Santa Clarita Diet: On Property (Patreon)

There's an issue with this show that I haven't really talked about, so for this next section I want to take a step back and think about something on a larger and more abstract scale. (Don't worry, I'll get back to the episode by episode recap writing next time). Namely, what I want to talk about here, is the idea of property and the role and function of the real estate agent. There's a long tradition in Marxist and leftist thought when it comes to writing about housing. It functions as one of the basic needs of life (the kind of need which is talked about by thinkers like Vivek Chibber and Jodi Dean as a shared basis for solidarity) and at the same time it functions as one of the most profitable assets for capitalist accumulation. Homes, and having a home, has moved from being a necessity to being something invested with not just speculative economic value but with ideological significance (exemplified in Britain at least by the Thatcherite drive to turn home dwellers into home owners). What this means then, is that the real estate agent becomes an ideological agent of capital, a symbol of the ways in which the commodification of life has accelerated and a visible example of the desperate neoliberal desire to turn life itself into an economic exchange. 

It's worth taking a long view here - perhaps a suitable starting point would the history of enclosure which started in the Tudor period (tied up in the political and ecclesial struggles against the Catholic Church). The enclosure of land, which was previously held in common and sustained through grazing fees saw the formation of large farms and estates which could rent lend to tenant-farmers. This process accelerated through the centuries as Britain entered a period of intense industrialization. Advances in technology made consolidation of land more profitable and the profit generated was easily converted in political power by large farmers and landowners. Here the political and the economic began to merge as increasingly the enclosure of common land was not just driven by those with economic power but mandated by the legal and political structures of the country. In the space of around a century approximately 4,000 Parliamentary Acts were passed leaving almost no common land at all. In much the same way that Caliban and the Witch discusses how the bith of capitalism demanded a new kind of sexual politics and gender relationships, the rise of capitalism also necessitates a new kind of property relationships. It should be stressed that the elimination of common land, of shared property, was not a predetermined outcome - even figures like Thomas Paine wrote of the idea that the earth is 'the common property of the human race.' (Tangentially, it is worth pointing out that this serves as yet more evidence that American colonialism was always already predicated on seeing  black and indigenous peoples as not human).

From here, the shift towards an urban and industrial society accelerated as rural life became less sustainable. What this led to (in Britain at least) was an explosion in slums, the vicious exploitation of the needs of a population that had been forced into being a mobile labour force and genuinely crushing poverty.  In a sense, the problem hasn't really been solved - see how prophetic Engels seems writing all the way back in 1872: 

 The so-called housing shortage, which plays such a great role in the press nowadays, does not consist in the fact that the working class generally lives in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings. This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it. In order to make an end of this housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class. — What is meant today by housing shortage is the peculiar intensification of the bad housing conditions of the workers as the result of the sudden rush of population to, the big towns; a colossal increase in rents, a still further aggravation of overcrowding in the individual houses, and, for some, the impossibility of finding a place to live in at all. And this housing shortage gets talked of so much only because it does not limit itself to the working class but has affected the petty bourgeoisie also.

It would take two cataclysmic World-Events in the form of world wars to both accelerate the development of capitalist forces and to encourage bourgeois politicians to form the post-war consensus wherein minor re-distributive policies were married to a broad general commitment to high-employment and backed up by strong unionization among working class people. It's generally this twenty year period of the 1950s to the 1970s that Jodi Dean sees as the period in which organized labor was effectively able to somewhat muzzle capital, though Dean also acknowledges that this was a period where the fight against capital was not carried nearly far enough to prevent the forces of political neoliberalism from undoing the gains of the New Deal era. 

I won't both recapping the history of neoliberalism here - the story is familiar enough by now - the collapse in wages, the smashing of labor power and union busting and the slow drawing down of the grey curtain of capitalist realism are by now well known. The rise of the precariat over the past decade or so has in effect brought Engels words back in full force. Not for nothing did Alain Badiou a while back say that we on the left are now effectively back in a nineteenth or even pre-nineteenth century position. So the privatization of public housing gives rise to the parasitic figure of the real estate agent and the letting agent, the attempt of market forces to maximize surplus value generated by an asset. The idea that estate agents are there to find people homes to live in is a grotesque lie that no-one should believe as the briefest glance at the numbers of empty homes in large urban centers will show that empty homes can be far more profitable to the estate market than ones which are being lived in. But what of the SCD real estate agent then? Rather than urban life, Santa Clarita is an archetypal American suburb, there are echoes of Santa Mira I think - a dream place, that harks back to a notion where it would be conceivable for a small family to be able to afford their own home in California . (And dream it absolutely is - the average house price across the state is around $600,000 and houses like the ones in the show will go for far higher). 

This notion of the dream is not simply an individual thing, but something which we can link to the idea of a collective culture unconscious. What this means then is that the function of the real estate agent in the show is tied up within the function of the show itself - which is to project a fantasy of a certain kind of American life. Underneath the vision of blue skies, a perfect marriage and a successful business there's a violence, a darkness which the show seems to be drawing out. The real estate agent then, (in their fictionalized guise) are embodiment of a kind of ideological investment, but in a post-2008 world, wherein entire generations have no hope and no expectation of being able to buy into home ownership (and all that entails both ideologically and practically) then it's little surprise that Santa Clarita Diet would highlight the ways in which the property is both phantasmal, insubstantial and something desperately desired (Joel and Shelia are constantly worried about closing a sale, but never about where they live after all).  All of which goes to underscore the extent to which this show revolves around the notion of fantasy - which, much like horror, depends upon what we think we know about something. Beneath the fantasy of property is the zombie nightmare of consumption. 

NEXT TIME: Back to the Zombies