But this has much to do with the absurdity of being poor in a city that’s obviously wealthy, in the material sense.ĭoNormaal (left) and Acacia Porter in Fantasy A Gets a Mattress. And this brings me to another aspect of Mattress: it’s a funny movie. But that did not stop him from posting more flyers (some even reached Green Lake) nor sour his sense of humor. (The former is played by the latter.) One of his flyers asked: “Want a Rapper for a Roommate?” It was clear this rapper could not afford to live in his own city. For them, the poorer you are, the more dysfunctional, disconnected, and disorderly the city becomes.įantasy A, in the movie, is a funhouse mirror of the actual Fantasy A, who began posting flyers all over Seattle around the middle of the 2010s. Fantasy A and others in his film are on the other side of this reality. And the higher your income, the more coherent the city becomes. If you can afford to live here, you can get to work on time, or simply work from home, or not be dependent on underfunded public services. Those who are behind the Seattle Is Dying movement, members of Safe Seattle, or who attack the only politician fully devoted to the working class and progressive policies, Kshama Sawant, have only this as their understanding: money makes the city. In this art, it’s nothing but normal for, say, a Capitol Hill apartment building, a Beacon Hill sidewalk, a University District overpass, and a Northgate parking lot to become, in the editing room with continuity and color correction, one and the same place. And this is the way it should be it’s not for nothing we call cinema “the grand illusion.” The coherence of interiors or exteriors is fabricated because, as any filmmaker knows, location fidelity is almost next to impossible. Though Mohajerjasbi’s film deals, in part, with gentrification and racist policing, he presents a coherent city. And those with deep pockets increasingly blamed progressive leaders for the negative externalities of the affordability crisis-homeless camps, petty crime, vanishing Seattle, and so on. One by one, iconic businesses-the city’s “soul”-closed their doors. In this way, Mattress and Place are about a Seattle radically transformed by a tech boom ignited by the e-commerce corporation Amazon.ĭuring this period, the billions speculators spent on new office and luxury towers made the city’s skyline almost unrecognizable and inflated housing values displaced the working classes, many of whom were people of color. Both films are set in Seattle, and were shot around the same time (the end of the previous decade). David Norman Lewis and Noah Zoltan Sofian directed the former Zia Mohajerjasbi, the latter. When considering Fantasy A Gets a Mattress, it’s instructive to compare it with Know Your Place.
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