Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film by John David Rhodes (review)

Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, famously located the foundation of American democracy in the peace and endurance of the family home, claiming that the American "derives from his own home that love of order which he afterwards carries with him into public affairs."¹ Tocqueville's understanding of the private sphere as separate from yet also fundamental to the proper functioning of the public has had a lasting influence on American social and political discourse. It is evident, for example, in the housing reform movement that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s and sought to locate within the home a set of values and ideals that were adequate to a rapidly transforming American society. Almost a century later, President Hoover's 1923 declaration that home ownership was "the foundation of a sound economic and social system" explicitly tied private property to the public good through the image of the family home as a source of financial and emotional stability.² Yet, as John David Rhodes points out in his fascinating and fine-grained study of the house in American film, the "fantasy of ownership" that underpins such rhetoric requires a willful disavowal of property's fungible nature, a refusal to acknowledge that "whatever is promised by the house is radically susceptible to violation, displacement, and loss."³ As Rhodes's book reveals, cinema's seductive images of domesticity both whisper the promised pleasures of inhabitation and confront us with the anxieties produced "when we try to force the house to deliver on these promises."⁴ By eschewing a single thematic focus for a series of conceptual passes through domestic architecture on-screen, Rhodes foregrounds the investments made by filmmakers and viewers in the idealized image of home. His work explores those moments when the material overwhelms the imaginative and we no longer experience the house as an image of belonging but as property that demands a return.

In the book's opening chapter, Rhodes offers an overview of some key conceptual frameworks through which the home as dwelling has been understood, alighting briefly on the Freudian uncanny and Gaston Bachelard's phenomenological account of the home as the original ground for human experience. Rhodes's approach, however, remains firmly materialist throughout and, at its best, is rooted in close textual analysis that maps the specifics of film form onto our sensual experience of the house as a particular kind of space; For Rhodes, the force carried by cinematic images of property comes from the fact that cinema, fundamentally, is property; or, as Rhodes describes it, "property is cinema's ontology."⁵ Property inhabits the filmic image both as spectacle and as trace, it is present as visual splendor in cinema's domestic imagery and in the material conditions that enable these images to exist. As Rhodes reminds us through a deft conflation of meanings, the "properties" of cinema demonstrated, for example, in the deep-focus frames of Citizen Kane's (Orson Welles, 1941) Xanadu are quite literally exploited to demonstrate property.⁶ These images are filled with, and indeed require, a miseen-sccne of wealth that is both a diegetic expression of prosperity and an exhibition of the economic power of the Hollywood studio, which alone can build and populate such expansively conceived sets.

Rhodes's determination to explore the material substratum of the house on-screen is exemplified in his brief discussion of the fictional town of Maycomb, setting of the cinematic adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). As Rhodes points out, this small Alabama town was in fact constructed on the back lot of Universal Studios using repurposed housing from Latino neighborhoods that had been forcibly demolished during the construction of a Los Angeles freeway. Thus, the film's claims to liberalism and to an investment in economic justice are undermined by the property relations that produced it and that remain quietly...