On the Noises of Neighbors
This is the first of a miniseries within Crush Material — let’s call it “Cameos” — about minor, marginal, and not-quite relationships with outsized impact. Our subject today is the neighbors we hear through the walls.
I’ve lived in apartments for most of my life, and I’ve heard my neighbors much more than I’ve seen them. Sound travels through the walls of an old building: Tinder dates start and end fast; relationships begin passionately, then taper off into Netflix documentaries. Someone in the courtyard outside my window is always yelling in helpless frustration about seemingly trifling concerns. It may or may not be the mild-mannered nurse on the first floor, but the possibility makes me like them more — I’m also always yelling about internet outages and fallen fruit, at the podcast announcer or the laptop screen, and sometimes I hear myself midway through, and yell context or apologies at the hypothetical listener. I once lived beside a man whom I liked socially at first, but less with each girlfriend he brought home: one night I’d hear slapping and moaning from his unit, and the next, a woman crying in the stairwell. These sounds form a psychic overlay that sometimes complicates or mystifies preexisting relationships.
In run-ins and entanglements with strangers, sight is usually the dominant sense at play: someone you’ve never seen before resembles someone you used to know; two people make accidental eye contact from across a room. But sounds can be much more evocative, and much more typical of strangers in close proximity. The relationships we form with people we hear but can’t see are crushlike. They are intrusive, lingering ambiently and forcing your attention when it’s trained on something else. They also create the sense of being constantly observed: one of the main features of a crush, for me at least, is the feeling of being ceaselessly evaluated by the person I imagine my crush to be. Unlike most crushes, however, these auditory relationships are mutual. If you can hear someone, they can probably hear you.
In her essay “Eavesdropping: An Aural Analogue of Voyeurism?” Elisabeth Weis coins the term “écouteur” for the auditory equivalent of the voyeur — one who overhears without participating. Drawing on psychoanalytic principles, she points out that hearing is often more visceral than seeing: as a child, you are more likely to hear than to witness your parents having sex, and to project a violent meaning onto the scene. “Freud thus prefigured the very cinematic axiom that a threat that is heard but left unseen can allow the audience to imagine something more terrifying than anything a filmmaker could embody in a specific image.”
Sound seeps into your life in ways that images cannot. Watching your neighbor is a choice, whereas the sounds of other lives accompany you through your own. Seeing is believing — to watch your neighbors, as Jimmy Stewart’s character does in Rear Window, is to gather some idea of what they’re up to — but hearing always raises more questions than it answers. As Weis notes, the dynamic of “écouteurism” is one of inclusion and exclusion: sounds transmit information that is not for you; listening places you where you do not belong.
You, in turn, can draw the curtains, or hide in a dark corner of the room; you can control, in large part, what your neighbors see, but have much more limited rein over the sounds you make. Lauren Collee, in a recent essay, notes that the voice has a privileged relationship with the body, and by extension the self — “the most fundamental aspects of who we believe ourselves to be.” For that reason, she writes, its severance from the body, and mobility through space or across social media, can feel particularly unsettling.
A thin-walled apartment is a kind of auditory panopticon. At any given moment, someone might be intercepting your private utterances. Another metaphor might be the algorithm: the auditory data of your private life forms an intimate profile you can’t access. Your musical tastes, your choice of entertainments; whether or not you yell, and at whom; how loud you are in bed, how belligerently you sing in the shower — somebody, somewhere, is forming an impression. And in some way, you are who you are to them.
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In her book The Apartment Plot, Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the symbolic role of the apartment in film and popular culture between 1945 and 1975. The apartment plot, like the “road movie,” is a kind of genre that crosses genres — a dramatic frame that lends itself to horror (Rear Window, Dial M for Murder) as easily as romantic comedy (Bells Are Ringing, Barefoot in the Park). These stories domesticate the excitements, dangers, and possibilities of city living according to their protagonists and creators. The cities are almost all versions of New York.
At the center of the apartment plot is a kind of urban fantasy, or “philosophy of urbanism,” that Wojcik connects to the work of Jane Jacobs. In various ways, these stories animate her “ballet of the good city sidewalk,” featuring serendipitous encounters, casual intimacies, and a “porousness” that is ultimately more productive than unsettling — the convergence of many different people, from many different walks of life, chaotically forming “an orderly whole.” Wojcik, however, distinguishing the classic apartment plot from that of the tenement or public housing unit, notes that the characters in this genre are most often middle-class and white; so is the fictional city they belong to.
Jane Jacobs has been critiqued, even by those who celebrate her work, for the myopia of her own racial and class identifications — as Sharon Zukin wrote in her book Naked City, Jacobs’ urban idyll makes a fetish of “authenticity” while presenting a sanitized construct thereof. It also fails to predict its own influence on the fate of such environments, which, in becoming desirable to elites, become inaccessible to the residents who first made them desirable. The cities of the apartment plot, as Wojcik notes, tend to leave out actual diversity and replace it with imagined or inflated distinctions within the middle class itself: the urban bachelor vs. the suburban family man; the Upper East Side princess vs. the Greenwich Village bohemian, much like the typical ’90s high-school movie pitted the nerd against the jock.
In order for neighbors to meet serendipitously, or provide a secret sliver onto a different sort of life, they need to not already know each other. The precondition for this sort of anonymity is often freedom of choice: of where to live, of whether or not to know your neighbors. I can think of more recent domestic or neighborhood narratives that point to different philosophies of urbanism than those in Wojcik’s study, which ends at 1975. In the stories that come to mind, many of them featuring characters who aren’t white and/or who aren’t middle class, drama or tension arises from the opposite of anonymity: the divergences between linked and adjacent lives (Moonlight, Love and Basketball), close relationships between distinct personalities sharing the same space (Chewing Gum, arguably Seinfeld), or the presence of an outsider who threatens the preexisting social ecosystem and its inhabitants (Do the Right Thing).
In more contemporary narratives, when characters meet characters who don’t share the same background, the result is often complex, uncomfortable, or funny for reasons other than screwball delight. In thinking of modern-day examples of “apartment plots” featuring eavesdropping, two came immediately to mind. The first is a Sex and the City episode where Samantha hears her neighbors fucking nightly through the wall. “Though she had never met them face to face, she already knew them intimately,” Carrie narrates. Samantha decides to join them, by masturbating loudly, and a “threesome in absentia” begins. At first, Samantha “relish[es] her role as the invisible vocalist to an unseen band.” She’s intrigued when the neighbors leave her a note inviting her over. When she knocks on the door, however, she’s horrified to find “a middle-aged Eastern European couple.”
The second example is from the show Search Party, whose protagonists, Drew and Dory, are a couple in their mid-20s. They live in an artfully appointed loft somewhere in Brooklyn; although they are barely employed, Drew’s parents are understood to be well-off. Their upstairs neighbors fight loudly and violently, and Dory asks a reluctant Drew to intervene. When he knocks on their door, a white woman with a cut on her lip answers. He begins an awkward, condescending ramble (“I know what it’s like when things get bad, and the guy you’re with is like a total jerk, and I want you to know that it’s not your fault”). She interrupts him with wild invective, screaming, “Get the fuck out of my business, you baby-cocked bitch!” as he retreats down the hall.
These examples strike me as instances of cosmopolitan bathos — a deflation of that Jacobsian fantasy of joyful coexistence. In either case, the initial sound accompanies a notion of “pure,” unmediated communication — the kind of unexpected encounter with strangers that a city is beloved for providing. Before meeting her neighbors in person, Samantha enjoys that “porousness” both feared and desired in Wojcik’s analysis. The “middle-aged Eastern European couple” on the other side of the wall are not racialized per se — the show is only slightly too genteel for that, although the episode includes an unpleasant characterization of a nonwhite maintenance worker, who answers Samantha’s questions in broken English — but they occupy an age group and ethnocultural category that disqualifies them as sexual peers. There’s nothing reflexive or critical about SATC — it neither meaningfully acknowledges the existence of non-wealthy or non-white New Yorkers, nor idealizes their lives as “authentic” — but its callous rejection of Jacobsian ideas is probably honest to Samantha’s real-life corollary. The disappointment for her is simply the intrusion upon her life of people unlike her.
In Search Party, the sound of neighbors fighting is unsettling, but it gives the couple a chance to heroically intervene. The neighbor who comes to the door is understood to be working-class, and she recurs throughout the series as a foil for the protagonists’ economic and cultural privilege, as well as their fruitless, fumbling search for self-actualization. “Your friends are pointless, entitled, empty idiots!” she yells, in her final showdown with Dory. “They’re the people that were born with everything that I wanted but couldn’t have… you deserve every minute of your suffering.” This rings less like a scathing indictment than the interior monologue of “creative-class” guilt.
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No apartment exists in isolation. Every unit has a position in the building, every building a position on the block, and every block a position in the city — by extension, so does the occupant. An apartment plot that well encapsulates this is Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. Polanski himself plays Trelkovsky, a mild-mannered Parisian of Polish origin. He rents an apartment whose previous occupant, Mme. Choule, killed herself by jumping out the window; he understands her reasons soon enough. His neighbors and landlord scold him constantly for the smallest transgressions, pounding on his walls at the slightest noise. The building abides a strange set of customs he can’t understand or seem to assimilate into; at the same time, he finds himself assimilating against his will into the apartment itself, taking on a seemingly preordained role as an outsider to the prevailing social order.
Whether you read it as a parable of real persecution, through the lens of Polanski’s Polish-Jewish background, and survival of the Holocaust; or of a guilty conscience, with reference to his later conviction of child rape, along with other accusations of sexual violence — and whether you like the movie at all, which I don’t — it gets vividly at an emotional concept, which is a particular bifurcation of “home” and “self.”
In his essay on the film, Dylan Triggs writes of the “prehistory of the apartment,” where “entire histories are told within the space of four walls,” enveloping the unwitting tenant. Sometimes this prehistory presents a concrete risk, like bed bugs, or black mold; sometimes it’s an unease that is harder to quantify, like the “cursed storefront” whose occupants are always out of business within a year. As Wojcik notes, apartment plots often make use of secret objects and architectural features, “like stairs that used to connect parts of a house,” or “secret passageways between apartments that used to connect rooms.” In The Tenant, Trelkovsky finds a tooth wrapped in cotton and lodged in the wall, perhaps, as Triggs writes, “left purposely by Choule to extend her presence in the apartment after her death.”
We idealize home as our own, a space where we can “be ourselves.” The Tenant is about the ways this “self” is usurped, if it ever really existed (Trelkovsky’s past is never described); the way we internalize our role within a broader system, and how social forces — ones that hold you down, and ones you guiltily participate in — intrude upon private space. Elisabeth Weis points out that, in the act of eavesdropping, you don’t have to know what someone is saying to receive emotional information from the sound of their voice. It’s often unclear whether Trelkovsky’s encounters with his neighbors are real or hallucinated. Similarly, your neighbors are almost assuredly never talking about you. But their voices are a spectral presence in your private space, a seepage from the outside. You imbue them whatever, and whoever, is “out there.”
In taking an apartment, you are entering a web of preexisting dynamics, taking on the role of the person who resides there. And yet the act of renting an apartment is often idealized as an act of independence: a rite of selfhood, of passing from the delimited life of one’s family home to a life of greater self-direction and reliance “out in the world.” In that way, the apartment can also symbolize the rude epiphany that one’s place “out in the world” is as relational and contingent as the world one hopes to burst through. Less fantastical than the “ballet of the good city sidewalk,” these constant disruptions to the ideal of isolation — the reminder that, even while alone, you exist in relation to other people — are as close to an authentic city experience as one can find.