Cinematic Representations of “Home as a Site of Humiliation”

Home is often taken for granted as the prima facie locus of “care.” Home is often idealized
(particularly during COVID lockdown era) as a “white fluffy teddy bear” site of harmony, safety,
comfort, belonging, care, affirmation, and togetherness. During the first COVID lockdown in 2020 in
New York City, we were ordered to stay at home and cut out any “inessential contacts” (those
outside of our immediate home). We were admonished that if we did not do this, we must be selfish,
reckless, and that we must not care about our country or the health of our fellow citizens. This
powerful amalgam of discourse mixing patriotism, moralism, do-gooder-ism, collectivism, civic duty,
and public health—all designed to pressure us to quarantine—was predicated upon the assumption
that home is a place of comfort and care. In his weekly TV briefings, Governor of New York Andrew
Cuomo sprinkled his urgings to New Yorkers to stay home with cloying anecdotes about how
wonderful it was all three of his adult daughters now returned to his home during COVID and how we
should all be grateful for this time we can spend with our family. At times, it appeared the public
health discourse endlessly pounded into us around quarantining served as propaganda to
delegitimize all forms of social organization that do not elevate the heterosexual nuclear family.
However, for LGBT children who are despised, dis-owned or ostracized by heterosexual parents,
home can be a site of humiliation; home as a site of a micropolitics of conflicting power differentials,
internecine warfare & power struggles; home as a site of a low-grade but persistent form of
aggression and repetitive acts of intimate humiliation; home as a place where you have to escape to
have any hope of self-preservation; home as a place where “the politics of care” has become
seriously dysfunctional. This essay discusses and dissects a multitude of film/literature examples
premised upon the trope of “home as a site of humiliation,” such as Ordinary People (1980), The
Breakfast Club (1984, director: John Hughes), Harold and Maude (1971), My Own Private Idaho
(1991, director: Gus Van Sant), Happiness (1996, director: Todd Haynes), The Myth of the
Fingerprints (1997), American Beauty (1999), The Sweet Hereafter (1997. director: Atom Egoyan),
Safe (1995, director: Todd Haynes), Funny Games (1997, director: Michael Haneke), Mother (2017,
director: Darren Aronofsky), Lady Jane (1986), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Splendour in the
Grass (1961), Jane Eyre (novel, 1847, author: Charlotte Bronte).

It takes as its starting point an excerpt from “Manifesto Against the Home:”

“For so long Jeanie had indelibly ingrained in her psyche that home was a site of confrontations that
produced an intimate humiliation that no place outside of the home had a similar power to inflict, that
all new homes she went to she already had embedded in her a blueprint of how to act. For so long
she viewed home as a place to protect herself from, a place to keep her guard up, a place where her
greatest hope (or relief) would be to simply pass through as a ghost (or stranger) unnoticed—that
she couldn’t comprehend the notion of “making someplace your home”. She felt sheer revulsion at
the thought of decorating her home to reflect her personality, of accumulating things that were
special to her to fill her home, or of any type of “nesting” impulse that would turn her home into a
comforting, reassuring place. To her home was a place that she had trained all her life to erect a
hardened shell of psychic armor in order to survive. Once she saw a film where an assassin for the
CIA had to constantly change his home every 2 weeks, because after each “hit job” he was in
danger of being discovered or killed himself by opposing parties (or foreign countries’ intelligence
agencies). As such, the assassin lived out of a sleeping bag in different apartments with only bare
necessities and made sure there were absolutely no identifying markers in his home that would give
away the identity of who was living there. Jeanie felt a euphoria that finally there was a depiction of a
way of living in a “home” that she could relate to.”
BIO:

http://replaceandrea.blogspot.com/

Andrea Liu is a New York City-based visual art and performance critic (and artist) whose research
often involves geneaology, or the epistemic context within which bodies of knowledge become
intelligible and authoritative, as a point of departure in art production. She was curator of
Counterhegemony: Art in a Social Context, a theoretical fellowship program for visual artists at
Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius. Since 2009, she was awarded over 12 artist residencies in the
U.S., Berlin, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Prague, Italy (various locations), including Banff Centre,
Atlantic Center for the Arts, Art & Law Program, Ox-Bow/Art Institute of Chicago, Center for
Experimental Museology, Centrale Fies Liveworks Performance Act Award Vol. 4, ZK/U-Berlin,
Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core and was a Core Participant in Anton Vidokle’s (founder of e-flux)
New Museum’s Nightschool Program. She has written art/performance criticism for Afterimage,
ArtMargins, Art US, e-flux (AUP), Social Text, New Museum Social Practice Glossary, Movement
Research Journal, and has book chapter contributions to Sarai Reader 09: Projections (Raqs Media
Collective, 2013), IN Works 931-14209 (Edition Fink, 2014), Deste 15th Anniversary Exhibition 1999-
2015 (Deste Foundation, 2017), Legal Interventions, 2007-2014 [Utigeveri Press, forthcoming
2021), An Anthology on Failure (Genderfail, 2018) and Museum in a Liminal State (V-A-C
Foundation, 2021). She has given talks/panels/lectures at Centre for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry
University, UK), Royal Central School of Drama and Speech (UK), London Conference in Critical
Thought, Society for Artistic Research Conference (University of Plymouth, UK), Graduate Centre for
Europe (University of Birmingham, UK), Yale University Whitney Humanities Center, CTM Festival
(Transmediale Berlin), Jan Van Eyck Academie Alumni Conference, Geffen Museum (Los Angeles
Printed Matter Contemporary Artist Books Conference), College Art Association, NYU Performance
Studies Conference (Affect Factory), MASS MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art Massachusetts),
Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center, CUNY (City University New York) Graduate Center
Open Pedagogy Conference, amongst others. She received her undergraduate education from Yale
University and thereafter was a Visiting Scholar at Centre Parisien d’Etudes Critiques in Paris,
France.