Loving Small Rooms
Below is an excerpt from a conference paper I presented at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion annual meeting earlier this year, on the capacity of small spaces to ameliorate mimetic rivalry (with an analysis of Midnight Diner and Here). An expanded version (incorporating a review of Perfect Days), has been published on Humanum Review at the John Paul II Institute in Washington DC. The link to the full version can be found below.
Our cities are heaving and continuously getting bigger. Around the world, cities continue to be magnets of desire, with ever-growing numbers of people flocking to them with dreams of finding better lives for themselves and their families.
Many make this work and find in cities the fulfillment of what they sought. Many others do not. Woven into the stories of these urban dwellers—perhaps even in the most successful of these—are varying combinations of isolating dislocation, receding hopes, and most of all, frenetic competition with other city dwellers, for jobs, salaries, foodstuffs, dwellings, even toilet paper.
To manage and leverage the clamor to get an edge over another, offerings of all of these have gotten smaller over time, manifested most starkly in the decrease in physical spaces for habitation and commerce, whether it be in the form of the tiny house movement, shared spaces, or even cage apartments. This has had the twofold effect of increasing the number of walls between inhabitants, as well as increasing the number of inhabitants within each set of walls (and, with that, one’s proximity to another). The presumption, it seems, is that increasingly small spaces will intensify the drive towards competition, but with this too comes a greater angst for urban living.
The three artefacts below, Netflix’s dramatic adaptation of Yarō Abe’s Midnight Diner, Wim Wender’s Perfect Days, and Robert Zemeckis’s Here, suggest that angst need not be inevitable. Each takes the angst over the ever-increasing confinement of modern life seriously, but also finds in this reality a capacity, often unseen and unrecognized, for…
