1. The most photographed suburban neighbourhood
Nobody remembered when the first tourists started roaming our streets. One day they were there, and ever since it has been impossible to imagine our neighbourhood without them.
That morning, I stood in the doorframe, watching the woman I lived with.
‘I saw one of those tourists again,’ I said, ‘right outside our front door, taking photographs of our mailbox.’[1] (00:13, 03:07)
She was at the kitchen sink, washing her cereal bowl, using a soapy bare hand to scour the edges. The radio was playing in the background, one advertisement after another.
‘Available for a limited time,’ the radio said, ‘Only with optional megabyte hard disk.’
‘Mega-byte-hard-disk,’ Charlotte said.[2]
Our daughter sat at the breakfast table, talking to no one in particular. She was almost four, and had recently started to repeat voices on the radio or television.
‘I know, I saw him too, at Rem’s house,’ she said, ‘I almost felt pity for him, trying to level his tripod with his bare fingers in this cold weather.’
I watched Jane place the cereal bowl back on the shelves, before she approached me and squeezed past me through the doorframe, almost touching me. (00:28)
After six years of marriage, we had decided to divorce. We still shared the house, for financial reasons, for our daughter, for convenience. Jane kept the master bedroom and I moved into the guest room, which was planned to be the bedroom for our second child. We made agreements about the use of the bathroom, about visiting friends, about the fact that one-night stands couldn’t have breakfast, and about Charlotte.[3]
Later, when I went back upstairs, I saw the tourist again through the window at our front door. He saw me as I stood staring at him. He smiled and started walking along the side of our house, toward the garden, undisturbed. We were the characters in the story he was here to photograph, nothing more. (00:59)
Our house was built as part of a large development plan, designed by one of the bigger real estate developers around. We had received brochures about the project through the mail, showing images that promised the bright and sunny future of the single-family houses that were for sale. (01:16)
When we went over to the real estate developer’s office to sign the contract, we were seated in a waiting room together with a few other young couples, all of them waiting their turn to go in and sign. The chairs stood lined up next to one another, facing a white wall with several framed advertisement posters. The posters showed the same images all of us had seen in the brochures – all smiles and sunshine.
In the waiting room we met our future neighbour, Rem K., seated among the young couples, the only person in the room who was on his own. Rem was a journalist, but he mainly wrote books about architecture. He had had a brief success with a publication about New York, but that was a long time ago.
‘Your wife couldn’t be here?’ I asked, assuming only stereotypical couples with clichéd names lived in the suburbs.
‘I’m not married,’ he said, ‘and I’m not particularly interested in the marital lifestyle. I am here to do a study on the theoretical implications of living in a suburban environment, where each plot is at the same time identical and unique; where each plot comprises the same elements but differently combined in an attempt to differentiate themselves from their neighbours, while knowing this will inevitably fail; where each plot is aimed at creating unity and identity, but in doing so only creating sprawl and sameness.’[4] (00:44, 01:33, 01:50, 02:38)
I decided to stare at the wall.
Somebody called Rem’s name. It was his turn to go in.
‘Do you really think we will be that happy, Tom?’ Jane asked jokingly, pointing to one of the posters.
‘Of course,’ I said, trying to imitate one of those broad smiles, ‘we’re not here to buy a house, we’re here to buy happiness.’
When we were seated in front of the salesman at his desk, I wondered why we were still here, well knowing that those images were nothing more than marketing stories.[5]
The divorce had changed the house. Not so much the building itself, but the movement through the house had changed, the traces that were left behind through time.
There was the family bathroom we shared, with two sets of towels and a key in the lock. There was the absence of family pictures in the living room. There were the two different brands of coffee on the shelves, and the two different coffee machines on the counter top. There were the empty glasses of wine on the coffee table in the morning, when Jane’s new boyfriend had come over. Other nights I left the guest room, by invitation, and spent the night with Jane. It still felt like the guest room.
There was the photo album, stored away on top of the closet of the guest room. After signing the contract, the salesman had advised us to keep some sort of photo diary of the construction progress. We would feel more involved, he said.[6] Whenever we could, in the weekends and after work, Jane and I drove to the construction site, taking photographs of every new development, and updating the album late at night in bed, when we still slept together. On the cover of the album we had taped one of the brochures, showing a rendering of the front side of a house, similar to the one being built for us. There was some kind of suspense in tracking the construction development in relation to that faked-up scene on the cover. (02:08, 02:23)
Little more than a year later the house was finished and we could move in.
When I drove home that evening, I noticed a new sign had been put up at the edge of our neighbourhood. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED SUBURBAN NEIGHBOURHOOD. An arrow pointed roughly in the direction of our street. When I drove further in the direction of the arrow, I noticed two tour buses parked on the side of the road, a few metres from the corner of our street. As I made the turn, I had to manoeuvre through a crowd of tourists walking in the middle of the street, and eventually I had to park my car a bit further down, as the crowd was blocking all access. I got out and started walking home. Almost there, Rem K. appeared at my side.
‘No one sees the homes,’ he said.[7]
‘What do you mean?’
‘The tourists, they don’t see the homes. Once you’ve seen the signs about our neighbourhood, once you’ve read about it in the tourist guides, it becomes impossible to see the homes.’
Unsure what he was talking about, I stared in the direction of my house, where a small group of people with cameras and tripods was just leaving the driveway.
‘They are not here to capture an image, they’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. They see only what the others see. They’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colours their vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism. They are taking pictures of taking pictures.’
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons.
‘What was our neighbourhood like before it was photographed?’ he continued. ‘What did it look like, how was it different from other neighbourhoods, how was it similar to other neighbourhoods? We can’t answer these questions because we too have now read the signs, seen the people snapping pictures. We don’t live in our homes anymore, we now live in pictures of our homes.’[8] (02:52, 03:08)
He seemed immensely pleased by this.
I went inside.
When the house was finished, we also finished the photo album. The last photo we took was an imitation of the brochure on the cover. We had placed the tripod in the middle of the driveway, framing the front door and part of the garage, the side of the car visible on the left. I stood in the doorway, playing the role of the stay-at-home dad, waving, while Jane held the car door halfway open, somewhere between arriving and leaving. The photograph shows our fake, broad smiles, almost breaking because of our restrained laughter.
We were happy.
[1] The act of reducing the front door to its image refers to the notion that the representational function of the front side of the house today becomes increasingly undermined by developments in communication technology: ‘Before the introduction of the mobile phone and the virtual mailbox (the email address), fixed physical places were necessary to contact each other. These fixed places (the place where people lived and worked) or addresses had a significant social role, they were the anchor points of communication: the places where you could go see someone or wait for someone. The mobile phone, wireless internet and the miniaturisation of the archive (the memory stick) make it possible for people to be contacted at any moment and to have all information at all times. The developments in communication technology resulted in a disconnection of the house from the public, which ultimately undermines the representational function of the house’ (Verschaffel [2006] 2010: 146–47; my translation).
[2] The character of Charlotte is used to emphasise the continuous presence of mass media in Western society and the role it serves in (unconsciously) establishing a worldview. The words and phrases are references to DeLillo’s White Noise, which explores the pervasiveness of mass media in more detail. See DeLillo ([1985] 2011: 131).
[3] The housing situation of a divorced couple in a suburban single-family home introduces a script error in the clichéd scenario of happy family life, depicted in the advertisements for this type of housing.
[4] The character of Rem K. is used as a device to introduce comments on the architectural setting the characters live in. From an architectural perspective, the suburban house can be characterised as the indivisible, basic building block of the suburban environment, analogous to, and at the same time sustaining, the concept of the nuclear family. The paradox of the suburban home is the presence of a bourgeois logic of identification and representation in the typology, while making use of a generic architecture producing the effect of sameness throughout the suburban environment.
[5] The cynical attitude Tom and Jane have toward the advertisement scenario while still buying the product is an illustration of Žižek’s definition of ideology: ‘If the illusion were on the side of knowledge, then the cynical position would really be a post-ideological position, simply a position without illusions: “they know what they are doing, and they are doing it”. But if the place of the illusion is in the reality of doing itself, then this formula can be read in quite another way: “they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it”’ (Žižek [1989] 2008: 30).
[6] The photo album of the house introduces the idea of the ‘sujet supposé savoir’, formulated by Lacan: ‘Such a displacement of our most intimate feelings and attitudes onto some figure of the Other is at the very core of Lacan’s notion of the big Other; it can affect not only feelings but also beliefs and knowledge – the Other can also believe and know for me. In order to designate this displacement of the subject’s knowledge onto another, Lacan coined the notion of the subject supposed to know’ (Žižek 2006: 27). It is through the album and the images within (an external object determined by the Other) that Tom and Jane become involved in the house built by the real estate developer. It is not them who define the meaning of homeliness and family life, but this object to which these notions are displaced.
[7] The following dialogue is based on an episode from DeLillo’s novel White Noise. In this novel, DeLillo describes ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America’ and a dialogue takes place between the characters Jack Gladney and Murray Jay Siskind. The conversation can be seen as a commentary on tourism and the role of the image in the development of the meaning of cultural heritage, which has been adapted here in the conversation between the protagonist and his neighbour in order to discuss the suburban type of housing in the same way. See DeLillo ([1985] 2011: 13, 14, 15).
[8] According to Jean Baudrillard, the substitution of mediated images for their physical reality has progressed to the point that the signs of the real, which are being used in the system of mass media, have overtaken the real itself. The image of the real has replaced the real and has become a new reality, or as Baudrillard calls it, a ‘hyperreality’: ‘It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes’ (Baudrillard 1994: 2).