And I’m Not Even Going To Discuss The Toilet

A few months back, I saw the much-maligned The Fourth Kind. I was fascinated the entire time, though not by the alien abduction plot (it was pretty familiar, except for one sort of ballsy little twist.)

What I found interesting was the film’s use of split screens showing the film’s reenactment of the “true” story on one half and “real footage” from home video cameras on the other.

It wasn’t that Unsolved Mysteries-style telling of the story that interested me, in itself. It was the… well, I guess the art direction, if you get right down to it.

For example, a number of scenes take place in a psychologist’s office. The film shows reenactments of some hypnosis sessions, alongside the psychologist’s video records of the sessions.

The offices are similar, in a number of ways, but not the same.

In the fake office, everything is beautiful. The room is huge and the furniture is set in the centre–plenty of room for cameras to move around. The two places where characters will sit are backed with attractive but non-distracting features, such as a fireplace. Soft light comes in through a pair of open windows.

Uh, open windows? In a shrink’s office, on the ground floor? Not to sound paranoid, but some psychologists’ patients ARE paranoid. They wouldn’t like that. Besides, are your sessions anyone else’s business? Your employer’s, for example?

But this is the fake movie office, and that’s kind of the point. When the split screen comes up, we see the real office. It has a lot of similarities, but it’s a real room. Imperfect. Not designed for filming.

It’s strange… I spend so much time looking at rooms on TV and movie screens that I forget how ridiculous they are. When I’m in IKEA (which is rarely. Get off me.), I notice where cords should be and aren’t, and what basic parts of a living home have been removed so as to make the space look tidy. I think about what would happen if my dogs spent ten minutes in that room. But I don’t tend to think about that when I see TV and movie rooms.

We’re all very aware that TV and movies show us unrealistic body types. We know that it can take hours to get a twenty second shot and that people spend hours in make-up before going anywhere near a camera. We know about body doubles. We know that actors have the time and money for personal trainers and surgery. And still we think (especially if we’re girl-people) that we should look that way.

How often do we look at the sets of a show or movie and think they aren’t realistic? I’m not talking about the Batcave or that prison where they keep Magneto. I’m talking about supposedly average living rooms. Do we stop and think, wow–you never see cords, or an outlet? You don’t, usually. You don’t see marks on the wall or plants with dead leaves or anything that isn’t utterly perfect. You do on reality television, so that’s something–but you don’t see a real mess even on shows where, come on, you know there’d be one. Big Love, for example. How many kids are running around those houses? And there’s not a single scuff on a single wall? I don’t care if Bill does own a hardware chain or if Nicki is a handiperson. They would not be able to keep up.

I was pleasantly surprised by the normalcy of the home in Paranormal Activity, though of course some bitchy movie reviewers who are shallower than the gloss on their lips just had to pipe up about the ugliness of the window treatments. How offensive, that a young couple should have $20 curtain rods from Home Depot instead of, I don’t know, carved ivory with panda-fur trim. And how appalling that they might not have had the services of a professional decorator.

I can see why the reviewers would expect that, though, because it is the standard. That’s what we’re used to seeing. Even the homes of characters who are supposed to be poor tend to be shabby in a tidy and coordinated way. Lucky Louie went the other way with their bare-bones set, making it worse than most people’s apartments, but even that exaggeration was far closer to the places where I used to babysit than is most of what I see on TV.

As a viewer and home owner, I’m disturbed by the realization that, while I’ve been trying to steel myself against the unrealistic demands on my physical self, I’ve been thoughtlessly absorbing the demands on my home. Not the obvious things, like fancy new cars every year and huge houses for everyone in New York. I know better than that. But the little things… the lack of clutter or dust or smears on the windows… those things have worked their way into my brain and made me look at my house in a way that probably isn’t fair to either my house or me.

As a writer, I’m curious about sets and their effect on the audience. Do we want to see perfect houses for the same reason that we supposedly want to see perfect bodies, which is that it’s a fantasy and an escape–maybe even a chance to project and pretend we’re something “better”? Or do we subconsciously want to see people whose homes are like (or better still, WORSE than!) our own?

Would it help us get into the stories to see realistic places onscreen? Or do we find it easier to get immersed in a story when the sets are bland and clean–nothing to block the shots or draw focus or interfere with the action? Nothing that would make us notice the home and, in so doing, notice that it wasn’t our home and we weren’t in the scene.

Weigh in, if you would… and let me know if you know of a good cleaning person in Edmonton who doesn’t charge a million bucks an hour.

Hey, I said I was trying not to have unrealistic expectations. I didn’t say the sinks weren’t kinda grungy around the taps or that there weren’t dust bunnies under the computer desk. You know how it is.

Current Bedside Reading: Catherine Crier, Final Analysis: The Untold Story of the Susan Polk Murder Case

Commentary: You would think, if a guy really wanted to kill himself, that he could find a faster way than becoming a shrink, diddling a teenage patient, marrying her, and making her progressively crazier for decades until she finally got around to murdering him. But I guess some people will go to any lengths to have someone else do the deed for them.

My iPod Is Singing: “There’ll be faerie lights, as bright as any city night.”

Feb 7, 2010

• Posted by gayleenfroese
• 8 comments
• All Posts

Comments

James (Feb 08, 2010)

There is currently a narrative going on in U.S. politics in which the liberal commentators and media personalities claim that the conservative outlets are airing narratives which aren’t true. Simply by airing them, this thinking goes, they are reinforcing the false story in the minds of people and creating more viewers who believe the lie. Examples of this are Fox news pundits labeling Obama a socialist, and a Kenyan. Now without delving into the truth of these claims, I do find an analogy to the clean house thing.

I don’t think that these shows are causing many people to consciously question the perfection of the homes on TV. I’ve certainly never though about cords and lampshades and where they find the 20 hours a day to clean the place. The subconscious implications seem to be less clear cut though. If we watch a show does it provide even a tiny blow to our self esteem? I don’t know. I know that I certainly feel like a slob sometimes when I see the portrayal of other living spaces on TV. Is this negative reinforcement, and, if it is, is it harmful?

Personally I think that the analogy to body type self esteem is apt – for some people. From a story prospective though, it’s interesting to wonder what the cluttered set would take away. Would we be less involved in the story if it were presented on a gritty and cluttered background? How many people would be caught up in the background enough that it detracted from the story? Do we want to see idealized people and sets that reinforce our cultural ideas about life and society in such a way as to make the story more understandable? Does a clean view of the story make it more enjoyable to us opposed against the dirty view reminding us of doing the laundry and dusting the mantle? All a fine can of worms to think ourselves out of.

The show I’ve been watching lately, Numb3rs, shows a man who is arguably a savant doing all kinds of crazy math to solve crimes. The thing that they clean up to make the story enjoyable is all the time that goes into setting these things up. They love showing all the chalkboards full of arcane equations, but sometimes they talk about entering thousands of data points to solve a crime in an hour or two of time in the story. That is completely unrealistic. Would I be happier with an unsolved crime while the protagonist spends 9 hours grinding a few thousand points of data into his computer? Of course not.

I can see positives and negatives from the sets for shows being clean and idealized. From the point of telling the story, I think that showing a clean frame is helpful. When I think that some people may be getting higher and higher expectations about what the clean set means for their own lives, and don’t realize that we all have to live with some clutter, then I think that damage can be done.

gayleenfroese (Feb 08, 2010)

The extent of the blow to one’s self-esteem may depend in part on what you think is expected of you (or what people around you do, in fact, expect.) So, if you’re a scientist (mad or otherwise) and your house is a mess, well, you’re an absent-minded professor. Your messy house is practically a credential.

If you’re a business executive, though, and your house is a mess, that gives a poor impression–as if you don’t have it together, or don’t have the money to pay people to get it together for you.

I also think a lot of people still look to the woman as the bad housekeeper when they walk into a messy or dirty home. True or not, and conscious or not, I think a lot of people consider the woman the one who dropped the ball.

So, a male scientist can shrug off all those perfect home images… but a female businessperson might find it more difficult. And she might also find that, even if she doesn’t have those expectations for herself (heck, even if she never watches TV), other people have absorbed those expectations and are putting them onto her.

Thunderhowl (Feb 11, 2010)

I find myself more and more looking at the residence of a character as one of the characters of the show in it’s own right or as an interesting facet of a character of said show.
On Supernatural for example, The Metallicar is a character to me, as are the various divey motel rooms the guys stay in. I also point to the the vibrant colors in Pushing Daisies.
While sometimes I find it distracting, usually to me it works like the music does in a movie by enhancing the mood or tone of the show.

Cori (Feb 11, 2010)

With crunch last year, I finally broke down and let Dave hire housecleaners for the house, and I’ve gotta say, I love them. I /think/ it’s called ‘Ultimate House Cleaning’ or something like that. His house is giant, so it costs a fair bit, but for once a month it’s actually a pretty good price.

He got their reference from Deb, whose sister also used them.

It turned out to be quite the blessing, really, as I was away for 2 months in the spring, and then laid up for two months in the summer, then back in crunch in the fall. So we’re keeping them.

Gayleen (Feb 11, 2010)

I /think/ it’s called ‘Ultimate House Cleaning’ or something like that

Interesting–I’ll have to check that out.

Gayleen (Feb 11, 2010)

Making such a big deal out of the Metallicar is a smart move for Supernatural. They don’t have familiar sets (except in the sense that all the hotel rooms look similar and of course in the sense that Vancouver-area locations can be awfully familiar), so the car stands in for the apartment or office or secret spy base or whatever location viewers might have gotten attached to on another show.

You know, aside from it being an awesomely cool car.

DPCS (Feb 11, 2010)

One thing that is a problem for me these days, though I suspect it slides past most people, is the depiction of bathrooms and kitchens. I work in a very high end bath and kitchen reno shop, and it pulls me out of the moment A LOT, when I’m watching a movie or show…Supernatural, for example, and the characters are in a “dive” that happens to have thousand dollar faucets.

Product placement, soft and hard, is also distorting what we see. These fixture companies offer their stuff for free to increase visibility. Most people could never afford them for their place.

jf (Feb 11, 2010)

mrs. JF is using clean green squad, they are nice and we are both happy with them. DPCS, I agree with you, seeing different pieces of technology used in ways that they just don’t work is quite jarring to me. CSI Miami for example.
Next time I watch Supernatural I’m going to check out the faucets.