Hoarders: Telling Stories with Trash

Each show begins with a disclaimer: hoarding is a mental disorder. That’s true, although the DSM-IV doesn’t describe an individual diagnosis for the condition. Instead, hoarding – or disposaphobia – falls under OCD. The hoarders appearing on each episode of the A & E series Hoarders do seem to suffer from compulsive saving behavior. However, they don’t present OCD in ways that might be familiar to tv and film viewers who haven’t watched the series: they save stuff, all stuff, any stuff, including broken fish tanks, animals, excrement, garbage, decomposing Halloween pumpkins, carcasses of vermin or pets, comic strips, clothing, boxes of stuffed animals bought at garage sales, broken furniture that someone might be able to fix. The men and women profiled on the weekly reality show have saved stuff until they no longer have space to sleep or sit down: one woman tied herself onto her portable toilet at night so that she wouldn’t fall over and end up lodged between piles of trash. Some have lost their children; many have no friends; most of their living spaces are condemned as uninhabitable by the time therapist, professional organizer, Got-Junk crew, and housecleaners meet them at the door.

Some of the hoarders profiled this season admit that they have struggled with psychiatric conditions, and a number commit to counseling by the end of their episodes. Their mental health, though, isn’t what compels neighbors, family, and friends to contact town or city authorities; smells emanating from hoarders’ houses, or their dilapidated physical condition, prompt official involvement. Investigators deem a hoarder’s house unsafe or unhealthy; without serious cleanup, most of the hoarders’ houses featured so far this season would be torn down. They are catastrophic messes: goats ate through one wall of Gail’s house in Oklahoma; both of Judi’s legs were amputated because untreated bug bites on her feet led to life-threatening infections; Dale brought vermin into his apartment building in Boston with the items he retrieved from dumpsters; more than one hoarder had no working toilet — instead of repairing that situation, Judi and Augustine used adult diapers, disposing of soiled ones in their bathrooms; cleanup crews at one hoarder’s house found dead rats crushed under stuff in the kitchen and crews at another house found stray cat carcasses. Clearly, these are houses at the point of disrepair.

I have been nauseated watching this show, horrified, angry, disgusted, disbelieving. Bette Davis’ “What a dump!” can’t begin to characterize the state of the living spaces shown on Hoarders. Despite that, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this show – particularly, about the question why this show now? Now, when our national leaders encourage us to shop until we drop even after major domestic tragedies and to spend, spend, spend to jump start a failing economy? What are we suppposed to do with all that stuff we accumulate for psychological comfort and as evidence that we are doing our part? Now, when we all save recyclables until recycling day (how quickly the bottles, cans, and paper accumulate if we forget to put the stuff out for pickup one week and then have to keep on saving until the next scheduled pickup day)? Now, when obsolescence of just about any consumer product begins before a sale’s person swipes our credit card – and we need the newer model before the old one wears out? Can we justify throwing the obsolete product out when it’s still working, even if we purchase a newer version? Now, when we can auction our trash on eBay or trade it on Freecycle (why didn’t my parents save my Barbie and Ken dolls; they’d be worth something today)? Now, when reports about the (potential) artistic and economic value of garbage appear in the news media? E. L. Doctorow created fiction out of others’ trash, publishing Homer and Langley this year, a book about brother hoarders who lived in New York City during the 1940s (the Collyer brothers were found dead in their apartment in the midst of over 100 tons of stuff that they had collected). Chinese industries buy tons of American trash for all the plastic it contains: they have developed a way to transform discarded plastic into insulation. Why this show now, when we have access to so much unfiltered electronic information that, at times, it’s difficult to discern what’s important from what’s not (Tara hoarded because she couldn’t figure out which material objects might matter to her in the future) – and so, until we can tell the difference, whenever that might be, we might be, as Tara was with material objects, prone to save it all – on a blog, in a desktop folder, in messages forwarded to an email inbox?

The men and women profiled on the A & E series don’t save electronic data, bytes, feeds, alerts, portals, digital texts, blogs, websites, tweets, cyberfriends – at least that’s not the type of compulsive saving behavior discussed on any of the episodes so far this season – they accumulate piles and piles of material, physical stuff. Augustine’s son described his mother’s house an “alluvial flood”, a testament to her life, although decomposing, a physical monument nonetheless, what she can leave behind.

So when I think about the question why this show now, I confront these thoughts: there’s nothing new about hoarding (the Collyer brothers evidence that), except the context, so what does the present-moment context tell us about hoarding today; for instance, does Hoarders depict the other side of a contemporary fetish for web stuff; do the hoarders who tell their stories for the A & E series give viewers a glimpse of what might happen if we printed it all out; is their saving a compulsive need to preserve a physical record of themselves and their worlds – at a time when such records are less and less necessary/desirable/reliable – neat/organized/manageable; does all that stuff “write” their memoirs?

A TLC six-part documentary, Help! I’m a Hoarder, can be accessed on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3akft5wENjw (part 1);

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygRLmJYObwU&NR=1 (part 2);

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGjL9cqa1FU&feature=related (part 3);

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W47tSyYOpx0&feature=related (part 4);

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZTCkvX_6nU&feature=related (part 5);

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f63zmDS6uKQ&feature=related (part 6).