Heart-Make Hotel
Moving places, moving pictures - locating ‘home’ in hotels, narratives of connection in a hotel space
By Nancy Hervey
The Penthouse, Pretty Woman (1990).
In Of Other Spaces (1987), Michael Foucault gives the hotel as one of his ‘heterotopias’ - cultural locations at once mirroring and transforming what’s outside of them; capsule worlds where conventions can be momentarily subverted. Certainly, in their décor, hotels can feel like Polly-Pocket package of the cities in which they stand, acting as high-concentrate editions of local traditions. Like souvenirs in an airport duty-free, their visual motifs act as mental road signs (a dirndl-esque fringed bed in Frankfurt; wallpaper replicating street art in Atlanta) reminding their guests of the specific world that’s outside, with the signs of these new settings spiked with more “folkloric” associations shaped more by the guests’ expectations than the outside reality. The resulting effect feels both over-egged and somehow half-hearted.
Even when a Hotel has been designed for luxury ease, a sense of physical comfort often evades the guest. Buffet banquets can cater to all tastes, yet mask the gentle intimacy of true home knowledge - how do you like your breakfast? Room temperature becomes key, yet for all the agility of control settings and instant adaption, they cannot know those barometers of personality and biology. Do you feel the cold? In these spaces, the people and rituals from which daily lives are usually woven are suspended. The process that can be chilling at any temperature, as lockdown has shown in 2020.
The Stanley Hotel Colorado, inspiration for The Overlook Hotel, The Shining (1980).
Hotels hold prime-location status for horror stories, from The Shining to Bates’ Motel, in which the hotel becomes a site of reckoning for those upon whom isolation is inflicted. But the hotel’s detachment can also provide a place of connection. After all, it’s in Tokyo’s Park Hyatt that Bob meets Charlotte, and Lost in Translation unfurls. It’s the Regent Beverly Wilshire which provides the penthouse suite where Pretty Woman’s Vivian and Edward hold each other back from a life of cutting loose, or Lucy and George exchange landscapes and life perspectives in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. In each narrative, characters on the move are momentarily held still. The attachments they make in this brief intermission prove enriching and permanent, suggesting something more lasting is kindled beyond the sliding of lives and doors.
Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air (2010) follows Ryan Bingham, a man employed to hand out redundancies when company managers are too squeamish to break the news themselves. We meet Bingham traversing the U.S as a successful, smooth talking, career hitman, ‘This is a re-birth…how much did they first pay you to give up on your dreams?’, easing his conscious through the motivational platitudes he uses to temper each blow. He has turned his bleak profession into an art form, and he enjoys the job for the same reason he feels most at home in the airport hotels. Both combine a dialogue of manufactured familiarity and ultimate detachment, ever charming but never tethered a balance he takes pride in having mastered. Bingham is only rooted when in motion, smoothly shifting from lobbies to escalators, his deadpan narration articulating a self-styled philosophy of liminality and concierge keys from Santa Fe to Seattle.
One of the many hotels frequented in Up in the Air (2010).
It’s in these same spaces that Bingham has two encounters prompting him to reassess his view, gradual acknowledging the benefit of relationships that might extend beyond welcome-desk pleasantries, and invested in more than Air Miles. As a plotline goes, it may sound corny. Were it not for its sharp humour and style, with Vera Farmiga and George Clooney sparkling in warm-hearted, quick-witted sexual tension throughout, it might be. Yet by setting Bingham’s emotional journey against the backdrop of the airports and hotels, the potential of both these as sites for positive connection and epiphany, as much as for ceaseless shifting, sings out.
Hotels may be heterotopic, curious cathedrals set to a hymn of recycled air and cellophane wrapped freebies - yet it seems their disruptive nature can be as rich in opportunity for humour and heart as it is for horror and unrest. Even if arrivals are motivated by task and function (a room for the night, a pitstop on the way home, a business conference), removed from the camouflage of regular routines, the personalities inside are made magic in a raw and open quality, and the possibilities for connection of all kinds is transformed.
Whether cinematic fantasy or lived reality, it’s the hotel’s neutrality that seems to be the nirvana, a chance for those inside to witness both each another, and themselves, anew. In the cinematic imaginings discussed here, it is the twilight of elevators and mezzanine suites in which the humanity within - friends, partners, family or complete strangers - is thrown into greater relief. It’s the nod of recognition in the morning lobby, the frustrated fourth try of the room card key, the fact that you are the only soft edges against endless angles of doors and numbers. When you’re the only variables in such a regulated landscape, for sure, you’re the kindred spirits.
With surroundings so fixed, the usual necessities for performance and persona’s feel bizarre, replaced by a renewed revealing of self. It’s the softness, the organic gift in a slumped shoulder or a furrowed brow which provides a cosy reassurance and sense of rooted location. As these stories explore, however strange the hotel space can be, the comic humanity and recognition of yourself or another in a bathroom mirror, out of home, time, perhaps even complete with ill-fitting towel slippers, lends a compassion that routine tends to restrict.
'Hotel' shares its root with 'hospitality', a word in turn holding links to both ghos-ti "stranger, guest", and poti "power or master/lord". Hotels are the guest-masters of cities and spaces. Hotels can make us feel stranger to ourselves, and acutely aware of our status as guests - though, as these films explore, they can unite us with others in such estranged surroundings.