When hobbies attack
A dangerous affliction can overtake us when our hobbies begin to subsume our personalities. Shelves start to buckle under the weight of “world’s greatest” knickknacks and memorabilia slowly displace cars from garages. Back in the 1980s, before the age of chat groups, enthusiasts of all varieties resorted to carrying tote bags announcing that a certain activity -- knitting, chess, underwater dominoes -- was not just an ordinary pastime but a full-fledged, don’t-leave-home-without-it bag.
Today there is a TV program about such bags, a home-design show, no less. The producers of Discovery Channel’s “Monster House” are clearly obsessed with the iconography of hobbies and, perhaps sensing the unsexiness of the name “Bag House,” have used the word “monster” as their catch-all term for what happens when good avocations become bad home renovation ideas. Upping the ante of the adage “You are your car,” “Monster House” suggests that we not only “are our houses,” we’re living embodiments of our passions. It’s this kind of bliss-conscious, soul-positive thinking that leads to giant crocodiles protruding from roofs and turns modest ranch houses into shrines of NASCAR worship.
But NASCAR is the least of it. In Three Stooges House, the enormous heads of Larry and Moe burst through walls. In Miniature Golf House, a living room is transformed into an enchanted forest where golf balls are sucked up the chimney and rolled down an indoor tree. In Fright House, the lead singer of the band Suicidal Tendencies clears out his furniture to make room for an indoor “voodoo jungle.” As for Christmas House, well, you get the picture.
The show is hosted by Steve Watson, a comedian-former construction worker who has the amped-up, recovering redneck quality of a manual laborer who was too articulate for his own good and ended up in management. Each week, he oversees a crew that has been custom-selected for the job -- for Viking House, a retired boat builder was brought in; Ancient Rome House somehow required a performance artist -- and the goal is to complete the project in five days while the residents (and, yes, most of these houses are occupied by all-American families) camp out in a nearby trailer.
I like “Monster House” because it’s really the anti-home-improvement show. While its projects may be the only home renovations in history where contractors actually rush to the finish rather than taking 27-day coffee breaks, what stands out most about this show is its flagrant disregard for property value. In a culture whose obsession with real estate is often less about aesthetics (particularly when they tend toward the idiosyncratic) than the prices that can be garnered in a perpetually red-hot market, the idea of knocking holes in walls to accommodate bursting Stooges is enough to send owners -- not to mention brokers and neighbors -- into cardiac arrest.
Counter to the trend
But “Monster House” is nothing if not a monster-sized indictment of the wall stencils, room dividers and oh-so-practical kitchen islands that have turned much of home-design TV into a manual for investors looking to flip properties for profit. It’s impossible to watch “Monster House” without wondering just how much resale value each monster detail is shaving off the house.
But what’s most captivating about “Monster House” is that it isn’t about houses at all; it’s about the way personal obsessions can be reduced to mere figments of style, the way the golfer can become indistinguishable from plaid pants and the pet owner summed up by the “Dog Is My Copilot” bumper sticker. Real estate has always functioned as a vehicle for the expression of taste and status. But “Monster House,” which has no use for subtlety and exhibits no visible class prejudices, throws the usual conventions out the window. By turning houses into theme parks, it assumes that people have themes as well. As depressing as this is, it’s also sort of true. In a nation where supporting the troops and healing the bay often have more to do with SUV bumper stickers than direct action, why shouldn’t a biochemist have a purple ceiling textured to look like a brain?
Recently, on the U.S. version of “What Not to Wear,” another guilty voyeuristic pleasure (this one on Discovery’s the Learning Channel), the hosts demanded to know why the hapless makeover subject insisted on wearing a Betty Boop T-shirt. “We know you like Betty Boop,” they said, “but why do you have to wear her on your shirt?”
That’s a question Steve Watson would never ask.
