When it comes to art, the movie Phantom Thread is the most heterosexual example of the form. There is zero need to put any more straight love stories on screen. PTA, you did it, you killed the sub-genre. But in a good way. That movie, about a fashion designer and his latest muse, is the Reichenbach Falls of straight romance. Anything else is a mistake, a giving in that won’t hold. You took the last eggs on the worktop - or from the fridge, I dunno - and you beat them so hard the cake is now impossible. It cannot stand.
Despite this clear point in the timeline - this spike on the cardiac monitor before the fire starves out - we’re still subject to love narratives which don’t involve cracking eggs. (1) Boring stories which say nothing interesting about suffocation and gleeful submission.
A prime example of the subgenre’s postmortem voiding? The mortgage ad. Capitalism’s attempt at a trojan horse narrative. (2) When one plays in the cinema I take it as a cue for a safety piss. These ads are mini montages of fake or real couples building something together, celebrating a new era of their lives. These happy clear-skinned perfect citizens are a version of safe personified, they will owe money for many years, they are who you should yearn to reflect. There is one mortgage ad where the protagonist is a single lady, but how she got a mortgage I don’t want to know. There shall be no suggestion of the guillotine straight off the bat in 2020! We can ease into it.
So, as we reach into this new year, read our horoscope forecasts, and idly wonder which celebrities might die, I am sharing with you the mortgage ad idea that plagued my mind during a drive home to Tipperary contemplating the winter solstice. This is a mental It Follows. I must expunge it from my memory. You are now cursed. Take care of the baby I have left on your (mortgaged) doorstep.
Themes: hipsters buying houses in up and coming neighbourhoods, parquet flooring, middle-class DIY culture, compromise, Celtic mysticism, loving banks.
Plot: It is early January. A couple tour a run-down house with a nervous, grimace-making estate agent. The estate agent makes apology noises but as the camera angle shifts to our couple, this go-between merchant becomes blurry. The couple enters the focus, and they don’t look like they need to hear a flurry of ‘sorry’! They - she in her late twenties, he 31 – look enchanted. They want to buy this dusty, cobwebby fixer-upper.
We don’t know how they put the deposit together, we don’t know their jobs. But they are employed and wear non-threatening middle of the road brands. Their backstories aren’t fleshed out here. We can leave that up to the viewer. No need for a prologue.
Then, the montage. They renovate, fight about paint swatches, then playfully flick at each other’s grey threads a colour they are painting on a wall - which wasn’t part of the swatches. Plot twist. She scours Instagram accounts of other house renovations while on the train to work. He tries to make friends with the unimpressed tradesmen who come and go.
We see the couple make mistakes. The dishwasher is too short for the space they set aside! Turns out his having a dick doesn’t mean he understands how wiring works! They order the wrong door and one of them is like, “it’s the wrong door” and the other is like, “listen it's nearly Christmas, we'll just use the fucking door that came in that departing DHL van, the house needs a door.” (3)
The closing scene. December 21st. The couple are up early in the dark having breakfast – eggs boil and wobble in a pot, water pushes down through ground coffee beans, a toaster hums. The radio, via the familiar tones of a Morning Ireland presenter, announces that today is the winter solstice. Newgrange is mentioned. As the couple mindlessly crunches food and reflects on the Boyne Valley, the now-installed banjaxed wrong door with the unwanted weird window on top is actually doing what happens at Newgrange and letting in the light in a really cool way as the sun dawns. The sunlight runs across their kitchen table like a thrown lance. One of them whispers, breaking the human silence, “I actually love the door.”
(1) I just realised HBO’s Watchmen, with which I’m obsessed, is part of this great straight egg-breaking genre. My mind? Always blown.
(2) I read that a website’s style guide has banned the phrase ‘late capitalism’, lol.
(3) I think adding a BLEEP for the fucking part would give this work a much-needed dose of realism.