Infrastructure Romance

I moved to Houston from Kerala, India in 2017 and, upon trying to walk around the neurotically clean, empty sidewalks with MC Escher-esque design, realized that Americans walking in movies and writing in dim-lit diners was a Hollywood simulation. Retrospectively, it is not surprising that this was when I started paying more attention to the lived environment of cities and discovered a subgenre of movies that I like to call Infrastructure Romance—movies in which the landscape and city that the movie is set in is of intellectual interest to the main characters and becomes entangled in the fate of their romance. For example, Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive is a love letter to Detroit set in the ruins of post-2008 collapse, which feels like the ideal place for vampires Adam and Eve to live under the radar. In Columbus, the surprisingly good architecture of Columbus, Indiana, is what the leading couple connect on to escape their morbid realities. In the German film Undine, 20th-century Berlin history is transposed with a modern retelling of a mermaid fairytale.

Infrastructure Romance movies contain eloquent monologues about architecture and cityscapes. In Undine, the man asks his lover, who is a historian, to do her talk on the history of the Humboldt Forum for him because "you say such clever things in such a nice way." The monologue describes the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace to be the Humboldt Forum. It also forebodes how fairytales repeat and sets up the third act. The scene that establishes the intimacy between Adam and Eve in Only Lovers Left Alive is a late night drive through Detroit neighborhoods in a 1982 Jaguar XJS. The scene is an ode to the city's architecture and role in technological revolutions, and forebodes the fate of the lovers who need uncontaminated human blood to survive, while commenting on the decline of western civilization. By using elements of the city as a narrative tool, these movies bring to the foreground what usually remains in the background for us—the fate of our relationships depends heavily on our lived environments. The relationship of the characters with their lived environment is nostalgic and slightly melancholic. Melancholy is the happiness of being sad, as Victor Hugo put it. Paired with the wishful affection the characters have for the city, Infrastructure Romance movies feels like a love letter written at the end of a deep relationship.

In Infrastructure Romance, the lead character's interest in architecture and their lived environment is used to signal that they are desirable companions to their lovers and to the audience. The characters use this knowledge to flirt and show their desirability to their romantic interests (and by extension the audience). Architecture and interest in the lived environment, like high connoisseurship in music or cinema, becomes a form of identity expression in Infrastructure Romance. If impeccable taste in music sets apart John Cussack’s character in High Fidelity, the little details that Adam knows about Detroit in Only Lovers Left Alive and Casey’s knowledge of the architecture history of Columbus sets them apart from others in the eyes of their lovers. In an excellent piece about fashion trends, Blackbird Spyplane expands on the nature of trends and identity. It divides trends into three types—Macro, Micro, and Nano. Nano trends are observable only to the true obsessives, while Macro trends are observed by everyone with a basic pulse on culture. The leads of these movies would fall in the Nano or Micro trend observers of architecture. Though they're not architects or involved in the trade itself, their attention to the lived environment makes them desirable to their lovers and engaging to the audience.

Characters in Infrastructure Romance movies are not architects themselves and do not try to make drastic changes to their lived environments. They appreciate the history of the lived environment with a tinge of nostalgia and make that ability to appreciate a part of their identity. In that sense they tend to be traditionalists. These movies are set in a world where architecture is visual art or metaphor to be appreciated but not tinkered with. The lovers are trapped in the terrain and are observers of how the lived environment is entangled in the fate of their romance. Filmmaker Christian Petzold talks about this in his interview about Undine (slight spoiler alert):

“She knows everything, but nothing has changed. Everything’s the same. Every man betrays her. She has to go and then come back to our world. There is no development and she’s searching. She has a desire for development, to come out of the curse. And I think we also have a desire for development when we are looking at the history of Berlin. We don’t want these retro houses and these retro castles. We want development. That’s why it was a good idea to choose this place.”

This hints at the West’s helplessness and struggles to change the lived environment in the last 15 years. We live in a time when there is elite overproduction of content about infrastructure and urbanism, but the actual lived environment appears stuck and unwilling to change. This gives all our ideas around urbanism a touch of nostalgia for a future that never seems to arrive. This yearning is reflected in Infrastructure Romance.

In his book Beautiful Necessity, Claude Bragdon describes architecture as the only pure art form apart from music in that while music is experienced in time alone, architecture is experienced in space alone:

“Music, which is in time alone, without any relation to space; and architecture, which is in space alone, without any relation to time, are thus seen to stand at opposite ends of the art spectrum, and to be, in a sense, the only “pure” arts, because in all the others the elements of both time and space enter in varying proportion, either actually or by implication.”

In this sense, Infrastructure Romance movies use architecture and the lived environment similar to how music is used in film to heighten emotions, to transition between scenes, to forebode and create suspense. Architecture is Frozen Music as Bragdon describes:

“..since that which in music is experienced by harmonious intervals of time and pitch, successively, after the manner of time, may be translated into corresponding intervals of architectural void, and solid, height and width.”

The lived environment is the frozen background score to Infrastructure Romance. The characters are more aware of this background score because falling in love is when everything else outside of yourself comes into sharp attention and feels to either conspire for or against you. The audience gets to observe how this frozen background score forebodes and heightens the relationship of the lovers. The frozen background score of Infrastructure Romance dares the audience to make the lived environment a part of the narrative.