MOTEL AMERICA

by

Christopher Howell

Those who remember the plot details of Psycho, and surprisingly few do, may recall that it begins not in the Bates Motel (which is, in fact, an improbably homely establishment despite its taxidermy collection), but in a far sleazier place where Janet Leigh is having a lunchtime tryst with her married lover. She complains about having to meet in these low-rent surroundings, and this more than anything propels her towards stealing the bag of money from the real estate office where she works, which in turn propels her towards the Bates Motel, Anthony Perkins and her fate.

In fact there is a strange stylistic discontinuity in the film between the Victorian Gothic of ‘Mother’s House’ and the more standard, insubstantial architecture of the motel itself, but together they reinforce the idea of architecture as threat, the haunted house plus the motel room, two mythic spaces where terrible things happen to people.

When Psycho was made in 1960 the Holiday Inn chain had been in existence for a decade or so and was doing well, but it still had only a few hundred franchises, and it would be scame into existence, offering a similarly standardized but much cheaper product. Most travellers in 1960 who needed a bed for the night had to take their chances.

As far back as the 1940s, in a more or less deranged article that J. Edgar Hoover wrote for a magazine called the American Nation, he claimed that motels were places where criminals hung out, where illicit sex was freely available and where it was easy to buy drugs. The simple response to this is ‘only if you’re lucky’. But in motels you do have a tendency to get lucky.

I, needless to say, think it has something to do with the moral dimensions of architecture. The best motel architecture looks not merely playful but actually trivial, as though to say this place is unreal, what you get up to here in this fun house doesn’t really count, it’s outside your real life. You won’t be held responsible for what happens here. And so you’re free to have illicit sex, to take drugs, to consume beer and potato crisps in bed, to watch mind-numbing television. You are free to behave like a sleaze.

You wouldn’t behave like this if you were staying in some high-class Venetian palazzo, not even if you were spending the night in a good old-fashioned seedy English bed and breakfast, but to engage in bad behaviour in an American motel is to partake of the truly American experience.

Transience and anonymity, these are the great American virtues. Tomorrow you’ll have moved on and put it all behind you. Everyone remembers the horror of the Bates Motel but there are many worse motels in America, and I’m sure that if Janet Leigh had been able to check out the morning after she wouldn’t have found it so terrible at all.

My favourite is the Rocket Motel in a place called Frontier Town in the Mojave desert, geographically not that far away from Palm Springs, but a million miles away philosophically. Frontier Town itself was built in the 1940s as a sort of permanent movie set. A property speculator reckoned there’d always be somebody who needed a place to shoot a cowboy movie so he built Frontier Town, a place with greater solidity and authenticity than sets usually had, and for a while he did good business. Then cowboy movies became less popular and the town declined until the 1960s when hippies decided Frontier Town had just the kind of surreal trippiness they were looking for. A group of them moved in, refurbished the place, and they or their successors are still there now.

The Rocket Motel consists of half a dozen gloriously inauthentic, free-standing log cabins, and above the check-in office is a sign consisting of a neon rocket ship trailing a burst of stars. The cute proportions of the cabins, the brilliantly eye-catching incongruity of the sign, the fact that it’s in the desert in a town that was built as a movie set, suggest that this is a place where nothing authentic, nothing consequential, could ever happen. One can behave badly here with complete impunity and on my few visits I’ve done my very best to live up to this architectural imperative.

The Rocket is my favourite, but it isn’t my ideal. For that I envisage a thousand-unit motel, built somewhere mythical and metaphorical, like Timbuktu or Alice Springs or Xanadu, and each of the thousand units would be built in a different architectural style. First there’d be all the usual motel imagery, the tee-pee, the railway carriage, the motel court, but then there would be cabins in the shape of mud huts, miniature Palladian villas, geodesic domes, pagodas, cricket pavilions, bathing huts, beach huts, grass huts, gazebos, igloos, bedouin tents, lighthouses, gingerbread houses, tea houses, tree houses, bottle houses, boat houses, gate houses, Ashanti fetish houses, aeroplane hangars, mosques, parish churches, castles, crofts, windmills, miners’ shacks, Tudor cottages, Swiss chalets, Bauhaus cubes, fall-out shelters. There would be units showing the influence of Vanburgh and Boulee, Mies van der Rohe and Christopher Wren, Louis Sullivan and Louis Kahn, Vignola and Palladio, John Nash and Edward Zander. And in each and every one of these units every guest, whether singly or in pairs or in groups would be acting very, very badly indeed. It would be a kind of Arcadia.