Table Of ContentUnhomely Cinema
ANTHEM GLOBAL MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES
Anthem Global Media and Communication Studies aims to advance
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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:
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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
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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
791.43’75–dc23
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 Kieślowski’s 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 Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love
and Jason Reitman’s 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 Cantet’s 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
humanity’s military and technological prowess, instead of decimation being
2 UNHOMELY CINEMA
the story’s ultimate point of culmination, the film delves into the far from
futuristic matter of population control, namely, the issue of how to manage the
film’s political refugees. As the film’s 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 city’s 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 Hélène, a passionate and
culturally sophisticated matriarch, dies and leaves her vast country estate to
her three children. As the viewer quickly learns, for Hélène, 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 Hélène dies, however, the fate of the home becomes uncertain. While
Frédéric, 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 Jérémie has taken a
new job in China, neither of them feels that they would ever use the home. As
Adrienne comments, “The house doesn’t mean very much to me anymore –
France either.” Living and working all over the globe, Jérémie 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. Hélène’s
home, steeped in the rich heritage of its local surroundings, is simply too
cumbersome for their jet-setter lifestyles. Subsequently, while Frédéric 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 Hélène’s 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 home’s 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 Freud’s 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 film’s 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 else’s terms, the
film shows how for many exiled peoples home can be quite alien. It’s 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 Jérémie, Hélène’s home
is simply too French, too provincial, too entrenched in the past to support
their exceptionally mobile lives. Unlike Hélène’s conception of home, which
is firmly rooted in the cultural life of one’s native land, home for Adrienne
and Jérémie is always elsewhere, always some unmoored place in today’s
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 uncle’s artworks are merely remnants of a bygone age that has
been eclipsed by international products, like Jérémie’s prized Puma shoes or
Adrienne’s Japanese tea sets. Capitalistic change is simply the order of the day.
Indeed, while Frédéric protests against his sibling’s 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.
