“You have to let go. Yes, you there, reading this. And me,
typing this. At some point, you’re going to have to let go of a place you love,
or a plan, or a person. Most likely, if you live long enough, you’ll have to
let go of all of those things plus a lot more. And it fucking sucks, and I’m
sorry if this is how you’re learning this because you deserve someone better
than me telling you, but here we are.”
- Leah Schnelbach in a review of The House (2022) in Reactormag.com
I watched The House in 2022 when it came out. Back then, I
felt a personal connection to the third segment, Listen Again and Seek the
Sun, for reasons I will explain later in this essay. But reading Tim
Cresswell's discussion of “sedentarist metaphysics” in Place: A Short Introduction
shined a completely different light on this film for me. Cresswell describes a
way of thinking, traced back to Liisa Malkki's work on refugees, that treats
being rooted in one place as natural, moral, and safe. Meanwhile, movement,
meaning vagrancy, homelessness, and refugee status in this context is treated
as a threat to social order. He points to Zygmunt Bauman's figure of the “vagabond”:
someone whose mobility unsettles a settled world because they escape “locally
based social control,” and whose lack of a fixed destination makes them
illegible and therefore dangerous to the systems around them. Homelessness, in
this framing, is about being out of place in a world that has divided
itself into nations, properties, and bounded units that are supposed to
correspond to identity.
Rosa, the calico cat landlord in the film's final segment, is essentially
staging this ideology from the inside. She lives in a half-drowned house on a
flooding, post-apocalyptic island, and her entire sense of self is tied to
keeping the building standing and restoring it to its former glory. She refuses
to accept that the water is rising, refuses to let her remaining tenants leave,
and treats every sign of the house's collapse as a personal failure rather than
an unavoidable material fact. In Cresswell's terms, Rosa has fully internalized
the idea that staying rooted is virtuous and that leaving (becoming, in effect,
houseless) would be a kind of moral and personal collapse. Her tenant Elias,
who wants to build a boat and leave, is treated by her almost like Cresswell's “vagabond”:
untrustworthy, ungrateful, refusing the responsibilities of belonging to a
fixed place. It is only in the final minutes when the house itself is torn
apart by Cosmos and rebuilt into a ship, that Rosa is forced to accept that the
thing which will actually save her life is movement, not rootedness. The film
visually inverts Cresswell's framework: the vagabond's mobility, which
sedentarist thinking treats as the dangerous choice, is revealed as the only
viable form of survival, while staying put (the moral choice) would have killed
her.
This is also where one can draw connections with bell hooks' essay Homeplace.
hooks argues that homeplace is never a natural given. It has to be made,
actively and often against hostile conditions, through the daily labor and care
of the people who build it. Rosa spends most of the segment assuming the
opposite: that home is a fixed physical structure she has to preserve exactly
as it was, rather than a relationship among the people living in it that has to
be continually remade. Her arc only resolves when she stops fighting Cosmos's
changes to the house and instead works with him, Jen, and Elias to turn the
wreck of the building into something that can carry all of them forward. That is
a fairly literal dramatization of hooks' point that homeplace is sustained
through collective care and resistance to circumstance, not through nostalgia
for an unchanging structure.
This segment of the film hit me hard because I grew up with the long-held
goal of leaving my home country, so I could build a life somewhere I would
actually have control over it. Watching Rosa patch the same leak over and over,
refusing to see that the house itself had become the problem, was uncomfortably
familiar. The instinct to keep repairing a situation that structurally cannot
be repaired, because leaving feels like defeat rather than survival.
Cresswell's chapter gave me language for something I believe a lot of people
who leave restrictive places feel but rarely see validated: that the “rooted” choice
is not automatically the virtuous or safe one, and that mobility can be the
thing that lets you live, not the thing that unmakes you.
The film ends by Rosa only surviving because the house stops being
a fixed structure and becomes something that moves, reframing leaving as the
only way home becomes livable again.
References
Baeza, P., de Swaef, E., Roels, M. J., & Lindroth von Bahr, N.
(Directors). (2022). The House [Film]. Nexus Studios; Netflix.
Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A short introduction. Oxford Blackwell
Publishing.
hooks, b. (1990). Homeplace: A site of resistance. In Yearning:
Race, gender, and cultural politics (pp. 41–49). South End Press.
Schnelbach, L. (2022, February 9). The House opens the door
to the true horror of home renovation. Reactor. https://reactormag.com/the-house-netflix-stop-motion-animation-anthology-review/
Parvin,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your interpretation of The House. I haven't watched the film, but your description of Rosa made me think about how strongly we can hold on to a place, even when staying there is no longer safe. I found your connection to Cresswell's idea of "sedentarist metaphysics" especially interesting. We tend to think of being rooted somewhere as something good, something that gives us stability. But what if staying becomes more dangerous than leaving? And what if leaving doesn't bring us the freedom or sense of belonging we hoped for?
It's funny how your post connects with my own reflections on home. For Rosa, movement becomes a way to survive. In my case, leaving was also necessary, but moving from one place to another hasn't helped me feel at home anywhere. So I keep wondering: is mobility a good thing or a bad thing? What does it give us? What does it take away? Perhaps it gives some people freedom and possibilities while taking away others' sense of belonging. So many existential questions! :)
E.