A Melbourne apartment block. Image: Pat Whelan, Unsplash.
In his influential 1957 book, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard merged philosophy and architecture to propose that inhabited space is more than just geometrics. Living in a residence is an existential matter; it’s where our consciousness and dreams unfurl and are nurtured. The ‘chief benefit of the house,’ Bachelard writes, is that it ‘allows one to dream in peace’. Yet even the traditional house, a seemingly enclosed, cradle-like refuge, ‘appears to move elsewhere’; we carry spaces with us throughout our lives, particularly our earliest childhood homes. The image of the house in our memories suggests ‘proofs or illusions of stability,’ and, in turn, we are motivated by our desires of an elusive future house.
Written in response to France’s encroaching urban modernity, elements of Bachelard’s theory are inevitably dated, hinging on nostalgic fantasies of a childhood home—a large, private abode with a cellar and attic—and the safety it provides. But isn’t all property ownership, any attempt at dwelling and place-making, dependent on numerous ingrained and inherited fantasies? When it comes to contemporary rental and share-house settings—defined by transience and the merging of public and private—the past and future become increasingly permeable. ‘Homes’ are made and deserted quickly, place-memories merge with the habituations of other former and present tenants, and the future is near-impossible to plan for. Still, many people harbour the same fantasies of ownership that appear increasingly unattainable. It’s a fragile, disaffecting thing to want, built on property’s deceptive promises: intimacy, protection and control.
*
The Australian attitude to housing is often traced to the post-war Commonwealth State Housing Agreement of 1945, and Robert Menzies’s valorisation of a home-owning middle class of upstanding ‘frugal’ individuals. This conservative orientation, which linked property ownership to values of civility and freedom, has been hard to shake. It’s why, if you’ve lived in Australia for any substantial length of time, you’ll know how central The Castle is to our flimsy sense of national identity; a film premised on one’s right to their slice of property, where a working-class patriarch and his neighbours fight a government corporation looking to seize their homes.
Living in a residence is an existential matter; it’s where our consciousness and dreams unfurl.
Richard Lowenstein’s film He Died With a Felafel in His Hand was released in 2001 while house prices rapidly increased due to financial liberalisation, low-income renter households suffered increasing rental stress and a neoliberal attitude to property investment (and well, everything) continued to rise under John Howard’s government. Adapted from John Birmingham’s 1994 novel, the story centres on Danny (Noah Taylor), a rootless 20-something living in his 47th share house. Each of the film’s three acts sees him in a new precarious rental, taking us through residences in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.
In Lowenstein’s heightened reality, these homes offer Danny comically little peace and protection. A ragtag group of housemates drifts in and out of his life, providing various comforts (and a lacklustre love triangle). But more striking is the absurdly brutal powers of the state that arrive to enforce rent payments and demand money, like the landlord’s goons or trigger-happy cops. The original sin Danny and his various housemates commit is arguably very simple: they don’t have much money. Accordingly, the slacker dramedy is propelled by Danny’s progressive accumulation of debt, his lack of a safety net and his evasion of the forces requiring him to pay.
Danny (Noah Taylor) in He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (2001). Image: Imdb.com.
The film is defined by a sense of existential aimlessness and material vulnerability—rooms appear wet, grimy, cramped and porous, or otherwise so starkly ordered they become suffocating. As an aspiring writer (or someone intent on modelling himself on one), Danny carries from house to house a typewriter, a postcard collection and a guitar he repeatedly uses to play the homesick folk-rock ballad ‘California Dreamin’’. These objects can be read as attempts to approximate consistency and comfort, but, more so, they approximate a cohesive sense of self amid transient conditions.
The most compelling image of Lowenstein’s film occurs towards the end of its first act. Unable to produce the necessary rent, skinheads are enlisted by one of Danny’s housemates to destroy their Brisbane home, who use chainsaws to dismantle its very foundations. With a pagan ritual unfolding in the backyard, an entire side of the house fully detaches, collapsing to the ground. The moment evokes the instability of not just their living arrangement but perhaps the image of the house more broadly, as its illusion shifts to reveal a frail spectacle. And yet the lingering sentiment of Felafel’s eventual ending might suggest a light at the end of the tunnel (despite a former housemate’s untimely death). Danny has miraculously paid off his debts with a short story submission to a softcore porn mag, and one interpretation of the conclusion is that he’ll eventually manage to build himself a less volatile life.
*
The anxieties of housing insecurity have been infiltrating cinema—implicitly and explicitly—for decades. This is particularly true of the horror genre: haunted house films, for instance, invert tropes of the home as somewhere private and safe through the intrusion of something malevolent. Over the past ten or so years, there’s been a particular rise in holiday rental horror, reflecting our increasingly unstable relationship with domestic spaces and loss of privacy. Holiday and short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Stayz are associated, of course, with transitory and entirely transactional relationships to private dwellings but also with displacement: they’ve been linked to the ongoing housing crisis, particularly local rent hikes, with an altogether negative effect on communities.
The anxieties of housing insecurity have been infiltrating cinema—implicitly and explicitly—for decades.
Currently, more than thirty per cent of Australian residents rent their homes. Due to limited supply, many who’d benefit from public or social housing are forced to rent privately, competing with higher earners for leases (see Lucie McMahon’s fantastic recent documentary, Things Will Be Different, on Northcote’s Walker Street public housing estate) and our homeless population must rely on community resources in the absence of effective government action. This landscape—where suitable housing is scarce and landlords with multiple properties benefit from this scarcity—is considered almost impossible to navigate for anyone regarded as low-income or reliant upon government payments.
Rowan Devereux’s Evicted! A Modern Romance is a 2022 Sydney-set comedy about this very impossibility. The film deals with modern malaise in many shades, including the gig economy, our obsession with frictionless comfort, and our distorted relationship with the past. But above all, it depicts the instability of the rental market in Australia’s most expensive city. A household of young people wake one morning to learn the landlord is selling the house they rent, and they have one month to find somewhere new to live. Woven within the day-to-day of tenants Maggie (Amanda Maple-Brown), Will (Will Suen), and Isabelle (Rose Haining) are many failed inspections of new properties. These sequences buzz with anticipation, only to be deflated by familiar horrors: a toilet attached to a kitchen, an inaccessible attic falsely listed as an extra bedroom, the ruthless competition of other prospective tenants. You can imagine many of these dwellings on shitrentals.org.
Share-house friends turned auction bidders in Evicted! A Modern Romance (2022). Image: Imdb.com.
The brutal figures who pursued Danny in Felafel are here replaced by a baby-faced real estate agent and an alienating online system for housing applicants called Rentist, which assigns individuals a percentage indicating their value as renters. The barriers to acquiring housing are not outwardly threatening or even physical; in accordance with the times, they’ve become coldly impersonal and data-driven.
The film’s ostensible protagonist is Maggie. She has a master’s degree in history, is admittedly bad with people and is desperately trying to adjust to a new job she hates. In the living room of the home they’ll soon lose, she asks Will whether she really belongs in the worlds she insists on entering. ‘You definitely don’t belong here,’ Will responds. ‘So why are you trying so hard?’
Stability is no longer much of an option.
What I find fascinating about Evicted! is its sly embodiment of Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’—broadly, a condition wherein ‘something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing’. Like the dreams of success and security we often model our lives around yet have begun to feel totally unsustainable. After failing to find a suitable rental, Maggie and her housemates come into a surprisingly large sum of money, which they decide to use to buy their house from its current owner to avoid being kicked out. (‘Better to own in hell than rent in heaven,’ they reason.) At the auction, they receive a rude awakening: the amount they thought was big-Sydney-house money is barely a quarter of what the market demands. Even worse, the winning bidder plans to subdivide and redevelop the property into townhouses. Their makeshift home is further fractured and atomised, its tenants forced to disperse elsewhere.
It’s here that I think of Berlant. The characters’ brief fantasy that a large sum of money will help them buy stability ends up ruining, in some respect, the possibility of them all staying together. They’re left with an uncomfortable truth: stability is no longer much of an option.
*
In an interview published in Metro the year Felafel was released, Lowenstein suggested that the film captures a moment of freedom and togetherness for its young characters before the harsh divisions of ownership drives them into private bubbles. The share house thus provides a kind of ‘household village’ (similarly observed in Lowenstein’s Dogs in Space). Devereux echoes this found family sentiment, now tinged with 2020s cynicism: ‘It just keeps going and going and going until you get to thirty and you realise, “Oh, I’m maybe not gonna get a house anytime soon.”’ Both Lowenstein and Devereux’s films are underpinned by the sense of community (and trauma bonding) found within Australia’s volatile system of inner-city rentals. To some, this togetherness-in-crisis may be a kind of comfort; for most, it should be a sign of large-scale policy failure.
When eventually the home becomes ‘alien to all the promises of the future,’ Bachelard writes, we retain the possibility to ‘return to [it] in our night dreams’. But the old desires with which we cling to housing ideals have long mutated. Bachelard’s dream-space, evoking the many longings and attachments bound up in dwelling, feels more akin to a nightmare.
