Garage Documentary

CPH:DOX
2020

Adapted from artist Olivia Erlanger and architect Luis Ortega Govela's 2019 book Garage (MIT Press), this documentary explores the history of the garage, from its invention by Frank Lloyd Wright to its transformation into an incubator for subcultures and tech entrepreneurship. Filmed on location in Merced, California, the film considers the evolution of this architectural turned cultural construct, exploring how the garage has come to serve as guest room, game room, home gym, wine cellar, and secret bondage lair. This provocative deconstruction employs the garage as a lens through which to view the advent of suburbia, the myth of the perfect family, and the degradation of the American dream.

The film's characters are: weed dealing nuns, actress Aubrey Plaza, and a live in sex slave. The garage is the id of the home. Often windowless, it’s where the excess of a home spills into, squirreled away into cobwebbed concrete corners. Though designed “for” the car, it is often misused, so to speak, making it a sort of antiprogrammatic space, one both of and separate from the normative family home. It’s where disaffected dads can form maladapted masculinities and grunge rock teens can delude themselves into thinking they’re counterculture, which is to say in this space of difference, the sameness of the white heteropatriarchal family may in fact be formed.