{"id":104722,"date":"2016-11-11T13:03:30","date_gmt":"2016-11-11T18:03:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=104722"},"modified":"2016-11-11T14:24:18","modified_gmt":"2016-11-11T19:24:18","slug":"our-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/11\/our-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Our House"},"content":{"rendered":"

Violence and gentrification in John Schlesinger\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Pacific Heights.<\/p>\n

\"PACIFIC<\/a>

Still from Pacific Heights<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThis is our home. This is all happening to us in our home.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is the sound of a white woman\u2019s despair. It\u2019s the second act break of the domestic thriller Pacific Heights<\/a><\/em>, and Patty (Melanie Griffith) has just realized that her stupid, pseudo-liberal boyfriend and her smart, pseudo-liberal self are no match for their leering, destructive tenant (Michael Keaton), a failed trust-fund sociopath with a who-me?<\/em> grin and a twofold goal: first destroy her home from the inside out, and then grab it for himself. Not to live in it, but to profit from its collapse.<\/p>\n

When Pacific Heights <\/em>was released in 1990, critics were puzzled<\/a>\u00a0and more than a little contemptuous<\/a>\u00a0of the workaday \u201creal-estate thriller\u201d directed by John Schlesinger in his post\u2013Marathon Man<\/em> slump. Patty and her boyfriend, Drake (Matthew Modine), are unmarried yuppies who\u2019ve pooled their resources to buy an albatross of a Victorian fixer-upper in San Francisco\u2019s rapidly gentrifying Pacific Heights neighborhood. They fudge the numbers on their mortgage application\u2014\u201cEverybody does it,\u201d bleats Drake\u2014and stay afloat by renting out two units to tenants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Enter Keaton\u2019s Carter Hayes, gentrification\u2019s leering id, a serial destroyer of property and lives who sweet talks his way into the apartment without a credit check, based solely on the color of his suit, skin, and rented Porsche (these being the traits that put him ahead of the black applicant who was first in line). Most valuable of all, though, is Hayes\u2019s ability to lie without a trace of shame, waggling his eyebrows to let you know that he<\/em> knows that you<\/em> know he\u2019s lying, but come on, what are you going to do about it? Hayes shoulders his way in and immediately begins dismantling the apartment from the inside, breeding cockroaches to scare off the other tenants, and, for good measure, changing the locks.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Michael Keaton in Pacific Heights<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Locks are very much at issue here. After all, domestic thrillers are always about who gets to participate in the American dream, the so-called good life; as such, they take place right on the border between public and private life, where one threatens to bleed into and corrupt the other. As resourceful Patty single-handedly fixes up the Victorian (Drake can\u2019t even manage to get paint on the walls), the two argue about what the property means to them. \u201cWe have to remember, this is an investment, Patty,\u201d says Drake. \u201cIt\u2019s not just an investment, it\u2019s our home,\u201d she replies. As if to underscore this line, she soon discovers she\u2019s pregnant\u2014all this nesting has kicked her eggs into overdrive, apparently.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sign of the times, critics wrote of Daniel Pyne\u2019s script, when the landlords<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>are the ones we\u2019re meant to feel sorry for. But\u2014are we? Watch Pacific Heights <\/em>with careful attention and what you see is a satirical fable: the making of a pair of villains under the careful tutelage of a psychopath. Because Schlesinger plays its satiric edge much more broadly than Curtis Hanson would with The Hand That Rocks the Cradle<\/a><\/em> three years later, the clues are all there. Drake underwrites his real-estate discrimination with blatant racism, dismissing the black applicant who got there first as a \u201cminority scam artist\u201d and vocally hoping the quiet Japanese couple in the other unit aren\u2019t bringing \u201call these people<\/em>\u201d (their Asian movers) with them. His job? Overseer at a designer kite factory. (Yes, really.) Meanwhile, Patty is a \u201cformer equestrienne\u201d (yes, really<\/em>!) with a hard head for numbers and a soft spot for her boyfriend\u2019s tantrums. We see plenty of these, as, with Bugs Bunny\u2013like calm, Hayes antagonizes Daffy Drake, saving his insinuating leers for Patty, a worthy opponent\u2014or perhaps potential partner. (\u201cUnder different circumstances, you and I could have gotten to be good friends,\u201d he tells her.)<\/p>\n

If Hayes\u2019s weapon is his brazen, hateful smirk, his calling card is the Victorian dollhouse that he leaves mockingly on Patty and Drake\u2019s doorstep\u2014not a trivialization of their domestic fantasy, but rather a deep understanding of its foundations in white nostalgia for a perfect, never-existent past. It\u2019s not the only miniature associated with Hayes in the film: the other is an architect\u2019s model of a sprawling condo development in the LA suburbs, which sits in glass at the posh lobby of Hayes\u2019s last residence, promising endless green lawns despite the bleak desert landscape. It opens the entire film, as a trompe-l\u2019oeil shot pans over its flat turquoise swimming pools.<\/p>\n

Miniatures make cameras of us all, giving us a kind of fantasy access to vast tracts of compressed space in which the nostalgic past and utopian future can be held together in one moment, the everlastingness of pure desire. This is why they\u2019re often associated with children, the elderly, and those, like Hayes, in a state of permanent stunted adolescence. Hayes, you see, is a kind of antimogul, an undeveloper. He knows there\u2019s more money in failure than success if you don\u2019t give a damn about the mess you leave behind.<\/p>\n

Mature couples like Patty and Drake should theoretically be busy living and expanding the American dream for their hypothetical children. Instead, Patty eventually loses her baby in anguish over Drake\u2019s increasingly violent outbursts toward Hayes and illegal attempts to eject their tenant, which expose them to the kind of lawsuits they should probably have faced earlier for real-estate discrimination. When, after the miscarriage, Drake asks Patty how she is, her first words are: \u201cI feel like Lady Macbeth.\u201d<\/p>\n

She means because of the blood, of course\u2014of course! And yet soon enough Patty\u2019s on the warpath, wearing a blazer-and-blouse combination that evokes Hayes\u2019s own suit, tracking the bastard down to enact her (incredibly satisfying) revenge. \u201cYou got into my area,\u201d Hayes snarls during their final confrontation. \u201cYou crossed the line, and it felt good.\u201d What genius there is in the movie lies in the fact that it really does feel good to see Patty morph into her nemesis. When the dollhouse reappears, like the horse head in The<\/em> Godfather<\/em>, in Patty\u2019s bed, she hurls her fantasies of domesticity right out the window with it.<\/p>\n

Plenty of other winks in the script suggest satire. There\u2019s the surreal dream sequence in which Drake\u2019s fears are mocked\u2014he sees his girlfriend sleeping with Hayes, of course, but also shudders at the vaguely homosexual threat of Hayes\u2019s male partner-in-crime, who cuddles a fluffy white cat. There are the frog-on-the-toilet tchotchkes cluttering the desk of Patty and Drake\u2019s affordable real-estate lawyer. There\u2019s the inexplicable chimp in Carter Hayes\u2019s old family photos. There\u2019s the fact that the spurned black martyr never returns to save the day, as in other domestic thrillers\u2014he only shows up with a sour grin to say, \u201cI guess you\u2019re wishing now you\u2019d rented to the black man.\u201d And finally, there\u2019s the call-and-response instructional method of equestrienne Patty, who yells at her students, all white women circling mindlessly on horseback, \u201cWhat\u2019s the most important thing I told you?\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re the boss!\u201d \u201cAnd why are we the boss?\u201d \u201cBecause we\u2019re smarter!\u201d\u2014as malignant self-deception as I\u2019ve ever heard.<\/p>\n

\"pacific-heights\"<\/p>\n

Later, this horse-circling moment comes back to haunt Patty, the camera whirling around her as her lawyer explains just what a gull she\u2019s been. \u201cThis guy has been playing you like a piano concerto.\u201d \u201cWhy?\u201d Patty asks. \u201cI don\u2019t know, because it\u2019s possible, because he\u2019s evil. What difference does it make?\u201d Is this Schlesinger breaking the fourth wall to shrug off Hayes\u2019s increasingly incoherent motivations as we move into the third act? Or is the most important part of evil never, in fact, why<\/em> it exists but the fact that it consists, fundamentally, of the power to turn us all evil in its presence?<\/p>\n

Of course, Patty herself has nothing to fear. The requisite domestic-thriller impalement sequence eventually clears her cockroach problem right up\u2014Hayes even wiggles his legs spastically, his back pinned to the floor by rebar\u2014and Patty is free to DIY the place up again, good as new. The curtain falls on Patty and Drake, now full-fledged real-estate flippers unloading onto the next young, dumb, white couple in line, hoping to clear a $150,000 profit on their willingness to suspend their disbelief about the realities of their role in the continuing cycle of destruction. When the next victim\/villain naively comments on how much \u201cheart\u201d they put into fixing up the house, Patty insists, \u201cIt was just an investment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goodbye, house. Goodbye, home. There goes the neighborhood.<\/p>\n

This is the second in Amy Gentry\u2019s series about domestic thrillers. She the author of the debut thriller <\/em>Good as Gone<\/a>, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in July 2016. Her writing on books and culture has appeared in <\/em>Electric Literature,\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles\u00a0Review of Books, <\/em>The Rumpus, <\/em>Salon, <\/em>Fusion, and the <\/em>Chicago Tribune, among others. Amy holds a doctorate in English and lives in Austin, Texas.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Violence and gentrification in John Schlesinger\u2019s\u00a0Pacific Heights. \u201cThis is our home. This is all happening to us in our home.\u201d That is the sound of a white woman\u2019s despair. It\u2019s the second act break of the domestic thriller Pacific Heights, and Patty (Melanie Griffith) has just realized that her stupid, pseudo-liberal boyfriend and her smart, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[20331,25651,775,16803,16698,25656,25655,24166,25432,14380,6699,15550,25650,384,9036,25117,24829,13353,217,1370,25653,21876,25441,81,6204,25652,11597,14780,1179,20028,19854,25654,25430,13579,25657],"class_list":["post-104722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-american-dream","tag-amy-gentry","tag-california","tag-change","tag-community","tag-cycles","tag-daniel-pyne","tag-destruction","tag-domestic-thrillers","tag-fear","tag-gentrification","tag-gone-girl","tag-good-as-gone","tag-home","tag-horror","tag-house","tag-landlords","tag-lawyers","tag-los-angeles","tag-matthew-modine","tag-melanie-griffith","tag-michael-keaton","tag-miscarriage","tag-movies","tag-neighborhood","tag-pacific-heights","tag-pregnancy","tag-property","tag-real-estate","tag-scary","tag-suspense","tag-tenant","tag-the-hand-that-rocks-the-cradle","tag-thrillers","tag-villain"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOur House: Violence and Gentrification in \u2018Pacific Heights\u2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Domestic thrillers are always about who gets to participate in the American dream, the so-called \u201cgood life.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/11\/our-house\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Our House by Amy Gentry\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 11, 2016 \u2013 Violence and gentrification in John Schlesinger\u2019s\u00a0Pacific Heights.\u201cThis is our home. 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