Joanna Walsh - Hotel

It is the only place I am happy.

All the things we hardly dared to do together.

III

I’m back in the vorhof , the vestibule, the only place, in Grand Hotel the movie, where we see the hotel staff.

VANEIGEM

The bourgeois no-man’s-land of exchange.

I have my copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem.

The lobby is where the exchange goes on, furtive. I am leaving the hotel (to go, where?). I don’t pay, also furtively; I don’t want the others to know I’m getting it all, apparently, for free.

(I enclose myself in embarrassing parentheses.)

VANEIGEM

Nothing moving, only dead time passing.

In a hotel, as in a hospital, I am not at home. I am required to do no home work. Ordinary things are done for me: cooking, shining shoes. I am rendered helpless. I have rendered myself helpless. I treat myself as I normally do others. It is, I suppose, a kind of self-othering. In a hotel I can get anything, anytime, but nothing I want, or need. It is a place where I am taught to become someone with desires, that is, someone whose desires meet what the hotel provides, on hotel terms — a hotel person. I’ve finally become someone, but I don’t recognize myself. Like Freud in his railway carriage, here I am one side of the mirror, and, (equally, but differently) on the other: “Hello.” In a hotel, I’m always searching for the reflexive verb. Could it be self-serving?

This desire to serve — is it selfless, or selfish? There are hotels where you can self-serve — a credit card in the door, you’ll never see anyone lower down the order than yourself. Now that’s a real isolation unit. It’s not for me. In a hotel, whether guest or staff, I relax in the presence of someone else’s authority. But what about the flipside: the servers (now that’s the name for an implement)? Service is a strong word. Things can be put into it, and taken out of it again. Something can be made to serve, as can someone, for the time being, in a hotel as it can at home, though it’s easier here; in a hotel at least you can get rid of your server with a tip, however awkward the tipping point.

It’s surprising how few of the stories in Grand Hotel concern the staff — apart from frontman Senff (Jean Hersholt), the servers are content to remain ghosts. Senff is an unsatisfactory character who seldom steps beyond the lobby, either into or out of the hotel. He remains at reception by the switchboard, which is as much of a character as he is, in this movie about switched connections. Only once, in the film’s opening scene, does Senff the ghost porter overstep a boundary, using a hotel line to call the hospital about his pregnant wife. Life happens (people are born) outside the hotel, especially for Senff, whose story never crosses any of the other strands of plot. His connections with the guests are purely professional and he is necessarily fooled by appearances; it’s part of his job. “I don’t believe it!” is his response to the revelation that the Baron is a thief. “I know people.”

Do I know what serves me, and is it the same thing I am serving?

What do the waiters look like when they take off their waistcoats, those black waistcoats with the multiple pockets like ticket pockets but longer, slanted horizontal? Do they look like stripped penguins? The pockets are laid flat against their abdomens. In them, they keep different denominations, but you cannot see the shape of what they will bring out, only that there are little slits in their sides, ranked like ribs, out of which and into which they can put surprising things. Permeability is a feature of abjection. It is the human made serviceable. The abject is what a hospital cannot treat, and maybe not even a clinic. Despite its holes, it insists on still existing. It keeps on going, just as though it were a person: self-serving, unpermeated, whole. The abject is also what we need to remain abject, what we desire to continue to exist to serve us; what we need to expel, pay off, need not to acknowledge as quite human — dress it up in what uniform you like.

Abjection literally means “the state of being cast off.”

Dora gave Freud fourteen days’ notice of quitting.

She paid Freud for his services, but it was she who gave notice.

FREUD

That sounds like a serving girl, or a governess.

But Freud did not say who, in this scenario, was the server, who was the served.

Dora cast off Freud, in the end. She cast off everyone: her family, their friends. She went away to stay, perhaps, at a hotel, where she was clean, clean as a hotel bathroom. She lived for her studies, and did not think of marriage . She was no longer dirty, was not put to use. She was no longer abject, at the mercy. Maybe it was lonely. Maybe things couldn’t enact, not even words, after she refused to employ any actors. Eventually, said Freud, “life would win her back.” When life won, we hear no more from Dora. Did she lose, perhaps?

I can leave. No one’s stopping me. That’s the difficult thing. No one’s stopping me from doing anything. But it’s so difficult to lack all obstacles.

I must learn to live without the hope of serving, of being served.

I must learn to live without hope.

(This is not as hopeless as it sounds.)

IV

At the end of Grand Hotel , the Doctor (Lewis Stone), who is not the hotel dick, but, as in Room Service , acts as a kind of moral policeman, insists that, in the hotel, “nothing ever happens,” but the old cynic is barking up the wrong tree. We’re meant immediately to notice he’s wrong, as the movie’s full of action — but the illusion is that it ever comes to anything.

Grand Hotel is a movie about illusion, pretense, imitation, including the illusion that its stories have endings. It starts with endings: clerk Kringelein dying, Grusinskaya at the end of her career, Baron (John) Barrymore on his uppers, Beery Preysling demanding more drink to down the dregs of his failing company. “This is the end,” says Garbo/Grusinskaya, “I always said I’d leave off when the time came.” But she doesn’t; at the Grand Hotel no one can. Everyone goes on and on repeating just what they did before. Grusinskaya returns to dancing; Preysling hangs onto his company with a lie; Kringelein, despite his decline, spins out through the hotel’s plate glass revolving door — a style that has migrated from hotels and is now more likely to be found in offices — in the movie’s final shot, Flaemmchen on his arm, with all appearance of gusto, forgetting the Baron’s death in his determination to perform for the next Grand Hotel.

Maybe Kringelein found a cure. It looks like he was never ill.

Hotel A

In a niche set on the stairs between each floor, an artwork representing a woman who was alive once, in the style of artists who also lived, but not painted by these artists, and not painted in the presence of the woman, who died some centuries ago.

Hotel B

In the lift shaft: stencils of skeletal figures by an artist who usually graffitis the outside of buildings.

Hotel C

The ceiling in the restaurant, painted with blackboard paint. Words on it. The chicken: too salty.

Hotel D

A president and a famous movie director have stayed here, among others. I bled on the sheets, unexpectedly, washed them in the shower, and dried them with the electric hairdryer. The mushrooms were salty.

Hotel E

It makes me shy to eat such a grand dinner in the empty restaurant at lunchtime. It makes me shy to swim alone in the circular basement pool.