Hoarders vs. Clean House

I’ll echo Sonia’s feelings of repulsion toward the episode of Hoarders that we watched (a feeling intensified for me as an animal lover). I’ve only seen a few episodes of that series, but watching it alongside these articles made me recall Style Network’s comedic reality show, Clean House (2003-2011), which has a premise that superficially seems the same, yet makes for an instruction point of comparison. On Clean House, a cast of experts intrudes into the home of a compulsive hoarder, assesses the situation and then uses the promise of an interior redesign to motivate the collector to part with their objects. The home remodel, to a large extent, is funded via a yard sale, in which the homeowner must sell their abundant goods in order to raise money to purchase new furnishings, which are presumably intended to serve as a corrective that will inspire them to embrace their new, normalized life. To a greater degree than Hoarders, Clean House presents capitalism as its own solution, with hoarding characterized almost as a temporary blockage in the circulation of goods, which can be corrected as the collector re-enters the marketplace as a reformed citizen and reassigns the blocked up (but still useful) goods that they have over-consumed to others. Here the “neoliberal theater of suffering” (19) that McCarthy describes becomes even more obviously exposed, because the sense of rehabilitation is more completely enacted (by contrast, Hoarders haunts us and creates dramatic tension primarily because so many of its stories end without hope), although ironically the cure comes about via the negotiation of trading underutilized clutter for “stylish” new furniture.

On these shows, hoarding is pathologized as a singular dysfunctional behavior, but there are many kinds of hoarding displayed in these shows. Some hoard animals, others objects. Some seem are motiviated by fear of scarcity others are driven by a misplaced sense of value. Perhaps the most interesting distinction, though, is that some of the hoarding that springs from traumatic emotional attachment (this is usually the kind seen on Hoarders)… a refusal to let go, whereas other hoarding (more often the sort seen on Clean House) seems to be predicated upon the assumption that the objects being saved will one day be of use. Ahmed implies that the articles in her special issue suggest that “happiness operates as a futurity” (12), but considering hoarding as a series of distinct, individualized pathologies rather than a single cultural trend forces us to acknowledge when hoarders hoard, the happiness they are seeking might not be located in the same space, temporally.

Whereas Hoarders traffics in abjection, the homes on Clean House can more often be characterized as rampantly overcluttered than legitimate health hazards. The families on Clean House seem to be more affluent, generally less overtly crazy (which excuses the show’s lack of commitment to providing psychological aftercare), and eminently redeemable, giving the show a discourse of hope that Hoarders often lacks. Still, both Clean House and Hoarders use grotesque images of disorder, of pathological consumption run amok, to emphasize consumption as a process that should instead be thought of as rational. As Illouz points out, however, consumption is “less about the ultilitarian value of objects than it is about their symbolic meaning” (380). Consumption is never entirely rational, and these shows, by presenting particularly emotionally motivated consumption as a problem, mask the affective logic that guides much of our everyday purchasing, flattering us by making us think that we are in control of ourselves as consumers.