That ditch out in the Valley that they're diggin' just for me

Since I am a fool, I’ve been in the market to buy a house for a little while now. It’s simply not a good time to be doing so. My gripes with the Pittsburgh-area housing market are endless and specific, and tempered only by a vague understanding that it’s even worse in other cities. I simply refuse to believe that anybody would buy an aluminum-siding rowhouse in Bloomfield, carpets grubby with tobacco resin, for half a million or more. And yet, miracles do happen, new fools are born every day. I toured one place in a beautiful neighborhood that looked passable in the listing but in reality was drooping and cracking in unacceptable places, smelling like cigarettes and mold. In the basement, there was a spot of still-wet, freshly poured concrete on the floor, and a door to the backyard was, ominously and for no reason, left open, like a hastily-abandoned crime scene. As my friend’s Russian father sagely warns about sojourning in the real estate game: “Picture always look good.” 

At least I’m not the only one with real estate woes. Jax Taylor (Cauchi) and Brittany Cartwright are getting divorced, very messily and publicly on the reality show they anchor, The Valley. A principal object of contention, more so than their 4-year-old son Cruz¹, is the $1.9 million house in Valley Village the couple purchased in 2019. The Valley Village house is fairly typical insofar as it is not actually wildly expensive for the neighborhood and the square footage and honestly not that nice. It’s blocky and black-and-white, with a corrugated aspect that aspires simultaneously “modern” and “traditional,” as any House Hunters head can plainly see. It’s the kind of place that would have those Chip and Joanna-ass sliding barn doors, if it had any interior doors. The space inside is, instead, loosely divided into two open concepts. There’s no way to describe the style of the  interior other than “California fugly” (excuse me, “modern farmhouse”). There’s cheap laminate floor in a blond shade that faintly recalls Scandinavian wood. The walls, and indeed the entire color scheme, are white and gray. There is shiplap (white). There is herringbone tile (gray). The gigantic television in the living room area is tessellated into a confusing pattern of irregular square and rectangular shelves intended to evoke bookshelves but meant to hold only pictures and tchotchkes – there is only one book in the Cauchi house, whose spine reads simply “LOUIS VUITTON.” There is a massive sectional couch encumbered by heavy pillows which have to be tossed over the back (according to Brittany) in order to sit down; Costco-sized white and gray with an occasional commemorative one (“Mr. & Mrs., est. 2019”) in the mix. The front of the house, rarely photographed, is an untouched liminal space. I think maybe there’s a dining room table in there. Various placards made of garish fake wood welcome you to the “Cauchi homestead” (abandon all hope, ye who enter here… ) but the true décor of the house is Amazon boxes. 

A few years ago I took a cursed family trip to California. We stayed in an Airbnb in the Valley in what turned out to be a learning experience for me. The abundance of sunshine in California makes a bubbled white paint-and-laminate shanty look passable in photographs even when it’s chintzy, and cheap in real life. In Pittsburgh, it takes creative subterfuge to make an ugly house photograph well; strategic placement of warm incandescent lights and inviting clutter, plants best of all, is a good strategy. Frederic Jameson writes that the postmodern “appetite” for architecture is really the appetite for photography, and that’s certainly what Jax and Brittany’s house is made for, photography and its grotesque, hyperreal cousin, reality TV. The big open TV/kitchen space can accommodate cast and production crews; we know Brittany’s not making her Mamaw’s infamous beer cheese in there, but she can stage the types of day-drinking bacchanals that the production teams set up to provoke filmable conflict. The space is also a perfect anonymous backdrop for “content creation.” During the pandemic, Brittany fought her way up through the DIFF Eyewear trenches (harder than she fought on Special Forces) and into paid partnerships with real brands like Jenny Craig, who partnered with her to chronicle her postpartum weight loss journey. This is interesting, because said weight loss journey was at once a focal point of Jax’s emotional abuse and what enabled her to become the family breadwinner. Both Brittany and Jax have openly acknowledged this role reversal as a major contributing factor to the end of their relationship.

A recent book by an economics professor named Corinne Low (Having It All: What data tells us about women’s lives and getting the most out of yours) puts a Freakonomics-style spin on the political economy of marriage. I’m ignorant of most of the book’s contents and not that interested; I mention this just to say that even the economists have realized that the social role and sign value of marriage no longer correspond even remotely to the structure of emotional, legal, and financial commitments it entails. Everyone is subject to these forces of dissolution, isolation, and “male loneliness,” but their effects are extremely amped up with Jax and Brittany because they are reality stars, and because Jax is horribly, cartoonishly evil and unredeemable – his performative stint in “the facility” for coke addiction and rage issues on the latest season of The Valley being one of the least damning things we’ve seen him do in his reality TV career. I’ve been rewatching Season 6 of Vanderpump Rules (I basically continuously watch Vanderpump Rules chronologically in a continuous loop, starting it over whenever I finish) – the one that starts with the shocking revelation that Jax cheated on Brittany with a coworker and friend, in front of the hospice patient (?) said friend was taking care of, and ends with Jax’s proposal at Neptune’s Net and Brittany’s triumphant acceptance of her reward for years of suffering and humiliation in the role of Jax’s Serious Girlfriend. A less determined woman would have left him, but Brittany held out, and we know it wasn’t only for love; she needed him to get certain things – a role on the show, a job at SUR, partnership deals, the ring, the wedding at the Kentucky Castle, the house, the son. Now, she doesn’t need any of it anymore, least of all his abysmal treatment of her. And it’s all playing out in their house (on film) and through their house (which is in a complicated tax lien situation due to Jax’s petulant nonpayment of the mortgage). 

The “free plan,” distant modernist ancestor of today’s “open concept,” was one of the five principles of Le Corbusier’s 1923 manifesto. The free plan was, as Frederic Jameson points out, connected to a Utopian vision, a new living space meant to invite and to enable a new manner of living. The open concept of Jax and Brittany’s shithole house is cheap and commonplace – it goes without saying that the open concept of their Valley house has little to do with Le Corbusier in any aesthetic sense. It may, however, bear a mutant inverse relationship to Le Corbusier’s political ambitions. Like other postmodern structures and living spaces, Jax and Brittany’s house expresses the spatial confusion of our contemporary experience – how are we supposed to inhabit and navigate spaces optimized for capital flows, nowhere more literally and concretely obvious than a cheaply constructed dream house on a tract of land in Valley Village, California? It also expresses the economic and emotional confusion of marriage in, as Jameson would probably have put it, our current conjuncture. Jax and Brittany’s mass market Valley house conveys a dystopian rather than a Utopian vision of cohabiting in the physical space of a house and the emotional-contractual space of a marriage.

Jameson wrote of architect Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica house that it is “postmodern” in that it collapses inside and outside, confounds the photographic vantage point, and that through “wrapping” the older space of the original house in a newer, more confusing spatial container it turns those older parts of the house into an Epcot-style simulacrum of themselves, the image of the old house persisting within the new. Jax and Brittany’s house also collapses inside and outside, but it does so by facilitating rather than confounding photography. The photographic vantage can conceal the heap of Amazon boxes just out of frame, but it flays open all the emotional mess of domestic life. Just as in an “open concept” it’s impossible to hide dirty dishes, kitchen smells, or noise, the presence and purpose of the camera reveals all aspects of private emotional life for image-making and consumption. The continuity between reality TV and content creation is deeper than just aesthetic. The vivisection of private life that is professionally produced and still somewhat pleasurable in reality TV assumes a really pornographic status in short-form video content. (It really feels like I shouldn’t, at some fundamental taboo level, be watching 30-second videos of a random woman crying about her stillbirth, or even just packing lunch for her kids.) Content prises more of people’s hitherto-unexploited experiences open to subject them to the valorization imperative, but the transactional stakes are more camouflaged into the everyday underbrush of daily life – daily life that, more and more, reflects the economic instability and untenability of our times. 

What is “wrapped” in Jax and Brittany’s house is not the skeleton of an older house inside the avant-garde structure of the new. The house just is. The house wraps the traditional marriage structure in the encumbrances of a radically degraded form of life and partnership. The house itself expresses this whole process of wrapping – all the economic realities that render the old social signification of marriage retro and unusable. This operation makes the family itself into a postmodern simulacrum. The Cauchi Homestead is so viscerally unsettling because it’s a sign without a referent. The image of a stable, happy, and self-sustaining family unit pointing at nothing, presiding over the troubled home of a cokehead reality star and his equally idiotic partner, both consumed in endless spirals of chaotic bullshit because their livelihoods depend on it.