Open Concept
Lucy Van on House Hunters International
House Hunters International, Season 151, Episode 7: Ying and Yang in Brisbane first aired November 20, 2019 on HGTV.
We are told that one Christmas, a white North American family find that they don’t know what presents to buy for each other because they ‘already have everything.’ So, they decide to move to Thailand. Another time, an African-American woman from Chicago decides to move to Auckland. She has never lived out of Chicago and knows nobody in New Zealand. Yet another time, two young white women from Georgia and North Carolina, respectively, decide to relocate to a shared dwelling in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. They are perfect strangers who share little beyond this sentiment: ‘I’m just … lookin’ for more.’
There have been many times like these. I’m alluding to the structuring premise of a little show that became dear to me last year in lockdown—don’t call it ‘The Lassitude of Lockdown’—called House Hunters International (HGTV). This is a show I’ve heard described as ‘proudly formulaic’; a show whose specific details I’m surprised to remember, given that the way the show is made and the conditions under which I view it seem devised to impose oblivion. It’s the prolific spin-off of an even more prolific show, House Hunters (HH), which at the time of writing has aired 1772 episodes. I like HH too. But, because it is based exclusively in North America (and primarily in the United States), HH lacks the mysterious dimension of HHI that I think is its key: a feeling that something fundamental has been withheld, has not been communicated to the viewer. Time and again, across episodes and seasons, we find the overwhelming feeling that the true reasons for the house hunters’ crossing of the globe can never be disclosed.
HHI has been running for a whopping 169 seasons, a fact that pleases me in the same way knowledge of an endless supply of Valium might please me: I might never run out of episodes, I might always have something to take the edge off. While the effect is not exactly narcotic—it doesn’t dull the senses any more than other television shows—it sedates and comforts with its outrageous banality, with its distinctive lack of charisma, a stylistic condition which arises, no doubt, out of the story’s lack of evident desire. It is transgressively boring. The show begins with the barest of alibis, outlining in not much more detail than I gave above, the reasons a family, couple or individual might be moving to a new country. Of course, moving to any new place generally necessitates house hunting, and this is where the show comes in. With the help of a local real estate agent, the people in question embark upon their quest.
It is always the same quest: the agent takes the house hunters through three properties, whose selection was filtered through the wishes and budgets generated by the house hunters. Their wishes are never extravagant: one family member might want to be close to downtown; another, usually the breadwinner, wishes to have a short commute to work. Someone usually wants a ‘modern’ house; this same someone will voice approval when shown a house displaying an ‘open concept.’ Someone else usually wants a ‘traditional’ home, something typical of the new locale. ‘It just feels like Switzerland,’ murmurs a homemaker inspecting a property near Lake Geneva. Nearly universally, hunters want a large kitchen for ‘entertaining’ and a spare bedroom for ‘guests.’ Nearly universally, hunters insist that the number of bathrooms match the number of hunters. ‘Only one and a half bathrooms?!’ I hear a couple from Minnesota exclaim when shown a modest townhouse in modest Brisbane. The wishes of the hunters are never so extravagant that the houses the agent selects for them are worthy of note. Episode in and episode out, the three housing options are reliably ordinary, with the tiny bedrooms, strange carpets, and upsetting bathrooms anyone who has ever house hunted anywhere will immediately recognise. The houses are too far from work, or in the wrong part of downtown to enjoy the amenities of downtown. They are over budget. They are not open concept. Disappointments and rationalisations ensue: the format has a clear ancestor in Goldilocks, but no house is ever ‘just right.’ Reasonable houses, reasonable budgets, and palpable disappointment come together at HHI’s climax, where the hunters sit down, usually at a café or bar dispensing the local flavour of the new locale, to decide their fate. The choice never surprises, not because there is a clear favourite, but because none of the choices could surprise. Nearly universally, at least one of the hunters will struggle to hide their disappointment with the final decision: ‘so it’s house number two?’ The desultory process continues into the episode’s coda, which depicts the hunters living in their chosen abode ‘three months later’. Over footage of the hunters cycling in Copenhagen, or selecting vegetables at a market in Da Nang, the hunters’ voice-over affirms that the house selected was the right choice, that the relocation has improved the hunters’ overall outlook on life.
The formula is predictable. But formula alone is not enough to explain the deep zones of pleasurable boredom I enter whenever HHI is on television. After all, all reality television is formulaic (rose ceremonies, elimination finals, voting confessionals, etc), but not all television affords the odd appeal of HHI. To get to the core of its affective dimension, one might look beyond format and toward the show’s expressive realm, an area where HHI is very different to other reality TV shows. Something of the n-log of reality programming; it’s not-like-other-reality (n-lor?). The classic reality shows, Keeping Up with the Kardashians (KUWTK), the Real Housewives franchise, Married at First Sight (MAFS), 90-day Fiancé, and so on, trade in nothing if not emotional overstatement. Reactions are milked in real time (cue Kim’s shocked jaw dropping), then milked for all they’re worth again in the edited retrospective storytelling. Nothing could ever be said to be left unsaid—the point of it all is to undergo the speech ritual—as in this sample from The Bachelor: ‘I’m confused, I have literally no idea what to do’—whereby the viewer learns how the subject thinks and feels in the most literal and didactic way possible. Through this ritual the television program opens onto the potential for audience catharsis, collective scapegoating, and a bit of spontaneous narcissistic identification. A bit of fun, then. I suppose if reality shows are a bit of fun, then the very different emotional organisation of HHI suggests something else. Something not a bit of fun.
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‘John really wants to rekindle memories of college with a Queenslander. But Shelley wants a river view.’
—House Hunters International, season 151, episode 7
For ‘fun’, I experimented with this episode by watching it to the soundtrack of The Shining, an experience I would recommend to others. For the purposes of this article, I chose HHI s151e7 both for its typicality and its closeness to our own home (who doesn’t love Brisbane?). Here, the hunters are a middle-aged couple, John and Shelley, of whom we are told very little. They hail from the cold climes of Minnesota. They ‘got married late for the first time.’ They make few references to friends and no references to children. John hates the cold, we are told, supplying the first biographical detail to explain their relocation to the subtropical city. The second biographical detail is meant to account for the couple’s demands for space. By marrying late in life, each hunter is accustomed to having their own space. The agent shows the couple a house with only one built-in-closet, only to be chastised by Shelley: ‘John and I don’t share a closet!’ ‘Hostile environment!’ the Brisbane agent banters back. These outward facts are held in tension with their narrative counterpoint, another story that is only partially expressed. A little further into the episode we are told that John once started and ran his own engineering company, which he has recently sold. Hence it is temporally and financially feasible to relocate in this way at this juncture of their lives. We are not told why he sold this engineering company; but we know the sale can’t be explained by a disinterest in owning engineering companies—or even that specific engineering company—when the couple briefly raise the possibility of starting it again in Brisbane. We are also told that in the 1990s, John undertook his MA in engineering at Queensland University of Technology.
The counternarrative that emerges—but which doesn’t fully congeal—might indicate something simply to do with narratorial discretion, making a refreshing case for emotional reserve in an emotionally incontinent televisual landscape. Why should John and Shelley’s real motivations be disclosed to the viewer? What difference would knowledge of truly personal circumstances make to our investment in their selection process? But what is critical to HHI is that none of this is exceptional. There is always an implied counternarrative; we know we can never take the surface stories literally. The family that couldn’t buy itself Christmas presents had another altogether different reason for moving to Thailand—it could not be expressed, or we simply cannot be told, and this is precisely the point. Likewise, John was not simply ‘cold’ when he decided to return to the scene of his salad days in Brisbane. Perhaps the coldness that fell upon his life went beyond the meteorological. We are not supposed to know.
At the same time, the master question of the show cannot be answered without recourse to the counternarrative. This question happens to be explicitly asked in this episode, with John asking Shelley, ‘so, can you picture yourself happy here?’ But how could she answer this question without exposing the selection process—to the richness of their shared background, the story of her personal sacrifice towards John’s happiness? Thus, the counternarrative is covertly threaded through the dominant narrative, orienting the program to demand interpretation of its surfaces and silences. John and Shelley, like every other hunter on HHI, have moved across the globe in a journey devoid of glamour but saturated with enigma. The contrast between this journey and the putative ‘journey’ made in most reality shows recalls the very beautiful and very famous distinction Erich Auerbach makes between two major ‘broadcasts’ of the ancient world, the Odyssey and the Old Testament.
In ‘Odysseus’ Scar,’ the brilliant first chapter of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Auerbach makes a remarkable observation about the Odyssey. Extrapolating from Odysseus’ homecoming scene with his nurse, Eurycleia, Auerbach shows that the Homeric world is one where everything is externalised. ① Homer’s storytelling knows no background, so nothing is beneath showing: the world exists for itself, containing nothing but itself and conveying no secret meanings. Thus, according to Auerbach, Homeric epic is analysable but not interpretable. Emotions are constantly displayed in the words and deeds of the heroes; they undergo no development, and their life stories are clearly set out once and for all. There is nowhere that character development could come from, as the story contains no hidden reserves. Like the sensational reality programs of today, everything in Homer has already been shown.
In contrast to the heroes of Homeric epic, there is the Old Testament figure, exemplified for Auerbach by Abraham in the story of Isaac. In this story, nearly nothing is shown of character and motivation. Yet somehow the inner life of Abraham impresses itself upon reader. We are told that God calls Abraham, and that Abraham replies, ‘Behold, I am here.’ But where are the speakers? Where is here? We are not told. We are told that Abraham and his followers travel for three days. But these are three days of nothingness, of which the reader is given no narrative details: we are left with ‘the impression that the journey took place through a vacuum.’ ② What does Abraham think during his silent journey to sacrifice his son? Where Homeric narrative is overwrought, complex, and superficial, the stories of the Old Testament offer something hidden and unilluminated. They are, as Auerbach describes them, ‘mysterious and “fraught with background.”’ ③ Speech expresses not the externalisation of thought, but the indication of thoughts which remain unexpressed.
Despite, but also because of the surface narration, we don’t know what house hunters like John and Shelley think and feel. In its own way, each episode of HHI is fraught with background, cloaking the exuberant desire that once motivated the hunters’ odyssey to the other side of the world in the mundane fabula of kitchen dimension, bathroom quantity, and work commute distance. Yet the emotional impenetrability that all these represent suggests something ‘heavy with the implication of extending into the depths of time, space, and consciousness,’ as Edward Said puts it in his introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Mimesis. ④ Hiding the founding thoughts and desires behind this vacuous form, the show’s producers—perhaps inadvertently—protect the sanctity of the desire to be wayward. The outrageousness attached to the wish of leaving home remains opaque.
What would Auerbach have made of HHI? Writing Mimesis in Istanbul during WW2, he was in double exile from his home and his library (one of the most impressive facts in literary history is the fact that Auerbach composed this masterful work nearly entirely from memory). Would he, like me, be soothed by the show’s vacant formula, or be strangely seduced by the mysteries of the show’s rituals? Would he find any resemblance between the three empty days of Abraham’s journey and the three empty houses shown by the HHI real estate agent? Could we imagine Odysseus journeying around the Mediterranean in search of the perfect traditional-meets-modern open concept turnkey? I assume that for Odysseus, the existence of a guest room would be important. But these are easy questions to answer. No way would classy Auerbach watch Channel 9, or more precisely, 9Life (how’s the ‘Life’?), which is where I’ve been viewing my episodes. And it’s highly doubtful that the conceit of the Odyssey as a ten-year house hunt has any legs. Of course, the point of all this is only to expose a practice of thinking about representation to our own contemporary representations of reality. It can be no accident that the thinkers who shaped my thinking about HHI—Auerbach, Said, and though I have not directly quoted them, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno—were all exiles. Under what conditions does leaving home become thinkable to us now? When did the object of ‘house hunting internationally’ become a consummation devoutly to be wished? Why does the search for the perfect family home structure so much of what passes for contemporary public discourse? How did house hunting become such a significant part of life/Life?
The facts are these: house hunting sucks; and the House Hunters program and its 16 spin-offs are wildly popular. (I have heard that there even exists a Car Hunters iteration of the show, which presents a categorical headache that I’ll simply leave to one side for now.) Perhaps this dissonance can be partly reconciled with recourse to a more general rule of reality television, in that viewers seem to enjoy watching activities that they do not enjoy performing in real life. Who really likes to cook (MasterChef), to renovate (The Block), to date (Love Island, MAFS), and to spend time with family (KUWTK) as much as our viewing habits would suggest? But I think there is something about the house’s residence in the contemporary imagination that lies beyond the remit of such a rule.
Limiting my view only to Australia, I think of our ever-expanding Bunnings Warehouses, our ever-escalating property prices, our ever-embarrassing fact that Domain is the only bit of the paper that makes any money (incidentally, for Channel 9). We love house hunting. We hate house hunting. In an 1812 letter, Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes, ‘We were house-hunting for a month & more—& the prices really sickened me.’ Ooof, they sicken me too. When Coleridge used the term ‘house-hunting’ it had only been in circulation for a few decades. If the search for a dream home is a legacy of Romanticism, how can we account for the vexing impotence of the venture, which seems fundamentally at odds with the meaning of the term ‘hunter’? But I did not set out to condemn nor judge the nature of the desires and dreams that motivate house hunting. Our collective dreams ought to be taken seriously, and dream houses in dream locations have become one of our best dreams. Especially, as for the likes of John and Shelley, when the house of dreams is very far from the original home. There is little sense in disparaging the dream expressed in HHI, of walking into a well-appointed house, close to everything, with little work to do. We are left to wonder about the hidden implications of the well-appointed house. What is the unilluminated meaning of the open concept? These remain stubbornly fraught with background. The real life of the hunter once they are finally at home is something the episodes never show.
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Works Cited
✷ 1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003).
✷ 2. Auerbach, 9.
✷ 3. Auerbach, 12.
✷ 4. Edward Said, ‘Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition,’ Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003), xix.
Lucy Van writes poetry and criticism. She is currently a research associate at the University of Melbourne where she is completing a monograph on postcolonial poetry, The Beginning of the Poem. Her first poetry collection is The Open (Cordite 2021).
