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The Motel

An Image of Elsewhere

University of Auckland

This article proposes that the motel, with its conjunction of mobility and temporary arrest, is activated in the domestic present by the aftereffects of violent national or local occupation. Often described in terms of a temporary and secondary homeliness, the motel might also be entertained as an imagining of everyday life without routine, without closure: the possibilities of mobility disconnected from linear progress and allied instead to chance and desire. The motel is envisioned as an architectural remnant of an often violent longing for distance and freedom that colors colonial and domestic enterprises. Acknowledging Benjamin’s desire for a "heightened graphicness," this article attempts to read the motel as an interference device, a transgressive architecture that complicates linear accounts of progress, family, and history. The motel as interference device is fabricated in an "image" drawn from various constructions of motel; from Nabokov’s Lolita, Edward Hopper’s Western Motel, Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel, and Meaghan Morris’s At Henry Parkes Motel.

Key Words: motel architecture • interiority • graphic image • Edward Hopper • Walter Benjamin • Laurie Anderson

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