Doing Things with the Hoover: "Deep Clean" and Sex in the "All-Electric" Home

The wonderful queer waste/collage/craft artist-scholar Daniel Fountain sent me a link the other day to Deep Clean, a film short by David Wilson written by Wilson and Harry Clayton Wright and starring Clayton Wright.

I can't stop thinking about it.

Picture this. A handlebar mustachioed dude dressed like the cowboy from the Village People-meets Mary Tyler Moore circa 1963... wearing fluffy bunny slippers ... pushing a mushroom grey upright vintage Hoover across the pink carpeted floors of a house straight out of Blue Velvet ... and then fucking it.

Hard.

Did I mention that he first polishes the dining table, and then uses the polish as lube?

And that the soundtrack is Neiked's song, "Sexual"?

And that the Hoover appears to come alive as man and machine gyrate throughout the home, first cavorting and pirouetting, then lunging and thrusting, before it ends up static and solemn once more, like the most obedient of servants standing to attention and waiting to be told which room to clean next?

It's a thing of beauty.

You could approach this film from all kinds of angles - just as the Hoover does with the protagonist! - but what fascinates me is the film's upending of the tropes of:

(1) midcentury appliance advertising, and

(2) the 7- to 15-minute promotional reels produced by utility providers and trade associations released in the 1950s, several of which were directed by well-respected Broadway choreographers.

In other words, while Deep Clean's directors have positioned it as a rejoinder to the cooption of the queer aesthetic by mainstream culture - a culture that simultaneously capitalises on queerness and sanitises it to appeal to heterosexual viewers - what I see is a film that exposes the inherent campness and erotic energy crackling and pullulating throughout post-war electricity and appliance promos.

Put differently: this film merely exposes the subtext long present in appliance ads, and that is apparent, if you pay attention, in iconic industry films such as General Motors' Design For Dreaming and Bell Telephone's Once Upon a Honeymoon, both released in 1956.

(The film also shares elements of erotic appliance parodies in literature, which I have written about here).

Both of these films were musicals featuring surreal elements. In Design For Dreaming, a housewife is awakened in the middle of the night by a masked stranger in a tuxedo who takes her on a tour of the future, sponsored by General Motors. She gasps at the sight of new Buicks and Cadillacs. She cavorts around a kitchen equipped with all manner of push-button magic.

She gazes dreamily at two spinning electric egg beaters as they grind up and down over an empty bowl.

And then she changes into various leisure outfits (golf! tennis!) before leaping onto an empty stage, where she dances manically and smiles maniacally to the lyrics, "Everyone says the future is strange / But I have a feeling, some things won't change!"

Design For Dreaming ends with the protagonist driving off into the night with the same masked stranger, against a futuristic landscape devoid of people, but replete with machines. General Motors imagines the housewife as a woman possessed by modernity - literally sleepwalking, and then sleepdancing towards a future over which she has no control, a future that happens to her. She entrusts herself to the unknown and unknowable force of a corporate-sponsored electricity coded as seductive, male, dark, and capable of taking her far away from her humdrum bedroom. In this way, the ad both inscribes itself within the world of erotic dreams and play, and simultaneously refutes their possibility. The future won't change; the masked man will take you out of your bed at night... and deposit you in the kitchen. The world of GM is sexy - but also not.

Once Upon a Honeymoon features several of these same tropes. A board meeting of guardian angels looks down on earth, where a suburban couple of newlyweds have had to put off their honeymoon while the husband finishes writing a musical number called "The Wishing Song" for his producers. The board sends down a camp, bespectacled angel to help.

We watch the housewife trail into the kitchen, where she looks with dismay upon her faulty, old appliances and begins dancing around and singing a song about all of the gadgets she wishes she owned. But hey, presto! The camp angel showers fairy dust down on the house. New appliances appear, the song is a hit with the producer, and the couple can go on their honeymoon and - it is implied, finally consummate their marriage.

The Bell Telephone Company connects newlyweds to their dreams - connects men and women to each other - and helps maintain the sparks that make for happy, healthy, heterosexual relationships.

And yet the community of male angels up on high, dressed in glamorous white robes, throwing down fairy dust on the heterosexual mortals, and giggling to themselves, gestures to other modes of living, other kinds of community - be it the musical theatre community, or non-heteronormativity more broadly. The existence of this community is what renders the honeymoon so very necessary. Where the new refrigerator and stove will free up the new wife's time and the song about the new refrigerator and stove will ensure the husband is able to take time off for the honeymoon, the honeymoon will ensure he doesn't veer off with a fairy dust-wielding angel from Broadway. (You could complicate this, actually, and see the board room of angels as embodying corporate masculinity, or masculine corporateness, and the hapless, camp, bespectacled guardian angel as the queer rogue element that fits in neither the heavens of corporate America nor the everyday drudgery of the home -- and that the task of the honeymoon is to ensure that the suburban husband doesn't end up in this queer in-between space, either).

Deep Clean, then, effectively exposes the way the mythos of "all-electric" living has always been premised on referring to without ever naming all the illicit, suppressed desires that mainstream culture for much of the twentieth century could not bear to acknowledge. Deep Clean renders explicit the (frequently queer) sexual energy on which "all-electric" living ran.

It does so by taking us back to the scene of the heteronormative crime, so to speak - the house in which it's set could easily have been the set of Once Upon a Honeymoon - and swapping all of the roles therein.

The housewife is a man who looks suspiciously like an appliance salesman from a 1970s porn film.

The vacuum cleaner performs unruly acts.

The house stays dirty, while the anus gets cleaned, deeply.

And the housewife-porn star is revealed to be very dirty indeed.

Notice as well how, like in Design For Dreaming, the housewife undergoes several transformations -- only here, it's not from pyjamas to an evening gown, and from evening gown to tennis and golf outfits, but from khaki trousers to jockstrap, frilly, flowered apron, and rubber glove combo. The humdrum clothes of the housewife become the stuff of erotic role play, while the home itself is revealed to be teeming with sexual energy. You don't need a Cadillac or fairy-dust-wielding angels from on high to rev up your home life: the stuff of fantasy is already here.

And maybe, too, there is something about the way that the passage of time renders unfamiliar the most humdrum aspects of the past. The faded pink carpet, the flowered curtains, the Wedgwood china plates - all of these are imbued with frisson when looked at through the lens of the present, and when treated as the relics of an irretrievable past that may never have really existed, and that we can only access, now, through role play.

Oh - and of course! The film conveys the energising effects of transgressing the gender categories and norms that were so central to the social construction of post-war life. While Wright and Davis are British, this film very easily reads as a "fuck you" to the heteronormative values on which the "all-electric" American home was based, and that were central to Cold War containment culture. To watch this film is to witness the boundaries between The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and the Desperate Housewife come crashing down.

But again, the humour derives from the multiplicity of norms, tropes, and genre categories being dismantled. Gender-bending, sure. Mis-use of the appliance and subversion of the notions of "clean" and "dirty," okay. But more than this, I'm struck by the film's splicing of genres and tropes:

(1) the mid-century sitcom, with its housewives getting to the "bottom" of problems and finding nifty solutions to them;

(2) the cliché of the desperate, and sexually-frustrated, housewife;

(3) mid-century heterosexual porn that played on the period's television clichés (such as the repairman or vacuum cleaner salesman),

(2) gay porn;

(3) neo avant-garde visual media (I'm thinking here of Andy Warhol's 1964 film short, Couch, in which Gerard Malanga and Ondine make out on a couch, Walter Dainwood breaks a mirror over them, and Binchamton Birdie vacuums up both the people and the shattered remnants; or his 1965 film, Kitchen, in which Edie Sedgwick and various other actors and artists associated with The Factory sit around a kitchen table while someone else opens and shuts the refrigerator door ad nauseum, as if the appliance has infected him with its automation);

(4) the sexual explicitness of contemporary music videos (including, but of course, Freddie Mercury in the iconic video of I Want to Break Free (1984)).

Deep Clean combines elements of all of these. Which is why I can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be adding more to this as soon as I have the time. But I wanted to dash off these ideas for now, as the list of strange and surreal appliance depictions for which I didn't have space in the monograph is growing... and I don't want them to go to waste!

Also: if you're looking for more queer appliances, you could do worse that Michael D. Snediker's 2013 poetry collection, The Apartment of Tragic Appliances, the surface of whose meanings I have only begun to scratch.