There’s something special about inviting people into your home. It’s so much more intimate than meeting at a restaurant or bar, offering a chance for the kind of fellowship that seems increasingly rare these days as we segment into our designated demographic groups for infotainment. It’s also fun to clean up and cook in advance, to think about how others might perceive your stuff. Even if you’re highly critical of materialist culture (like me), you probably still have a bunch of stuff (like me). Some of it is useful (refrigerator, couch), some of it is frivolous (Playstation, leopard-print platform shoes). Some is informative (books), while some probably makes you dumber (television). Still, it surrounds you, your stuff.
There was a time when I was an avid viewer of the show Trading Spaces – when it first started, in the pre-Paige-Davis’-bad-haircut days, when home improvement type shows were still fairly new and emerging from their This Old House cocoon. One of the reasons I liked the show so much was that I was super interested in how other people live. What do their houses look like? What kind of stuff do they have? How do they organize it? Clearly other people are into this too, as the unchecked proliferation of HGTV and similar home improvement porn demonstrates (Anyone remember when TLC stood for The Learning Channel?). We like to look at other people’s stuff.
Ultimately, I stopped watching Trading Spaces. I got bored with it – the predictable home-made upholstery, the uncomfortable banquettes, even the bizarre theme rooms began to seem uninteresting. Also it started to occur to me that most of the people on the show were relatively comfortable, economically speaking, and were mostly looking for ways to add some character to their super-boring suburban houses. All the houses started to look the same. Because they were the same – generic houses to whom generic improvements are made, under the guise of “expression.” Home improvement television is a bourgeois fantasy, typical of the stuff-centered lifestyle, where old stuff can be repurposed (making you feel frugal) and new stuff can be purchased (splurges validated both by the repurposing of the old and the need to “express yourself” with your things), and all of it can be re-arranged to look like what you (or a designer) thinks a home should look like. TLC is still The Learning Channel, in other words – it’s just shifted the kinds of things we learn about.
The learning element is part of what makes shows like Trading Spaces so comfortable to watch. They make us feel like we’re improving ourselves by learning how to improve our homes. They validate our expectations about our identities as consumers, about economic class and upward mobility. We gain new hope that we too can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps or glue gun to a better tomorrow (or at least a better dining room). The sameness of the homes is a palliative – we are not forced to venture too far beyond the comfortable.
The poor don’t exist on Trading Spaces, or Design on a Dime, or Property Ladder, or any of their ilk. When the poor get televised home improvement, it’s a total tear-down, often courtesy of Trading Spaces alumnus Ty Pennington, who’s made quite a career for himself after lurking for several seasons on TS with body language that clearly communicated that he thought his ideas were better than those of the designers. If you’re poor, a simple makeover isn’t good enough for you. You’re gonna need an Extreme Makeover.
Meanwhile, as we Americans improve our suburbs (or abandon them), the world is increasingly moving to the city. And a lot of those people (more than a billion) live in slums. It’s easy to think of slums as not really homes, as pitiful temporary waystations for the poorest among us. But a magnificent project by Jonas Bendiksen proves otherwise. His site shows us the insides of some of the world’s biggest slums, and as we look around the residents’ homes, at their stuff, we listen to their stories of life, work, aspirations, and hardships. It’s inescapably linked to the pioneering work of noted muckraking racist Jacob Riis, but transcends that entirely by simply listening to the voices of the poor, whose homes may not be carpeted, or IKEA-d, or feature granite and stainless steel, but which are still, even in deepest poverty, something to be proud of and show to others.
I agree that TLC’s home shows turn a blind eye to most of the poor, but it’s really under the guise of ignoring city-dwellers and focusing on suburbs. Consequently, there’s virtually no focus on renters — only homeowners, which also toes some class lines.
I disagree that Americans are increasingly moving to the suburbs, for a couple reasons:
1. Until recently, fuel prices and high transport costs were causing a significant shift towards urban areas. I also think that high fuel prices remain prominent in people’s memories, so the recent easing won’t necessarily drain motivation to shorten the commute.
2. Even if it’s true that the current population has been sprawling, I think that the retirement of the baby boomers will bring many back to urban areas, or Naples, Florida. That’s assuming they ever do retire — the market carnage of the past twelve months seems to have delayed many of those plans.
Also, I think the Bendiksen photos are fabulous on a lot of levels. However, I wonder if there’s tension in mystifying the homes of slum-dwellers as telling “stories of life, work, aspirations, and hardships” while dismissing the homes of the comparatively more affluent as materialist and consumerist?
Actually, I said that people were leaving the suburbs – see that Atlantic article I linked too. What I said was that we were improving our suburbs. When we’re not foreclosing on them. So I agree with all of this.
Also your last point. But I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad to be materialist. I’m copping to be a materialist, as clearly indicated in the first paragraph (talking about my stuff, and my fascination with other people’s stuff). My point was simply that it’s nice to look at other non-wealthy people’s stuff for a change, no more the story of “life, work, etc…” than someone in an exurb, just different. And even if you’re right that there’s some “mystifying” happening there, perhaps that because I, like most other people in the US, are mystified by what it might be like to actually live in one of the world’s biggest slums.
The home improvement thing is, seen in this light, really just a sidebar. I saw that they’d hired Paige Davis back on Trading Spaces (guess Broadway didn’t work out for her the way she’d planned?) and wanted to write about that.