The house in American cinema, from the plantation to Chavez Ravine.

"This is the story cinema has been mutely telling all along — a story about the house, the security and ease it promises, and the horrible anxieties produced when we try to force the house to deliver on those promises."

Perhaps the most mysterious and desired feature of housing is the privacy of property, and especially the property of and in the house. Property, however, is fungible and alienable. Whatever is promised by the house is radically susceptible to violation, displacement, and loss. Often the experience of property’s violation or redefinition involves an unwelcome reminder that the house is not a very private place after all. Partly we know this: we have all spent time in living rooms, on porches, or in other spaces of the house in which it is nearly impossible to say where the public ends and the private begins.1  But when property’s inherent instability is experienced vividly — whether in “real life” or in representation — we are forced to confront the tenuous relationship between public and private, as well as the tenuousness of all property relations as such.

Cinema heightens the ambivalent but powerful pleasure we take in looking at property. The private property of the house is already a spectacle, of course, as the house is a medium for making visible the wealth of its owners and inhabitants. In a movie theater, this spectacular function is multiplied. We pay to occupy a space owned by another in order to look at something — the film — owned by yet another (at least after the bust-up of the vertically integrated Hollywood monopolies). When we see a house onscreen, the property relations implicit in the seemingly simple activity of moviegoing proliferate into confusion. And yet there is a kind of clarity in what is at stake here. In purchasing a movie ticket we pay for the right to occupy a space in order to gaze up at a space we can never occupy.

  • 1. See Raymond Guess, Public Goods, Private Goods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. 32–33. 
The Architecture of Displacement in To Kill a Mockingbird
The Architecture of Displacement in To Kill a Mockingbird - ... if we are attentive, we might glimpse a mountain range in the deepest background of these images and might infer, correctly, that we are not, so to speak, in Maycomb, but in California — in a back lot of Universal Studios, to be precise. Making this observation about the fictionality of the diegetic world would be banal and beside the point, were it not for this one material fact: The houses that we see along this fictional street were actually expropriated from a real organic community in Los Angeles, a few miles from Universal Studios. Filming locations had originally been scouted around Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, but that town no longer resembled the lost object it was meant to symbolize. Director Robert Mulligan recalled the effort: “The town had changed radically. After World War II a lot of the old buildings came down. There was a lot of corrugated iron up and modern looks to the buildings, and big plate glass stores. … It just didn’t have the feel of the small town.” In an interview, art director Henry Bumstead narrated his experience of being shown around Monroeville by Lee, who introduced him to collard greens and to the local scenery. He rounds off his story with this somewhat paratactic insight: “I did get a lot of wonderful research done in Alabama. And so when they were moving a lot of houses in Los Angeles to make way for the freeway, we bought three or four of them and remodeled them. That saved the studio a lot of money.”
 The story of those expropriated houses is a murky one. One account suggests that the houses were to be demolished to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium, home to the baseball team that had recently moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn. Another account, in the film’s publicity pressbook, coincides with Bumstead’s memory that the houses were to be destroyed due to the development of the freeway, and confirms that their purchase was a money-saving measure for the studio. According to one of the packaged articles (which could be adapted to suit the needs of distributors and exhibitors), “Almost a dozen 50-year-old Southern California cottages being removed to make room for a network of Los Angeles Country freeways were hauled to the back lot at Universal studios to provide the main setting, a small Alabama town.”  Another article from the pressbook adds more details: Cost of the set would have been at least $100,000 more had it not been for the ingenuity of [Alexander] Golitzen [another member of the art department] and Bumstead. Learning that a number of clapboard houses of the same general style as many Monroeville homes were being demolished to make room for a new Los Angeles Freeway, Golitzen and Bumstead made arrangements to buy a dozen of these houses. After they had been moved to the studio back lot and slightly remodelled to match specific Monroeville houses, the total cost to Universal was approximately $25,000. To have built them from the ground up would have cost close to $125,000, according to Golitzen. 
 The studio’s breezy reference to the state’s assertion of eminent domain, resulting in the displacement and expropriation of Angelenos, is disturbing enough to raise the curiosity and suspicion of the historian-analyst. These vaguely specific production anecdotes suggest that the film’s production is imbricated in one of the most notorious episodes in Los Angeles history.