Home/Homelessness in US Cinema (Lecture)

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

If, as John David Rhodes argues, “the detached single family home is one of the most powerful metonymic signifiers of American cultural life – of the dreams of privacy, enclosure, freedom, autonomy, independence, stability, and prosperity that animate national life in the United States,” that is not to say that then home in American cinema is by no means a simple or stable construct, but is, if anything, represented most often as troubled, precarious, invaded, porous, unstable, or out of reach. This class considers meanings of home in American cinema by looking at films that confront the problem of how to live in a home, offer alternate structures, and show the fantasy of home to be out of reach. The class will analyze films about unhoused figures during the Depression, housing shortages during World War II, the rise of modern homelessness in the 1980s, and contemporary precarity. We will consider fantasies of home related to family, class status, age, and race. We will consider the roles of banks, landlords, gentrification, and other institutions and structural causes of home insecurity and homelessness. Students will read various theories and histories of housing and homelessness to frame understanding of films. Students will write weekly one page reflections, an 8-10 page paper, and a 15 minute conference presentation. Films may include: Wild Boys of the Road (Wellman 1933) Modern Times (Chaplin 1936) You Can’t Take It With You (Capra 1938) The Wizard of Oz (Fleming 1939) Tender Comrade (Dymytryk 1943) Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli 1944) Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House (Potter 1948) All That Heaven Allows (Sirk 1955) A Raisin in the Sun (Petrie 1961) Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Mazursky 1986) The Money Pit (Benjamin 1986) The Fisher King (Gilliam 1991) Straight Outta Brooklyn (Rich 1991) Where the Day Takes You (Rocco 1992) Public Housing (Wiseman 1997) The Pursuit of Happiness (Muccinno 2006) Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt 2008) 99 Homes (Bahrani 2014) The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Talbot 2019) Nomadland (Zhao 2020)