhabit ones native soil requires that
the unhomely qualities of speed are vanquished. In contrast, I believe that
it is possible to think about movement, transience and exile in terms of the
creation of new kinds of mobile homes. As Rapport and Overing write, []
the realization of a world of movement gives onto radically different ideas
of home and also of homelessness. A far more mobile notion comes to the
fore, ideational and behavioural: home as something to accompany people
whenever they decamp (2000, 158). Home may not be a place of settlement
but a set of ideas, practices and memories that accompany the dweller while
in flight. Exile and dispersal may be even required to find ones way home.
There is also the paradox, Rapport and Overing continue, that it is by
way of transience and displacement that one achieves an ultimate sense of
belonging [] to be at home in ones own place it is necessary to become
alienated and estranged to some degree, mentally or spiritually. Exile is a
resource inasmuch as it gives onto that vantage-point from which one is best
able to come to know oneself, to know oneself best (2000, 161).
In her essay Too Many Houses for a Home: Narrating the House in the
Chinese Diaspora, Jane M. Jacobs (2004) goes even so far as to claim that it
is impossible to think about mobility without acknowledging the architecture
of home. Jacobs frames her analysis around Agnes Hellers (1995, 2) article,
Where Are we at Home, especially Hellers contention that the modern
world contains two vastly different experiences of home. The first (spatial)
experience of home rests on what Heller calls a geographically monogamous
relationship to home, a kind of dwelling where the dweller is confined to a
limited spatial location and travels very little. To illustrate this monogamous
experience of home Heller recounts a story about meeting an Italian man
who couldnt tell her directions to a nearby town since he had never left
his home community. In contrast to this form of dwelling, Heller describes
a temporal home-experience (1995, 7), a mode of dwelling in which the
dweller is perpetually on the move: this kind of dweller is embodied by the jet
setter, who may have several homes in multiple locations or is someone who
visits hotels regularly and speaks several languages. Unlike the monogamous
geographic experience, this dweller is geographically promiscuous (1995, 1).
 AN UNHOMELY THEORY 21

To illustrate, Heller describes being on a flight and meeting a mobile

professional who was stumped by the question of where she calls home.
Since the woman spends most of her time travelling to and from various
international destinations, the woman was troubled by the idea of pinpointing
exactly where she feels most at home; in the end, she declared that her home
is where her cat lives. As Jacobs writes, this answer suggests a world in which
house and home are radically uncoupled (2004, 166).
For Jacobs, while Hellers notion of geographic promiscuousness is
fitting for a contemporary world besieged by various modes of migration,
her ideal time traveller fails to conceptualize the way mobility and
architecture need to be understood together. That is, while migration
seriously undermines more monogamous ways of dwelling, this does
not mean that the home is eschewed by hyper modes of motility. As she
writes, Migration [] involves a complex system of inhabitations that
incorporate architectures as various as the ancestral home, the departure
lounge, the vehicle of passage, the temporary shelter and the new house.
As such, architecture is always being called upon to structure the spatiality
of a mobile world (2004, 167). For Jacobs, speed and migration does
not simply equate an unhomely world where instability abounds because
people are unable to settle. Rather, what is required is a mobile theory
of the home that addresses the way home is formed through a series of
dispersed sites, practices, memories, emotions and ideas. Furthermore,
instead of the absence of home becoming a sign of ones homelessness,
the migrant home can actually act as a rich archive, as the home comes
to accumulate all the different stages and scales involved in the process of
migration. As Jacobs writes, [t]his is not the vernacular house, although
it is a house that may well contain any number of shifted vernacularisms.
This is not the ancestral home, although it may be a home that comes to
embody that idea in any number of ways and localities. This is the mobile
home and regardless of what kind of house it is, it calls into being flexible
architectures of inhabitation (2004, 168).
So while it might be tempting to see the hyper motility of contemporary
societies in terms of the impossibility of finding home, or an imminent sign of
the contemporary unhomely, Jacobs analysis invites us to see the unhomely
anew. Indeed, an underlying theme that is evidenced in all the films I analyse
is the way contemporary dwelling needs to be understood as a dispersed and
disjointed phenomena that nonetheless calls for new kinds of making home.
This may be seen in the way mobile communications allow family members to
connect across a range of fragmented spaces or the way global trends in urban
redevelopment affect local spaces and architecture. Either way, mobile homes
are the future of dwelling.
22 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Unhomely Cinema
From Freuds uncanny reading of the short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann to
Homi Bhabhas discourse on the unhomeliness of the postcolonial novel,
literature appears to be the prime site for an unhomely encounter. However,
while the uncanny nature of literary space has taken centre stage, becoming a
supercharged trope, as Jay writes, there has been very little critical work on
the cinematic unhomely. This is unfortunate, since the cinema is undoubtedly a
haunted medium that offers its own unique way of representing unhomeliness.
Indeed, the home maintains such a ubiquitous presence in narrative films that
it is hard not to watch a film without witnessing some unruly or inhospitable
dwelling place. As John David Rhodes writes, If we think of almost any genre
the melodrama, the horror film, film noir and its many cousins, or even, very
often, the western we are confronted immediately with the problem of how
one is to live in a house. (2006, 102)
For Rhodes, the cinematic home cannot be divorced from genre. I hope
to show, Rhodes writes, that it is difficult to think about genre without
thinking about the way almost every genre embodies a mode of meditation
on and use of the house and domestic space (2006, 85). While Rhodes
focus on genre may be fitting for an overall assessment of the homes place
in cinema, it is not the favoured approach here. On the contrary, using a
classificatory system that relies on reoccurring patterns and characteristics
runs contrary to the most fundamental characteristic of the unhomely: its
disturbance of proper rules and patterns. As Royle writes, The uncanny is a
crisis of the proper: it entails a critical disturbance of what is called proper
(2003, 1). Rather than rely on genre to explore contemporary unhomeliness,
I offer a broad-based, sociogeographic style of analysis that focuses on
the spatial politics of home, especially how images of home and domestic
settings refer to processes and relations that exist outside the cinema. As
a spatial phenomenon that resonates with contemporary geopolitics, the
unhomely is best served by a territorial understanding of cinema; an approach
that, as James Hay writes, understands film as a social practice that explores
how social relations are spatially organized [] and how film is practiced
[] always in relation to other sites. In this respect, cinema is not seen in a
dichotomous relation with the social, but as dispersed within an environment
of sites that defines (in spatial terms) the meanings, uses, and place of the
cinematic.
Such a territorial approach to the cinema is certainly not new. Over the
past few decades, film studies have benefited from the so-called spatial turn
in social and cultural theory, as the field has witnessed a growth in the use of
various spatial and geographic theories and concepts. Nowhere is this critical
 AN UNHOMELY THEORY 23

spatial perspective in cinema more prevalent than with the unexpected rise
in the study of the relationship between the cinema and the city. Just over
a decade ago, the urban geographer David Clarke bemoaned the fact that
while it is clear that there are strong parallels between urban and cinematic
space, and that it is unthinkable to understand the rise of the cinema without
acknowledging the rise of the modern city, little theoretical explication
of this fecund relationship exists. How times have changed. Since Clarke
published his influential book, The Cinematic City, there has emerged a rich
body of research that takes quite seriously the relationship between urban
and cinematic space. Turning around several key phrases that have become
common currency within media and film studies, concepts like the cinematic
city or the televisual city continue to explicate the formal, thematic and
experiential intersections between urban and cinematic spaces.
One of the major offshoots of the cinematic city paradigm is that
instead of the cinema being seen as a purely textual or visual medium, film
is increasingly understood as a spatial art form that offers differing ways of
perceiving and representing architectural space. As Katherine Shonefield
explains in her book, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City, as a spatial
medium that draws on and reflects life in the modern city, film can teach
us much about how architecture and cities invariably work (ix). For while
film relies on fictional places, its representation of architectural and spatial
borders nonetheless provides clues and insight into the ideological nature
of architecture, especially how borders function within various social and
political environments. For example, just as the components of a building its
walls, windows and doors situate and maintain what is considered inside
and outside, the cinemas mise-en-scne is equally composed of various sets
and props that divide space into spatial categories. The cinemas architectural
world may require the viewer to suspend their disbelief; nonetheless, this fictive
place of cinematic architecture still calls upon many of the same experiences
and expectations associated with the built environment.
Interestingly, while Shonefields exploration of architectures ideological
construction of space is not framed around the idea of the unhomely, at
times her assessment of how architecture and film order the world through
borders comes close to my own conception of contemporary unhomeliness.
This is particularly evident in the way she discusses architectures role in
the purification of the social environment. Like the mythological homely
interior, which is designed to ward off an external intrusion, the demarcation
of borders can be used to purify spaces, as an architectural barrier can help
monitor what moves between a set of spaces. As such, architectural space
retains a normative function: by marking and maintaining rigid boundaries
it can, for example, legitimize certain places by determining what kinds of
24 UNHOMELY CINEMA

behaviour are proper and acceptable, thereby limiting who has access to
specific spaces. At the same time, spatial barriers can and often do become
blurred. What is inside can suddenly become external; what is public can
become private. Thus, while architecture may strive to maintain a stark
division between interiorities and exteriorities, these purified zones all too
often become hybrid and permeable. As Shonefield writes about architectures
hybrid spaces, The idea of the hybrid is the opposite of the pure. The hybrid
straddles two or more classes; its edges are unclear, and difficult to delineate, to
draw a line around the hybrid doesnt have an identifiable, categorisable form.
The hybrid obscures the possibility of its reduction to an original set of parts
or classes (2000, 4).
Another aspect of the cinematic city paradigm that is indirectly important
to the geopolitical nature of the contemporary unhomely involves the rise of
globalization. Clearly, as a spatial medium that provides images of various
domestic and urban settings, the cinema is well suited to exploring contemporary
unhomeliness. However, from an economic and industrial point of view, the
cinema relates to globalization in ways that go well beyond matters of aesthetics
or representation. In their book, Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a
Global Context, Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice point out that from the onset,
the cinema, especially Hollywood cinema, has represented a globalized industry
that operates through a sophisticated transnational system of production,
distribution and exhibition. The true transnational quality of the cinema thus
is not found in the way that the cinema represents the new spatial environments
created through globalization; rather, the cinema is an industry that creates the
very transnational conditions represented in film. As Mark Shiel writes, In this
sense, not only may cinema particularly Hollywood cinema be described
as having always been postmodern, even before postmodernity, because of
its peculiar combination of both sign and image (culture) and manufactured
goods (industry, technology, capital), it may also be recognized as central to,
rather than merely reflecting, the process known as globalization [] Films are
globalization, not its after-effects (2001, 11).
To emphasize the transnational quality of cinema discussed by Shiel, I have
chosen a multinational corpus of films: films from Hollywood, Poland, China,
South Africa and France are featured in the book and combine to create a nuanced
account of space and place in an era of postmodern globalization. This use of
an international cinema is not designed to offer a comparative analysis of the
way different national cultures represent unhomeliness. The point is to address
tangible everyday modes of existence and to place them in a postglobal world
that sees the home as an increasingly flexible and transitory idea and experience.
Furthermore, just as the process of globalization questions the solidity of national
borders, as people, goods and services and money are openly exchanged within
 AN UNHOMELY THEORY 25

a global system of capitalism, navigating through the chapters is akin to a series

of transnational migrations, border crossings that show the flexibility and fluidity
of space under late capitalism. In this way, there is no natural progression to the
book; chapters can be read out of order, from back to front or front to back. The
proviso is to begin somewhere, to settle down and then watch how quickly ones
place of settlement can dissolve.

Unhomely Narrative
While analysing the unhomely through a spatial perspective may be an
obvious choice, it does not represent the only way films capture the experience
of domestic uncertainty. The wayward temporality of narration, especially
the way certain stories can settle and unsettle the viewer, offers another
way into the unhomely world of film. In his classic work on narrative, Tzvetan
Todorov (1977) argues that the temporality of narratives can be defined
qualitatively as the movement between opposing states of equilibrium and
disequilibrium, order and chaos and familiarity and unfamiliarity. Narrative
films usually begin with an initial state of equilibrium that is eventually thwarted
by some kind of danger, obstacle or threat. After this break in the normal state
of affairs, the narrative then moves toward a state of reparation, a point of
closure, wherein a new state of order is brought into existence. While not all
narratives end with this kind of reassuring closure, a central part of going to
the movies involves anticipating the arrival of a happy ending: somehow in
the movies the good guys always win, good triumphs over evil and normalcy
is reinstated. In a way, this movement toward a happy ending is akin to the
experience of going home. Home, like many narrative endings, represents
a place of comforting familiarity. It is the mythical place we like to go to in
our dreams, a reassuring place where we are free to dream. Subsequently, if
many films, especially those of the Hollywood variety, invariably move toward
a redemptive state of familiarity, might we say that the cinema is an institution
that deals primarily in the cosy comforts of home?
This is precisely the reading given by Elisabeth Bronfen in her book Home
in Hollywood. Mobilizing a psychoanalytic framework, Bronfen contends that
Hollywood is, at heart, a place of imaginary geographies, a dreamscape where
protective homes or comforting places return the subject to a state of homely
familiarity. Working her way through Lacanian and Freudian theory, Bronfen
argues that the world is for the subject a place of perpetual uncertainty.
The subject is, to borrow from Lacanian terminology, constituted by an
irreparable lack, a permanent state of homesickness, which must be remedied
through various homely illusions. For Bronfen, one of the primary institutions
that can help heal the subjects psychic angst is the cinema. Films, especially
26 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Hollywood films, create mythological narratives of unity and comfort that

compensate for the worlds uncertainty. Going to the movies is like taking
a brief time-out from the chaos of the world; it is a place where various
imaginary geographies whether it is a cosy space in a film or a characters
profound sense of attachment to a site become reassuring because they
provide the viewer with a space of familiarity and homeliness that does not
exist out there in the world.
It is easy to see this kind of homely familiarity at work in many Hollywood
films; films like E.T., Its A Wonderful Life and Field of Dreams are memorable
for the way they raise peoples spirits, using the quaint and wholesome family
home as a safeguard against the troubles of the world. Even in more troubling
or disturbing films, the presence of the home can be used to bring comfort to
the spectator. In the suspense thriller Klute, Brea is a New York City prostitute
who, despite her dangerous profession, enjoys the freedom that comes from
living in the big city. However, her independent life takes a radical turn for the
worse when she begins to be stalked by a sadistic killer. Luckily, Brea is saved
by an idealistic private detective who arrives from the countryside with the sole
purpose of expunging the city of all its vice and crime. As the film closes, we
see Brea packing up her things, ready to move out of her New York apartment
and join her hero in the idyllic spaces of the countryside. Here, the process of
going home is a literal component of the narrative, as we witness Brea move
from an independent, albeit dangerous life in the city to the familiar spaces of
domesticity.
But while narratives can be experienced as the movement toward home,
quite often this passage is complicated by the inability of closure, by elliptical
narrative endings or fissures in the story. Here, going home is presented as an
impossible or improbable prospect since the narrative never arrives at any
stable resting place. Bronfen writes about the way some films highlight the
unhomeliness of the world: The happiness at the end of a cinematic narrative
notably the return to a familiar place, to the protection of the family or the
successful couple building as well as the pleasure that such resolution affords
the spectator, remains aporic, for these narratives inevitably also render visible
the fissure written into any notion of the recuperation of home (2004, 25).
An example of this narrative uncertainty can be seen in the closure of the film
The Road. Based on Cormac McCarthys novel, The Road tells the grim story
of the desperate attempt by a father and son to survive in a postapocalyptic
world. As the father and son make their way through a ravaged landscape,
scourged by a massive fire, they not only have to contend with the hardship
of a world where food and resources are rare but they must remain constantly
on guard against a dangerous gang of cannibals. According to the father, all
their woes will subside when they make it to the coast. But when the two finally
 AN UNHOMELY THEORY 27

arrive at their destination, they are not greeted by a secluded haven; rather
things become worse, as the father suddenly takes ill and dies on the beach.
As the film closes, the young boy is seen leaving with a new family that arrives
just in time to save him from complete isolation. However, while the boys
reconnection with another family unit provides the viewer with some sense of
relief, what lingers is the grave feeling that for the young boy, life will only ever
be an unhomely and ungodly journey through a derelict wasteland.
Throughout my reading of the unhomely, the uncertainty written into all
narratives whether we arrive at a safe space of homely familiarity or are
prevented from attaining closure emerges as one of the most important,
albeit difficult characteristics of the unhomely. Indeed, as we will see, most
of the films I analyse do not leave the viewer with any sense that the homes
fragility will be repaired or remedied. Rather, the disruption to the home
seems inevitable and imminent. But while the unhomely may seem like a
pessimistic experience, there is much to be gained from these encounters.
For while an encounter with the unhomely may lead some to the desire to
recuperate more conservative ideas of home, to retreat from the problems
of the world by dwelling in private enclaves, the unhomely does maintain
an ethical dimension, as the homes destabilization can lead to new ways of
thinking about and experiencing the place of home.
 Chapter 2

THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY:

HOME AND NATION IN KRZYSZTOF

KIELOWSKIS THE DECALOGUE

The Politics of Domestic Uncertainty

In the fourth episode of Krzysztof Kielowskis Polish television series The
Decalogue (1989), the relationship between a father and daughter undergoes a
sudden and shocking transformation. Anka, a restless young woman who is
unsure of her identity and place within the family home, learns that Michal
is not her real, biological father. Already troubled by the loss of her mother,
who died tragically during childbirth, Anka becomes extremely distraught, as
her discovery creates a precarious rift in a home already plagued by fragility.
However, while tension over who is Ankas real father creates a volatile family
sphere, this is not the episodes most scandalous moment. The most troubling
scenes occur a little later, when the pair momentarily transforms their familial
relationship into a dangerous game of moral uncertainty. Freed from the
laws of the family, technically no longer father and daughter, Anka and
Michal initiate a radical reversal of social roles, momentarily replacing their
familial bonds with the energy of forbidden desire. Michal, in the end, rejects
his daughters incestuous flirtations, restoring order to the family unit by
reclaiming his status as the father-figure. By the end of the episode, however,
no matter how hard we try to imagine them in a normal fatherdaughter
relationship, an insurmountable feeling of doubt and uncertainty remains, as
the solidity of the family bond that most important bearer of social order
lays in tatters.
While episode 4 contains The Decalogues most risqu and scandalous
domestic scenes, images of troubled homes are by no means exclusive to this
episode. Quite the contrary, the entire series pivots around scenes of domestic
woe and hardship, especially the way families are ruined by internal strife.
Everywhere one looks, it seems, what is encountered in The Decalogue is the
same recurring theme of unravelled and vulnerable family homes: children
die tragic and unpredictable deaths (episode 1); marriages are threatened
30 UNHOMELY CINEMA

by infidelity (episodes 2, 3 and 9); brothers are torn apart by greed (episode
10); children are kidnapped by their own family members (episode 7); families
engage in heinous crimes (episode 8). Without question, from start to finish
The Decalogue is a rich and moving story about the decline of the family, as
it weaves together melodramatic stories about homes in desperate need of
mending, homes overpowered by desire, longing, crime and pain. But while
the series has become well known for Kielowskis emotional exploration of
contemporary spirituality and individual morality, what is rarely mentioned is
the way the home, for Kielowski, is always politicized. Moral and metaphysical
concerns may be widespread in the series, but they are not the most pressing
part of Kielowskis poetic representation of home. Keeping to his roots in the
Solidarity movement, for Kielowski, the home is the place where the personal
becomes political; the problem of domestic uncertainty, which envelops the
entire series, is really a complex metaphor for the precarious state of the
nation in an age of globalization.
A political reading of The Decalogue can be found in the work of several
critics who have shown how the familys decline represents Polands uncertain
political environment. According to Joseph Kickasola, the trouble with
identity in the incest episode is deeply political, as the uncertainty of the
family bond, especially its inability to guarantee social order, signifies Polands
turbulent past (2004, 197). Ruth Perlmutter goes even further, arguing that
the entire series can be understood as a political meditation on the meaning of
the waning of family responsibility. As Perlmutter writes, Although with The
Decalogue, Kielowski ostensibly abandoned political issues for more universal
moral concerns, in a Kielowski film the personal cannot be severed from
the political. The struggles of his characters with identity, career options
and parental responsibilities emanate from Kielowskis ambivalence toward
his own repressive father-land, which seems to hover in judgment over
his Polish characters like a vengeful Old Testament patriarch (1997, 1).
Both Kickasola and Perlmutters political readings of The Decalogue are
important and noteworthy. Given Kielowskis recent status as a postmodern
obscurantist who supposedly abandoned the serious political work of the
social documentary, both political approaches are welcome. But while
I am indebted to these earlier critiques, neither interpretation is satisfactory.
Kickasolas political observations, for example, are made merely in passing;
Perlmutters reading is much more advanced, but her notion that the decline
of the family refers to political problems does not provide much substance:
What does the decline of the family really imply? Does the difficult father
figure refer to political corruption, housing problems or the impossibility of
finding a coherent social identity? In this chapter I will add in some of these
missing details (socialist Poland on the verge of a capitalistic revolution, the
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 31

failure of Polands mass housing projects, the creation of the socialist city,
etc.), using the idea of the unhomely to explore some of the concrete social
conditions that constitute The Decalogues historical backdrop. Set around one
of Polands infamous mass apartment complexes in Warsaw (the apartment
building is the home of all the main characters), the series provides an
evocative example of how the architecture of home is tied to ideas about
the nation, especially the way national borders become porous in an age of
transnational globalization.

Blurring the Boundaries of Home and Nation

In Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity, David Morley argues that images
of home have been used historically as a barometer for determining the health
of the nation-state. Home is not, according to Morley, merely a site of brick
and mortar; it is a polyvalent symbol that conjoins ideas of the hearth with
those of friendship, security, solidarity and, most importantly, the greatness
of the nation. Subsequently, within the imaginary spaces of the nation,
feeling at home can refer not only to ones local place of residence or even
ones community, but also being at home represents an iconic territory that
encompasses the shared values of an entire people. Ideally, to be at home
means to feel secure and situated within the borders of the nation. As Morley
writes in reference to the German idea of Heimat, [] national identity is
always mediated by local experience at the level of home, family, village or
neighbourhood and even wider spaces. In this process, communal intimacy
is reconciled with ideas of national greatness as the nation is idealized as a
kind of hometown writ large, a sociogeographical environment into whose
comforting security we may sink (2000, 33).
Whereas the idea of Heimat provides a cosy, nostalgic image of the home
as nation, in The Decalogue the home represents the disunity, even destruction
of the solidarity of nationhood. More precisely, the unhomely emerges as
a symbol of the inability to clearly demarcate boundaries, as the unifying
comfort of the nation becomes contaminated by hybridity, malleability and
porousness. Indeed, if I were to reduce The Decalogues representation of the
unhomely to a single definition, it would be this: the unhomely thwarts any
hope or dream that the homeland is a secure space which brings people
together in a state of idealized national unity. While the Warsaw apartment
complexes might have once represented a firm and stable place of hospitable
community, a sign of the might of socialist progress, in Kielowskis world the
home forms a site of abysmal neglect, a symbol of the way hybrid spaces blur
the protective boundaries between inside and outside; like the strange liquid
that keeps oozing mysteriously through the ceiling in episode 2, leakages and
32 UNHOMELY CINEMA

fissures are ubiquitous in the series, as Kielowski shows just how easy borders
and boundaries can be breached.
The homes inability to protect the characters from some unwanted
disturbance is evidenced immediately in the opening episode. The episode
tells the sombre and tragic story of a single father who loses his son, Pawe, in
an unexpected accident. For the father, the sudden death of his son not only
transforms his home into a site of intense mourning, but the way in which
Pawe dies forces him to come face to face with the fallout of his philosophy
on life. A computer scientist who is shown repeatedly praising the powers of
reason and rationale, the father champions a world in which only that which is
measurable matters. When the young boy asks his father about the meaning of
the death of a neighbours dog, for example, the father proclaims confidently
that the line between life and death is stark, definitive. Unlike Pawes aunt,
who has faith in the wonders of lifes mystery and is open to the ambiguous
and immeasurable, the father maintains a calculated approach to life, relying
only on those certainties that can be found through mathematical equations.
The fathers firm belief in reason is even translated into a parenting
philosophy, as he transforms the home into a playful space of calculability,
using cute mathematical equations (like when he asks Pawe to calculate
when Kermit the Frog will catch up to Miss Piggy) to teach Pawe about the
measurability of things. When Pawe dies, however, the fathers belief in the
supremacy of reason is threatened. While the childs death was a complete
accident (the boy drowns when he falls through the ice while skating), the
fathers use of reason to determine the safety of a nearby pond (he creates an
equation based on preceding night-time temperatures) is shown to play a role
in the boys tragic demise. Indeed, while the father shows how calculations
can be used to master a range of domestic affairs and technologies, his folly
comes from failing to acknowledge the uncertainty that emerges from unseen
or unaccountable outside forces. As in other episodes, the unhomely emerges
here through a false faith in the impenetrability and safety of the home.
Hoping to use science to protect his son, to create a playful environment in
which the boy can control things from a distance, the father, in the end, is
given a tragic lesson in the discomforts of home.

A Socialist Complex: Mapping the

Communist Home
In 1959, during the opening of the American exhibition at Sokolniki Park in
Moscow, Richard Nixon and Soviet premiere Nikita Khrushchev engaged in
a series of brief but heated discussions in one of the ideal American houses
on display in the American Pavilion. The house was designed to show Soviets,
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 33

and the world, that capitalism provided the best economic system for increasing
the quality of domestic life. With its array of new technological gadgets, like its
efficient washing machines and garbage disposal systems, the American house
was designed to showcase capitalism at its best: unlike other economic systems,
which neglected the well-being of the average citizen, the merit of capitalism
was that it brought the luxury of consumerism right into the heart of the
average American home. Unimpressed by the house, Khrushchev boasted the
virtues of communism, arguing that the possession of such domestic wonders
does not depend on capitalism; even more, the Soviets, he insisted, can build
domestic technologies much better and more efficiently than the Americans.
While Nixon and Khrushchevs so-called Kitchen Debate was quickly eclipsed
by Cold War politics, the debate nonetheless showcased the symbolic reach
of the home, as domestic matters were transformed into a sign of national
pride and unity during a time of fierce international tension (Oldenziel and
Zachmann 2009).
Just as an iconic American kitchen became an international symbol for
the differences between capitalist and communist ideology, in The Decalogue it
is the apartment complex which serves as the series most important sign, as
the building provides a rich and manifold symbol of the fallout of Polands
socialist dreams, especially its ubiquitous experiment with communist mass
housing. Fashioned in the monotone and unabashedly stark style of the
International Style, with its reinforced concrete, homogeneous exteriors and
rationalized planning, the apartment building forms an omnipresent reminder
of the dystopian nature of modern architecture, especially the failed legacy
of its grand ideological projects. Interestingly, though, while the modern
high-rise often conjures up images of the malaise of modern urban living,
in The Decalogue it is the suburbs that signify the inhospitable nature of Polish
society. Within cultural studies the deconstruction of the suburbs all too often
focuses on the way the single-family, suburban home has been encoded as the
prime ingredient in the attainment of The American Dream. In The Decalogue
the suburbs represent a very different ideological climate, one in which the
modern high-rise became the means to creating the ideal socialist state. Thus,
while the Americans and Soviets both looked to the suburbs to articulate the
desires, pride and unity of the nation, their architectural approaches differed
significantly, a contrast in spatial politics that can be seen clearly in the creation
of the socialist city.
One of the contradictions associated with the rise and spread of Soviet-
style socialism relates to the development of the industrial city. Whereas
the basic tenets of communist ideology sought to eradicate any substantial
social and economic distinction between urban and rural spaces, in reality
a very different pattern of spatial development emerged. In fact, much as in
34 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Western nations during the early twentieth century, under the burgeoning
drive of industrialization, Soviet-style spatial development favoured an
ineluctable bias toward the city. As Jiri writes regarding the socialist process
of urbanization, The 1931 Central Party Committee resolution rejected
the decentralization theory and recommended that the town-country
gap should be eliminated not by abolishing cities but by transforming
them, while simultaneously carrying out a socialist transformation of the
countryside, bringing it under the influence of progressive urban culture
(2004, 28). As many satellite socialist countries, such as Poland, underwent
an intense and unprecedented process of industrialization, it was the city
that became the prime emblem for socialist progress. Speaking about how
the Polish authorities used the city of Tychy to reinforce the supremacy of
socialism, Szczepaski writes, The decision to create the city of Tychy was
basically political, although it was justified by ecological, social and economic
considerations [] Tychy was to be a symbolic city, the embodiment of
new socialist principles of urbanisation and architecture (Szczepaski
1993, 2). Thus, despite an official political ideology that promoted even
spatial development, communist countries shared with the Western world
an intense investment in the status, development and industrialization of the
city (Musil 2004, 3336).
While communist and capitalist nations invested heavily in the modern
industrial city, there are substantial differences between socialist and capitalist
cities. One of these, which relates directly to The Decalogue, involves the
development of Soviet-style housing. Whereas in America the postwar solution
to housing emphasized the benefits of private development, especially the
creation of individually owned, single-family homes (Oldenziel and Zachmann
2009), housing in Poland followed the Soviet model of centralized planning,
which emphasized public resources and collective dwelling spaces over private
ownership. According to Muril (2004, 39), this lack of private development
had a profound effect on urban organization and housing developments in
countries like Poland. As in most postwar countries, housing shortages were
an ever-present reality in Poland; to deal with these problems, Poland relied on
a centralized urban planning agency, which focused on developing peripheral
areas outside the city centre. Since land has no monetary value in a socialist
system, there is little incentive to redevelop and reuse prime areas within the
city centre. Instead, whenever new land was required, older industrial areas
were abandoned and new suburban land became the key site for urban
development, especially the creation of mass-housing complexes (Bertaud and
Renaud 1995). Over time, this process of urbanization led to the rapid growth
of peripheral parts of the city, as the suburbs came to symbolize the creation
of a new, progressive socialist city.
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 35

Unlike the suburbanization of the American city, which rested on the

convergence of the single-family home, the highway and the automobile, the
design of the Polish suburbs rested on a utopian combination of working-
class ideology, the modern high-rise and social homogenization (Weclawowicz
2005). However, just as quickly as these apartment blocks were erected, critics
quickly began to see the socialist dream unravel. Waiting lists for a place
in the new apartment complexes were extremely long (Lizon 1996). And
while the authorities hoped to alleviate these problems over time, the matter
actually worsened, as construction of new housing plummeted throughout the
70s and 80s (Stanilov 2007, 17375). Furthermore, apartments were small
and hardly modern. For if one of the central ideological features of the
Kitchen Debate centred on the dwellers possession of modernitys new cosy
and efficient domestic amenities, in Poland these luxuries were few and far
between. And while different social groups lived side by side in the same
buildings, the mere proximity of different social classes did not immediately
promote social equality (Weclawowicz 2005). Finally, inefficient land use
caused the mass housing projects to become extremely costly, since even
more infrastructure, such as public transit, heating and water, was required
to meet the demands of the rapidly expanding city (Bertaud and Renaud
1995). Subsequently, while the achievements of modern socialist architecture
was supposed to catapult Poland into a new progressive age where communal
design bolstered the greatness of the nation, over time the visible signs of
neglect became all too apparent, as more and more of these complexes came
to resemble communist ghettos rather than utopias of socialist progress.
When the camera closes in on and frames the mass housing complex
throughout The Decalogue, it is helpful to place this structure within its
sociohistorical context to remind us of how the unhomely conditions depicted
in the series are not merely an issue of individual morality, but a matter of
public policy. While the Warsaw block apartments may have once symbolized
the greatness of the nation, for Kielowskis characters this dream of socialist
progress has gone terribly awry: as evidenced by the apartments decaying
structure, its bleak and monotone exterior, the building is nothing less than
a symbol of failure, a sign of the impossibility of finding a happy home to
call ones own. Indeed, each of the moral dilemmas witnessed in the series
can be read in terms of the ubiquitous fallout of modern architecture and
its grand ideological projects, as Kielowski turns a critical eye toward
the everyday, revealing a not-so-idealistic world plagued by uncertainty,
rudeness, envy, suspicion and even murder. In short, the building embodies
what Marek S. Szczepaski calls the bureaucratic disaster of socialist urban
policy: The creation of urban space in line with the Charter of Athens
[] was bound from the very beginning to lead to social disintegration of
36 UNHOMELY CINEMA

the urban community (1993, 13). Undoubtedly, as Perlmutter argues,

the unraveling of the family home in The Decalogue relates to the face of
Kielowskis vengeful Old Testament patriarch the failed paternity of a
communist bureaucracy unable to care for its socialist family. Yet, while it is
important to place the series range of familial crises in terms of this socialist
past, this critique forms only one-half of the picture. The other half faces the
uncertainty of Polands future.

A Present Future: Mapping the Flows

of the Postindustrial City
In The Decalogue the apartment complex symbolizes Polands communist past,
especially its experiment with creating the perfect socialist city. However,
while the series representation of domestic space makes explicit reference to
Polands socialist legacy, other sociopolitical signs are littered throughout the
series, which point toward a new geopolitical climate; one in which the stable
boundaries of the home-land give way to the transience and hypermobility
of the network society. To gauge these signs it is necessary to look beyond the
series explicit focus on family tragedy and focus on some of the minor incidents
and objects presented in the everyday world of the characters. Indeed, as we
will see, located subtly in the background of The Decalogues melodramatic
stories of familial woe is a plethora of everyday material objects passports,
international money orders, personal computers, airports, television screens,
telephones, Western consumer products, advertisements that reveal an
environment in the throes of transition as Poland verges on its revolutionary
return to a free-market economy. Subsequently, while the apartment complex
serves as a reminder of the failed legacy of the socialist city, a site where
communist ideology mixed concretely with modern architecture, elsewhere
in the series Kielowski weaves together another system of domestic signifiers;
signs that take us away from the idea of the home as the secure and enclosed
nation to the idea of the home as a nodal point in a multinational system of
cross-border flows.
In his book, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, Dennis
Redmond argues that The Decalogue should not be understood through
traditional film analysis, which he associates with the rise of national cinema;
rather, The Decalogue is an example of the multinational flows of video culture.
For Redmond, national cinema involves the works of a select group of auteurs
who attempt to develop a film language that speaks to national concerns and
identities. Video culture, on the contrary, is inherently multinational and
hybrid. This hybridity not only has to do with videos mode of transmission (as
data, video can be quickly transmitted across various information networks and
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 37

national borders), but it also has to do with the way video cultures recycle the
codes, style and content of other, international cultural products. To illustrate,
Redmond claims that The Decalogues hybridity resides in the way it uses
Western genre conventions and film stylistics to explore a series of distinctly
Eastern European characters and themes. From this formal perspective, The
Decalogue exists as a hybrid medium, a halfway house, to borrow a line from
Homi Bhabha (1997), where different artistic cultures meet and converge.
While there are merits to Redmonds analysis, by focusing on the series
formal aesthetics and international production values, he misses some of
the series most striking nationalistic features. Given the rich, historical
significance of communist mass housing, it is difficult not to see the apartment
complex as a palpable sign of the failure of socialist urban planning.
Furthermore, given Kielowskis deep involvement in the Solidarity movement,
it is hard to imagine that the series nuanced exploration of Warsaw bypasses
wholesale questions of national identity. What I like about Redmonds
analysis, though, is the way he sees the series in terms of a multinational world
of movement and flows, a transnational system where people, commerce and
material objects are circulated through a series of multinational nodal points.
This geopolitical reading is evidenced in Redmonds analysis of The Decalogues
special reoccurring character (known often as the silent observer). The silent
observer is a special character that appears in all of the episodes; in each
episode, however, he takes on a different character. In episode 1 he appears as
a homeless man; in episode 2, he is seen working in a hospital. Added to this
mysterious power of reincarnation is the way the silent observer is depicted
as possessing magical, telepathic powers, wherein he is able to read into the
future and foretell the fateful outcome of the other characters. In virtually
every reading of the series, special attention is given to this figure, who is
typically understood through two main interpretations: either the special figure
is representative of the omnipresence of God, or he represents the ideals of
moral conscience. For Redmond, neither perspective is convincing. Instead,
taking a geopolitical approach, Redmond argues that the omnipresence of
this strange and enigmatic character is best understood not as a sign of a
universal moral authority, but as a world system that is highly dependent on
new kinds of geopolitical movements from the international circulation
of cultural products, like music videos, to the real-time speed of advanced
communications technologies. That is, by possessing the ability to freely cross
over the diegetic barrier, a capability that frees him from the confines of
physical space, the silent observer represents the unhinging of local places by
the force of globalization.
I tend to concur with Redmonds interpretation. In the opening of episode 1,
for example, the viewer is presented with an unsettling juxtaposition that
38 UNHOMELY CINEMA

captures quite poignantly the idea that in an age of real-time transmission,

the meaning and experience of local places change: as the scene opens the
viewer is presented with the image of a woman (Aunt Irena) crying in the
city centre. We are then suddenly jolted back to the suburbs, where we see
a teary-eyed silent observer, as he sits huddled before an open fire in front
of the apartment complex. Though they are disconnected spatially, the
editing technique suggests their instantaneous connection, as though both
were participating in some kind of emotional or spiritual communion. For
Redmond, the coincidence of these two teary-eyed figures does not signal
the presence of some pseudomystical powers. Rather, the image of telepathy
here is informatic. The connection between the two characters is really an
allegory for a shift in multinational telecommunications, as their simultaneous
communion provides an image of the network societys instantaneous,
invisible flows of data.
On its own, the idea that the telepathic connectivity between Aunt Irena
and the silent observer represents the borderless world of contemporary
telecommunications is far from convincing; the scene, deep with sombre and
emotional overtones, does support the idea that what is shared between the
two is a religious or spiritual connectivity, a trust in faith or an encounter
with the incomprehensible. However, what makes Redmonds interpretation
more probable is not just the way both characters share a teary-eyed moment,
but the object of their sorrow: as Aunt Irena walks pass a storefront window
she becomes captivated by a television set broadcasting images of a young
boy running in a school. The boy, we learn later, is Aunt Irenas nephew,
Pawe, who had just died tragically in an accident. Like in other episodes, the
broadcast images of Pawe reinforces Kielowskis interest in problematizing
clean-cut boundaries, as the televised images demonstrate the way public and
private space can quickly change places. Indeed, while the deterritorialized
nature of broadcast media has become a quotidian aspect of everyday life, for
Aunt Irena the televised images of her nephew forms an unhomely encounter,
as her personal and private family tragedy is unpredictably made public, taken
from the home and flaunted unexpectedly in the streets. Subsequently, what is
uncanny about the opening scene is not just the way the communion between
Aunt Irena and the silent observer signals a placeless world of real-time
transmission, but how it becomes impossible to curb or control the medias
incessant process of replication, as the entombed images of the boy embodies
the repetitive nature of contemporary media.
A second way the silent observer embodies the flexibility and motility
of multinational flows involves the wide range of physical movements the
special figure is engaged in throughout the series. As mentioned above, at the
start of episode 1 the silent observer is shown to possess special telepathic
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 39

powers, communicating with Aunt Irena at a distance. Yet, while information

traverses the space between the two characters, throughout the entire scene
both remain absolutely still, immobile, their messages travelling through an
invisible communicative space. However, throughout the series, this image
of an immobile silent observer is rare. In fact, in most episodes the special
character is associated with a host of relentless physical activities that enable
him to traverse the spaces of the city: in episode 3, he is seen rowing across
a river in a boat; in episode 4, he speeds by in an automobile; in episode 6,
he is found returning home from a trip, carrying several suitcases; and in
episode 8, he is shown bicycling across a newly constructed roadway. If,
according to Redmond, the silent observer represents the placelessness of
instant communication, how do we account for this array of older mobile
technologies? Certainly, mobile technologies, like automobiles, bicycles
and boats, hardly form the emblematic technologies of our hypermobile
societies. But does global migration have to be solely understood in terms of
electronic motility or the invisible flows of data? Doesnt globalization entail
a wide range of physical movements, from the movement of bodies across
national borders to new trade agreements that enable products and labour to
circulate across the globe? This is the story that Manual Castells tells when he
explores the characteristics of the network society: for Castells, new methods
of broadcasting information, from the World Wide Web, mobile phones and
the Global Positioning System, have made space much more flexible, since
any space in a communications network can make an infinite number of
global connections; but alongside these spaces of flows are numerous physical
movements that are required for the functioning of the network society
(Castells 2009).
From this perspective, the mobility of the silent observer can be read
as a general sign of a society perpetually on the move. Indeed, throughout
The Decalogue there are no shortage of everyday objects that signify a world
preoccupied by movement, especially international travel. Take, for example,
the series perpetual reference to foreign countries, passports and air travel: in
episode 1, we learn that Pawes mother lives in a foreign country; we are never
given the name of the country but know that there is a significant difference
in the time zones of both parents, as Pawe must wait up quite late to receive
a phone call from his mother. In episode 2, Dorota is a musician who not
only references her experience with the medical profession in America, but
has a lover, who presumably resides in Western Europe; in the same episode,
Dorota uses her passport as a sign of identification to receive a piece of mail.
In episode 4, Anka takes her father to the airport. His destination also seems to
be a Western country, as his friend asks him to purchase some Western wonder
drug that is supposed to help with hair growth; in episode 6, Tomek describes his
40 UNHOMELY CINEMA

absent friend as an uprooted soldier with the United Nations, who is currently
serving in Syria; in episode 7, Majka threatens to emigrate to Canada with her
daughter; and finally, in episode 9, we learn that Hanka is a sales agent for the
Dutch airline KLM. Through all these signs of movement, Kielowski creates
a hypermobile environment, wherein the insecurity and confinement of home
is always framed around the adventurous world of international travel as if
the unhomely were directly related to some ubiquitous elsewhere. Indeed,
while it is difficult not to think of the absent mother in episode 1, especially
how her presence in the family home might have prevented her sons tragic
death, in episodes 7 and 10, this global elsewhere forms a luring space
of hope and desire: for Majka, it is a space of safety that will safeguard her
against her domineering and meddlesome family; in episode 10, it is a space
of immense profit, as two brothers learn that their deceased fathers stamp
collection will fetch millions in the Western market.
So far I have considered the series in broad strokes, showing how the
unhomely refers to two different temporal dimensions and geopolitical
realities; on the one hand, the unhomely speaks to the failed experiment of
mass socialist architecture. Whereas the apartment complex once signified
the greatness of the nation, as the solidity of the building and its communal
spirit reinforced the hope and ideals of socialist progress, in the series the
building is depicted as a space of neglect and failure. On the other hand,
through a wide range of material objects, the series explores the emergence of
a new geopolitical reality, one where the incessant mobility of the characters
attends to Polands uncertain place within a multinational world order. In the
remaining part of the chapter, I will focus on two episodes episodes 6 and
10 to explore how the individual episodes relate to these conceptions of the
unhomely.

Episode 6: Remote Control or Contact at a Distance

In virtually every episode of The Decalogue the interface between exterior and
interior space is blurred, a process that leads to the breakdown of the stability
and security afforded to the family home. In short, everywhere one looks in the
series, what one encounters is an unhomely world where spatial borders are
easily breached. However, despite this extensive meditation on the unhomely,
at no point are we given a consistent image or idea of what the decline of the
family means. Rather, a range of representations of home are provided, such
that the entire series can be seen as a multifaceted discourse on the problems,
hopes, anxieties and freedoms encapsulated in the idea of going home. This
multifaceted discourse on home is particularly evident in the different ways
the boundaries of inside and outside are represented in episodes 6 and 10.
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 41

Whereas in episode 6 the homes boundaries are crossed in the name of love,
obsession and desire as the love-struck Tomek uses a range of manipulative
strategies to spy on Magda, in episode 10 the inheritance of a family fortune
causes two brothers to become unhealthily obsessed with defending the
boundaries of home. The defence of the home even reaches the absurd point
where one brother is expected to a sacrifice a kidney in order to keep their
fortune intact. Subsequently, while in the former episode the homes defences
are momentarily breached in order that a new connection can be forged, in
the latter episode all connections to the outside are excised through a complex
system of surveillance.
In the opening of episode 6, Kielowski uses a reflective windowpane to
show how the domestic boundaries between Tomek (a shy and timid postal
worker) and Magda (a sexually adventurous artist) will be constantly breached
throughout the episode. The scene takes place in a post office, where we find
Tomek serving Magda behind a glass window. Since the shot is taken from
her point of view, the reflective properties of the window creates a doubling
effect, wherein Tomeks image overlaps the translucent image of the woman,
thereby conjoining both in a virtual space of interconnectivity. However, while
the episode begins with this hopeful image of interconnectivity, we quickly
learn that the connection between Tomek and Magda is really the result of
a crafty game of domestic surveillance. Like young Pawe, who, in episode 1,
showed an impressive propensity for controlling things from a distance (the
young boy creates a primitive version of a smart house, using his computer
to control things, like turning faucets on and off), Tomek is also a master of
remote control, as he uses various crafty surveillance strategies to breach the
home of Magda. In the next few sections, I will explore how Tomeks game of
remote control relates to the unhomely, especially how the issue of domestic
surveillance fits in with the series overall geopolitical themes. In doing so,
I hope to challenge any interpretation that would see Tomeks peeping Tom
antics solely in terms of traditional cinematic concepts, like scopophilia or
voyeurism. While Tomeks fascination with Magda is amorous at times and
entails the use of some optical technologies, Tomeks peeping has little to
do with the masculine world of visual dominance and a panoptical system
of surveillance; rather, the act of spying in the episode signifies a networked
world where control is exercised through interconnectivity.

The Network of Remote Control

Undoubtedly one of the most prominent features of the contemporary media
landscape is the ability to control things from a distance. Indeed, control and
contact may be two of the most apt characteristics of life in the network society.
42 UNHOMELY CINEMA

But while the ubiquitous connectivity of media networks has become a

quotidian, even banal feature of everyday life, at times the network society can
take on a paranoid dimension, as people may feel like their strings are being
pulled by some invisible and unknown force in the network. As Steven Shaviro
argues, in a world of perpetual interconnectivity, power is no longer exercised
through a panoptical system of surveillance; rather, power and control occur
merely by being connected to others through a whole assortment of everyday
interfaces (email, personal computers, television, etc.). Even more, unlike a
panoptical system where power is hidden and functions by existing outside
the everyday, power in the control society is all too familiar. As Shaviro writes,

Were moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining

people but through continuous control and instant communication (1995,
174). Once we have all been connected, there is no longer any need for
the Panopticons rigid, relentless, centralized gaze. The new forces of
control are flexible, slack, and distributed. In a totally networked world,
where every point communicates directly with every other point, power is
no longer faceless and invisible. Instead, it works in plain sight. (2003, 31)

Tomeks game of surveillance represents this move from the panoptical to

the control society. Like a panoptical system, which watches unseen, the
traditional voyeur gains power by being able to see the other while remaining
invisible and unknown. The key is to prevent the other from returning the
gaze. But this is not at all what Tomek does. While he begins by following
the typical behaviour of a peeping Tom, Tomek changes his position very
early on by confessing directly to Magda that he has been spying on her.
Ive seen you crying, Tomek proclaims to Magda in the street. Ive been
peeping on you. Almost from the beginning, then, Tomek breaks the cardinal
rule of voyeurism by making himself known to Magda, by working in plain
sight. Likewise, rather than using the register of sight as his only mode of
contact, Tomeks game of control is quite extensive, as he relies on a range
of everyday institutions and technologies (the postal system, a milk delivery
service, the gas company, a telephone and a telescope) to intrude on Magdas
domestic life. This cunning use of everyday communications devices is first
seen when Tomek sets up a forced meeting between the two neighbours.
As a postal worker, Tomek is placed in a position of privilege, wherein his
ability to access Magdas domestic life stems from his ability to monitor and
control the circulation of her mail. In order to force Magda into meeting him,
Tomek distributes a series of false messages involving a mysterious money
order, which lures Magda into his place of work. Hoping to cash in on her
mysterious mail, Magda continues to go back and forth to the post office,
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 43

demanding the money cited in the notice. But, as the viewer quickly learns,
there is no money order. Even worse, when Magda makes a scene over the
existence of the money, she is accused of forging the mail herself. Here, not
only does Tomek demonstrate how power in the network society is about who
has control over information, but Magdas frustration over the fake money
order captures poignantly both the hope and anxiety associated with Polands
entrance into a new money economy.
After making contact with Magda through the mail scheme, Tomeks game
of manipulation intensifies. He breaks into a camera store and steals a high-
powered telescope, which he uses to spy on Magdas sexual escapades; he then
takes on a new job, delivering milk to his neighbours, a task that allows him
to greet Magda at her door each morning. He even finds her phone number
and complements his surveillance practices with a series of intrusive phone
calls. But perhaps the cleverest way in which Tomek controls Magda from a
distance involves his use of the gas company. During one of Tomeks peeping
sessions, he becomes outraged by one of Magdas male companions. To
disrupt their lovemaking, Tomek makes an anonymous phone call to the gas
company, reporting a deadly leak in Magdas apartment. Of course, there is
no threat; but when the gas company employees show up at Magdas door,
Magdas lovemaking is immediately put on hold. Feigning a public health
risk, Tomeks reliance on the gas company to invade Magdas home provides
a wonderful example of how power can be administered through even the
simplest of networks.
Interestingly, while Tomeks surveillance practices show how vulnerable the
home is to an outside intrusion, he is never placed in a position of sadistic
power. Unlike other films, where the male voyeur torments his female victims
through sadistic games of surveillance (think of the classic peeping Tom, Mark
Lewis, and his vicious attacks in Peeping Tom or the creepy audio surveillance in
Klute), Tomeks peeping is benign and no match for the domineering Magda.
Indeed, as soon as Tomek lets Magda know that he is watching, the entire power
dynamic shifts. In short, by deciding to stare back, Magda takes control of
the situation. Fully aware of her peeping Tom, Magda even punishes Tomek
by playing up the exhibitionist role. Peering through the window seductively,
she initiates the game of surveillance, holding up her phone to encourage
the young man to keep up the game. She then moves her bed in front of
the window so that all of her sexual pursuits are performed in full view of
Tomek. So while the episode begins as a one-way game of voyeurism, by the
midpoint of the episode a two-way game of control ensues, as both parties
seek to manipulate the other from a distance.
After a relentless game of domestic intrusiveness, Magda finally takes the
upper hand when she decides to let Tomek inside her home. Believing that
44 UNHOMELY CINEMA

all Tomek wants is physical pleasure, Magda invites him back to her place
one night and, after a series of unexpected sexual advances, provides him
with a cruel lesson in the myths of love. Indeed, in stark contrast to Tomeks
networking games of remote control, throughout the scene Magda
demonstrates the old-fashioned powers involved in face-to-face, embodied
contact: she entices him with her good looks, guides his hands over her
body; she even causes him to have a premature orgasm. Subsequently, before
Tomek is able to comprehend what is happening around him, his first sexual
encounter is over: You came so quickly, she says. Here is your true love.
Here Magda is at her cruelest. Offering little consolation, asking him to clean
up his mess, Magda gives Tomek a firm lesson in the dangers of voyeurism,
as if she were able to respond resolutely to a whole history of cinematic
peeping. In short, by looking back, Magda attempts to put an end to
Tomeks domestic intrusions, to curtail his network of spying by containing
him in her apartment. However, her actions are unable to anticipate what
happens next. Hoping perhaps to merely shame Tomek out of his idealistic
ways, to give him a firm dose of the realities of love, Magdas cruelty goes too
far. For immediately following Tomeks sexual experience, he storms out of
the apartment and within minutes of being home attempts suicide.
Tomeks suicide attempt fails. After a brief stint in the hospital, Tomek
returns to his banal job at the post office. Whats more, he returns completely
cured of his obsessive peeping. We learn of Tomeks cure in the final scenes
of the episode, as we, once again, witness Magda and Tomek engage in an
intimate conversation through a kiosk window. As mentioned earlier, in the
opening scene the cinematography produced a doubling effect, as the image
of the love-struck Tomek was overlaid with Magdas; in the end scene, the
translucent properties of the window are used to create another, far more
unpleasant visual effect, one in which Magdas image is now marked by a gap
or hole. As Tomek confesses that he is no longer interested in peeping, we
are positioned with him behind the window. All visual attention is placed on
Magdas face. However, because we are positioned directly behind the kiosk
windows circular hole, we do not see her directly, but look at her through a gap,
a process that creates a circular indentation on top of her face. Subsequently,
whereas in the opening scenes the image of Magda is translucent and
shimmery, in the end scene her image is static and flawed, as the circular hole
becomes an irritant that distracts us from seeing her as a whole image.
What should we make of this reversal the movement from a virtual
space of overlapping simultaneity to the figure of a gap or hole? A more
standard reading of this change, I think, would envision the cessation of
Tomeks peeping as a lesson in the Lacanian register of The Real. That
is, whereas the opening scene was defined in terms of the virtual, as Magda
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 45

comes to represent an ideal image of desire, that necessary other that fills
in the subjects irreplaceable loss and uncertainty, the end scenes emphasis on
gaps or holes represents the failure of Tomeks idealism. Put in terms of the
unhomely, while Magda represents, in the beginning, Tomeks pathway to the
feeling and experience of home, a maternal space of plenitude, in the end this
space of jouissance is shown to be an illusion.
While there is some validity to this interpretation, I would like to suggest
another, more geopolitical perspective on the relationship between Tomek and
Magda. First of all, there is some truth to the idea that Tomek is desperately in
search of home. Tomek is, after all, an orphan, who appears to have no family
or friends. Yet, instead of seeing Tomeks homelessness as an irreconcilable
experience of loss, his unhomeliness can be taken as a sign of hope, a sign
of his desire to forge new connections, relationships and experiences. When
Magda asks him about his life in an orphanage, for example, Tomeks response
evokes neither pity nor regret; rather Tomek says that he enjoyed it immensely,
since his break from the traditional domestic sphere brought him into contact
with a host of other cultures and languages. This experience with difference
even prompted his passionate love of studying languages. Thus, if the home
is a sign of the nation, could we not read Tomeks homelessness as the desire
to part with the restrictive nature of national identities, as his acceptance of
other forms of dwelling? This might explain his attraction to Magda. As an
assertive and sexually liberated woman, Magda clearly represents a new kind
of femininity, which is not tied to any of those traditional domestic duties. As
such, Tomeks interest in Magda may not be at all about the subjugation of the
female other or her reduction to a visual object; his interest is about expanding
his horizons and the hopeful possibilities that come about by rejecting the
normative gender roles associated with the nuclear family.
Another way in which Tomeks peeping can be understood outside of a
standard voyeuristic reading has to do with the issue of access, namely,
who has access to the networks of control. After all, the episode does not just
feature a one-sided game of surveillance; Magda too uses a range of strategies
to peep in on the private life of her peeping Tom. This is seen near the end
of the episode, when Magda experiences guilt over Tomeks attempted suicide
and desperately tries to find out his whereabouts. Interestingly, while Tomek
has no trouble interfering with Magdas domestic life, having access to her
address, phone number and mail, Magda is unable to breech Tomeks home
life. Indeed, while Magda is able to command the face-to-face encounter
and is a master of bodily contact, she is not very proficient at commanding
and controlling flows of information. When she suspects that something has
happened to Tomek, for example, her only method for reaching him is the
register of sight, as she stands in front of her apartment window holding a
46 UNHOMELY CINEMA

placard which asks Tomek to call. Then when he doesnt call, she physically
goes to his apartment and asks his landlady what has happened. Other than
these two outlets, Magda appears to have no other way of finding out about
Tomeks life. Unlike Tomek, or the young Pawe, Magda possess very little
understanding of the powers of remote control, as her helplessness shows
the new kinds of social inequality that emerge from life in the network society.

Episode 10: Guarding the Home at All Costs

Unlike the sombre and still opening of episode 1, episode 10 begins in a
state of frenzied mayhem. As the scene opens, we are taken inside a raucous
punk concert, where an ecstatic young man shouts a plethora of harsh and
demoralizing sentiments: Kill. Kill. Kill. Commit adultery, covet things all the
week [] beat up your mother, your father, your sister[] beat up the young
one[] and steal everything, because everything belongs to you, everything
belongs to you. On the verge of Polands shift to a free-market economy, the
young mans rage pronounces in advance the decline of Western civilization,
as greed and corruption destroy all hope in the sanctity of the family. If the
series began on a sombre note, where the loss of young Pawe signaled the
homes inability to offer protection from the outside, it will appear that we will
end our journey through an anarchist hell, as the family home is not simply on
the decline; it will be actively destroyed.
However, despite this opening evocation of chaos, absolute egotism and
individual greed, what we actually witness in the final episode is the forging
of familial bonds, the creation of a family home rather than its rejection, as
two brothers come to bond over the death of their father. This odd mixture
of anarchy and familial bonding is captured succinctly in the punk concert
scenes: as the viewer watches the wild antics of the crowd, the camera singles
out and follows a rather normal looking businessman, as he tries to make his
way through the raucous crowd. The man is clearly out of place, an outsider
who has crossed over into a foreign world of youthful energy and frenzy.
A little later, the mystery behind the man is revealed, as the viewer learns
that he is the estranged brother of one of the punk rockers and has ventured
out into the night to relay the tragic news of their fathers death. Thus, while
on the one hand, the punk rocker signals the desire for the destruction of
the family, as greed and corruption contaminate the home from within, on
the other hand, the estranged brothers desire to contact his sibling signals the
possibility of a hopeful future of brotherly love.
Indeed, just as the series hinges on both the hope for a new promising future
and the uncertainty of entering a new world order, the final episode performs
a delicate balancing act, negotiating between the extremes of destruction
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 47

and restoration. For while the brothers enjoy a degree of familial bonding as
they put the past aside and find new meaning in the death of their father, it is
their reunion that ultimately leads them down a slippery slope of surveillance,
envy, greed, suspicion and betrayal. And like all other episodes, this path of
domestic uncertainty has everything to do with the presence of the apartment
building. As the viewer learns, when the brothers travel to their fathers home
to get his affairs in order, they are confronted with an enigma: while the father
lived in a desolate apartment and possessed few personal possessions, the
brothers discover that the apartment is protected by a sophisticated surveillance
system: not only has the father installed a steel-plated door, an alarm and
several locks (seven, to be precise), he even had all the windows boarded shut.
For the brothers the apartments excessive insularity is inexplicable. What
could all this protection be for? the younger brother Artur inquires. Moments
later, they get their answer, as they discover an extensive stamp collection that,
according to Jerzy, might be worth 300,000 to 400,000 zlotys.
While the brothers are right about the potential worth of stamp collections,
they have no idea just how valuable their fathers collection is worth. Instead
of the stamps being valued at a mere 300,000 zlotys, they are actually
appraised at tens of millions in the Western market. As an appraiser looks
over the stamps, he underscores the immense wealth the brothers have just
inherited: For this one, you can buy a small Fiat. For these, two diesels. This
series will pay for your flat. For the brothers, the discovery of their fathers
wealth is bittersweet. While the stamp collection becomes a shared project that
enables them to rekindle their distant relationship, the inheritance comes at a
huge cost. As the guardians of a new family fortune, they must contend with
the same dilemma faced by their father: How should they properly protect
the family fortune? Unlike episode 6, where the demarcation between the
domestic space of Tomek and Magda is momentarily blurred, the brothers
answer to the problem of safeguarding their fortune rests on absolute insularity.
Using the apartment as a vault, the brothers enhance their fathers already
sophisticated security system by adding steel bars to the windows and a guard
dog. Subsequently, in contrast to Magdas home, which becomes a permeable
space open to outsiders, in the final episode the home is depicted as nothing
less than a rigid no-mans land, an island of defence that is structured to keep
everyone out.
However, as we have seen, no home is free from an unhomely intrusion.
When the apartment is inexplicably robbed, the brothers are not only stripped
of their newfound wealth, but they lose all faith in the power of family. Since
neither brother can accept the prospect of an outside intrusion, their only
recourse is to turn on each other, as each one suspects the other of the crime.
Jerzy even secretly meets with a police officer, insisting that Artur is the prime
48 UNHOMELY CINEMA

suspect. By now, any of the charming interbrother bonding that had been
fostered up until this point has completely vanished. As it turns out, neither
of the brothers was responsible for the robbery. Rather, they were the victims
of a seedy stamp dealer, who, through an elaborate ruse, not only tricks Jerzy
into donating a kidney, but demonstrates that no level of protection is enough
to prevent an encounter with the unhomely. For the brothers, believing in the
impenetrability of the home is their downfall; having witnessed the isolation
of their father, who sacrificed his entire family over an obsession, the brothers,
too, betray their familial bonds by becoming the very greedy egotists portrayed
in the opening punk song.
Of all the episodes in The Decalogue, episode 10 provides the most direct
image of the home as the unstable nation, a territory which must be heavily
guarded in order to prevent the dissolution of its internal identity. Like the
French film Summer Hours, where the sale of the home of a cherished national
painter creates a metaphorical panic over the loss of French culture and identity,
the fathers precious stamp collection signals the way national identities are
potentially undermined by a global geopolitical climate. For instead of seeing
the stamps as a way to remain connected to their national past, the brothers
remain focused only on the future, especially the luxurious items they will
fetch through their new inheritance. However, if it werent for the last few
minutes of the episode, one might be led to believe that the final episode forms
the series most definitive image of unhomeliness. But this is not the case.
Rather, in the dying minutes of the story, we see the brothers overcome their
misdeeds and once again rekindle their relationship. After meeting by chance
on the street, they piece together the mystery of the robbery and admit their
wrongdoings. However, whats most interesting is that instead of being turned
off from the act of collecting, both brothers throw themselves back into stamp
collecting, as both are seen buying the same stamp collections in separate post
offices. Thus, despite their difficult and frayed reunion, the brothers, in the
end, avoid the opening demand to kill off the family and instead find in their
troubled ways a new path of discovery. In an episode that seems to signal most
forcibly the total decline of the family, this perhaps is also the series most
hopeful scene. Departing from the past, abandoning the flaws and folly of
their insular actions, the two brothers set out with their eyes what they hope is
a promising future.

Conclusion
If the home is the nations extended family, a metaphor for the longing for
communal fortitude, what happens when the hearth is attacked from all sides?
What happens when the homes protective barriers suddenly become porous?
 THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY 49

Through its extensive portrayal of domestic woe and the tragic decline of the
family, The Decalogue captures poignantly a nation at a dramatic crossroads:
with one side facing the past and the other side facing the future, the apartment
complex is quite simply the series most important sign, an architectural
presence that takes the viewer not only through the legacy and decline of
Polands socialistic past, but the building marks the anxiety and hope for
what may or may not come in the future. As we have seen from the episodes
explored above, The Decalogues spatial politics coalesces around the problem
of maintaining boundaries and borders. Much like the nation, which depends
on upholding certain linguistic, legalistic and political borders, the home
requires its own protective borders, its own modes of containment. Yet, for
the characters in the series, this protection lays in tatters, as the demarcation
between inside and outside, between what is public and private constantly
shifts sides, blurring the rigidity of the homes interiority. And, as we have
seen, all too often this unhomely shift in space is experienced as immense
dread. For Tomek, it entailed a near-fatalistic encounter with the sensuous
Magda, a desire for an alternative mode of dwelling that turned nasty and
cruel; for the two brothers, it resulted in a bitter rivalry that not only claimed
one of Jerzys kidneys, but put an immense strain on their home life. But while
the show shows the failure of grand ideological projects, there are moments
of hope. The past may be a site of failure, but the future may hold clues to
alternative modes of living.
 Chapter 3

THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU:

GLOBAL GENTRIFICATION AND

THE UNHOMELY NATURE OF

DISCARDED PLACES

Nostalgia, Technology and the Home

During the first season finale of AMCs hit television series, Mad Men,
Don Draper makes an emotional pitch to Kodak on the domestic benefits
of their latest invention, The Kodak Wheel a simple, circular device that
allows photography enthusiasts to seamlessly organize and showcase their
photographic slides. As Kodaks first attempt at creating a photographic
projector, the Wheel undoubtedly represents a technological milestone.
However, while the executives at Kodak remain committed to the Wheels
technological and commercial value, its advertising potential is far from
convincing. Containing none of the technological flash or enticing novelty that
attracts consumers, the archaic nature of the projector (one of the executives
comments that the wheel is one of mans oldest inventions) introduces the
problem of how to advertise a product that appears to have been around
forever. Unperturbed by the Wheels lack of aesthetic flash, Draper insists that
the projectors dependence on an old technology is irrelevant. Advertising,
Draper claims, is undeniably predicated on the lure of the new. Yet this is
only one side of advertisings arsenal of seduction; advertising also works to
create deeper bonds with the emotional life of the consumer, to draw on the
consumers feelings of homely comfort and warmth. Yes, the wheel may be
an old technology, but framed in a particular way, the old can easily become
seductive, especially when it spurs the desire to go back in time, to emotionally
reconnect with some long-lost place or memory.
To dramatize his point, Draper takes a trip down memory lane. First, he
recounts an invaluable lesson in advertising imparted to him by his mentor,
an old Greek pro named Teddy. According to Teddy, a successful ad can at
times use nostalgia to entice the consumer. As Teddy philosophizes, the word
52 UNHOMELY CINEMA

nostalgia is derived from Greek and involves the painful ache to return to the
past. Nostalgia is more than memory; it is about the hearts desire to return
to a special place in time. Then, to contextualize his mentors comments,
Drapers speech turns extremely personal, as he shows that what is at stake
in the experience of nostalgia is not merely a general longing to return,
but the desire to go back is really the desire to go home, to return to a place
of domestic plenitude. As he boasts confidently, the Kodak Wheel is not any
old wheel; it is a domestic time machine. Like the magic of a childs carousel,
which goes around indefinitely, the Kodak Wheel is a memory machine that
glides back and forth between different layers of time. As proof, Draper ends
his pitch by showing a series of slides that feature some of his most important
suburban family moments (his wedding day, Christmas celebrations, birthday
parties, picnics with the family); memories that combine to drive home this
central point: modern technologies, like the Kodak Wheel, not only celebrate
the importance of living in the present, they allow one to reconnect to special
moments in the past, places where one was once loved and perhaps cherished.
In other words, no matter where you are located, no matter how bad your
present situation may be, you are only ever a few clicks away from returning
to the comforts of home.
Unlike Mad Mens nostalgic return home, which offers a mythological
image of the wholesome suburban home, Michel Gondrys comedy Be Kind
Rewind invites us to think differently about the unhomeliness of urban life.
Whereas most films set in urban areas thrive on the decay and morass of
urbanity, Be Kind Rewind takes an opposing stance, showing how the urban
unhomely can actually bring people together and fight off collective forms of
social anomie. Specifically, the film focuses on a dilapidated building (a video
and antique store that, according to the owner, Mr. Fletcher, is the birthplace
of jazz great Fats Waller) and the way a few locals use their skills in poaching
Hollywood films to save the building from the threat of global gentrification.
Subsequently, whereas Drapers perspective on media technologies is framed
within the context of the pristine suburbs and its dominant position in the
cultural imaginary of postwar America, Be Kind Rewind shows how unhomely
spaces in the city can provide alternative living spaces, where public collectives
rather than suburban, private enclaves act as the ground for new modes of
dwelling. Furthermore, unlike Draper, who conceptualizes media technologies
as impenetrable time machines that can securely house your domestic
memories, Gondrys film provides a succinct commentary on the precarious
nature of urban memory, especially as remembering and forgetting come to
depend on the fleeting nature of architectural and media spaces. For while
architecture and media technologies may seem like durable mediums, in the
film both are depicted as fragile spaces that are unable to permanently house
 THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 53

the communitys collective stories. Indeed, when the building is deemed an

unattractive and obsolete part of the neighbourhood and set to be destroyed,
the question that emerges is: What happens to all the memories and stories
that are tied to the building? How does the nebulous world of memory survive
when it loses its material base?

The Future Is behind You

Perusing the critical reviews of Be Kind Rewind, I was surprised to find several
references to Frank Capras holiday classic Its A Wonderful Life. Given Gondrys
status as one of Hollywoods most idiosyncratic directors, the comparisons
to Capras wholesome slice of Americana seemed, at first glance, quite
unexpected: What could Gondrys bizarre, implausible story of two goofballs
(Mos Def and Jack Black), who try to save a local video store from gentrification
by creating weird, low-budget versions of popular films (a process known in
the film as sweding) have to do with the existential crisis of the straight-laced
George Bailey? The answer, it seems, has everything to do with nostalgia,
especially the way both films end with scenes that evoke the might of old-
fashioned civic pride and duty. In Capras classic ending, the suicidal George
Bailey is stitched back into the community when he realizes that without his
dedication, the small town of Bedford Falls would have been sucked into the
abyss of urbanization. Indeed, as Bailey comes to realize through the films
alternative universe, without his firm leadership Bedford Falls would have
been replaced by Pottersville, a decrepit city filled with pawnshops and sleazy
bars. The contrast could not be more stark: from the collective might of a
pristine American town to a city strangled by social anomie, Capras tale is as
much about the rapid process of modern urbanization as it is about the moral
fate of a troubled individual. In fact, for Capra, the two are ineluctably linked:
transformed by his glimpse into urban darkness, George Bailey realizes the
value of the public good and in a final act of collective action, Bedford Falls is
saved. At the end of Be Kind Rewind we are also asked to ponder the viability
of collective action. While, this time, the culminating moment of civic pride
involves the films two bumbling idiots who slowly bring together an inner city
neighbourhood by including the locals in their amateur film productions,
the result is no less moving or nostalgic. Like Capras tale, which ends with a
group of charitable neighbours, who come together to bail out their leader,
Gondrys film concludes with a touching scene in which the public takes to
the streets to show their support for the local filmmakers. Here, with images
of a cheering, jubilant crowd, Gondry pays homage to collective action at
its most nostalgic. Publicly united, firmly implanted in the streets, the crowd
seems destined to succeed: the store will be saved.
54 UNHOMELY CINEMA

However, while Be Kind Rewind may share Capras nostalgic sense of civic
pride, there are important differences between the two films, namely, the
location and resolution of the narratives. Whereas Capras tale is set squarely
within a sentimental framework wherein the all-American small town is pitted
against the demoralizing, noir-like features of urbanization, for Gondry, it is the
city itself that acts as the backbone of the public good. Thus, while the spirit
of these two films may be similar, their contrasting spatial environments tell
different stories about which location city or town is best suited to achieving
a strong public sphere. I would even argue that it is this territorial question of
how different living spaces foster alternative notions of the public good that is
the most interesting aspect of the counterhegemonic concerns of Gondrys film.
While many will find Gondrys critique of mainstream cinema the most pressing
concern of Be Kind Rewind, wherein the protagonists low-fi, creative remakes
mirror Gondrys own filmic experimentation, this critique needs to be placed
within the context of the geography of home, especially the way the unhomely
spaces of Fletchers building come to act as a viable public sphere.
Secondly, while both films may evoke sentimental endings, Gondrys narrative
steers clear of the homely closure found in Its a Wonderful Life. Unlike George
Bailey, who miraculously saves the towns bank, allowing the residents of Bedford
Falls to keep the roofs over their heads, Fletcher is unable to save his building, as
his home comes under the destructive hands of gentrification. For just as soon as
the narrative approaches a happy culmination, a legal team representing several
Hollywood conglomerates arrives and thwarts the dreams of the community.
Since Mike and Jerrys homemade movies are in violation of numerous
copyright laws, they are forced to terminate the business, thereby thwarting
any hope of saving the building. The building will be destroyed. The loss of
Fletchers building, however, does not mean that the end is all gloom and doom.
Quite the contrary, abiding by a liminal narrative structure wherein hope and
dismay constantly intermingle, Gondrys story shows how local communities can
still find new and creative ways of dwelling together. To unpack this question of
home, I will navigate through the series of alternating changes/disruptions that
occur to the Fletcher residence. More precisely, I argue that the changing status
of the home (Fletchers building moves from being considered an eyesore in the
neighbourhood, a hub of local creativity and a site of copyright infringement, to
ultimately being destroyed) provides a series of apt metaphors for the way global
urban strategies are experienced and worked out at the local level.

Disruption One
The first disruption to the Fletcher home occurs immediately and its effect
on the buildings place within the neighbourhood is stark, definitive: because
 THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 55

the city has declared the building a public health risk, Fletchers home will be
destroyed to make way for a new condominium project. While for Fletcher
and his adopted son Mike, the building represents a historical gem (the homes
status as the birthplace of Fats Waller formed a sign of hope for the orphaned
boy), for the city officials it is nothing more than an unhomely pile of rubbish,
an old, decrepit and dangerous building that, like the past, must be overcome
to make way for the future. Unable to keep up with the times, Fletcher is, in
the eyes of the city officials, a burden on the local community, an impediment
to urban progress and restoration. By insisting that the city must be freed
from obsolete and outdated architecture, the governments gentrifying
policies resonate well with what Sharon Zukin (1991) calls the battle over
the right to the city. According to Zukin, since the economic sustainability
of cities depend on their ability to attract global investments, rebranding and
beatification projects are often used to increase a citys portfolio. In particular,
gentrification has become an important global urban strategy that is utilized to
improve the image of cities, as certain urban areas are made into aseptic zones
of commerce that are inviting to tourists, consumers and corporate investors.
While many films have tackled the issue of gentrification, in Gondrys film
an entirely new regime of urban renewal is imagined. As Neil Smith (2006)
argues, as an official urban strategy used by both public and private groups
interested in garnishing global investments, contemporary gentrification no
longer abides by the same rules and patterns witnessed first in major urban
areas, like London and New York during the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, a new
globalizing process of gentrification has emerged which supersedes the dualistic
structure of earlier modes of gentrification. For example, whereas earlier
forms of gentrification relied heavily on a centre/periphery system of space,
todays gentrification is far more dispersive and ubiquitous. Subsequently,
one of the major characteristics of contemporary gentrification involves the
wide scope of its reach: whereas previously only a few ultrametropolitan areas
like Paris, London and New York experienced gentrification, now virtually
every city in the Western world, even industrial centres like Cleveland, Detroit
and Pittsburgh, are experimenting with urban rebranding and city cleanup
projects. As Smith writes about the evolution of gentrification,

On the one hand, gentrification as a process has rapidly descended the

urban hierarchy; it is evident not only in the largest cities but in more
unlikely centers such as the previously industrial cities of Cleveland or
Glasgow, smaller cities like Malmo or Grenada, and even small market
towns such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania or Cesky Krumlov in the Czech
Republic. At the same time, the process has diffused geographically as
well, with reports of gentrification from Tokyo to Tenerife (Garcia 2001),
56 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Sao Paulo to Puebla, Mexico (Jones and Varley 1999), Cape Town
(Garside l993) to the Caribbean (Thomas 1991), Shanghai to Seoul []
The important point here is the rapidity of the evolution of an initially
marginal urban process first identified in the 1960s and its ongoing
transformation into a significant dimension of contemporary urbanism.
(2002, 239)

In addition to the diffuse reach of contemporary gentrification are the ways

in which urban development is consistently understood as a privatepublic
initiative. It is no longer the self-interest of the real estate market that drives
urban redevelopment; gentrification is now equally inscribed within official
public policy. Whereas [] postwar urban renewal in Western cities helped
to encourage scattered private-market gentrification, Smith writes, that
gentrification [] has, in turn, provided the platform on which large-scale
multifaceted urban regeneration plans [] are established [] Whereas
the key actors in Glasss story were assumed to be middle- and upper-class
immigrants to a neighbourhood, the agents of urban regeneration thirty-
five years later are governmental, corporate, or corporategovernment
partnerships (2002, 238, 239).
To illustrate the way the line between the private and public is increasingly
intermeshed in the creation of global urban regeneration plans, Smith relays
a controversial story involving the supposed Christmas gift Mayor Giuliani
offered to New Yorkers in 1998. According to Smith, the gift, which involved a
$900 million tax subsidy that would allow the New York Stock Exchange to stay
in New York, illustrates quite succinctly the fierce interregional competition
required of cities to compete in a global game of international investment and
capital (2002, 427, 428). Several months earlier the New York Stock Exchange
had threatened to relocate to New Jersey, where it would have received a much
more lucrative tax package. Overnight, it seemed, the NYSE was prepared to
abandon its long and colorful history in New York by relocating to a peripheral
place promising a sounder environment for competing in the global economy.
While the NYSEs threat captures the way cities must constantly duke it out in
order to ensure that they are the most lucrative places for global investments,
the real issue for Smith is not simply the content of the threat but how city
officials choose to respond to this act of defiance. Using the seductive language
of the gift economy, Mayor Giulianis claim that the act of saving the NYSE
was a gift to the people of New York illustrates how issues of the public good
are consistently placed in the service of the global economy. Of course, Smiths
point is not that economic factors are unimportant to the good life or that
New Yorkers should not have been happy that they were able to retain an
important historical institution; rather, the issue is the way the public good is
 THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 57

consistently used as a play toy for advancing the agendas of corporate enterprises,
as the urban environment is increasingly structured and calibrated to express the
impulses of capitalistic production rather than social production (2002, 427).

The City in Film: The New Process of Gentrification

The cinema has a rich history of documenting urban gentrification, as both
the documentary and narrative film have been used to explore the complex
social, economic and cultural changes brought about by urban renewal.
Be Kind Rewind continues in this tradition; however, its image of gentrification,
especially the unhomeliness associated with urban decay, departs from
more traditional representations of urban disparity. The first and perhaps
most subtle difference involves the films location. Unlike other notable
films about gentrification, which focus on the iconic streets and buildings
of New York City (Brave New York, Everyday People, 7th Street, batteries not
included), Be Kind Rewind steers away from this traditional urban backdrop
by setting the film in a far more obscure and peripheral city, Passaic,
New Jersey. Subsequently, just as Fletchers revisionist account of American
jazz downplays the cultural importance of New York (Fletcher claims that
the real hot spot for jazz music in the 1920s was Passaic), Gondrys uses a
marginal city to show what is lost through the calculated eradication of the
architectural environment, a feature that is evoked immediately through the
films opening shots. As the credits begin, we are given a long aerial shot that
begins from some distant place outside New York City; as we hover over an
undisclosed part of the city, we can see New York in the distance, with its
bundle of iconic, shimmering towers. However, while it might appear that the
viewer will be taken into the heart of New York, the camera stops short of this
typical itinerary. While we can see the iconic New York skyline in the distance,
the viewer is never allowed within the city limits. The camera instead takes a
detour into the far-from-glitzy city of Passaic. With a slight shift in direction,
the camera suddenly veers under an overpass, where we find the heroes of our
story painting graffiti on a wall.
The transition from the iconic to the obscure is swift but significant. On
the one hand, Gondrys use of a peripheral city could be read as the desire
to challenge the cultural dominance of certain key places that continue to
dominate the cultural imaginary. This alternate map of American cultural
geography certainly fits well with the films exploration of historical revisionism,
as the members of the neighbourhood graft their own anti-NYC history of jazz
great Fats Waller. At the same time, the move toward the marginal need not
be read in an oppositional vein. Viewed in terms of the diffuse and ubiquitous
nature of contemporary gentrification, wherein virtually all urban areas are
58 UNHOMELY CINEMA

touched by urban rebranding, Gondrys representation of Passaic highlights

the way even remote, obscure places are now included within the global
march of urban redevelopment. Both readings in fact come together nicely
in the film and provide an evocative image of what has been recently labelled
the glocalization of culture. On one level, the eradication of Fletchers
home is associated with the global ubiquity of gentrification, as urban renewal
emerges as a unifying force in the spread of global capital. Yet, on the other
hand, Gondrys charming and nuanced exploration of everyday life in Passaic
(the film is noted for Gondrys desire to work the real inhabitants of the city
into the film) provides a striking look at how local places and communities rise
to the challenges produced by global forces. When all is said and done, Be Kind
Rewind is a gentle film that uses the eccentricity and playfulness of the city to
create a hopeful image of the resourcefulness and creativity that still resides
in local places.
A second facet of Gondrys representation of gentrification that falls
in line with Smiths conception of urban renewal involves the way public
reconstruction policies disguise their gentrifying characteristics through
joint publicprivate initiatives. After finding out that his building is destined
for demolition, Fletcher proceeds to city hall, where he is greeted by a
very pessimistic city official who is adamant about the inevitability of the
buildings destruction. While, for Fletcher, the fate of the building is far
from sealed (after all, he will propose a plan to save the building), for the
city official, the buildings destiny has been decided. Your video store is a
tenement, the official declares, and you have sixty days from this notice
of demolition to bring it up to code. Otherwise, we will have to demolish
it. As if reducing his home to a slum wasnt enough, the official then has
the nerve to try and console Fletcher by suggesting that he relocate to the
projects, as if this highly stigmatized place were the natural fit for someone of
Fletchers social and racial status. As in other black urban films, such as Spike
Lees Do the Right Thing or John Singletons Boyz in the Hood, Gondry insists
that the issue of urban rights and access to the city needs to be explored via
racial discourses. What is unique about Gondrys film is that the restrictions
imposed upon racial bodies possess neither the excessive violence nor police
brutality evidenced in other films about power and race. Quite the contrary,
in Gondrys film the unhomely reality of policing spatial boundaries appears
rather benign. Fletchers fated move to the projects is not achieved through
brute physical force; there are no great outbursts of violence, where tempers
flare and entire neighbourhoods become victimized by random acts of
brutality. Rather, Fletchers access to the city is determined in the citys banal
urban development office, with boring speeches about public health and
affordable living.
 THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 59

While Be Kind Rewinds perspective on race and urbanity may not possess the
shock and awe of other urban films, the process of gentrification evidenced
in the film is no less insidious. In a picture-perfect image of Smiths contention
that contemporary gentrification rests on privatepublic initiatives, Gondry
invites us to consider how the objective claims made by the city official
about public safety are deeply influenced by the real estate market. In the
city hall scene, for instance, not only is Fletcher confronted by a city official,
who is supposed to represent the larger public good, he is also confronted
by a private real estate developer. It pays to look at the mise-en-scne of this
scene. To the left of Fletcher we find the private developer. Deeply invested
in Fletchers case, since he needs to get rid of his home in order to start a new
condominium project, the developer insists that his only desire is to improve
the living conditions of the people of Passaic. In short, Fletchers building
must be removed to make way for the hope and prosperity of the future. To
make his point, the developer constantly makes reference to a glossy placard
that features a before-and-after image of how his urban development project
will improve the city. In the first image (present tense), we find a partially
completed utopia. All the new buildings are in place, the city has been cleaned
up and families are shown enjoying their new homes; however, this image is
marred by a major flaw: sitting in the corner is Fletchers old decrepit building,
which stands in strong contrast to the pleasant and light ambience of the
neighbourhood. But then, to visually display how easily this partial utopia can
be fully realized, the developer peels back the image of Fletchers building,
revealing the remaining part of the developers architectural utopia.
On the right of Fletcher we find an agent of the public good, a city official
who speaks, not in terms of urban regeneration or progress, but through the
agency of the law. Unlike her counterpart, the architect, whose sentiments
form qualitative judgments (i.e., Passaic will be better off without Fletchers
building), the public official utilizes a quantitative logic: since Fletchers home
is not up to the citys building codes, it must be destroyed. Yet by bringing
together both figures, the film suggests that the process of gentrification
requires both agents to expedite the regenerative urban process. However, what
is problematic about this joint initiative is the winwin situation it implies, the
way neither group comes to represent overtly the evils commonly associated
with gentrification. From either side, the regenerative process seems undeniably
optimistic. Who, after all, would resist the developers promise of progress?
Or from the officials standpoint, who would stand behind a governmental
agency that turns a blind eye to the hazards of an unsafe building. But, as
Smith recognizes, disguising the social inequalities of gentrification through
official urban policies does not eliminate magically the social injustices created
through so-called urban beautifying projects. Current urban policies, as this
60 UNHOMELY CINEMA

scene captures, are all the more deceptive, since the blatant social problems
represented in earlier forms of gentrification are now promoted in the name
of the public good.

Disruption Two: Memory, Media and

the Forgotten World of Junkspace
At the root of gentrification is the act of physical erasure. Old buildings
and neighbourhoods are removed in order to make way for new homes
and neighbourhoods. But alongside these tangible modes of erasure is the
intangible matter of memory and forgetting. Buildings are not simply physical
enclosures that house people in the present; architecture possesses virtual
qualities, as its durability helps form an archive of memories, stories and
information about the past. As one of the most resilient arts, architecture
is designed to endure and outlast, to outlive its fleeting designers. However,
for critics like Paul Virilio, architecture can no longer maintain its role as
something eternal, as the increased speed of contemporary societies leads
to the loss of architectures durability. As Virilio writes,

The acceleration of history that we have witnessed in so many aspects

of life has of course not made an exception with regard to the life span
of buildings. In contrast to previous epochs, a building today is not built
to last forever [] An eloquent example of this is found in the fact that,
whereas up to now, a construction permit was enough to put up a building,
nowadays in the United States, and soon in France too, you also need
a demolition permit. The transient duration of a building is therefore
being projected in advance by the planners. A building has ceased to be
something lasting, something eternal, as it used to be. (2001, 58)

Without a doubt, the physical erasure of Fletchers building forms one aspect of
the films exploration of the contemporary unhomely: demolition, so Fletcher
is told, is the only way into the future. Gondrys exploration of gentrification,
however, goes a step further in showing how alongside the destructive nature
of physical erasure is the precarious nature of time, memory and forgetting.
For if, as Virilio argues, speed necessitates eradication, what happens to all
of the memories and stories that are housed in the built environment? Can a
neighbourhoods memories persist when it loses its architectural support? Or
must they too be discarded to the rubbish pile of the past? In most of Gondrys
films, the themes of time and memory are quite palpable, as Gondry insists that
memory is not simply a personal archive contained within the subject, but memory
and time are intimately linked to external objects, especially the technologies we
 THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 61

use in everyday life. Since memories are both crafted and retrieved through
various technological interfaces, the way we treat our technologies (whether they
are rendered obsolete or useless) can affect the way the past is accessed and
preserved. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, Gondry considered
the issue of prosthetic memories by painting a damning depiction of the way
new technologies foster collective amnesia. Borrowing from the sci-fi genre, the
film focuses on a high-tech medical treatment that allows people to have their
painful memories extracted and destroyed. But whereas Gondrys task in Eternal
Sunshine was to show how technologies could pull people further apart (in the
film, relationships cease to exist because people forget each other), in Be Kind
Rewind Gondry moves in the other direction, showing how the risk of erasure
can actually bring people closer together.
This positive perspective on erasure emerges in the film principally through
the strange antics of Jerry, the eccentric mechanic who inadvertently destroys
all of Fletchers video rentals. During Fletchers leave of absence, Jerry comes
to believe that the local power plant is sending out subliminal messages and
somehow convinces Mike to help him sabotage the plants mind control.
During the sabotage, however, Mike abandons Jerry, a decision that proves
quite costly, as Jerry is electrocuted in a freak accident. Interestingly, just as
a disruption to the home creates the narrative crisis that must be remedied,
it is another uncanny intrusion on the home that provides the narrative
solution. For when Jerry shows up at the video store the next day feeling ill
and distraught, he accidentally destroys Fletchers entire collection of VHS
rentals. Jerry, it seems, has been electromagnetized and his presence in the
store causes all the video content to be erased. But while Jerrys accident is
initially perceived as a total disaster, it turns out that it is this ubiquitous act of
erasure that leads Mike and Jerry to their creative encounter with sweding
popular Hollywood films. Armed with an old analog camera and some
makeshift props and costumes (cardboard cutouts, pipes, marshmallows, etc.),
Mike and Jerry attempt to conceal the accident by making their own amateur
remakes of the movies, a move that turns out to be quite successful, as the
locals flock to the store in search of their lo-fi masterpieces. With time, the
whole neighbourhood catches on to these unique productions and in the span
of a few days Fletchers building is transformed into a creative hot spot, a
desired space in the neighbourhood that, as we will see, forms the ground for
a collective lesson in historical fabulation.

Sweding: A Lesson in Creative Erasure

Media experimentation has been at the forefront of Gondrys career, as his
work with numerous media formats from experiments in music videos and
62 UNHOMELY CINEMA

commercials to his work in the social documentary and popular narrative films
has produced an assortment of new and visually compelling narratives. Yet,
what has always struck me about Gondrys work is that while his innovations
appear to depend on the latest computer-generated effects, in actuality his
approach demonstrates the complete opposite: working in the manipulative
tradition of Georges Mlis, where special effects are created on set and
depend on innovative camera techniques and creative set designs, Gondrys
work consistently shows how compelling narratives and visual effects can be
produced without the aid of high technology. In previous films, like Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, a variety of inventive practices
from basic animation techniques and unique set designs to sophisticated
computer-generated imagery (CGI) effects and in-camera montage effects
were used to pull the viewer into the strange and vivid worlds of memories and
dreams. With Be Kind Rewind, Gondry opts for an entirely minimalist approach
as he resurrects the obsolete world of analog video to create a lo-fi homage
to Hollywood, a move that, at first glance, appears quite surprising. Given the
highly affordable and assessable nature of digital technologies, one might have
expected the amateur filmmakers to adopt a more contemporary approach to
filmmaking. Indeed, since the digital revolution is supposed to allow greater
access to media content and production, how should we interpret Gondrys
explicit use of outdated media technologies? Why use analog video when the
digital trend is supposed to offer greater access, participation and creativity?
One explanation could be that claims that equate digital media with
instant access and greater democratic participation are largely and grossly
oversimplified; this way, the return to an older media format suggests that all
the latest hoopla over the democratization of digital media hasnt advanced
us much further than older analog technologies. Simply updating a media
format is not the solution to the lack of collective participation in the media.
Another interpretation, one that has more to do with the films depiction of
the unhomely, involves the way older, discarded media technologies do not
disappear when they become obsolete but sediment in various abject spaces.
Viewed from the perspective of cultural and technological obsolescence, the
return of analog video becomes a symbol of the return of the forgotten world
of junkspace, the way technological progress cannot be divorced from the
proliferation of cultural waste. In his article Exhausted Commodities: The
Material Culture of Music, Will Straw describes the different temporal rhythms
and spatial configurations that arise through the physical and semiotic decay
of cultural objects. According to Straw, the ubiquitous processes of cultural
obsolescence endemic to capitalistic societies does not depend on magical acts
of disappearance, whereby products immediately vaporize into thin air, leaving
no or little material trace of its posthumous flow through the marketplace.
 THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 63

Rather, decaying artefacts continue on after their designation as cultural waste

and are caught up in new processes of circulation. As Straw writes regarding
the decay of music,

This article presumes that obsolete objects do not simply disappear, giving
way to a future which will unfold without them, but persist and circulate
throughout the commercial markets of contemporary life [] This
involves an attention to time, to the life cycles of cultural commodities
and the ways in which they age. It invites us, as well, to focus on questions
of space, on the accumulation of exhausted commodities alongside each
other, in the retail sites and other institutions which have evolved to
contain them. (2000)

Crucial to Straws observation that cultural objects persist despite their

obsolescence are the different ways cultural artefacts decay. All products are
subject to both physical and semiotic modes of decay and, in large part, what
determines whether a product becomes a form of cultural waste depends on
how both of these processes interrelate. Certain products, like automobiles,
are physically exhausted over a relatively long span of time. Other cultural
items, like food products or media events, are subject to a short shelf life,
wherein the item can be exhausted immediately. This same process of decay
also applies to the semiotic value of cultural objects. While some products are
esteemed by consumers for their enduring semiotic value (think of the eternal
value of diamond rings) other products go out of fashion quite quickly. What
is important for Straw is the fact that these physical and semiotic rates of decay
are not always congruent. A product that is built to last may not even reach
the market. Given this situation, wherein an object may or may not achieve
the same rates of semiotic and physical decay, the pertinent question becomes:
What happens to those products that persist physically but are no longer of
cultural value? As Straw writes, Here, an analysis of cultural artefacts almost
of necessity becomes an ecological analysis, in the broadest sense of the term.
The accumulation of artefacts for which there is no longer any observable
social desire invites us to deal with the question of how we deal with cultural
waste.
Straws examination of the ecological problems of cultural waste offers a
pertinent way of decoding Gondrys media politics, especially his exploration
of the obsolescence associated with urban decay. As already mentioned, the
films depiction of unhomeliness surrounds the waning semiotic and physical
value of Fletchers decrepit, old building; like the ugly and stark architecture
found in The Decalogue, the obsolescence of Fletchers building is registered
on the outside, as the buildings disrepair becomes a prime cause of its
64 UNHOMELY CINEMA

fated destruction; however, equally striking is the ways in which the interiority
of Fletchers home reminds the viewer of how waste and decay are integral
parts of the functioning of contemporary capitalistic societies. As Straw
observes, when the semiotic value of an object decays, it does not necessarily
physically disappear but continues to accumulate and sediment in various
abject spaces, where it becomes the forgotten remnants of a cultures system
of cultural taste. In the film, Fletchers building acts as this reservoir of cultural
waste. From the obsolete VHS tapes that are lined against the walls to the
old records, cameras, photographs, gramophones and television sets that are
piled up in heaps of junk throughout the building, Fletchers home provides
the perfect visual reminder that we cannot escape the reality of modernitys
proliferation of junkspace. As Rem Koolhaas writes,

If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junkspace

is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built [] product of
modernization is not modern architecture but junkspace. Junkspace is
what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely,
what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout []
Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more
than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not
register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids. According to a new
gospel of ugliness, there is already more junkspace under construction in
the twenty-first century than has survived from the twentieth. (2002, 175)

For Koolhaas, modernity represents a mode of production that is excessively

accumulative: invention begets invention, production leads to more
production. Junkspace is literally the outcome of a ubiquitous littering
process. In the film, Fletchers home embodies this world of unending
accumulation. Unlike his major competitors, who have all moved on to the
DVD revolution and utilize the clean and efficient design philosophy behind
the all-pervasive big-box store, Fletchers home swells with obsolete junk,
as his building acts as a museum of the cultural debris that is necessarily left
behind through modernitys proliferation of newness. Here, the unhomely
literally represents a return of the real; whereas his competition thrives by
remaining in tune with the digital revolution, moving to the ebb and flow
of the latest consumer cultures, Fletcher is bogged down with the forgotten
world of waste. Certainly, there is some nostalgic charm in Fletchers status
as a connoisseur of waste. Surrounded by the relics of an outdated media
landscape, Fletchers resistance to the present possesses a commendable spirit
of defiance that helps the viewer sympathise with his plight; yet, it is hard not
to associate Fletcher with what Martha Rosler calls the negative social stigma
 THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 65

of obsolescence: Staying up to date with high-touch and high-tech goods

not only is frequently associated with improved social standing but is also
conflated with civic participation, citizenship, or nationalism. Obsolescence
here bears a negative valence (2002, 7). It is this form of obsolescence that
the urban developer so adamantly detests. Seeing Fletchers building more as
a trash pile of media technologies than a successful neighbourhood business,
the urban developer desires to remain in an eternal present, to escape the
cultural and historical reality of waste. It is not so much that he denies the
past; rather, it is that the eradication of the past is used to justify and evoke
the hope for a better present and future. Waste, in short, is good so long as it
is happily replaced by something better. Yet, while the urban developer seems
quite sure of his dedication to architectural eradication, at no point does he
articulate a viable solution to how one should responsibly deal with the refuse
produced through progress and change. Does ones demolition papers also
specify how to manage the debris left behind from calculated destruction?
They apparently do not. By arguing that Fletcher should simply relocate to
the projects (presumably taking his waste with him), the developer proposes
only a surface solution, as he hopes to displace Fletchers junkspace to another,
less conspicuous, part of the city.
Whereas the urban developer sees waste as a sign of regression, Mike
and Jerrys sweding business offers a more viable solution to how we may
deal with waste: it can be recycled. That is, by infusing older technologies
with new dynamic purposes, new life can be breathed into the obsolete,
resurrecting it from the trash bin of cultural inertia. As Straw argues, the
process of decay is never definitive, as artefacts live on and circulate according
to different temporal rhythms. Products that are cast to the forgotten spaces
of obsolescence can, and often do, return and regain semiotic value. Just as
retro clothing can suddenly become in vogue, achieving premium economic
and semiotic status, older technologies and their content can be refashioned,
recycled and resurrected so that their outdatedness becomes crucial to their
new semiotic life. This is precisely the way analog video is positioned in the
film. However, not only do the sweded films gain economic and semiotic
value (the store is able to thrive financially after it begins promoting the
sweded films), but the revival of the obsolete becomes the communitys mode
of resistance. By energizing the relics of an outdated past, the community
of amateur filmmakers create a counterdiscourse, wherein the use of analog
video can be read as the desire to escape the speed and space of contemporary
times. For if one of the goals of the contemporary technosphere is to calibrate
all places, so that the globe moves to the same rhythmic beat, the return to
an antiquated technology allows the community some freedom from this
technological procession. Thus, if the people of Passaic are unable to ward
66 UNHOMELY CINEMA

off the spatial threats represented by global gentrification, at least they have
the ability to retreat into their own temporal media world. In this sense, falling
behind the times becomes an antidote to a globalized world that requires all
places to perpetually upgrade to the eternal present.

Disruption Three
With the success of Jerry and Mikes sweding business, Fletchers building
is quickly transformed from a space of outdated and obsolete media to a
hot spot in the city, as crowds of people line up to rent one of their latest
sweded films. When the amateur filmmakers allow the local residents to
star in their own productions, an even more dramatic shift in the collective
life of the neighbourhood ensues, as Fletchers building moves from being a
provider of prepackaged media to the site of an experiment in collective film
production. Unleashing the creative powers of the neighbourhood, Mike and
Jerrys success, however, ends up being the cause of their demise. As news of
their weird films begins to circulate (their success story appears on the national
news), residents from several neighbouring cities, including New York, become
captivated by the prospect of appearing in their own sweded film; and just at
the moment when the building seems destined to be saved, a new disruption to
the community occurs, one that threatens to dampen the entire collective spirit
of the film initiative. Since the community uses copyrighted material to make
its recycled films, a legal group representing several major Hollywood studios
declares a legal war on the group. The gloomy fate of Fletchers building seems
unavoidable; since Fletcher is barely able to come up with the money to keep
the building alive, the prospect of doing battle with Hollywood is, quite simply,
too daunting and the lucrative film business is terminated. Just as Gondry
shows how gentrification destabilizes the collective home through the erasure
of important communal landmarks (throughout the film Mike insists that the
building is instrumental to keeping alive the memory of Fats Waller), the issue
of copyright infringement is shown to affect the viability of the public sphere,
especially the way local groups use the media to their advantage. When the
legal system shuts down the local film initiative, what is at stake is not simply
the economic success of Fletchers business, but the very means by which the
community communicates. As James Carey (1988) writes, communication is
never simply about the successful transmission of information across space;
communication is a communal act, wherein rituals, symbols and signs allow
people to come together and participate in the creation of social reality. In the
film, this collective form of communication is seriously jeopardized by a legal
framework that understands cultural goods as commercial commodities that
are not available to everyone. As Siva Vaidhyanathan (2001) argues, when
 THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 67

copyright laws seek to protect the profitability of large corporations above

everyone else, what suffers is the ingenuity and creativeness that is instrumental
to the collective and democratic production of culture.
For Mike and Jerry, the legal threats from Hollywood have a devastating
effect on their film business. No longer having access to the cultural goods that
they recycle into local masterpieces, the film collective, quite simply, no longer
has a cultural ground to stand upon: not only are their cultural codes taken
way, but the social glue that brings the community together is also jeopardized.
However, as soon as the narrative is bent on hopelessness, the film suggests
another answer to the communitys desire for a vital cultural life, an answer
that depends on what Gilles Deleuze calls the real art of fabulation. Noting
the importance of the concept of fabulation in Deleuzes philosophy, Gregg
Lambert writes, Health as literature, as writing, consists in fabulation, which
Deleuze defines as the invention of a people who are missing; thus, the
ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, in this creation of
a health, in this invention of a people, the possibility of a life (1998, 22).
For Deleuze, fabulation is not simply the individual act of invention; rather,
fabulation is deeply political, as it entails the collective invention of a people
who are missing. Like the idea of utopia, wherein the future is the site of new
societies, fabulation is a political activity that brings together a people that
have not yet been organized into a territory. Again, Lambert writes, [] the
writers solitude cannot be reduced to a normal situation of solitude in the
world, to an experience of being-alone and apart from others; this is because
the figures above do not experience their aloneness from the perspective of
this world, or of this society, or from the presence of others who exist, but
rather from the perspective of another possible world or another community
that these figures anticipate even though the conditions for this community are
still lacking (1998, 26).
Viewed from this Deleuzean idea of fabulation, the sweding business
exemplifies the way invention and storytelling creates new collectives, as the
act of poaching Hollywood films reorders the locals in a new system of social
relations. While Fletchers building begins as a symbol of the forgotten and
neglected, its purpose is renewed at the end of the film when it becomes the
primary force in the creation of a new and unchartered territory. Here, not
only does the unhomely signal a destabilization of preceding territories, but in
its opening up of a third space, it becomes a sign of collective hope; for by
bringing together the neighbourhood, the single home becomes many. Even
more, the building does not merely act as the site or container for these new
social dynamics; it does not merely house a new territory. It acts as the very
content the locals use to create a new mode of dwelling together, one where the
past can be creatively retold in order to alter the present. When the legal team
68 UNHOMELY CINEMA

shuts down the film collective, for example, the community does not stop its
interest in innovative storytelling; instead, the group turns its attention toward
its roots, using the historical status of Fletchers building as the incentive to
reinvent Passaics cultural past. As mentioned previously, the importance
of Fletchers building stems from its place within an alternative history of
jazz music. As Fletcher enthusiastically proclaims in the opening voice-over
narration, whereas most people believe that the capital of jazz was Harlem, in
reality the real hot spot of jazz music in the 20s and 30s was the small town
of Passaic, New Jersey. Each weekend, Fletcher continues, New Yorkers would
venture across the river and spend all night listening to what would become
one of the greatest musical movements in American history. And what was the
reason for this unexpected migration to an otherwise marginal city? It was due
to none other than local jazz hero Fats Waller. Born and raised in Fletchers
building, the prolific musician was the towns cherished son, a figure who not
only charted new avenues in music but enabled the town to flourish culturally.
Of course, anyone with even the most trivial knowledge of jazz history will
apprehend the absurdity of Fletchers revisionist story of American jazz. Near
the end of the film, Fletcher confesses that the story of Fats birthplace was
entirely fabricated, a bedtime story he devised for the young, orphaned Mike.
Like Deleuzes idea of fabulation, Fletcher used the art of fabrication to create
a vital illusion, as the story of Fats provided Mike with a compelling reason
to embrace his harsh surroundings. This all comes to an end, however, when
Fletcher decides to finally tell Mike the truth. No longer tied to an important
part of the past, Mike loses faith in his vital illusion, as his cherished abode
becomes an unhomely site of embarrassment and disappointment. What was
once an instrumental part of the community is now merely a space of junk
and rubble. Yet, as usual, Jerry has a plan, a plan to get Mike out of his rut,
a plan for a new film project that will not only reaffirm Fats status as a local
cultural icon but will, once again, bring the neighbourhood together to wage
a final battle against the threat of gentrification. As Jerry explains to Mike,
while the copyright laws may prevent them from copying Hollywood films,
they always have the option to use the tools they have garnished to create their
own films. Second, just because the story of Fats is false, there is no reason why
it couldnt be true if the neighborhood came to believe it. Indeed, through the
act of fabulation, they not only can invent a people for the future, but they can
reshape the past in order for the neighbourhood to thrive in the present. And
so, using the same lo-fi stylistics found in the sweded films, Mike and Jerry
once again bring together the neighbourhood to create a story about Passaics
local jazz hero; a story that despite its falsity creates an undeniably authentic
social reality.
 THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 69

Conclusion
In the last few moments of the film everything is focused on the collective
production of a lie: poaching the story of Fats Waller, the film collective
shows the real powers of fabulation, as they transform the city streets into
an imaginative playground, a space where the past is not a settlement for
the forgotten, but a house open to constant revision. Indeed, by erasing
the dominant and historical remembrance of Fats, the film explores what
Marc Aug calls the creativity of oblivion, a kind of forgetting that is necessary
for the creation of present and future social identities. As Aug poetically
writes, Memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are
created by the sea (2004, 20). With this image of a creative coupling of land
and sea, Aug outlines a model of forgetting that is opposed neither to memory
nor its sign of failure. Rather, loss is memorys co-author, the force that carves
out the past in retrievable traces, marks or representations. In fact, memory is
marked by a double figure of loss. Since the past is not a pure presence that
can be retrieved in itself but returns in the form of representations images,
words or sensations all memories are traces or imprints of an irretrievable
real. To forget, then, marks the absence of an already lost object. However,
for Aug, it is a necessary loss. For if everything were remembered, the past
would become meaningless, as the weight and density of remembrance would
overcome the present. We must forget, Aug writes, in order to remain
present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful (2004, 89).
Like Mad Mens magical carousel, which glides back and forth between
different layers of time, for the film collective, time is a malleable object that is
open to constant revision. However, unlike the uncanniness of Drapers time
travels, which allow the consumer to slip back into the nostalgic privacy of
some suburban utopia, for Gondry, the unhomely is a disruptive force that can
help rescue an urban neighbourhood from social anomie. As Carey argues,
communication is really about reality building, a task the film collective
attempts to create by bending the orders of time, rewriting the past (both at
the level of technology and content) in order to act in the present. And while,
in the end, the documentary film fails to save the building, the neighbourhood
nonetheless gains a new form of cultural memory and identity that shows how
some part of our technological past can resurface to challenge the temporality
of the present.
 Chapter 4

NO PLACE TO CALL HOME:

WORK AND HOME IN PAUL THOMAS

ANDERSONS PUNCH DRUNK LOVE AND

JASON REITMANS UP IN THE AIR

Introduction: The Unhomely Spaces

of Home and Work
In 2006 Newfoundland and Labrador initiated a rebranding campaign
that invited tourists to get off the beaten track and experience the
provinces rich history, culture and natural beauty. As an integral part of
the campaign, the province released several slick and glossy commercials
that conjoined images of the provinces rugged beauty with wholesome
images of family life. In one commercial, the historical legacy of the
provinces rural heartland is praised through a montage sequence, which
takes the viewer through some of the provinces oldest towns. Undoubtedly,
one of the central messages of the commercial is the celebration of the
provinces historical roots (as each town is described, a caption appears
that tells the viewer when the town was founded); equally important are
the ways in which the commercial (and the entire campaign) dwells on the
theme of home and family. As the voice-over narrator describes each town,
a plethora of charming images of home are presented (kids frolicking
outside, a stunning wedding, a father raising his newborn up into the air)
that celebrate the purity of the rustic family, especially its role in creating
the social bonds necessary for maintaining a healthy, authentic community.
Indeed, as the commercial subsides, the voice-over narrator declares,
Where is this place exactly? It is about as far away from Disneyland as
you can possibly get.
While it is hard to deny the charm, even uniqueness of these tourist
advertisements, one thing that is unmistakably common about them is the
way cosy and charming images of home are used to compete in the global
marketplace. As Michael Schudson explains, positive images of home are
72 UNHOMELY CINEMA

a mainstay in the advertising industry, as the home provides the perfect

vehicle for representing the prevailing desires and values of a society.
Recalling a moving and emotional Coca Cola commercial, Schudson
writes,

It was beautifully done. It brought the hint of tears to my eyes and it

evoked great enthusiasm in the auditorium. The advertisement does not
so much invent social values or ideals of its own as it borrows, usurps or
exploits what advertisers take to be the prevailing social values. It then
reminds us of beautiful moments in our own lives or it pictures magical
moments we would like to experience. (1984, 221)

For Schudson, commercials like these dwell on the happy family in order
to elicit emotional experiences, magical moments, in which the desire
or memory of a perfect family event is tied to the purchase of a product.
However, for Schudson, there is something deeply ironic about the use of
the idyllic family to promote the pursuits of capitalism. By insisting that the
family unit is the most important system of social relations, one would think
that these advertisements compete, even clash with the logic of capitalist work,
especially since the marketplace often encourages rather than prevents the
breakdown of the family. As Schudson writes,

There is little one would want to call capitalistic in these moments.

Indeed, if capitalism is a system promoting private ownership, these ads
are oddly anticapitalsitic or noncapitalsitic, honoring traditions of social
solidarity like family, kinship and friendship that at least in principle
are in conflict with the logic of the market. What is capitalistic is that
these values are put to work to sell goods, invoked in the service of the
marketplace. And what is distinctly capitalistic is that the satisfaction
portrayed is invariably private. (1984, 221)

Capitalisms use of the home to promote the private values of the

marketplace is far from new. During the industrial age, for instance, the ideal
family home was represented as a vital tool in the smooth functioning of
capitalism, as the domestic sphere formed a feminized space of refuge that
freed men from the hardships of modern labour. As Katherine Shonefield
has shown, throughout the early twentieth century the separation of work
and home was perceived as necessary for the adoption of modern forms
of labour. Whereas the home was imagined as a feminized place that was
positioned within the insularity of the suburbs, modern work was carried
out in tough and gritty city spaces, urban areas that were deemed ill suited
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 73

for middle-class women. Subsequently, while the city was inhabited by men,
who possessed the freedom to move through the citys [] body, women
were restricted to the home and came to embody the decorative interior
(Shonefield 2000, 77).
For Shonefield, while the spaces of home and work were necessarily
purified, this did not mean that they remained unrelated; quite the contrary,
the creation of a cosy domestic interior was perceived as necessary to the
smooth functioning of capitalism. As modern labour practices underwent a
rapid process of industrialization, there emerged a growing concern over the
new dangers associated with modern work. In order to combat these new
problems, men were expected to possess some homely place of peace and
quiet that could momentarily take them away from the pressures of labour.
While the domestic home wasnt the only antidote to the new problems
of labour, the single family home occupied a large presence in the social
imaginary, becoming the key site of refuge from the malaise of modern
urban life. Subsequently, whereas the man of the house was expected to
travel to the workplace and endure a harsh and competitive public sphere,
a place where work was taxing, difficult and fast-paced, women were to
retain the role of domestic guardian. But this domestic role was no trivial
matter. In order for the modern work environment to function efficiently, a
good family life was a firm requirement; and to meet this demand, women
were expected to work hard at adorning the family home, cooking, cleaning
and decorating the home in order to create a space of comfort for their
labouring husbands. As Kirsi Saarikangas writes regarding the way women
became in charge of the aesthetization of home, The woman is the soul
of the home. By creating beauty she effectuates her feminine nature, and
thereby also sweetens the lives of the other members of the family. It was
up to the woman to create the domestic milieu and the homely atmosphere.
In this spiritual private woman we glimpse the domestic angel in her purest
form (1993, 66).
Within contemporary times, this modern purification of work and
home no longer holds. In Everywhere You Want To Be: Introduction to
Fear, Brian Massumi argues that in postmodern societies the line between
production and consumption has imploded, such that it is the very notion
of internalization that proves inadequate. For if the capitalist relation has
colonized all of geographical and social space, it has no inside into which to
integrate things. It has become an unbounded space in other words, a space
coextensive with its own inside and outside (1993, 18). For Massumi, the
success of earlier forms of capitalism had everything to do with maintaining
the boundaries between interior and exterior space. That is, in order to ensure
that economic equilibrium was attained and workers remained dedicated to
74 UNHOMELY CINEMA

modern industrialization, a wager was required: in return for providing labour

to the modern work force, workers were granted a host of homely perks and
privileges that kept them dedicated to the pursuits of capitalism. As Massumi
writes,

Economic equilibrium was to be accomplished by increasing demand

to meet supply, through Fordism (the principle that workers should earn
enough to buy the products made with their labor) and welfare (enabling
even the unemployed to participate in the economy as buyers). In return
for this universalization of the right to consume, the workers would agree
to safeguard management profits by increasing their productivity apace
with their wages. Capitalism with a human face: everybody happy, busily
banking or consuming away. (1993, 13)

In an age of speedy telecommunications, just-in-time production processes,

disposable labour forces and niche markets, the wager between production
and consumption no longer holds. Instead, for Massumi, all the things we
happily associate with leisure time the home, consumption, pleasure,
culture, education gets pulled into the sphere of labour. As he writes,
Leisure has disappeared [] Time spent off the job is dedicated to self
improvement, most often oriented toward increasing ones competitiveness
in getting or keeping a job, or improving ones health to live long enough for
a raise. It is just as well that image-value has replaced use-value people no
longer have time to enjoy the fruits of their labor (1993, 16). Subsequently,
whereas the modern worker was able to escape from the drudgery of work
by retreating into the interiority of home, in postmodern times, workplace
dissatisfaction is ubiquitous, since there is no longer a distinction between
work and home, no longer a difference between leisure time and punching
the clock.
Massumis immanent account of capitalism betrays the hope and
promise many people assigned to the rise of postindustrial societies. While
in the modern industrial age the burden of work could be combatted
through comfy homes and increased leisure time, for many academics,
postindustrialism was supposed to signal an entirely new phase of work
home relations, as leisure would dominate social life. As Critcher and
Bramham write,

During the 1960s, American academics heralded the emergence of post

industrial societies, blessed with rapid technological innovations, high
rates of productivity and economic growth. Time devoted to work would
decline, career patterns would change and society could look forward to a
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 75

leisure revolution [] All societies capitalist and communist, Western

and Eastern would eventually converge around similar meritocratic
occupational structures, identical technological infrastructures and
common lifestyles. A future of leisure seemed inescapable. (2004, 34)

While the shift to a postindustrial society has led to profound changes in the
way people perceive work and leisure, as many workers experience labour as
a creative activity, the leisure revolution has not come to fruition. Quite the
contrary, instead of decreased work hours, postindustrialism has intensified
the time spent at work; even more, as new technologies and mobile forms
of work allow labour to be performed from all sorts of places and at any
time of the day, the home can no longer keep at bay the stressful realities
of the workplace. For the majority of workers, Critcher and Bramham
write, dedifferentiation means work time invading the rest of life, eroding
the boundaries with family and leisure. The material reality of the online
society, Sunday and late-night shopping or the 24-hour call centre, means
that someone else is working antisocial hours. (2004, 37)
These changes to postmodern work have resulted in an unhomely world
that rests on a whole new set of contradictory experiences of home. On the
one hand, the ubiquity of work represents a direct threat to the upkeep of
the traditional home. As Critcher and Bramham write, [c]hanged attitudes
towards cohabitation, marriage, parenting and childcare have transformed
generational experience and household composition. The traditional nuclear
family, though remaining an aspiration, has proved difficult to sustain (41).
On the other hand, faced with a contemporary social reality that sees the
bonds of family weakened, many have attempted to revive the nuclear family
as a remedy to widespread social anomie. In Home as Region, Theano
S. Terkenli contends that a return to the traditional family has emerged as a
widespread response to a political and social climate dedicated to a heightened
sense of individualism. Weakening identification with place and social group
in the contemporary Western world, Terkenli writes, seems to be reducing
home to a mere accumulation of habits or to the elaboration of a lifestyle.
During the twentieth century Western societies have witnessed a shift from
bourgeois notions of home based on themes of interiority, domesticity, and
the nuclear family to an individualistic concept of home based on lifestyle
gratification (1995, 332). To combat these unhomely trends people gravitate
to a sense of home that provides some form of renewed collectivity. The
current, widespread nostalgia for the home and the family, Terkenli
continues, however they might be construed, becomes all the more poignant,
because people find themselves not independently but through other people
and institutions (1995, 332).
76 UNHOMELY CINEMA

No Place to Call Home: Work and Home

in Punch Drunk Love and Up in the Air
Released in 2002, Paul Thomas Andersons quirky romantic comedy
Punch Drunk Love surprised audiences and critics alike with Adam Sandlers
arresting and eccentric portrayal of Barry Egan, a young workaholic whose
masculinity is constantly threatened by a domineering home life. Unlike
Sandlers other comedic roles, which often centred on a juvenile raucousness,
in Punch Drunk Love Sandler delivered an energized portrait of a man whose
family life is in tatters. Constantly tormented by his many sisters (they joke
about his gayness, remind him of embarrassing childhood memories and
try to set him up on various blind dates), Egans family life demonstrates
how not all domestic spaces are homely, not all interiorities are free from
abusive social relations. Indeed, by throwing himself into his work, Egan
tries at all costs to avoid his precarious family, a situation that leads him to
retreat into a bizarre and lonely world where his place of work becomes his
prime mode of habitation. Egans pathological dedication to work, however,
is not the only disturbing part of his personality; equally absurd is his
discovery that there are unbounded riches to be found in consumer loyalty
programs, like the ubiquitous air miles promotions featured in supermarkets
and other consumer outlets. For Egan, these kinds of promotions are not
merely consumer perks that make shopping all the more enjoyable; these
promotions are a way in which consumption can become a new kind
of labour, as certain glitches in the promotions offer the big payoff, a
situation where the number of air miles greatly exceeds the monetary cost
of the product.
Egans obsession with collecting air miles forms a central part of his
eccentric personality; however, on a narrative level, Egans air miles provide
an odd and unexpected device for resolving the storys conflict. When Egan
meets Lena Leonard, an executive who spends most of her time in the air
travelling to and from different business meetings, Barrys stockpile of air
miles suddenly takes on new meaning. Whereas, at the beginning of the story,
Egans reclusive life rests on the pointless accumulation of loyalty rewards,
when he begins dating Lena the rewards become his ticket to a new mobile
mode of home. In many romantic comedies, the narrative often ends with
the establishment of a normative domestic order, with the female lead
returning to her place in the home; in Punch Drunk Love an alternative mode
of closure is offered that challenges the typical gender roles associated with
domesticity. Finding little value in the traditional family unit, Egan and Lena
create a transient experience of home, as Egans air miles allow him to travel
everywhere Lenas work takes her. Thus, while Egan and Lenas work worlds
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 77

constantly undermine the separation of work and home, in the end it is the
strange reality of postmodern work that allows them to carve out their own
unique sense of homely comfort.
Nearly a decade after Anderson released his unique examination of
the viral reality of consumer loyalty programs, Jason Reitman released
Up in the Air, a romantic comedy that also centres on the lengths some
workers will go to in order to accumulate a plethora of air miles. Released
in 2009, Reitmans film tells the story of Ryan Bingham, a mobile
businessman who is obsessed with collecting a wide range of consumer
loyalty rewards from hotel perks, like speedy check-ins and luxurious
upgrades, to his prestigious collection of American Airlines air miles.
Unlike Barry, who amasses his massive stockpile of air miles by creatively
poaching the loyalty rewards industry, Ryans collection is the legitimate
byproduct of his highly mobile job. As the employee of a job termination
company that specializes in firing the employees of other companies, Ryan
finds himself in the perfect situation to accumulate his travel rewards.
However, just as Ryan is on the verge of joining the ten million club
a title given to a select few travellers who have flown over ten million miles
Binghams life takes a sudden and devastating turn. When his company begins
using a new software program that will allow people to be fired virtually
from a distance, Ryan is forced to deal with what it means to be grounded,
to return to a static mode of habitation; in short, Bingham is forced to give
up what Agnes Heller calls the temporal home-experience a modern
experience of home that involves people who maintain geographically
promiscuous (Heller 1995, 1) relationships to places.
Focusing on the lure of consumer loyalty programs, both Punch Drunk
Love and Up in the Air obviously share similar themes and plot developments.
However, the affinities between these films do not end here. Just as Massumi
argues that under late capitalism the dichotomies of work and play converge,
making it impossible for workers to retreat from the hardships of work, both
films show how changing technological systems and work habits create new
environments that alter the status and interiority of home. Furthermore,
as romantic comedies, both films use the romance plot to look at how the
loss of home is ineluctably tied to questions of intimacy. For if the home is
traditionally considered the principal site of trust and intimacy a moral
universe as Nol Carroll writes what happens when this domestic interior
is threatened or undermined by work conditions? As we will see, both films
suggest that in a contemporary world, where firing workers is a task delegated
to strangers, sex is purchased through the telephone and loyalty depends on
the amount you spend on a specific brand, domestic closeness and physical
intimacy may be all but lost.
78 UNHOMELY CINEMA

The Home as Moral Centre

In his book, The System of Objects, Jean Baudrillard provides a semiotic
exploration of the way the home is rendered meaningful through various
decorations, furnishings and interior design. Building on earlier semiotic
models, like the ideological analysis of Roland Barthes, Baudrillards concern
is to show how modernity has disenchanted the home, as the everyday world
of domesticity is overpowered by commodification. In short, for Baudrillard,
with the coming of modernity, with its range of new technologies, mass-
produced products and abstract semiotic codes, the homes traditional role
in maintaining normative social norms is undermined. In the first part of
the book, Baudrillard describes what he calls a traditional approach to
the home. The traditional home is one in which patriarchal authority and
unification dominate, as each space in the home is arranged in order to bring
the family unit together, to create a moral economy in which the different
parts of the home rooms, furniture and decoration function as symbols of
the familys coherence, stasis and hierarchical structure. As Baudrillard writes,

The typical bourgeois interior is patriarchal [] Although it is diversified

with respect to function, the furniture is highly integrated [] The
emphasis is on unifunctionality, immovability, imposing presence and
hierarchical labeling. Each room has a strictly defined role corresponding
to one or another of the various functions of the family unit, and each
ultimately refers to a view which conceives of the individual as a balanced
assemblage of distinct faculties. The pieces of furniture confront one
another, jostle one another, and implicate one another in a unity that is
not so much spatial as moral in character. (2005, 13)

In contrast to the modern homes abstract and impersonal design (the modern
home, for Baudrillard, is neither personable nor generational since it is a mass-
produced commodity), traditional homes are deeply sentimental and affective,
since they represent a passageway to previous generations. A classic example
of the generational and affective function of traditional domestic objects
involves antiques. In the traditional home, the function of an object like an
antique has little to do with its ambience or practicality; rather, the antique
has everything to do with legacy and chronology, the way it signifies the
homes historical continuity with the past. Even more, the traditional home
is transcendental, a space of domesticate solitude that personifies the very
human and emotional relationships that it houses. As Baudrillard writes, the
traditional home constitutes an organism whose structure is the patriarchal
relationship founded on tradition and authority, and whose heart is the
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 79

complex affective relationship that binds all the family members together. Such
a home is a specific space which takes little account of any objective decorative
requirements, because the primary function of furniture and objects here is to
personify human relationships, to fill the space that they share between them,
and to be inhabited by a soul (2005, 13,14). With the emergence of mass
production and the consumer society, the presence of the traditional family
home changes; in short, it loses its soul, becoming a depersonalized site of
disenchanted objects. Unlike the traditional home, which centres on signs of
interiority, the modern home is deeply externalized, its chief logic determined
by outside codes that rest on functionality, mass production and ambience.
What is striking about Punch Drunk Love and Up in the Airs representation
of home is not merely that the traditional affective home is openly rejected;
the truly unhomely aspect of the films is the way the hypermobility of the
characters leads to a whole new form of modern disenchantment, wherein
the home is reduced to its most elementary functions. For both Egan and
Bingham, the function of home has little to do with sentimentality or affection;
their apartments do not even contain any of the decorative requirements
associated with the modern home. Rather, the homes we see are stark,
bare and lonely. This lack of domestic warmth is particularly applicable to
Binghams apartment. While his apartment building bears the ironic title
Mansion House, Binghams home functions more like a tiny closet or
storage space. Containing only the most minimal of modern conveniences (the
apartment has a bed, fridge, stove, closet and a microwave), Binghams sparse
and minimalistic apartment reflects perfectly his transient work life. A self-
professed loner, who spends more time residing in hotel rooms and airports,
it is little wonder that Binghams domestic sphere lacks that lived-in feeling
that would suggest even a basic level of human care or attention. Unlike his
sisters home, which is rich in detail and warmth, Binghams abode bears no
traces of the human relationships Baudrillard envisions in the traditional
home. There are no sentimental pictures on the walls, no knick-knacks or
souvenirs lying around to reflect his international travel, nothing to suggest
that this home has any significant human contact. Quite the contrary, instead
of functioning as the ground for the creation of affective social relations, the
home is for Bingham a mere stopover space, a momentary resting place within
a world of perpetual motility.
For both Bingham and Egan, the homes status as the central place of
intimate human interaction is openly rejected. Whereas the home is supposed
to act as a protective barrier that buffers out the noise and hardships of the
workplace, for both protagonists there is nothing but work; and, as such, they
find little solace or refuge in the domestic sphere. Indeed, instead of relying
on their respective families for moral support, both characters despise their
80 UNHOMELY CINEMA

domestic roots, seeing the family home as an intrusive institution that must
be excised from their lives. In the case of Egan, this disavowal is downright
violent. During the birthday party scene, the domineering nature of Egans
sisters (throughout the scene they tease him about his eccentricities and
gayness) brings him to a breaking point, as he transforms the everyday world
of family gatherings into a pathological encounter with the unhomely. As the
family prepares to be seated for dinner, Egan breaks out unexpectedly in a
violent rage, smashing up a series of glass doors. Here, in a flash of aggression,
Egans behaviour draws into question the traditional homes patriarchal order
and coherence, as his outpouring of domestic violence highlights the fact
that sometimes the most dangerous things threatening the family come from
within.
While not as violent as Egan, Bingham rejects the family unit in a way that
is just as pathological. A self-professed loner, who has consciously decided not
to marry and goes through relationships like the disposable hotel toiletries he
collects on his business trips, Bingham embodies the freedom of antidomesticity,
a personal philosophy that envisions family life as a stagnant straightjacket that
hinders the individual. Binghams no home rules attitude is even the basis of
an entrepreneurial twist: as the creator and promoter of the Whats in Your
Backpack philosophy, a self-improvement program that helps people rid their
lives of unnecessary connections, relationships and responsibilities, Binghams
barren domestic life is supplemented by a work world that is entirely devoid of
relationships. Whether his philosophy stems from his work experience or his
work is a materialization of his philosophy is not known; either way, what is
clear is that both Binghams work life and motivational philosophy are based
on an approach that cherishes the temporary over the permanent, mobility
over stasis and lightness over solidity. As Bingham declares at the beginning of
one of his seminars,

This is how I start every day of my life [] imagine that you have been
given a new backpack. Now begin to fill this backpack with people, casual
acquaintances, friends of friends, people around the office; and then you
move on to the people that you trust with your innermost secrets, your
cousins, your aunts and uncles, your brothers and sisters, your parents;
and finally your husband or wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, fill them
all into your backpack [] now begin to feel the weight of that backpack.
Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your
life. Feel the straps cutting into your shoulders. All those negotiations,
arguments, secrets and compromises. Do we need to carry all that weight?
Set that bag down. Some animals were built to carry each other, they
live symbiotically for a lifetime, star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans.
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 81

We are not those animals. The slower we move the faster we die. We are
not swans. Were sharks.

The entire narrative trajectory of Up in the Air can be seen as a testing ground
for just how far Bingham can take his Backpack Philosophy. How light can
Bingham make his life? Just how much stuff relationships, compromises,
secrets can he discard from his backpack? Is there a firm limit to how much
he can carry? Is there a set speed he should move before becoming weighed
down? While the end of the film suggests that maybe we are not all sharks,
Bingham begins under the assumption that less is always more. Less hassle,
fewer relationships and no secrets; in short, a detached and disenchanted home
is Binghams remedy for being bogged down with the strife and complications
associated with domestic intimacy. For Bingham, it all comes back to the
question of speed. The slower we move, the faster we die, is Binghams
philosophy in a nutshell a message that is as much about the rapid flows
of modern capital, migration and technology as it is about Binghams rapid
movement away from human contact.

Air Miles Promotions: Consumption as New Labour

In both films the unhomely is expressed through a domestic void, as both
protagonists occupy homes that are far from the idyllic, warm and affective
abodes described by Baudrillard. However, domestic architecture (or the
lack of) is not the only way in which the films explore the way the interiority
of home has been colonized by new work conditions. As films that look
at the ways in which collecting loyalty rewards functions as a new kind of
labour, both examine the new moral economies that are created around the
working home. As mentioned earlier, historically, the home has been seen as
the prime space of private consumption; the home is the happy trade-off,
a space of leisure that workers are granted for remaining dedicated to the
toil of capitalistic work. According to Hirsch and Silverstone, however, the
homes status as a site of private consumption is not a trivial matter; rather,
the home functions as a moral economy, wherein the household acts as a
structure of meaning that influences how commodities are perceived, utilized
and subject to meaningful relationships. What this means is that the meaning
of a commodity (how it is used or the affective relationships it maintains) only
emerges through a domestic filter, as it gains different meanings according to
the different households it enters and circulates. As they write,

The household is a moral economy because the economic activities

of its members within the household and in the wider world of work,
82 UNHOMELY CINEMA

leisure and shopping are defined and informed by a set of cognitions,

evaluations and aesthetics, which are themselves defined and informed by
the histories, biographies and politics of the household and its members.
These are expressed in the specific and various cosmologies and rituals
that define, or fail to define, the households integrity as a social and
cultural unit. (1992, 16)

But if the home is considered the operative space that gives meaning to
consumption, what happens when the home is turned into a lonely place of
solitude? What happens to this moral economy when the divide between work
and home is strained, when work becomes the main site of social interaction
and communication? In both films the ubiquitous reality of loyalty reward
programs signals a transition in the moral economy of the household, as
the home is no longer linked to domestic consumption; nor is consumption
easily separated from the space of work. Rather, a different moral economy
emerges, which rests on the convergence of new work/home spaces, as private
consumption becomes a new kind of labour. As many gleeful consumers
can attest, loyalty programs, like collecting air miles, are often perceived as
consumer perks that enhance the already pleasurable act of consumption.
However, for some consumers, loyalty programs actually represent a viable
way to earn a living. In their article, The Ethical Dimensions Of Airline
Frequent Flier Programs, Arnesen, Fleehnor and Toh report that for many
business executives, air travel has become an integral way by which they can
increase their air miles portfolios. In their research they have found that
many workers will put in additional time to ensure that they maximize their
portfolios, often booking convoluted itineraries or taking additional flights in
order increase their air miles. These calculated means of attaining loyalty
rewards has even led to the emergence of specialized air miles brokers that
help facilitate the trade and exchange of air miles (Liston-Heyes 2002).
In Punch Drunk Love, Egan is presented as one of these new workers. While
Egan possess a legitimate job, throughout the film he is shown spending most
of his time surveying the aisles of supermarkets, sorting through myriads of
household products in search of one of those lucrative offers where the number
of air miles far exceeds the monetary value of the product. Whereas for most
people the purchase of household products is an act relegated to the private
sphere, a domestic duty that provides some pleasurable reward for a hard
days work, in these scenes Egan envisions consumption as a legitimate kind of
labour. More precisely, shopping is, for Egan, a pleasurable form of work. For
what is most striking about these scenes is not only the way the supermarket
is imbued with intense colours, as the piles of mass-produced products take
on a magical lure, but Egans ecstatic reaction to the act of shopping. As he
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 83

frantically moves through the aisles, Egans shopping experiences border on

the orgiastic, as if the endless rows of merchandise provided him with the
sensual pleasures he was unable to attain from others.
While the ubiquity of loyalty reward programs opens up a new employment
opportunity for Egan, who manages to transform the simple domestic chore
of grocery shopping into a lucrative business based on alternative currencies,
for Bingham, accumulating air miles is more sociological than economic: as
a business traveller, who spends more time in hotels than at home, Bingham
wears his collection of air miles as a badge of upward social mobility. This
desire to transform a life of international motility into a sign of distinction
and social exclusivity is evident in Binghams goal of joining the Million Mile
club a prestigious status offered to American Airlines customers who have
flown over ten million miles. Boasting that when he attains this status he will
belong to a select group that is even rarer than those who have walked on
the moon, Binghams lifestyle choices signify the way transience and mobility
can actually act as a form of social distinction. Whereas uprootedness and
transience have been historically associated with the plight of the poor or the
disenfranchised (just think of the social stigma carried by the urban homeless),
in the film being uprooted is imagined as a rare and special privilege, as being
homeless is taken as the ultimate sign of empowerment.
Interestingly, though Binghams loyalty rewards provide him with a sense
of social distinction, the privilege of being geographically promiscuous does
not offer him any unique cultural experiences. It is not as if his perpetual
travel provides him access to a land of cultural diversity; Bingham doesnt
even bother leaving the litany of hotels and airports he calls home. What
matters most to Bingham is not where he goes, but how he gets there, a
concern with efficiency and uniformity that aligns him with Marc Augs
fictional international traveller, Pierre Dupont, whose journey through the
contemporary non-place is described as a smooth and frictionless journey
through cultural homogeneity. In the prologue of Non-Places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity, Aug describes the ubiquitous rituals and codes
involved in contemporary travel: on the day of his journey, Dupont takes a
taxi to the airport, takes some cash out of an ATM machine, presents his
boarding pass to a flight attendant, passes through security, purchases a few
luxury items at a duty-free shop, boards his plane and then settles into his
flight by reading one of those trendy airline magazines. The description is so
mundane that it is easy to lose sight of its meaning. For Aug what is at the
heart of all these movements and passages from swiping your debit card to
receive money to presenting your passport to clear customs is a homogenous
zone of formal interactions wherein the subject is expected to navigate a
series of interconnected spaces that are identical to each other. The key to the
84 UNHOMELY CINEMA

non-place is the way the same formal codes (swipe your card here) make
travel easy, fluid and efficient. In other words, Duponts trip could be the scene
out of any travellers experience of the non-place.
Like Dupont, Binghams mobility takes us deep into the non-place. But
unlike Aug, who is highly critical of the way the infrastructure required
to facilitate the flow of global cultures reduces places to the same cultural
experiences, Bingham actually desires these spaces, finds comfort in the ease
and efficiency of moving through the formalized rituals of air travel. When
Bingham is asked to escort a colleague, Natalie, on a series of business trips,
the viewer is given a glimpse into the navigational prowess of Bingham and
his mastery of the non-place. As an ordinary, everyday traveller, Natalies
approach to navigating the non-place is, for Bingham, unbearably pedestrian.
Everything about the way she moves is far too slow and tedious: she carries
the wrong kind of luggage, is unlearned in the right way to line up for the
security check and doesnt possess any of the right loyalty perks to ensure a
speedy hotel check-in. Bingham, on the other hand, is a self-professed non-
place expert: he knows exactly how to pack, has all the right perks to make
travel light and easy. He even claims to know which line-ups are the quickest,
using a technique Natalie calls racist (Bingham professes that you should
always enter the line that has the most Asian people). In a way, Binghams
backpack philosophy is the perfect complement to the non-place. As Aug
argues, the whole experience of the non-place rests on the implementation of
simple codes or rules that are not rooted in any historical or cultural complex
(boarding a plane in LAX is the same as boarding a plane in Paris), but depend
on simple, formal rules that enable or prevent people from accessing different
spaces. For Bingham, this world of simplicity is home: possessing neither the
friction of complex social relationships, nor the variability and heterogeneity
of geographic difference, the pursuit of living light, the reduction of situations
to stereotypes, is Binghams answer to living amid a world of cultural
diversity.

Intimacy, Distance and the Home

Ideally, the home acts as a social space that fosters intimacy, affection and
human relatedness. Despite this supportive role, however, both Egan and
Bingham opt for a minimalistic home life, rejecting the family sphere,
especially its ability to foster intimate and amorous modes of contact. As
romantic comedies, which traditionally work toward a conclusive heterosexual
communion, both films cannot escape the tropes of love and lust, the desire
to arrive home in the arms of a woman. Yet, while both films utilize this far
from-novel narrative form, what stands out about their romantic plots is the
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 85

way the unhomely work habits fostered by the protagonists provide a poignant
image of the ways in which trust, affection and intimacy no longer depend
on physical closeness; rather, both films explore what it means to experience
intimacy from a distance.
According to Gaston Bachelard (1994) the home is the primary space of
human affection, closeness and imagination; the home is a space of peaceful
intimacy, a geometrical structure that defies its rational and abstract
qualities by becoming an affectionate and magical space that envelops its
inhabitants, allowing them to make essential and creative connections to
people, places and things. If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the
house, Bachelard writes, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming,
the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace
(1994, 6). While Bachelard provides a captivating and lyrical account of
how the home provides humans with close and intimate contact with their
surroundings, for many contemporary critics the sanctuary of home has been
replaced by an unhomely world of social and spatial fragmentation. Whether
we are referring to Marc Augs notion of the non-place, David Harveys
concept of spacetime compression or Paul Virlios notion of dromology, the
experience of postmodern space often rests more on dispersal, fragmentation
and distance than intimate proximity. Commenting on the way belonging to a
geographic place (the home at large) has been disrupted through the process
of deterritorialisation, Virilio writes: We have become deterritorialized. Our
embedding in our native soil, that element of hic et nunc, (here and now), in
situ, that embedding belongs, now, in a certain way, to the past. It has been
overtaken by the acceleration of history, by the acceleration of reality itself, by
real time, and by the live, all of which are in a stage beyond the hic et nunc,
in situ condition (Armitage, 17). Do we not find in Virilios understanding of
deterritorialization a more sophisticated summation of Binghams backpack
philosophy? To live well, Bingham boasts, one must pack light. To live well,
one must be able to move swiftly. It all comes back to the question of speed.
For Bingham, intimacy is only acceptable if it is brief and made in transit
contact as a kind of speed dating. But is this mobile form of intimacy really
intimate? Does not intimacy require a certain amount of time and space to
make those personable and embodied connections that are fundamental to
the act of bonding?
In their reinterpretation of Giddens (1990) understanding of trust, Licoppe
and Hourtin come close to exploring the kind of mobile intimacy praised
by Bingham. Focusing their research on the rise of mobile communication
devices, such as the ubiquitous cell phone, Licoppe and Hourtin contend
that trust is not a given in contemporary social interactions, but a process
that must be negotiated according to new contexts, channels of information
86 UNHOMELY CINEMA

and social norms. This is especially true for the absence presence afforded
by telecommunication devices. Since mobile communications involve a
delocalization of communicative space, wherein the interlocutors are unsure
of the others whereabouts, new kinds of negotiations are required to ensure
that trustworthiness and intimacy are maintained. It all comes down to the
problem of how to maintain the cues and codes of face-to-face communication
without actually coming into bodily contact. For Licoppe and Hourtin, while
trust is still the goal of modern communication, the delocalized nature of
distance communication will always contain a certain degree of risk and
uncertainty, since no level of relocalization will provide all the details required
to make an absolute claim about the trustworthiness of the other. Speaking
about the risk of making a mobile phone call, they write,

Risk is linked to the impossibility of assigning a spatial reference to the

mobile phone user. It is a risk because knowing where your correspondent
is, at least approximately, constitutes background information that helps
the management of the interaction [] As Giddens (1990) suggests,
distant coordination requires trust on the part of participants and trust
in human and material intermediaries that make the distant interaction
a success. (2002, 100)

In Punch Drunk Love, the problem of maintaining trust in an age of spatial

dislocation is captured in the phone sex scene, a brief scene where Egan
desperately attempts to know the spatial whereabouts and trustworthiness
of the sex worker, Georgia: Is Georgia really, as the seductive voice on the
telephone continually self-professes, lying naked in her bedroom? Does she
really have blonde hair? Is she really from Los Angeles? Egan, of course, has
no way of knowing. Given only a telephonic voice, the context of Georgias
situation her appearance, whereabouts, attire can only be accessed through
a dislocated presence. Indeed, as the viewer comes to learn a little later, the
sexy Georgia is not located in her Los Angeles home, but only plays Georgia
from inside a mundane office somewhere in Utah. Yet, despite the risky nature
of the telephone call, Egan persists in his pursuit of the truth. The desire to
know the exact whereabouts of Georgia even consumes Egan to the point that
he is unable to find any sexual pleasure in the exchange. At one point Georgia
asks, Are you horny, are you stroking it yet? Perpetually awkward, Egan
replies, No. No, Im not! And in a tone of self-defeat, I dont know what
Im doing. Egan simply is unable to play into the game of sexual fantasy,
to forget that the expressions she gives off cannot be absolutely verified or
trusted. Instead, Egan becomes obsessed with the space of the call: Where
are you located? he asks. Discovering that Georgia is actually a local, he then
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 87

boasts, Wow, Im in Los Angeles too as if being in the same city somehow
made the date more legitimate. Egans enthusiasm, however, quickly wanes.
As if suddenly awakened to the reality that everything Georgia says could be
a lie, Egan becomes slightly unruly, refusing to play into the seduction game.
Do you want to know what I am doing? Do you want to know what I look
like? she asks. But even before she can get past the clichd, Im five foot two
[] Egan interjects, It doesnt matter. None of this matters, since I have no
way of knowing that anything you say is true.
While Egan attempts to affirm some kind of trustful rapport with Georgia,
the phone call only increases his anxieties and fears. When Egan wakes the
next day, he is interrupted by an early morning call. Surprised to hear Georgia
on the other end of the line, Egan remains cordial, feigning all the social
niceties expected from an intimate call; when Georgia asks to borrow some
money, however, things quickly become too personal for Egan. Refusing to
help Georgia, the scene suddenly turns nasty, as the real exploitive reasons
for the call are revealed. Giving voice to the ever-present anxiety over identity
theft, Georgia replies, I have all your information, Barry, your credit card
number, your Social Security number [] Hoping to diffuse the threat,
Egan quickly hangs up and proceeds to cancel his credit card. But this just
makes matters worse. When the Mattress Man, the head honcho at the
Utah operation, hears about Egans reluctance to pay, he sends his goons to
Los Angeles in order extort the money through a much more palpable and
violent means. But when the gang puts Lena in the hospital, the situation
elevates to the point of absurdity. Spontaneously setting off to Utah, Egan
decides that what is truly needed in these kinds of situations is a return to the
reliability of the face-to-face encounter, as if the only solution to the problem
of intimacy was a good, old-fashioned showdown between men. And so Egan
shows up at the Mattress Mans store, demanding that he put an end to the
attacks or, in the words of Egan, Ill smash the hell out of you. What then
proceeds is a communicative tug of war, as each person resorts to all kinds
of verbal atrocities to eliminate any ambivalence between the men. Here, it
seems, the film suggests that the road back to trust can only be found in a
return to the physicality of the face-to-face encounter, as if being in the same
place were the only way in which trust could be reclaimed.
Like Punch Drunk Love, Up in the Air also explores how trust and intimacy
are intertwined with contemporary changes to the workplace. As a self-
exiled workaholic whose job keeps him on the move, Bingham experiences
intimacy as always at or from a distance. It isnt that he is unable to express his
feelings or sexual desires like Egan; rather, Binghams intimate life is stunted
because he is perpetually mobile, treating his relationships like the disposable
hotel products he encounters on his work trips. Even when he begins dating
88 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Alex, a like-minded businesswoman who appears to have abandoned a life

of domestication to dedicate herself to work and travel, Bingham remains
dedicated to his backpack philosophy. In fact, for Bingham, Alex represents
the perfect companion: unlike Egan, who has little faith in decontextualized
communication, Bingham finds delight in hooking up with another elusive
stranger. In one scene, Bingham even finds sexual fulfilment at a distance,
using his cell phone to engage in a quick game of sexting a form of
phone sex where seductive text messages are passed back and forth between
lovers. Subsequently, whereas for Egan the depersonalization of distant
communication represents a crisis in intimacy, for Bingham there is neither
the need nor desire to eradicate the instability associated with modern forms
of trust.
While Binghams disinterest in intimacy is exhibited through his precarious
love life, the most poignant image of the unhomely is found in Binghams
job as a white-collar mercenary, who does the nasty work of firing complete
strangers. Like the faux hospitality he receives through his travel rewards,
Binghams approach to firing employees rests on a sophisticated and glossy
game of corporate charades, as he provides his clients with a series of
disingenuous motivational speeches about how everyone who has achieved
anything great has been in the exact position you are now in. While the
viewer may be taken in by Binghams charm and passion during these early
speeches, as the film progresses we quickly learn that there is nothing genuine
about Binghams job or motivational speeches. Even Bingham has doubts
about the meaning and value of his services. In the opening scene, the viewer
is shown Bingham in action as he fires Steve, an employee Bingham has just
met. After Steve is fired, Bingham then speaks directly to the camera, asking a
question that will resonate throughout the film: Who the fuck am I exactly?
Attempting to answer his own question, Bingham provides this frank and
uncompromising observation: Poor Steve has worked here for over seven
years. He has never had a meeting with me before or passed me in the hall
or told me a story in the break room; and thats because I dont work here; I
work for another company that lends me out to pussies like Steves boss, who
dont have the balls to sack their own employees and for good reason because
people do crazy shit when they get fired. Despite these doubts, Bingham still
feels that his job is essential, that his approach offers a more humane way
of firing people that cannot be duplicated by the companys new software
program. Bingham is even asked to prove his claims by escorting the software
designer around the country, showing her how face-to-face contact is the only
proper way to terminate employees. In the end, Bingham is unsuccessful.
For not only are Binghams services just as depersonalizing as the new software
program, but his lack of interest in the emotional life of his clients proves fatal.
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 89

When Binghams boss informs him that one of his clients recently committed
suicide, Bingham declares adamantly that he is in no way at fault. But when
asked if the woman showed any of the typical signs of suicide, Binghams
mind runs blank: more of an automated firing service, Bingham is simply
unable to remember all the emotional nuances of the people he fires.

Love and the Homes Redemption

Though Bingham is, at the beginning of the film, a devout believer in his
backpack philosophy, near the end we see him show a change of heart:
Alex no longer seems like the perfect transient companion, a temporary love
interest that comes with no strings attached. Slowly but surely Bingham desires
to add more stuff to his backpack, suffering perhaps what Theano Terkenli
calls the inevitable return home. Observing that when societies are beset by
constant change and migration people often protect themselves by evoking
nostalgic ideas of home, Terkenli writes,

In the contemporary Western world, fraught with alienation and

individualism, the concept of quality time was invented to compensate
for the dissolution of home by engaging in intense, concentrated patterns
of interaction. In other words, concerted efforts are being made to share
diminishing free time with people or routines that are part of home []
A related phenomenon of contemporary North American culture is
that at some point in midlife people turn toward sharing the intimacy
of home or lifestyle with people they consider part of home instead of
striving to surpass outsiders. (1995, 333)

It would appear that Bingham indeed suffers from a nostalgic yearning to

return home. After spending several weeks in sexual limbo meeting up
with Alex for a series of impromptu one-night stands Bingham decides to
upgrade to a slightly larger backpack. What other interpretation could be
given for Binghams unexpected decision to invite Alex to visit his hometown
and attend his nieces wedding? When Alex and Bingham head off for
Milwaukee to attend the wedding (one of the most familial of social rituals),
Bingham not only shows signs of a nostalgic interest in home, but he is given
the perfect opportunity to prove his position within the household. When the
groom decides to call the wedding off moments before the celebration (the
groom, it seems, has come to see the benefits of packing light), the family turns
to Bingham to remedy the crisis. After all, as one of Binghams sisters protests,
he is a motivational speaker. Bingham, of course, is surprised: I coach people
to stay uncommitted. But the sister remains unfazed, arguing that this is his
90 UNHOMELY CINEMA

chance to prove that he is still a real member of the family. You have never
really been a part of this family, the sister declares, and you have never been
a part of your nieces life; but I tell you this, this is your chance!
Bingham, in the end, saves the day, proving that we are not all sharks. In
a complete reversal of his backpack philosophy, Bingham openly declares
to the groom that, life is better with company. Everyone needs a co-pilot.
However, while this warm and fuzzy declaration moves the narrative toward a
happy ending, Bingham never finds his own true love, never settles down and
fully accepts a world of domestic baggage. For even though everything seems
to be moving splendidly with Alex he takes her to his hometown, shows her
around his old high school and even lets her see some of his old yearbook
pictures Binghams relationship suffers from one major flaw: Alex already
has a happy home to call her own. A mom and wife, Alex was never whom
she claimed to be, never a true member of Binghams elusive club of mobility
and transience. Subsequently, despite all Binghams efforts at attaining a
stable domestic life, his relationship with Alex only confirms the appeal of
his backpack philosophy. And so, when the company decides to abandon
the new software program and send out its mercenaries, Bingham gleefully
returns to his life on the road. As the film closes and we rejoin Bingham up
in the air, he declares rather self-righteously, Tonight most people will be
welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids; their spouses will ask
them about their day and tonight they will sleep, the stars will reel forth from
their daytime hiding places and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the
rest, will be my wing tip passing over.
But while the film ends with Bingham praising the unhomely, other parts
of the narrative suggest that, in spite of the transient and disruptive qualities
of modern work, the creation of traditional homes is not only desired, but
possible. If Bingham represents the antisocial forces of modern capitalism
with its quick fixes and empty human resources, near the films conclusion
the home is imagined as a remedy to capitalisms malfunction. This faith in
the institution of home is seen moments before Bingham takes flight, when the
viewer is reintroduced to those unemployed souls first introduced at the films
opening. Again, in a documentary style, the viewer is presented with a series
of personal confessions that question Binghams backpack philosophy. For
no matter how hard things were, no matter how utterly dejected these people
felt after being fired, it was their families that acted as their saving grace. As
one man boasts proudly, I simply would have not made it without my friends
and family.
Unlike Up in the Air, Punch Drunk Loves eccentric tale of dislocation is
resolved through the pursuit of heterosexual love, as the coupling plot line is
used to close off and settle all of Egans unhomely pursuits. That is, Egans
 NO PLACE TO CALL HOME 91

life becomes redeemable only when his violent and antisocial qualities are
transformed by the love of a woman. But while Egans destiny resides in
finding a domestic companion, his movement toward home is not the same
as Binghams. Egan instead finds a compromise between the poles of mobility
and stasis, as his newfound love of Lena does not lead the couple toward the
typical site of domestication. Instead, when Egan becomes empowered by his
new love life, his strange obsession with collecting air miles provides him with
the opportunity to fashion a mobile home. Like Binghams ideal mate, Alex,
Lena is also a mobile worker whose work takes her all over the country. When
Egan inquires about her personal life, for example, Lenas response centres on
her job and the fact that she is rarely at home. Unlike in Up in the Air, however,
Lenas work schedule does not hamper the couples pursuit of companionship.
Instead, when their relationship starts to get serious, Egan decides to take a
chance: instead of merely accumulating air miles, he decides to actually use
them for travel. It is a far from unique choice, but one that will fill Egans new
need for his own mobile family: Just give me six to eight weeks, Egan pleads
to Lena at the films conclusion, and I can redeem my mileage and I can go
with you wherever you have to travel. Whereas Bingham loses all faith in the
home and its ability to bring intimacy back into his disordered work life, Egan
is revitalized by the thought of going home. This may not be the nostalgic
return home envisioned by Terkenli, but it is a conception of home that is
perhaps more in line with todays mobile societies.

Conclusion
Punch Drunk Love and Up in the Air are strange romantic comedies, no doubt,
but in their exploration of the new world of mobile work and loyalty reward
programs, both provide different readings of the homes relationship to work
and consumption. Indeed, while both films depict the traditional home as
an empty space that is of little value in a contemporary world where work is
ubiquitous, the manner in which each protagonist approaches these new work
conditions differs. For Bingham, the pursuit of joining the Million Mile club
is more of an escape into a vacuous zone of aseptic relationships: armed with
his loyalty reward cards, Bingham always knows what to expect from the other.
In Binghams world, the hyperindividualism of work and lifestyle choices does
not call for a nostalgic return home; rather, everything about Bingham centres
on the need for new kinds of speed and transience, the deterritorialization of
the world and its inhabitants. Egan, on the other hand, sees these spaces with
an aura of absolute enchantment. Everything about Egans trip to Hawaii
from his movement through the airport to his meeting with Lena in the hotel
lobby resounds with an old-fashioned sentimentality, as though the two lovers
92 UNHOMELY CINEMA

were in a quaint Hollywood musical. In short, Egans world is not one of

monotone hotels, indistinguishable international airports or homogenous
travel experiences. Quite the contrary, whereas Bingham embodies the
starkness of the non-place, Egan comes to see travel as a romantic place to
make a mobile home. By redeeming his air miles for a new life of mobility,
Egan has the chance of following his love interest, of maintaining a home
on the road. Perhaps this, then, is the only solution: in a world where work
involves excessive mobility, perhaps the best homes may be those that are
made on the move.
 Chapter 5

THE TERRIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

MOBILE: CELL PHONE AND THE

DISLOCATION OF HOME

Mobile Work and Play: The Uncanny

Feeling of Being Everywhere
In 2007 Sprint featured a range of commercials that envisioned the successful
businessman in terms of access to fast and reliable mobile networks. In
one commercial, Dan Hesse, the CEO of the company, is found working
effortlessly in a taxicab as he travels around New York City. Drawing a parallel
between the life of a CEO and the average worker, the bottom line expressed
in the ad is that success in the workplace depends on having access to Sprints
ultrafast and efficient mobile devices and networks. Whereas for the mobile
deficient worker, taking a taxicab represents an inefficient use of time and
space, as one remains outside the spaces of work, for the Sprint customer,
every space, even a trip around the city, forms a potential site of work. As
the commercial explains, because the new mobile worker is backed by a
3G cell phone network and fast mobile Internet, success is ensured, as there
is now no reason not to be working. In another commercial, Sprint continues
its masculinist portrayal of mobile work, referring to the problem of keeping
a constant network connection as connectile dysfunction. Like the taxicab
commercial, the setting for this advertisement involves an airport lounge that
is filled with a group of gloomy men who become depressed because they are
disconnected from their place of work. Without fast access to mobile networks,
the men are cast off as societys underachievers, men who have failed the test
of mobile virility. Everything changes miraculously, however, when a couple
of sexy women hand the men a Sprint mobile card, which instantaneously
cures them of their connectile dysfunction, as they become free to reconnect
with their work environments.
While these earlier commercials suggest that mobile technologies belong
to the serious world of mens work, todays mobile user is far more variant,
as mobile communications are no longer restricted to the stereotypical
94 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Blackberry businessman, but include a wide range of social groups and

practices. This is easily seen in HTCs You campaign, which showcases how
the companys mobile phones meet the needs of many different people, from
late-night office workers and family members to frisky adults and youthful
backpackers. Long gone are the days when possessing a mobile phone
connoted ones business status; instead, todays mobile phones are indictors
of divergent lifestyles, behaviours and choices that supposedly provide the
user with a unique individuality. Yet, while these commercials use different
social groups to promote a world of perpetual mobility, they nonetheless
revolve around a similar set of discourses or expectations: flexible, light,
and instantaneous, mobile devices are supposed to provide users with the tools
needed for managing and controlling their highly complex lives. As Katz and
Aakhua write regarding the new forms of flexibility that arise through mobile
technologies, The spread of mobile communication, most obtrusively as cell
phones but increasingly in other wireless devices, is affecting peoples lives and
relationships. Cell phones speed the pace and efficiency of life, but also allow
more flexibility at business and professional levels as well as in family and
personal life. They are a boon for those who feel they are not accomplishing
enough (2002, 2). For Katz and Aakhus, the mobile users positive experience
with cell phone technologies not only involves greater access to work and
home, but the mobile phone can lead to heightened feelings of power and
self-determination. In short, by having instant access to ones social and work
life, mobile technologies assist in the enhancement of individual liberation:

Mobile telephones are praised, on the one hand, as devices that will
liberate individuals from the constraints of their settings. Individuals
who master these devices are shown as people who control their destiny.
Stories circulate that focus on how people manage the contemporary
demand to be in multiple places at one time or to simultaneously serve
multiple roles and present multiple faces. These stories heap praise and
honor on those who pull off such an elegant performance through the
use of technology. (2002, 7, 8)

Analysing Feng Xiaogangs comedic melodrama Cell Phone and Laurent

Cantets eerie thriller Time Out, the next two chapters explore the unhomely
nature of mobile technologies, especially the way the placelessness of mobile
connectivity leads to precarious home environments. In opposition to the slick
campaigns mentioned above, both films raise serious questions about whether
mobile communications really provide users with the ease, transparency and
flexibility promised by the mobile industry. Furthermore, as melodramatic
films that examine the frailty of contemporary domesticity, both films take
 THE TERRIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING MOBILE 95

issue with the idea that mobile devices free people from the constraints of
physical places, as they show how mobile communications cannot be separated
from the experience of home. For if the phone (in the era of the landline) was
once about the firm relationship between the home and various outsides (ones
whereabouts was always determined by the act of placing a call), in an age of
perpetual contact, family members can now connect to each other through
new modes of absent presence, a spaceless form of communication that
leads to new problems in trust and intimacy. Subsequently, instead of mobile
devices offering flexibility and freedom from the home, in these films personal
liberation is seriously undermined, as mobile technologies become heavy
and burdensome tools that prove difficult to manage.
Xiaogangs Cell Phone is a comedic melodrama that traces the marital woe
a television star, Yan, faces when his mobile network becomes infiltrated by his
wife. Like in the Sprint advertisements, in Cell Phone mobile technologies are tied
to a crisis in masculinity. But rather than curing his connectile dysfunction,
the cell phone has the opposite effect, becoming a burdensome tool that causes
Yan to yearn for simpler times, when the wired telephone was used for only
serious purposes. Indeed, while the device is pictured in the beginning of the
film as the ideal tool for creating a flexible home life (Yan uses the phone to not
only check on his wife, but to arrange his extramarital affairs), by the end of
the narrative, the device sends Yan down a spiralling path of marital anguish;
not only does Yan lose two wives, but his twisted life of mobility results in a
complete mental breakdown, as he develops a paranoid fear of all mobile
technologies. Like Cell Phone, Laurent Cantets chilling melodrama, Time Out,
looks at how mobile phones contribute to familial problems, especially the way
the device can be used to enhance interfamilial lies and deception. However,
whereas mobile phone practices prove too heavy for Xiaogangs protagonist,
in Time Out the cell phone becomes too light for Vincent, an unemployed
man whose decision to concoct a false life in another country leads him further
away from the safety net of the home. Recently fired from his lacklustre job,
Vincents decision to take a time out from the manly responsibilities of
work causes his domestic life to spiral out of control, as his precarious mobile
connection severs him from his family and friends.

Film and Phones

Analysing the use of cell phones in narrative films may seem like a strange and
impossible endeavour. After all, the use of cell phones and other digital devices
in contemporary films are ubiquitous. Like other domestic artefacts that
make up the films mise-en-scne, cell phones are a quotidian feature of the
environment. However, as Ned Schantz (2003) argues, just because domestic
96 UNHOMELY CINEMA

technologies blend into the backdrop of many films, this does not mean that
they do not contribute actively to the development of the narrative. Quite
the contrary, as Schantz writes in his article Telephonic Film, throughout
modern film everyday communication technologies, like the telephone, have
played an instrumental role in the formal construction of narrative. As an
omnipresent technological device that enables the viewer to peer into the
homes of multiple characters, the telephone may even be the perfect narrative
device:

As our favorite way into the homes and offices of fictional characters,
the telephone serves novelistic interest as it moves into the twentieth
century, affirming that individuals are still worth watching. Our gossipy
desire to know becomes a desire for the phone to ring, or to place a call
ourselves [] We might indeed ask if the phone is not to the cinema
what the letter is to the novel: the vehicle for the incorporation of
multiple positions from which to narrate the somewhat wobbly vehicle
that, in its inherent vulnerability to inception, delay, misunderstandings,
or disguise, dependably delivers the conditions of instability that make
narrative possible. (Schantz 2003)

For Schantz, not only is the telephone intimately tied to the conditions of
narrative but the filmic telephone can teach us much about the social
worlds inhabited by the characters, especially the way gender norms are
encoded within cinema. As Schantz argues, in many modern films the
telephone has been encoded as a patriarchal technology. Referring this form
of telephony as the Classical Hollywood Telephone, Schantz contends that,
in the hands of many male protagonists, the telephone becomes an agent
of social order, as the device embodies the masculine traits of command,
control and communicative transparency. As Schantz writes, the Classical
Hollywood Telephone is an idealized phone that serves genre by transmitting
a singular meaning. In this fantasy the phone always works smoothly, allowing
its human masters to forget their bodies, their surroundings indeed, the
apparatus itselfto engage in communication with perfect control (2003).
At the same time, while the Classical Hollywood Telephone offers an image
of communication in its most perfected form, in some films the masculine
dream of disembodied communication is shown to have gone terribly awry.
In Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature,
Schantz explores how female networks can upset the smooth workings of
the Classical Hollywood Telephone, as female gossip, complex and forking
communicative exchanges, noise and delays thwart the singularity of
telephonic messages. As he writes,
 THE TERRIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING MOBILE 97

Picture women using whatever resources they have at their disposal to

support and promote each other not in any Utopia or sheltered enclave,
but in the modern world as it has developed since the eighteenth century.
Picture therefore female networks at once fragmented and technologically
extended, operating around and against powerful men with all of their
advantages, redirecting the powers of knowledge, money, and affect that
maintain gender among so many other devastating social asymmetries.
(2008, 3)

While most mainstream narratives evoke the social asymmetries associated

with the male phone, another kind of telephonic apparatus, a distinctly
female network of messages, exists that can seriously challenge and distort
the singularity of ideal communication. In this world of distortion and
delay, long-distance communication does not affirm the telephonic dexterity
of men; it clogs the lines of transmission. Like the powers of disturbance
inherent in the unhomely, the female network rests on the liberating powers
of noise and uncertainty. In its desire to free women from the domineering
codes of masculinity, this other network uses the precariousness of everyday,
domesticated communications to change deep-seated social inequalities. It
may not be a utopian network, as Schantz says, but, like the unhomely, it offers
at least some hope for a more inclusive and less domineering system one that
does not disavow the inherent differences built into communication.

Escape from the Home: The Flexibility

and Burden of a Mobile Life
As a film about the desire to perfectly command and control communication
technologies, Cell Phone wastes no time in outlining what is required to actually
pull off this improbable feat. As the film opens, the viewer is thrown not
into the contemporary world of hyperfast mobile networks but into a rural
Chinese village. The year is 1969 and Yan (now an innocent, young man) is
shown riding his bicycle joyfully through the countryside with his cousin. The
couple, the voice-over narrator proclaims, have set off toward the village to
make their first phone call. In contrast to the frenzy and speed that we might
expect from a film set in contemporary Beijing, everything in this opening
scene is extremely slow and patient. Filled with the unbounded beauty of
nature, this opening montage sequence positions Yan within a nostalgic world
of rustic charm. This all changes, however, after Yans trip into the village.
As the voice-over narrator foretells, Yans trip not only provides him with his
first experience with long-distance communications, but four significant events
occur that leads to the young mans success and eventual demise. While each of
98 UNHOMELY CINEMA

these events formulates one of the films core themes (for example, his cousin
gets married represents the theme of marital life) what interests me is the
method by which these events are foretold: whereas the characters in the film
are bound to their limited perspectives and, as such, only ever maintain partial
knowledge of their surroundings, the voice-over narrator maintains a special
epistemological position. A disembodied voice unbounded by chronological
time, able to see into both the past and the future, capable of providing a
seemingly objective account of not only what will happen in the film but what
events are most important, the voice-over narrator provides an ideal image of
what Schantz calls the impossible fantasy of telepathic communication.
As Schantz argues, in many films the Classical Hollywood Phone emerges
through the characters actual use of telephones. In many early talkies,
for example, the ideal telephonic situation can be seen in those bravado
performances in which the male hero commands the phone as though it
were a natural extension of the body. Here, it seems the hero gets exactly
what he wants because of a certain telephonic dexterity, as if how he talked
on the phone was an indicator of his proficiency and masculinity. But there
are other, more formal, ways in which films emulate the smooth functioning
of the ideal telephone. A case in point is the use of voice-over narration. As
an unseen voice that is potentially everywhere, sees everything and knows all
the most intimate details of the characters thoughts and actions, voice-over
narration encapsulates the absolute control and transparency associated with
masculinist modes of communication. For Schantz, this kind of impossible
power even demands an alternate name, the telepathic telephone, a
perfected form of telephony, where communication no longer requires a
medium but occurs instantly and perfectly by channelling messages between
minds. As Schantz writes, Telepathy is the telephone in a perfect state
of dematerialization no apparatus, no sound waves, no ear. Thoughts
simply move from one mind to another without static, delay or the need for
translation. Death and distance pose no obstacles. The only thing can go
wrong is the mind itself (2008, 80).
In Cell Phone the opening voice-over narration represents the impossible
telepathic situation all the male characters desire. In short, in order to control
and maintain the border between their homes and their secret lives of
infidelity, the male characters depend on the impossible fantasy of telepathic
communications. Interestingly, while the voice-over narrator represents
an impossible ideal, the film does distinguish between which long-distance
communication technologies provide the highest range of control: while the
traditional landline will come close to embodying the ideal masculine phone,
as the phone provides information about the exact whereabouts of the caller,
this same stability is not imparted to cell phones. Rather, cell phones represent
 THE TERRIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING MOBILE 99

a new mode of connectivity, an unhomely female network that, through its

creation of contingency and chance, undermines the male order of things.
The films idealized image of the traditional landline is first encountered in
the opening flashback. The year is 1969 and Yans village has just installed its
first telephone wires. However, unlike a domesticated approach to telephony
wherein the phone is confined to the family home and used to enhance the
privacy of the household, in Yans village the phone forms a public resource
that functions more like a postal system than a private network of intimate
messages. The phone, for example, is positioned in a community building, is
open to the public and is administered by an official telephone agent. Most
importantly, the phone is depicted as a serious long-distance communications
device, as the telephone operator is shown enforcing a long list of formal
procedures that restrict how the phone is used: the telephone can only be used
at certain times of the day and can never succumb to the feminized world of
idle domestic chatter. In contrast to this masculinist world of telephony, Yan
envisions the phone as an accentuation of domestic contact. After all, Yans
excitement over making his first call is not simply due to the abstract possibility
of making contact from a distance; his joy is domestic, as he hopes to use the
phone to reach out to his loved ones, to extend the family home to places
outside his community. This joyful innocence, however, is quickly diminished
by the operator, who chastises Yan for his feminized desire to forge domestic
relationships from a distance. The phone, the operator insists, is a practical
tool designed to relay important long-distance messages, not to be caught up
in the messy world of female talk. This is not an appropriate phone call,
the operator bemoans. Phones are for serious calls, not for the amusement
of housewives who may want to know when their husbands will be returning
home.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Connected

In a film about the disintegration of marital life, Xiaogang wastes no time
in signalling the technological culprit responsible for infusing the home with
secrets, lies and deception. After the lightning-fast opening credits subside, the
camera is catapulted into Yans apartment window, where we see his wife, Yu,
engage in typical domestic duties, cleaning up and maintaining the family
home. While the question of the proper role of the domestic wife will be raised
and challenged throughout the film, in this sequence the camera bypasses the
wifes domestic activities in order to focus on a specific object within the home.
Abruptly stopping at a table, the camera focuses blatantly on Yans cell phone,
as if it were able to anticipate the phones incoming call. With this shift in
attention, from domestic duties to mobile communications, the film brings
100 UNHOMELY CINEMA

into focus the core problematic of the story: like most melodramas, Cell Phone
capitalizes on those common melodramatic tropes of marital distrust, erotic
desire and domestic conflict; but by insisting that marital disharmony is the
product of the management of everyday technologies, like cell phones, the
film relocates the spatial parameters of the genre. Whereas most melodramas
are confined to middle-class domestic spaces, such as the family home or the
bedroom, by exploring characters that attempt to balance the flexibility and
individualism of everyday technologies with family responsibility, Cell Phone
shifts the location of domestic woe to the interspaces of mobile networks.
Just as Katz and Aakhus describe mobile devices as flexible technologies
that allow users to take control over how they use and manage time, for Yan,
the cell phone represents the ultimate communication device that enables him
to manage and manipulate his domestic life. Like Vincent in Time Out, the
device remains by his side throughout the film, as he obsessively uses it at all
times of the day, during leisure time and work, while travelling in his car and
on the train. He even uses it while using the bathroom. Yans obsession with
keeping tabs on the phone, however, spirals out of control when he starts
using the phone to facilitate two contradictory activities: on the one hand, the
mobile phone is used to strengthen Yans ties to the home. Like the mobile
users pictured in HTCs You campaign, the phone offers Yan an immediate
connection to the spaces of home, as he can coordinate events with his wife,
determine her whereabouts and send her loving messages from virtually
anywhere. On the other hand, whereas the landline acted as a kind of social
alibi (ones whereabouts could always be determined by the act of making a
call), the decontextualized nature of mobile communications loosens Yans
ties to the domestic sphere, as the phone enhances his private life, especially
his ability to conceal his double life from his wife. For along with bolstering
his relationship with his wife, the phone enables Yan to participate in and
arrange a series of steamy affairs, a contradictory set of actions that creates a
precarious domestic environment.
In an ideal world of mobile communications, Yans task of keeping
his home life separate from his double life would be rendered smooth,
manageable and predicable. Yet this ideal of possessing constant control
over the phone, especially what it conceals and discloses, is never a simple
and straightforward process. On the contrary, for Yan, managing the new
possibilities afforded through mobile devices proves downright impossible.
This difficulty, however, is not merely a question of Yans proficiency, his
masculine prowess in commanding the phone; it is a problem inherent in all
communications technologies. As an external technological device, which is
intimately tied to the users body and identity, the mobile phone belongs to
what Celia Lury calls prosthetic cultures a process of mediation in which
 THE TERRIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING MOBILE 101

the subjects sovereignty is undermined by its intimate dependence on a range

of technological devices. In her book Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and
Identity, Lury discusses how contemporary notions of identity have been altered
by the emergence of mass-produced prosthetic devices. While we often think
of prosthetic devices in medical terms wherein a physical defect is remedied
through the implementation of a technological device, for Lury, all consumer
products and technologies are prosthetics. What matters most for Lury is how
a technology is tied to the subjects identity and memory, how a product forms
an indispensable part of the self. An excellent example that Lury cites involves
the way photographic images become an integral part of the subjects memory.
As Lury discusses, most homes are littered with a range of photographs; some
may actually be put on display, while others are stuffed away in storage. While
we might think of these photographs as external objects that exist outside the
subject, family photographs actually form an archive of the past, an exterior
memory that is intimately tied to the subject. After all, when we erase or lose a
photograph, we also jeopardize the memory associated with the image.
For Lury, the subjects dependence on technological prosthetics is a risky
affair. Since the subject can become dependent on external objects, the
subjects self-integrity can be easily compromised, a process that leads to a
total breakdown of the Cartesian subject, especially its ability to control the
external environment. In place of the sovereign subject is what Lury calls the
subject as other, a hybrid form of subjectivity that cannot be divorced from
an external world of prosthetics. In adopting/adapting a prosthesis, Lury
writes, the person creates (or is created by) a self-identity that is no longer
defined by the edict I think, therefore I am; rather, he or she is constituted
in the relation I can, therefore I am. In the mediated extension of capability
that ensues, the relations between consciousness, memory and the body that
had defined the possessive individual as a legal personality are experimentally
dis- and re-assembled (1998, 3).
Like photography, cell phones are another example of the ubiquity of
prosthetic cultures. As sociologists and communication theorists, like James
Katz and Manuel Castells (2006), have argued, people relate to technological
devices, like mobile phones, in complex ways, forging new, flexible identities
that depend on having access to information networks. While we might like
to think that subjectivity remains detachable from these devices, in reality,
prosthetic technologies constitute the ground for a whole assortment of new
social relations, connections and resources that are created and sustained over
vast distances. In Cell Phone one of the key prosthetic relationships fostered
through the mobile phone involves the erotic possibility of connecting to
someone at a distance. Just as many new technologies spawn a range of
eroticized services and imaginaries, like mobile dating and phone sex, the
102 UNHOMELY CINEMA

mobile phone is, for Yan, another interface that can be used to project and
circulate his sexualized fantasies. The phone, however, is not merely a device
used to arrange his sexual encounters; as a new and expendable body part,
the phone is the very site of an erotic encounter. This can be seen in the
various erotic text messages Yan receives throughout the film. Subsequently,
unlike most melodramas about infidelity, wherein the films steamy sex scenes
are played out in a host of physical spaces from roadside motels to family
bedrooms in Cell Phone it is the phone which acts as a new virtual space of
desire and deception.
Like all sexual encounters, Yans erotic relationship with mobility comes
with its own set of unique risks: unlike the Sprint commercial, in which a
fast, mobile network provides instant relief from the problems of connectile
dysfunction, Yans erotic encounter with the mobile phone contains very
little virility: whereas the device is supposed to reaffirm Yans control over his
social life, in actuality, the phone causes him a whole lot of work and stress,
as he must continually monitor his prosthetic device. In order to ensure that
his family life does not cross over into his life of infidelity, for example, Yan
must keep constant tabs on the phones whereabouts, a relentless task that
is introduced first in the opening of the film when the camera zooms in on
Yans cell phone. While the phone sits inconspicuously at home, appearing
as an innocent facet of the domestic environment, Yan is shown sitting
in his car, stressing over the phones whereabouts. As Yan bemoans to his
friend Fei, if he has left the phone at home, he has potentially compromised
his marriage, as all his dirty little secrets are left wide open for his wife
to see. While most people inevitably lose or misplace their technological
devices, Yans intense disquiet over the missing phone brings into focus the
problem of investing so much personal information into a portable device
that can be easily detached from the self and intercepted by a third party.
In the end, the whereabouts of the phone becomes too much for Yan, as
he decides to abandon his work commute and return home to look for his
prized possession. Here, Yan confronts the heavy side of the technology,
as he become acutely aware of the constant need to keep a guard over
his prosthetics. Indeed, this matter of everyday surveillance should not be
downplayed. For dont we find in this image of hypersurveillance a glimpse
into Foucaults (1977) conclusion that in modern societies, surveillance
becomes internalized to the point that people begin to self-monitor their
behaviours.
Of course, in predictable dramatic fashion, Yans deepest fears about the
misplaced phone are realized. As he debates whether or not he should return
home to retrieve his phone, Yu is shown intercepting an unexpected call
from one of Yans mistresses, who, without hesitation, answers the call with
 THE TERRIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING MOBILE 103

an angry protest: Why havent you returned my calls? Thinking that the call
is merely a case of Sorry, wrong number, Yu attempts to clarify the situation;
however, before she can find out the identity of the agitated caller, the mistress
abruptly hangs up. Like other communication devices, the intercepted call
demonstrates how cell phones are equally susceptible to mistaken identities,
wrong numbers and unexpected calls. As Schantz (2003) writes, missed calls
or wrong numbers are a common facet of long-distance communication, so
much so that in many narrative films the everyday reality of an unexpected
or unknown phone call provides the necessary tension required of many
narratives. However, while Yus intercepted call conforms to the potential
disruption of many kinds of long-distance communication systems, the highly
personalized nature of mobile devices adds a unique feature to the way these
disruptions emerge. When Yans mistress makes her heated call, her unexpected
conversation with Yu is not simply a case of Sorry, wrong number. She
has dialled correctly and has been connected to the right number; the real
confusion comes from her expectation that the only person to have access
to the phone is Yan. Unlike the home telephone, which is associated with
the family unit, mobile devices are treated as personal technologies that are
intimately tied to a particular user. Dialling a mobile number, we often feel like
we have a direct link to a specific person, as if the line provided a stable and
predictable connection to the user and not the phone.
Along with being burdened by the perpetual need to monitor his phones
whereabouts, Yans marital problems are worsened by another technological
problem; one that has everything to do with the way mobile devices preserve
the past. Quite often, mobile technologies are praised for their ability to
make instantaneous contact, as one may make or receive a call at all times
of the day. Wireless devices, however, also maintain a unique relationship to
the past, as the phone allows the user to keep an archive of preceding social
interactions. Indeed, as mobile devices become more sophisticated, users
can avail of a wide range of applications from contact lists, voice mail and
emails to text messages, videos and photos that store information about the
users social interactions. Consequently, unlike the landlines mode of contact,
wherein social interaction ends when the phone is hung up, with mobile
devices the social life of a user persists well beyond the immediate present, as
the device acts a portable memory machine of the past. Quite recently, the
issue of how technologies provide a record of the past has been explored by
a range of theorists interested in the nature of prosthetic memory. According
to Allison Landsberg, the way in which information about the past is created
and shared changed dramatically with the proliferation of mass media, as the
task of disseminating stories about the past no longer depends on localized
groups or individuals. Rather, peoples experience of the past often depends
104 UNHOMELY CINEMA

on their access to the public memories created by modern media. As she writes
in the introduction to her book, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture,

This new form of memory, which I call prosthetic memory, emerges at the
interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an
experiential site such as a movie theater or museum. In this moment of
contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself
or herself into a larger history [] In the process that I am describing,
the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on
a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or
she did not live. (Landsberg 2004, 2)

For Landsberg, the key to prosthetic memory is the ways in which people can
feel connected to past events that they may not have actually lived. By sharing
in collective media events, people can create deep, empathic relationships to
stories and people that they have not personally encountered. Thus, just as
Lurys notion of prosthetic cultures redraws the boundaries between inside
and outside, Landsbergs concept of prosthetic memories shows how ideas of
near/far and authentic/inauthentic are radically transformed by mass media.
But while Landsberg makes some important observations about collective
memory in an age of technological prosthetics, her ideas do not help much in
explaining the domestic hardship Yan experiences with prosthetic memories.
Rather, the more interesting question raised by Cell Phone is how mobile
phones function as portable memory machines that allow private memories to
be detached and circulated independently of the user. This kind of memory
does not involve a larger public sphere, which unites distant people through
communal media events; it is a form of memory that is tied to a set of localized
places, especially as it circulates through the spaces of the home.
In many melodramas, the home is often presented as an incriminating
space, a domestic archive where everyday objects, like hidden or long-lost
letters, photographs and other cryptic objects, surface and bring light to some
secret world that was meant to be left hidden. In films about infidelity, for
example, the home is a place of spousal investigations, as objects in the home
are examined and surveyed in order to provide information or proof of an
affair. In the television series Mad Men, Betty, a domestic wife who suspects
that her husband is hiding something from the family, mistakenly uncovers the
mystery behind her husbands double life when she finds a mysterious key while
doing laundry. Using the key to unlock a hidden safe, Betty not only confirms
her suspicions, but uncovers the secret space in the home that her husband has
been using to safeguard his other life. While in Cell Phone the home also acts
 THE TERRIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING MOBILE 105

as a space of incriminating evidence, as many of Yans secrets are contained

within the domestic sphere, the film equally shows how sensitive information
is spread out across the archival spaces of mobile technologies. This process
of electronic dispersal is evidenced in the scene where Yan returns home after
spending an evening out with his mistress. As Yan prepares to greet his wife at
home, he engages in what appears to be a ritualized performance of erasure,
removing all material traces of the affair. Fearful that his wife will smell the
other womans scent, he begins by driving around the city in order to air out
his car. However, while the physical and bodily traces of the affair are usually
the first indicators of the crime, for Yan, the successful concealment of his
affair also depends on erasing any technological traces of the other woman.
Just before he enters the home, Yan repeatedly scans his phone, deleting any
incriminating evidence of the affair. Subsequently, unlike the husband in Mad
Men, whose task of safeguarding his double life entailed keeping tabs on a
limited set of domestic places, Yans system of surveillance focuses on the
constant need to monitor the archival traces of his phone. Ironically, with all
these distractions, the constant monitoring and scanning of the phone, Yans
risky life of infidelity actually becomes quite banal and tedious, as his affairs
look more like an additional job that he must schedule into his busy life than a
pleasurable retreat from responsibility.

The Ideal Female Phone

While Cell Phone is undoubtedly a film about the wayward pursuits of men and
their electronic devices, the female characters in the film hardly act as passive
objects who fail to participate actively in the new world of mobile networks.
For many of the female characters, access to communication technologies
provides an alternate perspective on the ideal phone, one where the unruly
nature of long-distance communications enhances their detective skills,
allowing them to infiltrate their husbands web of lies. In this way, the film
provides the viewer with what Schantz calls a more hopeful kind of phone.
As Schantz writes,

If the Classical Hollywood Telephone never quite manages to exist, its

influence as an ideal can nonetheless be keenly felt when films move
toward closure, triggering the narrow expectations of genre. The
foreclosing power of this ideal, however, meets resistance when films
allow for coincidence to interrupt the smooth flow of singular telephonic
meaning. As the phone ceases to behave itself, instead of delivering
messages devoutly wished for, it unearths a repressed sense of isolation
and chaos. But out of these nightmares we get a glimpse of a more
106 UNHOMELY CINEMA

hopeful kind of telephonic film, a film that makes use of the phones
inherent potential to route interest along unpredictable lines. (2004, 7)

In contrast to the ideal phone, the coincidental phone refers to the way the
smooth functioning of communications break down, the way unexpected or
chance calls, intrusions, noise and delays disrupt narrative predictability. In
Cell Phone the female characters embody this more hopeful phone, as they
use the technologys inherent disruptiveness and instability to grapple with
exposing their husbands deceit. At times, this exposure will come at a cost, as
the figure of telephonic coincidence will leave some vulnerable and isolated.
For others, the mobile phone will upset social inequalities, whereby access to a
female network helps move the vulnerable female to a position of dominance
and authority.
The first female figure to infiltrate and expose her husbands web of lies is
Yu, who, after intercepting a series of strange phone calls, finally unveils her
husbands infidelity. The first coincidental call occurs at the opening of the
film, when Yu receives a call from the disgruntled mistress. At this point in the
film it is not clear if Yu is suspicious about the caller or her husbands fidelity.
A little later, though, her suspicions are aroused when she intercepts another
series of calls that question her husbands whereabouts. The first call comes
from one of Yans relatives. Upset that they are unable to get Yan on his cell
phone, the relative has called to complain about Yans whereabouts. Since Yu
had just spoken with Yan, his inaccessibility becomes a sign that something
is amiss: Why would he turn his phone off if he were merely out with Fei?
Suspicious about her husbands whereabouts, Yu then cleverly overcomes
the mobile phones radical delocation by verifying her husbands location
through an alternate route: in short, she relies on the power of a small, but
important social network. Calling Fei on his mobile phone, Yu begins the
conversation by inquiring innocently about his whereabouts. Unaware of
the ruse, Fei responds truthfully, stating that he is out walking his dog. Yu
immediately protests: How can you be out walking your dog when you are
supposed to be having dinner with Yan? Even though Fei disapproves of the
affair, he understands the gravity of his response and backtracks, redrafting
his statement so as to keep his story in line with Yans. But he is too late.
Their stories do not match. And so while Yu is unable to verify her husbands
whereabouts directly, her understanding of the power of a simple social
network helps her get close to verifying her husbands location.
After her troubling call with Fei, Yu then intercepts several unintended calls
that allow her to piece together the story of her husbands whereabouts. As Yan
prepares to enter the home, he is shown engaging in his ritual of deleting all
of his mistress messages, as if scouring his phone were able to simultaneously
 THE TERRIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING MOBILE 107

wipe away all detection of his affair. However, no matter how careful Yan is
with his phone, he cannot be prepared for the contingent encounters that will
follow. As Yan enters the home, Yu offers him a last chance to tell the truth,
speaking perhaps the most clichd line in films about infidelity: Where were
you tonight? Yan continues to lie, stating that he was out with Fei. Of course,
Yu now knows otherwise. And then, as if fate were on her side, Yu is given all
the evidence she needs. First she intercepts a call from Fei, who, thinking that
he has Yan on the line, confesses that he had to lie to Yu. Then to seal her
knowledge of the affair, Yu intercepts a text message from the mistress, who
appears to want a little more action, as she invites him to disrobe. Aligned
with the powers of contingency, Yu shows just how liberating the female
phone can be, as her encounter with mobility allows her to piece together the
fragments of Yans double life.
Just as the unhomely embodies both hope and pain, both a world of
freedom and confinement, Yus encounter with telephonic contingency
is both liberating and restrictive, both a way to escape a marriage built on
lies and an isolating experience that disrupts her faith in the modern world.
For while Yu will use the contingency of mobile communications to leave
her husband, her separation comes at a cost. Disappearing for most of the
latter part of the film, Yus withdrawal stems from her isolating retreat into
a pretechnological space of nostalgia. Much like Yan, who finds momentary
reprieve from his electronic woes by returning home to his rural village, Yu
decides to leave behind her home and job in the city, retreating to an isolated
island that is free of all modern media. Even when Yu finally returns to the
city with Yans child, she is unable to embrace the liberation afforded by new
technologies. When Yan attempts to rekindle their relationship by offering Yu
a new pink phone, for example, she is repulsed by the offer, as if the phone
contained a bad omen or curse. Unlike Yan, who is oblivious to the fact that
all phones deal in noise and uncertainty, Yu has experienced the pain of the
coincidental phone, especially the way it can disrupt the home by dispersing
and concealing its dark secrets.
While the first half of the film focuses on Yus coincidental experience with
the phone, the second half is marked by the uncanny world of dj vu. When
Yans marriage fails, his life goes on as usual: he marries his dialogue teacher,
keeps his previous mistress and continues his usual cell phone habits, arranging
erotic rendezvous throughout the city; and before long, Yans second marriage
falls apart, as he once again encounters the unhomely world of coincidental
phone calls. This time, though, Yans marriage will end due to the detective
work of a far more active female network. For not only does Yans second wife
becomes proactive seeking out the information that will expose her husbands
wayward life but her ordeal becomes a shared experience. Unlike Yu, who
108 UNHOMELY CINEMA

had no support in her ordeal, Yans second wife, Shen, is supported by another
woman who has also endured the domestic woe of cheating husbands.
Perhaps the best example of the detective powers of this female network
occurs in the scene in which the two women make a trip to Yans mobile phone
company. After intercepting several suspicious calls, Shen decides to confirm
the identities of the callers, not by dealing in the fateful game of coincidence,
but by actively seeking Yans mobile phone records. As mentioned previously,
one of the key features of prosthetic cultures involves the way technologies,
like cell phones, form external modes of memory. In Yans case, this archival
function proves troubling, as he must perpetually monitor his cell phone
habits, ensuring that no incriminating evidence is circulated throughout the
domestic sphere. In this scene, another form of surveillance is revealed that
again draws attention to the way that in an age of information all kinds of
social interactions are stored in various data systems. Gaining access to Yans
phone records, Shen not only confirms her suspicions, but she comes to possess
hard evidence of her husbands double life. Even the way Shen receives the
data is indicative of the everyday functioning of female networks, as it is a
sympathetic female clerk who disobeys company protocol by handing over the
records. However, while Shen takes active steps to unravel Yans infidelity, her
unhomely experience with phone technologies does not end without at least
one encounter with the figure of chance. When Shen returns home from the
mobile phone company, she is greeted by Yans cell phone, which rings just as
she enters the door. Yan, it seems, has left his guard down again, leaving his
phone out in the open for Shen to use and see. Indeed, in an unhomely case
of dj vu, Shen is able to strengthen her case against her husband when she
intercepts a coincidental text from the mistress, Wu.
However, while Shen and Yu share in the strange power of chance phone
calls, there is a twist to the films evocation of dj vu. Whereas Yus unhomely
experience with mobility led her into a space of technological isolation, by the
films end it is Yan who spirals downward, losing his grip on reality, becoming
disillusioned with the flexibility of his mobile technologies. Like Yu, who
escapes the hypertechnology of the city by moving to an isolated island, Yan
returns to his rural village, hoping to avail of the simplicity and peacefulness
represented in the opening flashback. Purging himself of his mobile life
(he throws his cell phone into a ritualistic fire), Yan yearns for a time when
media technologies were divorced from his intimate domestic life. However,
Yans abandonment of high technology does not provide any assurance or
stability. When he returns to the city, his social position quickly dissolves: he
becomes ill, loses his job and finds himself living with his niece, whose job as
the representative of a new mobile company only makes matters worse, as her
presence in the home forms an uncanny reminder of Yans inability to couple
 THE TERRIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING MOBILE 109

love with high technologies. When she offers him a new job as the spokesperson
for the company and a new mobile phone equipped with the ever-pervasive
GPS feature, Yan cringes in disgust, as if merely being in the company of a
phone were the cause of his illness.
According to Nol Carroll (1991), by the end of a typical melodrama
the male hero has returned the family back to a state of social stability.
Commenting on how the family order, like the moral order, has the capacity
to restore itself, Carroll writes, The moral order, or at least the moral order
being valorized, is presented as part and parcel of the nature of things as a
casual force or as a regulatory force with casual efficacy [] The nuclear
family the favored form of human relationships in this ethos is also a part
of the cosmic order. If damaged, it restores itself. This process is given as
natural in a context where to be natural is right and vice versa. The family plot
in melodramatic fiction structures human events in a way that exemplifies and
endorses the ideology or ethos it presents as natural (1991, 189). For Carroll,
the family unit has the natural capacity to restore itself after some calamity or
crisis, as the male hero makes right what has gone terribly awry. In Cell Phone
no such restoration is possible. On the contrary, the narrative closes with a
complete reversal of Carrolls observation, as Yan is stripped of his sanity,
marriage and career. Furthermore, not only are the male characters incapable
of maintaining the male order of things, but their undoing is the product of
the detective work of various female networks, which actively undermine the
melodramas natural moral order.
Nowhere is the disruptive work of the female characters more clear than
with the character Wu. As Yans mistress throughout both of his marriages,
Wu is seen mainly in the background. She is the erotic other, the disposable
subject who remains outside the natural order. During the narrative,
though, Wus social standing changes. Beginning as the young, sexy and single
mistress who meddles in the family life of others, Wu eventually marries and
becomes, like Yan and Fei, a cheating spouse. However, while Wu becomes
like her male counterparts, a notable difference resides in how she successfully
manages and controls mobile technologies. Unlike the male characters, who
are unable to take charge of their mobile lives, Wu emerges as the most
cunning technophile, who easily uses the latest technologies to her advantage.
As mentioned earlier, near the close of the film Shen retrieves a naughty text
message from Wu. The message, however, was not intended as a testament
to their risky affair; rather, the steamy picture was meant to blackmail Yan.
During the book launch scene, the viewer watches Yan and Wu sneak off
to a hotel room, as Fei discusses his new book. The couple make love and fall
asleep. During this time, Wu uses her phone to record the two lovers in bed. In
a game in which controlling the latest cell phone technologies is paramount,
110 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Wu, it seems, has come out on top. As the voice-over narrator tells the viewer
at the films conclusion, Wu ends up becoming Yans replacement. Using the
photo to blackmail Yan into getting her a job at the television station, Wu
shows just how cunning new technologies can be, especially if used as a tool
for surveillance.
Whether or not Wu becomes the ideal female character who uses new
technologies to combat traditional inequalities in work and intimacy is not
entirely evident. Certainly, as the film shows, there is no single position for
the female characters who must contend with the controlling tendencies of
the Ideal Male Phone. Rather, as the characters confront the unruly and
unpredictable aspects of mobile communications, the risk is that any freedom
gained from an encounter with contingency and coincidence may be off put
by strict isolation. This is the fate of Yu, who, like Yan, simply turns her back on
the complexities of an environment saturated with communications devices.
Others, like Wu and the young niece, seem to revel in the new opportunities
afforded through technology, acting as if mobile technologies may in fact
become a female technology capable of breaking apart the old cosmic order.
Either way, what seems irrefutable in the film is that there is nothing light or
easy about managing ones mobile life.
 Chapter 6

UNHOMELY REVOLT IN

LAURENT CANTETS TIME OUT

Introduction
Laurent Cantets Time Out (LEmploi du Temps) is an eerie and uncanny film
that explores contemporary working conditions in France and the desperate,
even psychotic lengths some will go to in order to maintain their identities
as working members of society. Like his first feature film, Human Resources
(Ressources Humaines), which examined capitalisms role in disrupting and
dividing working-class families, Time Out explores the detrimental effects
unemployment has on an upper-middle-class family, as Vincent, the films
protagonist, spirals out of control when he loses his job and decides to concoct
a make-believe position at the United Nations. As films that explore the
insidious effect capitalistic work has on the home, Time Out and Human Resources
offer insight into the unhomely reality of contemporary estrangement. Indeed,
while in Time Out Cantet moves away from the issue of working-class injustice,
the film can nonetheless be read in terms of the Marxist concept of alienation.
As Bert Cardullo writes,

Without any plan to protect himself, with no rational reaction to his

situation or prospects, Vincent thereby reveals himself, in this film that
is hardly a Marxist tract, to be a white-collar instance of alienated,
blue-collar, capitalist labor: someone, according to Marx, who produces
something that is alien to him and his life; becomes alienated from
himself because his work is not part of his life or takes it over entirely;
and who, as a result, finds himself alienated from other human beings,
with whom he no longer shares a social essence or of whose society he no
longer feels a part. (2003, 348)

While important parallels exist between Time Out and Human Resources, reading
the former through a strictly Marxist perspective runs the risk of missing a crucial
feature of the films image of middle-class rebellion its immense isolation.
112 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Instead of conjuring up those communal images typically associated with

working-class discord (angry unions, public protests, violent strikes) Time Out
depicts Vincents estrangement as an extremely lonely and solitary affair.
There is no forging of class consciousness in the film; there are no moments
of public revolt; no one takes to the streets in search of the solution to job
dissatisfaction. Rather, the film takes the viewer through a series of mundane,
lonely and insular spaces as Vincent attempts to come to grips with his
disillusioned role as paternal breadwinner. Whereas the solution to working-
class alienation rests on the creation of collective consciousness, in Time Out
everything centers on Vincents unhomely escape from the private sphere, as
his rebellion takes him on a solitary voyage away from the safety net of home.
Of course, this narrow focus on the private sphere does not mean that the film
bypasses issues of the larger social good; rather, just as Kielowski politicizes
the personal, for Cantet, the home acts as a cipher for the unhomeliness
associated with life in the risk society, especially the way contemporary
fears over unemployment and job security have become a vivid part of the
cultural imaginary. As Will Higbee writes, Cantets examination of workplace
dissatisfaction would have been quite palpable for viewers in France during
the 1990s, as this period of political and economic uncertainty involved the
continued restructuring of labormarket policies in response to both internal
pressures on the welfare state and the external forces of globalization []
Unsurprisingly, unemployment or, more accurately, a fear of joblessness
remained one of the most salient political issues during the 1990s. In this
respect, with their focus on a shifting and uncertain economic climate in which
its protagonists are also the victims of the social and psychological fallout
from unemployment, Ressources Humaines and LEmploi du temps articulate a
sense of anxiety experienced at virtually all levels of contemporary French
society (2004, 239).
No doubt, Vincents middle-class rebellion would have resonated strongly
with many French citizens. However, I would argue that the films look at the
precarious nature of middle-class domesticity speaks to a much broader set
of structural problems linked with what has been called the risk society. As
Zygmut Bauman (2001) explains, even though postmodern societies place the
burden of housing, security and employment on the lone individual, the risk
society has little to do with individual choice. Rather, risk and uncertainty
are inherent features of the system. As Ulrich Beck writes: Risk may be
defined as a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced
and introduced by modernization itself (1996, 21). For Bauman and Beck,
in the risk society, uncertainty is not an anomaly that must be expunged
from the system; risk is the norm. The problem, and this is what the film
does well in bringing to light, is that in this volatile environment responsibility
 UNHOMELY REVOLT IN TIME OUT 113

still resides with the lone subject. Even though unemployment is undoubtedly
a product of large-scale structural changes in the global economy, in the
risk society the individual is still expected to accept full responsibility for
ones lack of accomplishment. Put another way, in order to function in the
hyperindividualized risk society, one must come to terms with the fact that
when one falls, there will never be anyone there to catch you. As Bauman
writes,

In the land of individual freedom of choice the option to escape

individualization and to refuse participation in the individualizing game
is emphatically not on the agenda. The individuals self-containment and
self-sufficiency may be another illusion: that men and women have no
one to blame for their frustrations and troubles does not now mean, any
more than it did in the past, that they can protect themselves against
frustration using their own domestic appliances or pull themselves out of
trouble, Baron Munchausen style, by their bootstraps. (2001, 34)

Time Out can be read as an intimate portrait of one of those unfortunate

subjects who actually believes that they can overcome the problems of
contemporary job dissatisfaction by pulling themselves up by their own
bootstraps. Of course, Vincent fails; despite all his attempts at returning order
to the family home, Vincents solution to the problems of work actually creates
the very unhomeliness that threatens to destroy his family. That is, when
Vincent decides to drop out of the work world (in the beginning of the film
we learn that Vincent has been fired and, instead of telling his family, takes to
the road, driving aimlessly around the French countryside), his rebellion only
fosters more uncertainty. For while Vincent will use an assortment of lies to
buy him some much needed time away from the pressures of work, his double
life comes at a cost. In order to act out his middle-class rebellion, Vincent
resorts to a world of white-collar crime, a decision that destroys his family
life. His son comes to hate him, refusing to participate in any family outings;
his wife, Muriel, becomes sick from her husbands strange behavior, as she
begins to fear him and what he might do to the family; even his father, the only
one perhaps who shows some sympathy towards Vincents plight, is unable to
fathom the lengths Vincent goes to conceal his unemployment.

Unemployment and the Experience of Free Fall

When Vincent is fired from his job, he experiences a devastating fall from
the social order. Unemployed, Vincent is tossed out, suddenly disengaged
from a social network in which ones productive contribution to the economy
114 UNHOMELY CINEMA

represents a capitalistic orthodoxy. His failure, though, is not accompanied

by one of those self-revelatory moments where ones defeat acts a catapult,
providing the courage and self-determination to return to the workforce
with added vigor and enthusiasm. Rather, in losing his job, Vincent loses
a way of life, loses his role as paternal breadwinner. No longer capable of
following the capitalist orthodoxy, unable to face the daily grind of work and
responsibility, Vincents middle-class rebellion represents a total disavowal
of his role as patriarch. But what is troubling about Vincents failure is not
simply that he hits rock bottom and is unable to confide in his family; the truly
unhomely facet of the narrative is found in the pathological way in which
Vincents attempt at remedying the problem of capitalistic work leads him
into a strange world of hypermobility, as he trades in a life of middle-class
domesticity for a precarious life on the road. Near the end of the film, this
unhomeliness is expressed poignantly through the story Vincent tells the seedy
businessman Jean-Michel about his love of driving. After experiencing many
unfulfilled years as a financial consultant, Vincent explains, he realized that
his only satisfaction came from his commute to work. Driving became his only
freedom! Over time, Vincents obsession with driving started interfering with
his work, as he would drive up to two hundred kilometers just to meet with
a single client. Often, he would not even have the courage to show up to his
meetings, choosing instead to keep driving, wandering aimlessly around the
French countryside. With most of his workday spent driving, it was not long
before Vincents boss reproached him for his lack of loyalty to the company. In
the end, Vincent says somberly, his departure was easily negotiated.
While Vincents time out is designed to provide him with a momentary
reprieve from the responsibilities of family, his solution only ends up creating
more ambivalence, as he becomes trapped in an uncanny world where
problem and cure become interchangeable. As such, at the center of Time Out
is an unresolvable narrative problem: while Vincents state of unemployment
represents a moral crisis that will be resolved ideally by the end of the narrative,
the film instead uses an uncanny case of dj vu to return Vincent to his initial
state of precariousness. For while Vincent feigns an adolescent joy over his
new concocted job with the United Nations, in reality his new work life is just
as risky and meaningless. Thus, instead of finding a new work environment
that would complete Vincents identity, the solution to the burden of modern
work only exasperates Vincents problems, as it forces him to compromise
himself by simulating joy and satisfaction. This contradictory or false problem
is expressed succinctly in one of the first scenes, where Vincent attempts to
convince one of his friends to invest in his high-risk developmental projects.
While Vincent boasts passionately about his fantastic new job, the friend
remains impassive, pessimistic and self-degrading, as he discusses his inability
 UNHOMELY REVOLT IN TIME OUT 115

to find a place of refuge that is not colonized by his work identity. One
cannot, in the words of the friend, escape the total dissatisfaction of work, its
trivialities and lack of meaningful accomplishments. Home is no option, since
it just reminds him of all the things he has not become. Rather, the solution
to the domination of work is to live a life on the surface of things, to forget
ones existential angst by pursuing cheap thrills. I go out after work, says the
friend, and treat myself to some luxury. But, in the end, I am reminded that
all these things cost money.
Despite his feigned joy and blissfulness, Vincent experiences the home
as the same kind of middle-class prison experienced by his friend. Terrified
that he will disappoint his wife and father, that he will be unable to live
up to the role of middle-class patriarch, Vincent perceives the home more
as a space of forceful confinement than a site of relaxation, freedom and
domestic plenitude. But while Vincent clearly disdains his position within
the family, he nonetheless continues to play the role of domestic protector,
continues to work despite its devastating effect on his social and psychological
life. According to Will Higbee, this inability to escape the role of patriarchal
head of household has everything to do with the engulfing and entrapping
powers of bourgeoisie masculinity. Vincent cannot escape his alienated life
because he is unable to escape the parental and domineering influence of his
father. As Higbee writes,

In LEmploi du temps, it becomes apparent that much of the pressure for

Vincent to maintain the pretense of continued affluence and professional
success comes from his father [] By the end of the film it is the pressure
of bourgeoisie expectation to maintain the trappings of professional
success and affluence articulated most intensely not through his wife, but
through the father that pushes Vincent to a breaking point. (2004, 242)

While Time Out is essentially about a crisis in masculinity, the film does offer
a brief but succinct glimpse into an alternative domestic life, one where
being a man has nothing to do with sacrificing ones individual identity. This
home involves Vincents old friend Nono. When Nono hears about Vincents
investment scheme, he calls Vincent personally, hoping to cash in on Vincents
new job. But when Vincent arrives at his friends home, he is surprised by
what he finds. Unlike his other upper-middle-class friends, who are all quite
successful and capable of investing large amounts of money, Nono clearly
falls outside the bourgeois order. A stay-at-home dad, whose wife maintains
the role of domestic breadwinner, Nono, quite simply, occupies a different
domestic sphere than Vincent and his bourgeoisie buddies, a home where
personal enjoyment and creativity can coexist with family responsibility.
116 UNHOMELY CINEMA

This is evidenced in the way Nono has been able to maintain his youthful
passion for music by transforming one of the rooms in his tiny apartment into
an amateur musical studio. Subsequently, whereas Vincents home inherits a
strong dose of the rigid and domineering patriarchy of his father, Nono seems
to have found the right balance between the responsibilities of family and the
need to sustain his individual creativity, a feat that Vincent clearly envies, as
Nonos happy home is the only place that Vincent desires. As Judith Franco
writes,

Vincents moral superiority is established primarily in relation to other

male characters. Whereas the fantasist has no scruples about defrauding
his carefully selected bourgeois victims [] an unexpected confrontation
with Nono (Maxime Sassier), a devoted family man who entrusts
Vincent with his savings without demanding a receipt, brings about a
moral awakening. Nono, Vincents former school friend, represents an
alternative type of masculinity and lifestyle associated with simplicity
and authenticity that contrasts sharply with the middle-class emphasis on
status and appearances (2008, 39).

It is unfortunate that the film does not dwell more on Nonos alternative form
of masculinity, as the liberating aspects of his gender-reversal provides the
viewer with a more hopeful image of the contemporary home. Instead what
we get is a film that almost exclusively explores the way work dissatisfaction
induces a crisis in masculinity. Nowhere do we find a sympathetic reading
of how other social groups, like working women, must cope with the risks
inherent in contemporary societies. We are never invited, for example, to
explore how Vincents wife, Muriel, has managed to maintain her personal
identity, having to both raise a family and work as a school teacher. Indeed, as
a working woman, who is held responsible for not only her own satisfaction,
but the wellbeing of the entire family, Muriel faces the extra burden of being
a woman, a mother and a wife. Like Vincent, Muriel also suffers from the
malaise of modern work, as her teaching position has lost all of its vigor,
becoming a burdensome chore that prevents her from attaining any real
satisfaction. Vincents advice, however, doesnt help. By claiming that she
should simply quit her job and pursue her inner dreams, Vincent shows just
how oblivious he is to the way the home is highly structured around gender
inequalities. What about the children and the home? Muriel replies bluntly.
Who is going to take care of these duties if we are both out pursuing our
dreams? Denied access to the freedom of pursuing her own inner passions,
Muriels minor role within the film speaks of a harsher cruelty that not even
Vincents crisis can encapsulate.
 UNHOMELY REVOLT IN TIME OUT 117

Vincents Time Out: Orbiting as an Escape

from the Ground of Reality
When Vincent is fired from his job he experiences a devastating fall from the
social order. However, Vincents free-fall does not entail a sudden and immediate
plummet to the ground, a jolting call to reality, wherein his problems with
work are brought to the attention of his family and friends. Rather, Vincents
free fall is avoided through an anti-gravitational detour through the fantastic.
By creating a simulated double life, whereby the reality of unemployment is
transformed into a high profile career, Vincents response to the trauma of
social dejection depends on keeping the Real at bay, a process that proves
untenable for Vincent, as his secret life ends up evoking a weird encounter with
the uncanny. As the films title indicates, Cantets story centers on the question
of time, especially the unhomely ways in which leisure time has been colonized
by the unpleasant experience of work. Unlike the original French title, L
Emploi du Temps (The Use of Time), wherein time is understood as an indistinct
opening, which can be put to many uses, the English translation provides two
other readings of time that address some of the films deeper themes. On the
one hand, time out can refer to the playtime of children, the temporality of
games, whereby the so-called laws of reality are replaced by frivolous or playful
activities. On the other hand, time out or out of time indicates a lack, the
dreadful feeling of running out of time or never being able to accomplish a set
of goals within a required time frame. Interestingly, both notions of time are
instrumental to understanding Vincents crisis: trapped in a dead-end job that
provides little personal freedom or time, Vincents recourse to the playfulness
of fantasy stems from the need to take an individual time-out, to create an
opening in time, in which its use is no longer dominated by modern work.
We are first introduced to the primary object in Vincents fantastic escape
from the home near the opening of the narrative: driving aimlessly around the
French countryside, the automobile represents Vincents only form of enjoyment.
However, unlike other notable films that use the mystique of car cultures to signify
the risky and perilous nature of rebellious masculinity (think of the iconic nature
of the car in the films of James Dean), Vincents love affair with driving lacks any
romanticism or reckless virility. Rather, Vincents rebellion is tediously quotidian,
falling more in line with what John Urry calls the freedom of automobility. As Urry
writes, one of the most salient features about car cultures is the way automobility
leads to feelings of freedom, as the motility afforded by the car allows the driver
to easily traverse a range of spaces without worrying about restrictive time tables.

Automobility is a source of freedom, the freedom of the road. Its

flexibility enables the car-driver to travel at any time in any direction
118 UNHOMELY CINEMA

along the complex road systems of western societies that link together
most houses, workplaces and leisure sites [] Cars extend where people
can go to and hence what they are literally able to do. Much social
life could not be undertaken without the flexibilities of the car and its
24-hour availability. It is possible to leave late by car, to miss connections,
to travel in a relatively time-less fashion. (2004, 28)

Along with the automobiles enhancement of timeless freedom, car cultures are
also linked to a heightened sense of privation. Unlike other, more communal ways
of navigating the environment, such as public trains or buses, the automobile is
deeply insular. As Urry writes, Modernist urban landscapes were built to facilitate
automobility and to discourage other forms of human movement. [Movement
between] private worlds is through dead public spaces by car (2004, 30). The
opening shots provide an evocative image of this automotive insularity. As the
credits subside, we find Vincent sleeping in his automobile in some undisclosed
location. Since the windows of the car remain foggy, the only space visible to the
viewer is the inside of the car. Like the idyllic middle-class home, which provides
the dweller with a protective interior, here the car encloses Vincent within an
insular zone of security. Taking a Freudian perspective on the scene, Judith Franco
comments that this opening scene represents Vincents retreat into a maternal
space of plenitude, as the fog-enclosed car represents a comfortable womb-like
space that shields him from the outside world (Franco 2008, 38). The maternal
overtones of Francos observation are important. While Vincent attempts to
maintain his role as responsible breadwinner, in reality, his road trips form a
childish game of disillusionment, as the car represents an immature retreat into
the fantastical spaces of make-believe. An example of this childish love of the car
is shown in the beginning when Vincent pretends that he is in an exciting race with
a speeding train. Revving the engine, smiling with child-like enthusiasm, Vincent
speeds off in hot pursuit of the train, oblivious to the fact that he has just been
fired and that his aimless road trips are made possible through a reckless series
of elaborate lies. The scene ends with Vincent being forced to stop at a red light;
as he watches the train pass by, Vincent remains defeated and dejected, as his
brief moment of jubilation quickly vanishes. Other than this brief, exhilarating
race with the train, Vincents automotive fetish lacks any gusto or energy. Instead,
Vincents love of driving takes the spectator on a banal journey through a series
of indistinct non-places, as he spends the better part of his days travelling on
monotonous freeways, eating in service stations and sleeping at roadside hotels.
As we saw in chapter 4, Binghams nomadic work habits brought him
into direct contact with the contemporary non-place. In Time Out Vincents
nomadic retreat from home also entails navigating through a series of
monotone spaces, like the indistinguishable gas stations and roadways he
 UNHOMELY REVOLT IN TIME OUT 119

encounters on his commutes. However, reading the films depiction of spatial

homogeneity through Augs conception of the non-place does not help us get
at the true meaning behind Vincents nomadic lifestyle. A better reading of
the non-place, I believe, comes from Gilles Deleuzes exploration of the any
space-whatever. In his book Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Deleuze describes
a form of cinema in which space becomes unhinged from any definable
location. Referring to the works of Bresson, Deleuze contends that there
are times in the cinema when the succession of images provides the viewer
with an indeterminable location, an abstract space that becomes any-space
whatever, a term that Deleuze borrows from Pascal Aug:

Space is no longer a particular determined space, it has become any

space-whatever [] Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in
all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely
lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the
connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an
infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual connection, grasped
as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability,
the heterogeneity, the absence of link of such a space, is a richness in
potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior conditions of all
actualisation, all determination. (Deleuze 1986, 109)

It is unclear if Deleuze is referring to Marc Aug in this quote, since he

does not cite any specific sources. Even critics seem unable to track down
this Pascal Aug and often refer to Deleuzes concept in terms of the French
anthropologist, without noting the discrepancy. Whether or not Deleuze has
referred erroneously to Marc Aug is perhaps not the most pressing matter,
since Augs concept bears little in common with Deleuzes any-space
whatever. While both terms indicate a lack of definable characteristics and
a decontextualization of space, for Deleuze, the any-space-whatever is a
space that abounds in pure potentiality. Whereas for Aug, non-places, like
supermarkets and freeways, represent a homogenization of experience, for
Deleuze, the any-space-whatever represents the infinite powers of the
virtual. Since the viewer is unable to locate the any-space-whatever, to
pinpoint an actual geographic location, space becomes indeterminate and
capable of referring to virtually anything and anywhere.
Deleuzes definition of the non-place, I believe, is far more appropriate to
Vincents time out. While Vincent may make his home in various generic
places, like the litany of parking lots featured in the film, these locations are
never for him actualized or determined; it makes little difference if Vincent
sleeps in the parking lot of a supermarket or a motel, since these places all act
120 UNHOMELY CINEMA

as sites of fantasy, an elsewhere that allows him to live out his double life. As
Will Higbee writes in reference to Foucaults notion of heterotopia, Vincents
trip through the non-place can be understood as a necessary passage through
a series of crisis spaces that allow him to work out his dilemma in identity.

Whereas in Ressources humaines social conflict and crisis are negotiated

directly within the domestic sphere (the family home), in LEmploi du temps
Vincent is forced elsewhere (motorway service stations, hotel lobbies) in
his attempt to resolve the crisis, ultimately seeking retreat in the deserted
log cabin in the Swiss mountains. These other spaces thus function
as what Foucault termed crisis heterotopias (1986, 24) a distant or
removed place or location that allows sacred or forbidden acts to be
performed outside the social space they affect in order for a certain crisis
to be resolved. (2004, 246)

Unfortunately, for Vincent, his attempt at making a mobile home on the

road does not solve anything, as his solution to the problem of middle-class
domesticity creates an unhomely case of dj vu. That is, by returning to the
workforce through a simulated job that increases his parental responsibilities,
Vincents heterotopia, quite simply, solves nothing. Instead, as the narrative
progresses, Vincent actually comes to determine and actualizes what could
have been left indeterminate, thus precipitating the need for another time
out. Nothing about Vincents journey into the fantastic, for instance, helps
remedy his dissatisfaction with work. His infantile escapades in driving aimlessly
around the French countryside do not revive his spirits or provide him with a
viable entry point back into the world of work and responsibility. Quite the
contrary, relying on the seedy world of white-collar crime to fuel his momentary
retreat from home, Vincents nomadic life is quickly transformed into a middle-
class nightmare. For if, in part, Vincents rebellion rests on a disavowal of the
patriarchal identity he inherits from his father, his sojourn into the world of
crime will only heighten his sense of domestic responsibility and even increase
his association with the masculinist world he has come to so fervently detest.

Cell Phone Connections: A Home away from Home

In Time Out the car represents the freedom of the road. More specifically, the
car is, for Vincent, a nomadic dwelling space, a private enclosure that allows
him to escape the drudgery and responsibility of family. However, while much
of the first half of the film is dedicated to showing Vincents aimless road trips,
he is never able to free himself totally from the accountability of home. No
matter how far Vincents mobile life takes him away from the domestic, he is
 UNHOMELY REVOLT IN TIME OUT 121

still grounded by the responsibilities of family. A pivotal scene that showcases

these two tendencies can be found in the opening shots of Vincent sleeping
in his car. As the fog subsides, and the external world is revealed, Vincent is
awakened by a call from his wife, who has called to see if he will be home
for dinner. Vincent lies, claiming that he has a busy day ahead of him and
will be late arriving home. Despite all his attempts at keeping the home at
bay, Muriels call shows how the presence of mobile technologies will make
this task improbable: by making Vincent available to his family, even when
he is on the road or living abroad, the mobile phone serves as a domestic
umbilical cord, a communicative link that prevents him from becoming totally
enveloped in his double life.
Yet, while the mobile phone serves as a grounding agent that brings
Vincent back to the reality of domestic responsibility, the decontextualization
of the phone will render this linkage unreliable and unstable. As we saw in
Cell Phone, since mobile communication does not depend on knowing the
whereabouts of the other caller, Muriels use of the phone to keep tabs on her
husband will prove tenuous. She may be able to get him on the line, even follow
the progress of his day, but his absent presence prevents her from knowing his
true whereabouts. Indeed, just as the automobile is doubly coded for Vincent,
becoming both a space of enclosure and a mobile technology, the delocalization
of mobile communications emerges as the perfect technology for his unhomely
life on the road. On the one hand, the device offers Vincent minimal proximity
to his family, as he can choose when and where he is contacted. On the other
hand, the phone is used as a form of personal freedom, as the cell phone allows
him to unhinge himself from the home, a feat that allows him to roam aimlessly
without anyone ever knowing his exact whereabouts.
In the beginning of the film, the decontextualization of the phone allows
Vincent to command and control his mobile life perfectly. Unlike Yan, who
constantly leaves his phone around the home, giving his wives access to his
double life, Vincent is not, initially anyway, burdened by the heaviness of
mobile networks. Since Vincent spends most of his time outside the home,
he doesnt need to worry about misplacing the phone or his wife accessing his
private life. Most importantly, as a business executive whose entire career centers
on using technologies to manage people and resources, Vincent is shown to be
the ideal candidate for hiding his actual whereabouts. As Bert Cardullo writes,

Cantet makes the subversive point that his protagonist is able to pull off
this pretense, this virtuoso duplicity, because, as a manager, he was trained
essentially to do nothing except manage other people, to manage his own
techniques or people skills, as it were. Instead of employees, he now
manages his wife, his children, his friends, even his own parents; and,
122 UNHOMELY CINEMA

since his white-collar job existed mostly in his mind anyway, Vincent has
gone so far as to eliminate that troublesome middleman, his employer.
(2003, 346)

Unlike Yan, who fails to realize that the placeless nature of mobile networks are
related heavily to specific locations, such as the home, Vincent is constantly on
guard, fully aware that in order to pull of his deception he will have to actualize
his concocted web of lies, from his new job at the United Nations to the new flat
he buys from the money he borrows from his father. This managerial prowess
is particularly evident in the scene when Muriel makes a surprise visit to see
Vincents new apartment in Switzerland. As we learn, Vincent does not spend
his fathers money on a new apartment, but instead, uses it to buy an SUV. After
all, Vincent has very little use for an apartment when he has his own version of a
mobile home. But when Muriel demands to see his new flat, Vincent is faced with
a dilemma. To solve this problem, Vincent has to rely on his managerial skills.
Using his knowledge of the area, he convinces Muriel that a weekend stay at an
old abandoned mountain cabin would be much more romantic than staying at
his bachelor pad. I dont even have any cookware, he declares to Muriel after
picking her up at the airport, as if the apartments lack of domestication would
repel her from wanting to go through with the visit.
In the scenes in the mountains, Cantet provides some of the grimmest
images of Vincents unhomely double life, as the lone, isolated mountains come
to represent Vincents homelessness. In one scene, Muriel and Vincent are
shown leaving the cabin when a blanket of fog sweeps in from the mountains,
enveloping the two in a thick and opaque cloud. Unable to see anything
around him, Vincent becomes extremely desperate, calling out frantically
for Muriel, as though she had suddenly vanished into thin air. The scene
culminates with Muriel, who reappears from the fog, pronouncing a statement
that will echo eerily throughout the latter part of film, Did you think that you
had lost me? As in the opening scene, the mountain fog provides a poignant
metaphor for Vincents frayed relationship with his wife and their strange
mobile connectivity. Absent but present, near and far, Muriels envelopment
in the fog functions exactly like the disembodied voice that is repeatedly heard
over Vincents mobile phone.
But while Vincent uses his managerial prowess to maintain his double life,
his ability to avoid detection will only last so long. Like Yan, whose mobile life
betrays him in the end, as he is unable to command and control his mobile
phone, Vincents double life also unravels through the powers of contingency,
especially the unruliness of unexpected phone calls. Vincents first encounter
with contingency involves his friend and colleague, Jeffrey. In one scene,
while out shopping with his family, Vincent encounters Jeffrey by chance.
 UNHOMELY REVOLT IN TIME OUT 123

As expected, Jeffrey acts concerned and tries to probe Vincent about his job
situation. But Vincent will have none of his pity. Dragging Jeffrey outside the
store, Vincent proceeds to give his friend a good tongue lashing, demanding
that he stay away from his family. But though Vincent tries to command the
situation by acting as the domineering head of household, he will have very
little power over the contingent encounters that follow. Indeed, when Jeffrey
begins calling Vincents home, it will be his disembodied voice and not Muriels
that threatens Vincents ruse. Just as the female characters in Cell Phone discover
the truth of their husbands infidelity by intercepting a series of coincidental
calls, Muriels moment of truth also entails a coincidental phone call with
Jeffrey. Calling to check in on his friend, Jeffrey inadvertently gets Muriel on
the line and proceeds to expose the truth about Vincents unemployment.

The Return to Work: A Case of Dj Vu

Karl Marx once wrote, Capital is dead labor, which vampire-like, lives only by
sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks (1923, 257).
Like Marxs vampires, Vincents fall into the seedy world of white-collar crime
depends on a calculated game of sucking living labor. Like most white-
collar crimes, which use false promises and luring investment opportunities
to encroach and feed upon the resources of others, Vincents double life
depends on stealing from those willing to believe in his high-stakes investment
opportunities. However, unlike many white-collars crimes, which represent a
threat to the larger public sphere, Vincents vampire-like attacks are directed
narrowly at the family sphere, as he uses his immediate family, former colleagues
and friends to secure the money needed to sustain his double life. In order to
start his new life in Switzerland, for example, Vincent borrows a large sum of
money from his father, which he claims is for the purchase of a new condo.
Then, in order to keep up appearances, Vincent begins manipulating his upper-
class friends and colleagues, luring them into investing in a series of make-
believe development projects with the United Nations. The only person Vincent
is unable to manipulate is Jean-Michel, a seedy businessman who confronts
Vincent in a hotel lobby. Immediately detecting the ruse in one of Vincents
bravado performances, Jean-Michel provokes Vincent one day, demanding that
he fess up to his game of lies. According to Judith Franco, Vincents inability to
convince Jean-Michel of his double life has everything to do with his different
social background. Unlike Vincent and his management friends, Jean-Michel
belongs to a different order of masculinity. As Franco writes,

If male alienation [] is figured in terms of the protagonists

inexpressiveness, LEmploi du temps draws attention to the alienating
124 UNHOMELY CINEMA

effect of language. Vincent delivers a virtuoso verbal performance and

ultimately gets caught up in his own rhetoric in an attempt to construct
a flattering representation of himself, tailored to the demands of his
bourgeois milieu [] Significantly, only outsider Jean-Michel, who does
not belong to Vincents bourgeois circle, sees through the verbal mimicry.
(2008, 40)

As the head of a bootlegging business that deals in fake merchandise, Jean-

Michel certainly has the advantage of being a master in detecting fraudulent
behaviour. However, what really draws Jean-Michel to Vincent has more to do
with their shared experiences with the unhomely. Like Vincent, Jean-Michel
was unable to live up to the pressures of middle-class domesticity, as his secret
criminal life destroyed his family. Before long, he confides to Vincent, he
abandoned his role as a family man and took to a precarious life outside of the
home, choosing to live and work out of a series of hotels.
There are two significant narrative developments that arise out of the
appearance of Jean-Michel. First, by detecting Vincents disillusionment and
even offering to listen to Vincents confession, Jean-Michel is the only character
who is able to bring him back to reality. He offers Vincent a place to live and
a job, which Vincent hopes will help repay all of his victims. In short, the
appearance of Jean-Michel represents a stage of narrative reconciliation. Yet,
at the same time, by accepting an illegal job that entails smuggling bootlegged
products into the country, Vincent only digs himself further into his moral
dilemma, as the presence of Jean-Michel literally has a sickening effect on
his family. This is evident in the scene in which Jean-Michel tricks Vincent
into having him over for a family dinner. Pretending to be a work colleague
whose job with the United Nations involves fighting international crime,
Jean-Michel comes to have a sickening effect on Muriel. When the conversation
turns to his expert knowledge of Italys criminal networks, Muriel suddenly
takes ill and has to retreat to her bedroom. Since Muriel has already figured
out that Vincent was fired from his job, the creepy presence of Jean-Michel
only confirms her fear that she no longer knows who her husband is and what
kind of work he has gotten into.
In the final scenes of the film, Vincents status as an outsider in his own
home reaches the uncanny point where he is transformed into an unwanted
intruder. Deciding to give up his bootlegging job, Vincent returns home and
desperately tries to reconnect with his family. However, his reception is neither
hospitable nor familial. His older son, who throughout the film becomes
increasingly alienated, barricades himself in his bedroom, refusing to talk to
the bastard. And, as Vincent attempts to retain control over his family, the
scene becomes extremely unstable, as the family looks at him as a complete
 UNHOMELY REVOLT IN TIME OUT 125

stranger. Oddly, despite being completely disregarded by his family, Vincent

continues to lie, declaring that he is tired from his long commutes and will take
a week off work. Receiving no response from his bewildered family, Vincent
then diagnoses his own condition through reference to his family: What are
you all looking at? You guys are sick. Then, like a criminal whose midnight
intrusion has been detected, Vincent jumps out of a window just as his father
proceeds up the driveway. Unable to live up to the masculine pressures of
being the head of household, Vincents flight from his home provides a perfect
image of his flight into the uncanny; while his time-out was supposed to
help him resolve his crisis in identity, in the end, Vincents rebellion pushes
him further and further away from the security of home.

Conclusion: The Return to Work as the

Precondition for a Free Fall
When Vincent is fired from his job, he experiences a devastating fall from
the social world, an orbit into the fantastic that leaves him detached from
the family home. By the end of the film, though, Vincents uncanny journey
comes full circle. As mentioned earlier, the film closes with Vincent escaping
the family home and climbing into the safety of his car; after a brief ride,
however, Vincent suddenly abandons his car by the side of the road and veers
out into the darkness. Suicide seems inevitable. However, instead of remaining
faithful to the true life story on which the film is based (in the real story,
Jean-Claude Romand kills his family and attempts suicide), Cantet avoids a
sensationalistic ending by having Vincent return to the workforce, presumably
cured of his delusional double life. But despite Vincents supposed return to
normalcy, Cantets ending does not provide any resolution to the alienating
effects of modern work. Though at the films conclusion Vincent is shown
interviewing for another high-profile job, his return to work merely places
him in the exact situation that led to his initial plummet. As Judith Franco
writes, The closing scene dramatizes Vincents tragic destiny as he succumbs
to social pressure (once again represented by the father who set up the job
interview) and is condemned to live a lie, to be something that he is not: an
ambitious businessman. Vincents last words, Im not scared, are contradicted
by his petrified facial expression. As the camera closes in on him and the
melancholic background music drowns out his final words, the male rebel is
literally crushed and obliterated (2008, 40). This, it seems, is Cantets tragic
resolution to Vincents crisis in the loss of time. Trying to salvage some form
of identity not colonized by modern work, Vincents devastating, shameful
and self-delusional encounter with the unhomely amounts to nothing more
than a painful return to the scene of the crime.
 CONCLUSION

A Look Back or an Unhomely Return

Set in a futuristic Los Angeles, Neill Blomkamps second feature film, Elysium,
tells the story of an alienating world that is set afire by class conflict: whereas
the rich and wealthy live on Elysium, a luxurious spacecraft that hovers just
above earth, the poor underclasses are forced to inhabit an overpopulated
and polluted planet Earth. Like District 9, in Elysium the future is now; the
Los Angeles of 2154 is really just a space of unhomely conflict that mirrors
the Los Angeles of today: social injustice is rampant, racial discrimination is
widespread and access to basic resources, like fresh air and medical care, is a
privilege only for the wealthy. However, unlike District 9, which uses the threat
of aliens to draw its symbolic map of contemporary apartheid, in Elysium the
most pressing danger comes from within, as the entire globe is pictured as
an unhomely and exhausted space that offers little comfort or pleasure to its
inhabitants. In this concluding chapter, I will use the geopolitical landscape
of Elysium to summarize some of the key characteristics of the contemporary
unhomely. The key themes addressed include the scale of the unhomely,
hybridity, motilities and the right to the home.

The Scale of the Unhomely

It is common to think of the home as a specific kind of dwelling place: a home
has four walls, a roof, comes with a mortgage and, if youre lucky, a backyard.
But, as seen in the films discussed here, the home is always more than a house;
the home is multi-scalar. The home incorporates a complex symbolic terrain;
its power resides in the way it calls upon and makes contact with other ideas
and places. The home may be a single room in an apartment, an entire house,
a neighbourhood, or it may even incorporate the entire nation. The home may
be a place where one may dream or a special place in the past. The home can
be extremely localized or it may intersect many sites, from the regional to the
international. Home, Gorman-Murray and Blunt (2007) write, is powerful,
emotive and multi-faceted. As a basic desire for many, home is saturated with
128 UNHOMELY CINEMA

the meanings, memories, emotions, experiences and relationships of everyday

life [] Indeed, many reinforce their sense of self, their identity, through an
investment in their home, whether as house, hometown or homeland.
Analysing the different spatial scales represented in a film can be extremely
helpful in addressing some of the narratives larger themes and issues. In District 9
we saw how the scale of the unhomely centred on an intergalactic siege, as the
relocation of the aliens to a state-sanctioned ghetto provided an inventive allegory
for the inhospitable nature of apartheid. In Elysium the scale of the unhomely
involves far more dwelling places: along with focusing on Maxs attempt to escape
his desolate, one-room house in Los Angeles, the film uses other domestic settings
(Max and Freys earlier life in an orphanage, the criminal underworld of Spider,
Maxs Latino neighbourhood, Freys middle-class home []) to show how the
injustices of capitalism represent a global problem that has transformed the entire
planet into an unhomely place of ruin. In contrast to the luxurious splendour of
Elysium, for the citizens of Earth, home is a wretched place: there are no happy,
relaxing moments in the sun; no grandiose cocktail parties where the thin and
beautiful sip champagne and gorge on sushi; and there is certainty no blissful
medical technology that frees people from the restraints and illness of the human
body. In short, for the citizens of Earth, life is an unending futuristic nightmare, a
space of woe that has become all too real now.
On a basic level, Elysium uses a straightforward narrative structure to
underpin its critique of the social injustices inscribed within contemporary
capitalism. However, by attending to the multiple domestic settings depicted
in the film, we begin to see some of the narratives internal contradictions.
From a broad perspective, for example, Blomkamps critique rests on a
binary opposition between two experiences of home: on the one hand, there
are Elysiums elite, who exist inside an insular environment that relies on
the latest military technologies to keep all undesirables at bay; on the other
hand, there is the brutal and desperate world of Max, who is surrounded by a
neighbourhood engulfed in crime, poverty and powerlessness. Unlike the safe
and luxurious homes provided by Elysium, Maxs home is nothing short of
a one-room prison, a place of squalor that looks like it had been lifted from
some war-torn country. While as a child Max wistfully dreamed of escaping
his horrible lot in life by taking Frey up to Elysium, his adult life is marked
by an unending cycle of crime and injustice. Unlike Frey, who used her book
smarts to leave behind their dismal upbringing, Max has very little choice
about where he calls home. However, when he suffers from a brutal work-
related accident and is poisoned by a heavy dose of radiation, Max must flee
in order to just survive. Given only three days to live, Maxs only hope is to
actualize his dream, to make his way up to Elysium where he may avail of its
impressive medical technologies.
 CONCLUSION 129

From this binary schematic, Maxs attempt to relocate to Elysium acts

as a metaphor of global hope and courage. As the film concludes, we find
that despite all odds, Max not only makes it to Elysium, but he is given the
opportunity to save all humankind. Using the codes encrypted in his brain to
reboot Elysiums security program, Max sacrifices his life so that all those living
in squalor below can be reborn as citizens of Elysium. This kind of narrative
resolution, however, betrays some of the complex issues raised in the film. By
sacrificing himself for the betterment of humankind, Max ends his journey
by allowing the entire globe to find a better sense of home. Yet this simple, all-
encompassing narrative opposition creates a false sense of unity, as if Maxs
plight spoke to the fate of all humankind. Simply put, by focusing on only the
conflict between Earth and Elysium, the film covers over the inequalities and
abuses of power that exist on Earth. How is it, for example, that Frey comes
to possess her own private hospital clinic within her home, when Max must
live in abysmal squalor? Or why is Maxs rage directed at Elysium when it is a
citizen of Earth (Maxs cruel work foreman) that forces him to put his life on
the line, causing him to be fatally poisoned by radiation? And is Spider really
a global humanitarian, or a criminal mastermind who profits from promising
people the possibility of freedom? By attending to these other dwelling places
we begin to see how the films neat and tidy power struggle cannot be simply
played out through a simple us/them binary scheme, but must include a whole
assortment of other social injustices.

Hybridity
As both Nicholas Royle and Homi Bhabha argue, at the heart of the experience
of the unhomely is the problem of demarcating boundaries. The unhomely, as
Royle writes, represents a problem in delineating the proper borders between
what is inside and outside, between what is public and private. For Bhabha,
the unhomely is a hybrid experience, as it brings together different social and
cultural worlds in a third space, a new experience of space and identity that
cannot be traced back to an original or pure culture. Hybridity represents an
ambivalent scene, a productive space that does not rest on fixity, but creates
something new out of the merger of conflicting ideas, experiences and places.
Thus, while it may seem like the unhomely represents simply the possibility
of an external or internal attack, in truth, the unhomely questions our ability
to know on which side of the line we find ourselves: Is the home inside or
outside? Are domestic memories private or public? Is identity housed in the
body or in technology?
In Elysium, hybridity is most apparent in Maxs transformation into a cyborg,
a new form of subjectivity wherein body and machine join forces to create a new
130 UNHOMELY CINEMA

kind of human being. Wired into a sophisticated war machine, Max is reborn
as a futuristic one-man army. His only hope for survival is to blast his way into
Elysium, utilizing the superhuman strength of his cyborg body to endure all
kinds of violent assaults. His power resides in what Donna Haraway calls the
masculinist orgy of war: From one perspective, Haraway writes, a cyborg
world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the
final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of
defence, about the final appropriation of womens bodies in a masculinist orgy
of war (1991, 154). However, while Maxs rebirth as a cyborg action hero
shows the militaristic ideologies associated with manmachine identities, his
unhomely transformation is not without its political ramifications. Using his
new cyborg powers, Max creates a shift in the balance of power, sacrificing
his individual well-being for the greater good. From another perspective,
Haraway continues, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily
realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals
and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory
standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once
because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from
the other vantage point.
Elysiums resurrection of the superhuman cyborg certainly lends itself to
a discussion of the political and social changes brought about through new
man-machine identities. However, another kind of hybridity is depicted in the
film, which invites us to think about how our sense of place is altered through
data spaces and networked interfaces. This kind of hybridity has less to do
with Haraways cyborg subject and more to do with what Katherine Hayles
calls the cognisphere. Whereas Haraways cyborg operates as a single entity
with localized agency (Max as a one-man army), the cognisphere attends to the
new emergent possibilities created by information networks. The cognisphere
is a metaphor for the way social agency and physical space is programmed
according to an architecture of computation. It is hard not to miss Elysiums
reference to this other idea of hybridity: while Maxs cyborg body provides
him with the brute force needed to make his way to Elysium, ultimately, it is
what he has stored in his brain (or more aptly what he has downloaded from
the brain of John Carlyle) that holds the ticket to his and all of humankinds
freedom. Containing the codes for a new boot sequence that would override
Elysiums current security system, Maxs cyborg body represents the sacrificial
vessel that is needed for a computational revolution.
From the perspective of the cognisphere, Elysium becomes less about the
conflict between the physical borders between Earth and Elysium and more
about who controls the architectural blueprints of Elysiums data codes.
Hybridity represents the transformative power of blending place and code,
 CONCLUSION 131

a fusion that is imagined perfectly through the bar codes that are printed
on the bodies of Elysiums citizens. In the futuristic world of Elysium, the
possession of an active bar code is all that matters, as it is what is written in the
code that determines where one calls home. Citizenship has little to do with
ones place of birth or ethnic background; the code determines everything.
However, as the film makes clear, since being at home is literally a product
of the invisible architecture of the datasphere, there is the possibility that the
codes can be altered so as to create a dramatic transformation in the current
order of things. In this way, Spider (the mastermind who uses the codes
locked in Maxs brain to make everyone a citizen of Elysium) is the true hero
of the film; for while Maxs triumphant death celebrates the old-fashioned
heroism of individual determination, in the end, grit and muscle is no match
for the power that comes from manipulating the codes that underpins todays
technological environments.

Motilities
If going home represents the ability to be firmly and safely grounded in
place, to withstand the uncertainty of motion by remaining still and immobile,
does the unhomely signify a world beset by migration, exile and flight? Is the
unhomely the quintessential experience of uprootedness? Certainly, from
the postcolonial perspective of Bhabha, the unhomely emerges out of the
inhospitable reality of forced migration, the fact that so many people have
to move in order to make a home on someone elses terms. Or, as so many
discourses on globalization can attest, movement is an ever-pervasive facet of
living in contemporary times: from the instantaneous nature of information and
the worldwide circulation of cultural goods to the emergence of the 24-hour
workday and the ease of international travel, the process of globalization has
certainly had an unsettling effect on how we occupy local places. Yet, as we
have seen so many times throughout this book, the unhomely is never this
neat and tidy. Migration may lead to unsettlement, but it may also be the
precursor to new kinds of stable dwelling places. Likewise, the experience of
being settled may not always be a positive experience, as being contained in
a stable and static home may be far from comforting or liberating; taking
flight or being exiled may, in fact, be the very antidote to the inequalities
associated with domestication.
In Elysium the contradictory nature of migration and flight is most evident in
the differing travel experiences of Max and John Carlyle. Like the ever-mobile
Bingham in Up in the Air, Carlyle is a mobile businessman who travels perpetually
between his home on Elysium and his work on Earth. To maximize the safety
and comfort of his commutes, Carlyle is equipped with a state-of-the-art
132 UNHOMELY CINEMA

aircraft that provides him with an Elysium-style experience of home while

he slums it with the locals on Earth. His daily commutes even entail the
companionship of two robot bodyguards that follow him everywhere, ensuring
that his stay on Earth is frictionless, an easeful experience in an otherwise
hostile environment. Like Vincents experience of automobilities, Carlyles
spacecraft provides a succinct image of the insularity of Elysiums elite: unlike
Spiders spacecraft, which are either barred from leaving Earth or are hunted
down by Elysiums missile defence system, Carlyles movements are, for the
most part, predictable and secure, as the aircraft provides him with all the
comforts of home, even while he must live among the unhomely debris of
Earths inhabitants.
Now compare this experience of flight with Maxs tragic journey to
Elysium. Like Carlyle, whose oscillating movements between Earth and
Elysium end with his demise, Maxs journey involves a one-way trip to death.
However, unlike his Elysium counterpart who is afforded the luxury of taking
his home with him, Maxs itinerary involves an unhomely flight from home, as
he must abandon his neighbourhood in order to just stay alive. First, he travels
to Spiders home, where he hopes that he can use his criminal services to
score a ticket to Elysium. Then, in order to pay off his debt to Spider, he must
hunt down Carlyle and download the contents of his brain to his new cyborg
body. However, as soon as Max succeeds in securing Carlyles information, his
itinerary is hit with a narrative twist: instead of being the hunter, Max must
now flee in order to escape being hunted down by one of Elysiums rogue
agents. Somehow, despite all these painful detours, by the end of the film Max
comes out on top: while he succumbs to the same fateful demise as Carlyle,
his death comes with the remarkable feat of being able to not only save his
childhood sweetheart, but through his sacrifices, he comes to revitalize the
whole of humankind.

The Right to the Home

Though the cinematic unhomely is most evident in narratives about dislocation
and alienation, there are promising, more hopeful lessons to learned from the
workings of the uncanny. As Iris Marion Young (2002) argues, while we need
to be aware of how home is quite often a site of repression and injustice, we
must nonetheless articulate ways of dwelling in the world together; everyone,
Young concludes, has the right to make a home on their own terms; everyone
has the right to a dwelling space that provides people with individual rights,
freedom and safety. This does not mean that the unhomely needs to eradicated,
since, at times, what is needed to disrupt the normative order is the uncanny
powers of uncertainty and unfamiliarity. In Elysium, the liberating powers
 CONCLUSION 133

of the unhomely is most powerfully represented through Maxs uncanny

reincarnation as a cyborg who must flee his home in order to just survive. Just
as Bhabha argues that migration and exile can form a resource that enables the
alienated to engage with the world, Maxs self-exile acts as the narratives only
sign of hope, as his journey to Elysium becomes a shared, global experience
that frees all humankind. Thus, while uncanniness all too often is treated as
a threatening experience that questions the subjects self-determination, films
like Elysium show how the unhomely can actually be quite liberating. Exile,
migration, dispersal, fragmentation these may all be the symptomatic signs
of our so-called postmodern societies, but homes can be fashioned on the
move. Homes can be made in spite of the worlds inhospitality.
 REFERENCES

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Armitage, John. 2001. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. London: Sage Publications.
Arnesen, David W., C. Patrick Fleenor, and Rex S. Toh. 1997. The Ethical Dimensions of
Airline Frequent Flier Programs. Business Horizons 40, no. 1: 4756.
Aug, Marc, 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London:
Verso.
. 2004. Oblivion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1967. The Fashion System. Berkeley: University of California Press.
. 1968. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang.
Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. The System of Objects. London: Verso.
Bauman, Zygmut. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1995. Life in Fragments. Oxford: Blackwell.
. 1999. In Search of Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Polity Press.

. 2001. The Individualized Society. Oxford: Polity Press.

Beck, Ulrich. 1996. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.

. 1999. World Risk Society. Oxford: Polity Press.

Bertaud, Alain, and Bertrand Renaud. 1995. Cities without Land Markets: Location and
Land Use in the Socialist City. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 1477.
http://ssrn.com/abstract=636157. Accessed 6 August 2010.
Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
. 1992. The World and the Home. Social Text 10, no. 3132: 14153.
. 1997. Halfway House. Artforum 35, no. 9: 1113.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2004. Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Cairns, Stephen. 2003. Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy. New York: Routledge.
Cardullo, Bert. 2003. The Employment of Time. Hudson Review 56, no. 2: 34554.
Carey, James. 1989. A Cultural Approach to Communication. In Communication as Culture:
Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Carroll, Noel. 1990. The Moral Ecology of Melodrama: The Family Plot and Magnificent
Obsession. In Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, edited by Marcia
Landy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Castells, Manuel. 2009. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and
Culture, Vol. I. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
136 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Castells, Manuel, Mireia Fernndez-Ardvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Araba Sey. 2006.
Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (Information Revolution and Perspective),
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Castle, Terry. 1995. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cixous, Hlne. 1976. Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freuds Das Unheimliche
(The Uncanny). New Literary History 7: 52548.
Critercher, Chris, and Peter Bramham. 2004. The Devil Still Makes Work. In Work and
Leisure, edited by John T. Haworth and A. J. Veal. New York: Routledge.
De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International. New York: Routledge.
Donald, James. 1999. Imagining the Modern City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Dowling, Robyn, and Alison Blunt. 2006. Home. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan
Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.
Franco, Judith. 2008. The More You Look, the Less You Really Know: The Redemption
of White Masculinity in Contemporary American and French Cinema. Cinema Journal
47, no. 3: 2947.
French, R. A., and F. E. Ian Hamilton. 1979. Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy.
New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Freud, Sigmund. 1919. The Uncanny. San Diego: San Diego State University. http://
www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html. Accessed 6 January 2012.
Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press. Oxford.
. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Los Angeles:
Stanford University Press.
Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Robyn Blunt. 2007. Home. M/C Journal 10, no. 4,
August.
Hage, Ghassan. 2003. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society.
London: The Merlin Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
New York: Routledge, 14981.
Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Heidegger, Martin. 1951. Building Dwelling Thinking. http://students.pratt.edu/~arch543p/
readings/Heidegger.html. Accessed 1 August 2010.
Heller, Agnes. 1995. Where Are We at Home? Thesis Eleven 41: 118.
Higbee, Will. 2004. Elle est o, ta place? The Social-Realist Melodramas of Laurent
Cantet: Ressources humaines (2000) and Emploi du temps (2001). French Cultural Studies 15,
no. 3: 23550.
Hirsch, Eric, and Roger Silverstone. 1992. Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in
Domestic Spaces. New York: Routledge.
 REFERENCES 137

Huddart, David. 2006. Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge.

Israel, Nico. 2000. Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Jacobs, Jane A. 2004. Too Many Houses for a Home: Narrating the House in the Chinese
Diaspora. In Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy, edited by Stephen Cairns. New York:
Routledge.
Jay, Martin. 1998. The Uncanny Nineties. In Cultural Semantics: Keywords of our Time.
Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 57169.
Katz, James E., and Marl Aakhas. 2002. Perpetual Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Kickasola, Joseph. 2004. The Films of Krzysztof Kielowski: The Liminal Image. New York:
Continuum.
Koolhaas, Rem. 2002. Junkspace. October 100, Spring: 17590.
Lambert, Gregg. 1998. On the Uses and Abuses of Literature for Life: Gilles Deleuze and
the Literary Clinic. Postmodern Culture 8, no. 3.
Landsberg, Allison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the
Age of Mass Culture. New York: Colombia University Press.
Licoppe, Christian, and Jean-Philippe Hourtin. 2002. France: Preserving the Image. In
Perpetual Contact, edited by James Katz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liston-Heyes, Catherine. 2002. Pie in the Sky? Real Versus Perceived Values of Air
Miles. Journal of Consumer Policy 25, no. 1: 127.
Lizon, Peter. 1996. East Central Europe: The Unhappy Heritage of Communist Mass
Housing. Journal of Architectural Education 50, no. 2: 10414.
Lury, Celia. 1998. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity. New York: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1933. Capital, translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. London: J. M. Dent.
Massumi, Brian. 1993. Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear. In The Politics
of Everyday Fear, edited by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. 2002. Reading the House: A Literary Perspective,
Signs 27, no. 3: 83746.
Morely, David. 2000. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. New York: Routledge.
Musil, Jiri. 2005. City Development in Central and Eastern Europe Before 1990: Historical
Context and Socialist Legacies. In Transformation of Cities in Central and Eastern Europe:
Towards Globalization, edited by F. E. Ian Hamilton, Kaliopa Dimitrovska Andrews, and
Nataa Pichler-Milanovi. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Oldenziel, Ruth, and Karin Zachmann. 2009. Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology,
and European Users. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Perlmutter, Ruth. 1997. Testament of the Father: Kielowski The Decalogue. Film Criticism
22, no. 2.
Rapport, Nigel, and Joanna Overing. 2000. Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts.
London: Taylor & Francis.
Redmond, Dennis. 2004. The World Is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 19681995.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Rhodes, John David. 2006. Concentrated Grounds: Grey Gardens and the Cinema of the
Domestic. The Journal of Cinema and Media 47, no. 1: 83105.
Rosler, Martha. 2000. Artist Questionnaire: 21 Responses. Obsolescence 100, October: 698.
Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.
Rutherford, Jonathan. 1990. The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha. In Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 20721.
138 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Saarikangas, Kirsi. 1993. Model Houses for Model Families: Gender, Ideology and the Modern
Dwelling. The Type-Planned Houses of the 1940s in Finland. Helsinki: Societas Historica
Fennica (Studia Historica series, vol. 45).
Schantz, Ned. 2003. Telephonic Film. Film Quarterly. http://www.filmquarterly.org/
index2.html. Accessed 14 July 2010.
. 2008. Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schudson, Michael. 1984. Advertising as Capitalist Realism. In Advertising, The Uneasy
Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Basic Books, 20933.
Shaviro, Steve. 2003. Connected, or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Shiel, Mark. 2001. Cinema and the City in History and Theory. In Cinema and the City:
Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, edited by John Walton, Margit Mayer, and
Chris Pickvance. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shonfield, Katherine. 2000. Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City. London: Routledge.
Smith Neil. 2002. New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban
Strategy. Antipode 34, no. 3: 42750.
. 2006, Gentrification Generalized: From Local Anomaly to Urban Regeneration
as Global Urban Strategy. In Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy,
edited by Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey. Durham: Duke University Press.
Stanilov, Kiril. 2007. Taking Stock of Post-Socialist Urban Development: A
Recapitulation. In The Post-Socialist City Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central
and Eastern Europe after Socialism. Dordrecht: Springer.
Straw, Will. 2000. Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music. Canadian
Journal of Communication 25, no 1. http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/
article/viewArticle/1148/1067. Accessed 1 July 2010.
Szczepaski, Marek S. 1993. Planning, Housing and the Community in a New Socialist
Town: The Case of Tychy, Poland. The Town Planning Review 64, no. 1: 121.
Terkenli, Theano S. 1995. Home as a Region. Geographical Review 85, no. 3: 32434.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Urry, John. 2004. The System of Automobility. Theory, Culture & Society 21(4/5): 2539.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 2001. Introduction. In Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of
Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press.
Vidler, Anthony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Virilo, Paul. 1986. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotextet.
Weclawowicz, Grzegorz. 1996. Contemporary Poland: Space and Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
. 2005. The Warsaw Metropolitan Area on the Eve of Polands Integration into
the European Union. In Transformation of Cities in Central and Eastern Europe: Towards
Globalization, edited by F. E. Ian Hamilton. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.
Wilson, Rob. Globalization, Broken Aesthetics and the Global Soul: Tracking Some
Uncanny Paths to Trans-Pacific Globalization. London: SAGE Publications. www.
sagepublications.com 1, no. 1: 3551.
Young, Iris Marion. 2002. House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme. In Gender
Struggles: Practical Approaches to Contemporary Feminism, edited by Constance Mui. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Zukin, Sharon. 1991. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disneyland. Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
 INDEX

absent presence 95, 121

consumer loyalty programs 7, 7677
Anderson, Benedict 16, 135; see also
consumption: domestic 7, 82; private 81

imagined communities
control society 42

any-space-whatever 119; see also Deleuze, cyborg 12930, 13233; see also Haraway,
Gilles Donna
architecture: cinematic 23; domestic 81;

modern 6, 33, 3536, 64; obsolete 55;

Deleuze, Gilles 6768, 119; see also any
socialist 3435, 40; urban 14
space-whatever; fabulation
Aug, Marc 1820, 69, 8385, 119, 135;
deterritorialized 19, 38, 85

see also non-place

diaspora, contemporary 3

automobility 11718, 138; see also dislocation 3, 86, 90, 93, 132

Urry, John District 9 (Neill Blomkamp) 13, 12728

Bachelard, Gaston 85
Elysium (Neill Blomkamp) 12733
Baudrillard, Jean 7879, 81
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel
Bauman, Zygmunt 11213 Gondry) 6162
Beck, Ulrich 112
exile 1718, 20, 131, 133

Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry) 6, 5254,

5759, 61
fabulation 61, 6768
Bhabha, Homi: and exile 133; and
Fordism 74

hybridity 37; and nationhood 16; and

Foucault, Michel 102, 120

third space, 16; and unhomely 4, 13,

Freud, Sigmund: castration complex 9,

15, 17, 22, 129, 131

12, 14; return of the repressed

Bourdieu, Pierre 3
5, 1213; The Uncanny 9, 19;

Bronfen, Elisabeth 2526 unheimlich 1112

Cantet, Laurent 8, 9495, 11112, 117,

gentrification: contemporary 5557,

12122, 125
59; global 6, 5152, 55, 66;

Castells, Manual 39, 101

representations 6, 58

Cell Phone (Feng Xiaogang) 78, 9395,

globalization 35, 10, 24, 3031,

9798, 100102, 104106, 109,

37, 39, 112, 131

121, 123
Gondry, Michel 6, 5255, 5763,

Classic Hollywood Telephone 96, 105;

66, 69

see also Schantz, Ned

cognisphere 130
Haraway, Donna 130

connectivity: instant 5; mobile 14, 94,122;

Hayles, Katherine 130; see also cognisphere

telepathic 38
Heimat 31

140 UNHOMELY CINEMA

Heller, Agnes: geographically

obsolescence 6, 6263, 65; see also Straw,
monogamous 20; geographic
Will; Koolhaas, Rem; Rossler,
promiscuity 2, 21; temporal home-
Martha
experience 20, 77

high technology 1, 62, 108,

perpetual contact 95

Hirsch and Silverstone 81

postcolonialism 15

Hoffmann, E. T. A. 9, 1112, 14, 22;

prosthetic: culture 100101, 108; device
see also The Sandman
101102; memory 61, 103104
homelessness 2021, 45
psychoanalysis 911; see also Freud,
homesickness 3, 25
Sigmund
Human Resources (Laurent Cantet) 111
public sphere 6, 15, 54, 66, 73

Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson)

imagined communities 16; see also

6, 71, 7677, 79, 82, 8687, 9091

Anderson, Benedict

Its A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra) 26,

risk society 112

5354
Rosler, Martha 64

Royle, Nicholas 10, 15, 22, 129

Jacobs, Jane M. 2021

Jay, Martin 910, 22

semiotic: codes 78; modes of decay
Jentsch, Ernst 1112
6263; value 6365
junkspace 60, 62, 6465, see also
Schantz, Ned 7, 9598, 103, 105

Koolhaaus, Rem Schudson, Michael 7172

science fiction 1

Kielowski, Krzysztof: borders 32, 38, 41;

Shaviro, Steven 42

home 30, 40; Solidarity movement

Shonefield, Katherine 2324, 7273
37; spirituality 30; The Decalogue 2, 29,
socialism 3334
3031, 37
space: cinematic 23; crisis 120; domestic

Kitchen Debate 33, 35

5, 7, 15, 22, 26, 36, 47, 76; private

Klute (Alan J. Pakula) 26, 43

38; transnational 13; uncanny 4;

unhomely 14, 52, 54, 71; virtual 13,

liminal 15, 17, 54; see also Royle,

1819, 41, 102

Nicholas
speed 7, 1820, 37, 60, 65, 81, 85, 91, 97

Straw, Will 6265

Mad Men 5152, 69, 104105
Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas) 23, 48

Massumi, Brian 7, 7374, 77

surveillance, panoptical 4142
melodrama 2, 4, 7, 22, 9495, 100,

102, 109
The Road (John Hillcoat) 26

migration, forced 23, 16, 131

The Sandman 9, 12

mobile home 7, 21
The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry) 62

mobile society 6
Time Out (Laurent Cantet) 8

Morley, David 31
transnational: capital 2; cinema 24;

motility, global 3, 5
globalization 31; migrations 25;

multi-scalar 13
space 13

network society 36, 3839, 4143, 46

Up in the Air (Jason Reitman) 6, 71, 7677,

non-place 19, 8385, 92, 11820

79, 81, 87, 9091, 131

nostalgia 3, 14, 5153, 75, 107

Urry, John 11718
 INDEX 141

Vidler, Anthony 5, 1415 Wilson, Rob 4

Virillo, Paul 1820, 60, 85; see also speed;

deterritorialized Zukin, Sharon 55

voice-over narrator 2, 71, 9798, 110

voyeurism 4144