A House for Sorcerers

"There's no way we could have a child now. Not with the market the way it is, no."

Idiocracy's case study on smart decision making

__________________________________________________

 

"Say you wanna get in

Then you wanna get out

When you get the money

To buy yourself a castle

[...]

But you won't

'Cause it's a traaaaaap..."

 

Metric - Handshakes

__________________________________________________

 

A couple of months ago, most of my evenings were spent combing Netflix' infuriating selection of zombies, superheroes, teen comedies and politically correct sitcoms for something watchable. We were pleasantly surprised by The House, three stop-motion-animated vignettes about personal investment in the place called home. I say "we" not because I've become some snowflake plurality but because I was visited at the time by the family's token cinephile, who having suffered through some of my short story attempts suddenly muttered during the second segment: "this feels like something you'd write!" Sure enough, that one was my favorite. So, OK, my enjoyment may have been a tad biased, but still...

 

If the movie has one consistent weakness, it's the forced full length anthology format. Each segment leans a bit hard on dramatic pauses and extended takes. Given this was filmed by Netflix for Netflix, I have to wonder why they didn't opt for a half-season miniseries format, given both The House's own episodic nature and the fact Netflix' more respectable offerings have tended toward low or mid-budget European miniseries or short runners. (Even the celebrated Dark was visibly padded out to three seasons. (the sex scenes alone...)) Miniseries are the one thing you're actually good at. Run with it.

 

But I do also want to address The House's thematic focus on the all-consuming cares and worries of caring for the titular house, and for that we must revert to ages before houses. Savage ages that is, or more literally ferocious ages.

 

Rahan didn't deal much with home ownership, being a caveman comic. Caves and huts and the odd lake-house or tree-house existed, were inhabited, and occasionally made plot points, but more often than not our fire-haired hero spent his nights on a tree branch, because nothing says superior intellect like sleeping outdoors with only a leather diaper for warmth in the younger dryas. Anyway, while doing his itinerant troglodyte lecturer routine, he runs afoul of a tribe that's come up with a quitessentially paleolithic solution to the problem of nerds. If you hear anyone voicing new ideas, toss 'im down a big hole! Naturally, our undeterred protagonist leads the nerds who welcome him at the bottom of Le Piège à Sorciers in a daring escape via cutting-edge seesaw technology (yes) and finally, in the comic's general spirit, they scatter their think tank to the winds, each knowing, whatever comes, that the others, somewhere, are combatting savagery and ignorance.

Except savagery and ignorance are monetizable. We don't want that shit combatted. For all that home ownership is presented as a logical, sensible and wise investment for the upwardly mobile, for the sorcerous (or rather, wizardous *sniffs contemptuously) among us it manifests more as a trap, a hole in the ground where intellect can be buried and busied scaling unscalable walls. I found The House's first segment rather dull with its dull, salt of the earth yokel protagonists, but the second and third segments center on practical, vivacious, urbane entrepreneurs (grating as their quirks may be) whose existence is obscenely degraded by their self-adjudged gaoling.

Granted, buying a house, buying a bigger house, buying the biggest house suits our species' most pervasive need for intra-tribal competition, for conspicuous consumption manifested in the most conspicuous form of property, but beyond that any natural justification dives into fallacy. There's no instinct for granite countertops, or yoking yourself to a mortgage, or two-story foyers or the other nonsense tacked onto our desperate thirst for ever more status by profiteers fleecing us so they themselves can buy the even biggest house, and so on.

 

I do not know how true it may be that a house is a good investment. Logically, resalable property is more reliable than volatile currency, especially if it's a necessity like shelter with a high unit cost. However, this implies a certain stability, as all through history people(s) who expected to be run off the land any given month found it more worthwhile to invest in portable wealth like jewelry or the family silver. At the other end of the spectrum, centuries of land-rich, bankrupt aristocracy demonstrate the need for property's utility, and for a residence that means... residence. The notion of a house being a good investment depends on finding someone willing to pay you a surcharge for your second-hand cave, man, which in turn is a figment of the 20th century's criminal upsurge in human population. Housing bubbles depend on population bubbles. This will not last. Either civilization must collapse by an order of magnitude to survive, or, far more likely, it will collapse entirely, but either way future generations won't be lining up to buy your two-story plywood-and-spray-foam cookie-cutter monstrosity in the dead middle of buttfuck nowhere.

 

Forgive the previous paragraphs' digression, but it's become entirely too fashionable to bemoan younger generations no longer buying houses. That's probably the best thing they're doing. A realtor with a hundred houses can be said to own them, but if you can only afford the one you live in, it owns you. Just ask the millions of families who lost everything back in 2009, and the investors who bought private islands in the aftermath. We need to stop imagining that grudgingly permitting the little folk to "own" some property will allow them to stand up to our moneyed aristocracy, give them security. Ownership is relative. Unless private accumulation of wealth is capped, the top of a skyscraper will always find some way to leverage that wealth toward dispossessing you of your precious little cottage or devaluing it to starve you into slavishness.

You are not a homeowner. You are a self-deluded drudge maintaining a property to enrich the rich, who love taking a cut not only of each resale but of the myriad parasitic transactions associated with a property, all the repairs and replacements, all the permits and salaries for all the go-betweens, gatekeepers, lawyers, third assistant sub-comptrollers and hardworking lawn flamingos. You say you saved money in the long run instead of renting? How much of your fucking life went into that glorified shack? As I was watching The House I couldn't help recalling my parents and I re-flooring our old place, three of us on our knees day after day, measuring, cutting, cleaning, fitting, hammering planks like out-of-work pirates. That and the gutters, and the yard, and the back yard, and the basement and the tree branches out front, and the pipes, and the outlets, and the chipping paint, and the stuck screen door, and the slanted mailbox and the shorted-out garage door, and the... everything!

That is not a life of the mind. It's drudgery, and that's not a bug, it's a feature. Though less direct, the final benefit the aristocracy draw from suburban sprawl is the inefficient effort itself put by individuals into individually maintaining those uselessly oversized living spaces, taking up their free time, piling on anxiety after anxiety, anchoring your entire existence more solidly than even the job you can't afford to quit. Keeps you too busy to think. It's just one more modern means of extending feudalism, continuing to tie serfs to the land, treating you as an extension of the property, just another lawn flamingo. Your house is an oubliette, quicksand for free thought, a particularly apt trap for high-INT sorcerers because it really does appear, on the surface, to be the smart, sensible, logical investment. (Caveat in the fine print: what you invest is not just money, but your life, to be reaped by the wealthy at their leisure.)

You don't need a house. You need a cheap, clean, safe, quiet, no-frills, greenery-adjacent, private living space maintained by efficient professionals, because even misspelling angry YouTube comments is a better use of your time than cleaning gutters. We don't need suburban sprawl with monoculture lawns. We need better-regulated cities with livable apartments.