The following piece is a continuation of a series, Behind the Frame by Chris Rogers, which analyzes how the built environment has been represented on the big screen. Interiors will post future pieces on INTJournal.com.

The most fundamental materialization of architecture is the home, the building that provides the essentials of shelter, comfort and privacy for each of us. But it is also often a manifestation of the owner’s personality, revealed through size, shape, materials and color, an aspect that has attracted many film-makers seeking more or less subtle indicators of their characters’ psychology.

Arguably the most famous home in cinema is the Bates residence in Psycho. A clapboard mansion, its Second Empire style and faded glory immediately suggest the previous century and so introduce Norman Bates’s mother long before ‘she’ appears. The remote, rural house also underscores the vulnerability of Marion Crane by contrasting sharply with the steel-framed modernity of the city she has left behind. Alfred Hitchcock had the house created on the studio backlot from a painting of a real home in upstate New York by artist Edward Hopper, whose work is associated with isolation and alienation and has itself influenced many films.

Directors have sometimes signaled their antagonists with Modernist architecture. Michael Mann demonstrates this with Francis Dollarhyde’s house from Manhunter. Generous strip windows and translucent glass block walls typify the International Style, originated by European architects between the world wars, but also represent a serial killer’s obsession with seeing, revealed elsewhere through his use of mirrors, film and surveillance. That the source novel has the same character inhabiting a large Victorian home reminiscent of Hitchcock’s earlier work shows Mann’s understanding of architecture’s narrative possibilities. For his Heat, armed robber Neil McCauley occupies only barely a vast, empty house of plate glass and slick surfaces whose clinical sterility echoes his credo of emotional detachment – a lack of personality in the house defining absolutely the personality of the occupier. The New England home to which former British Prime Minister Adam Lang retreats in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost [Writer] is a blank bunker whose slit windows give occasional glimpses of its windswept surroundings. With anodyne decoration and a staff of acolytes, the house may not be Lang’s own but serves as an analogue of the vapid, pliant politician.

More sympathetic characters are generally found in homelier, if still indicative, surroundings. Reaching 1980s New York and with considerable accrued wealth, the immortal clansman hero of Highlander lives above his own antiques store – a dryly witty nod to his origins – in an expansive loft apartment. Director Russell Mulcahy’s fluid camera movement through its double-height, open plan living space alludes to MacLeod’s own navigation through centuries of life. A polygonal inner sanctum lined with mementoes from across the globe makes both points explicit and recalls the childhood visit to the Tower of London armory that inspired co-screenwriter Gregory Widen to conceive the film. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Deckard’s 97th-floor apartment is also presented as a cocoon-like refuge from a wearisome world cluttered with objects from his and perhaps others’ lives. Richly textured cement block walls based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown House, a low ceiling and a windowless kitchen all contribute, as does diffuse lighting in warm tones.

In The Yakuza, Harry Kilmer returns to Japan decades after military service there to help his businessman friend Tanner. He stays with another friend, a settled expatriate whose dwelling is a hybrid of American ranch house and traditional Japanese home that features walls of planed timber and delicate folding screens. This calm, minimalist dwelling, seen to be located in a modest garden, welcomes Kilmer and slowly softens Dusty, his confident young bodyguard. It is juxtaposed with the metallic finishes and gaudy colors of the contemporary hotel suite favored by the bullish Tanner, who is later revealed to have betrayed Kilmer. Sensitively made by Sydney Pollack using a mixed cast and crew, the film was one of the earliest Western productions to shoot in Japan.

The homes of ambivalent personas lie between these opposites. The baroque eclecticism of Xanadu speaks to the shallow excesses of newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane. Outside and in, its uncaring melange of periods suggests restlessness fueled by unlimited wealth coupled to a lack of taste, as Oriental nudges Spanish Mission which jostles with Egyptian. In truth this approach was common to the rapidly-rich of that period and can be seen in the homes of many, including William Randolph Hearst, one of the real-life models for Kane.

Bruce Wayne either builds or inherits Wayne Manor, depending on the story, and fittingly its appearances on film have had varied representations. The Tudor Gothic Knebworth House in Hertfordshire seen in Tim Burton’s Batman was last rebuilt in the 1850s, three quarters of a century before Standard Oil founder Herbert L. Pratt even started work on The Braes in Long Island which features in Batman & Robin. Yet in these films and those of Christopher Nolan, which have used two further English country houses of wildly varying age, their architecture has always implied wealth and respectability, with just a hint of foreboding. A suitable home for a dark knight.

Chris Rogers writes, speaks and creates tours about architecture and other aspects of visual culture. He has written three books, including How to Read London – A crash course in London architecture (Ivy Press, 2017), a publisher's best-seller. His work and thoughts on architecture, film, art, design and television can be found at www.chrismrogers.net

Think Pieces

Beyond the Frame #14: Trailer

Interiors