Why do villains always reside in homes created by master modernists? In “Villains (4616 Dundee Dr.),” a song from his 2014 album “The Ambassador,” Gabriel Kahane poses the important query. The Lovell Health House, located at the same address in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, was built in the late 1920s by Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra for health expert and newspaper columnist Philip Lovell. In the 1997 movie “L.A. Confidential,” drug-dealing pimp-pornographer Pierce Patchett takes control of the Health House and has his staff undergo plastic surgery to make them seem like movie stars. Patchett eventually passes away in a chair in the living room, no longer able to take advantage of the healing light that streams in through Neutra’s south-facing ribbon windows.

Not every villain in a movie lives in a modernist home, and not all villains do. However, there are now sufficient instances to constitute a solid cliché. In the 1934 film “The Black Cat,” the demonic architect Hjalmar Poelzig lives in a castle designed in the International Style. The sophisticated spy Phillip Vandamm lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired cantilevered hideout in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” In Brian De Palma’s “Body Double,” the octagonal watchtower designed by John Lautner in the Hollywood Hills serves as the inspiration for a gory murder scheme. In “Lethal Weapon 2,” the Garcia House, designed by the same architect, serves as the residence of a despicable South African diplomat. A Palm Springs gangster from “The Damned Don’t Cry” as well as slick criminals from “The Night Holds Terror,” deadly gymnasts from “Diamonds Are Forever,” a drug-dealing record producer from “The Limey,” a super-wealthy serial killer from “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” a pyromaniac counterfeiter from “To Live and Die in L.A.,” and another porn mogul from “The

“Don’t Worry Darling,” the newest entry to the canon, lavishly utilises Neutra’s Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs. For the department store tycoon Edgar J. Kaufmann, who had already commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, the house was constructed in 1946. The house gained notoriety as a result of two photographs: a black-and-white image by Julius Shulman, in which the building glows against a desert sunset, and a candy-coloured image by Slim Aarons, in which well-groomed women are arranged around the home’s pool while sipping cocktails. When viewed side by side, the photographs show how modernist architecture evolved from avant-garde utopianism to capitalist excess in terms of its cultural function. Both images are a little bit too flawlessly shining to be trusted. The observer easily imagines sinister backstories.

The fantasy aspect of “Don’t Worry Darling” is initially emphasised, bringing Aarons’s photograph to posh life. The Victory Project, a covert corporation controlled by genius C.E.O. Frank (Chris Pine), is the owner of the Kaufmann House. Frank, a square-jawed cross between Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, exhorts his followers to question the status quo, promote innovation, and transform the world. This is the modernist goal reduced to psychobabble from Silicon Valley. The film degenerates into high-concept horror as it should, dramatising the discrepancy between the ideal of perfect order and the realities of human conduct. That gap plagued the architectural vanguard from the beginning, which is why these homes appear ominous in movies.

The evils of modernism have long been a source of debate in the architectural community. The “Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains” collection by Chad Oppenheim and Andrea Gollin, published in 2019, and Christine Madrid French’s book “The Architecture of Suspense: The Built World in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock,” released earlier this year, are two works of literature on the topic. The film director Thom Andersen, who has long resided in a home that was partially constructed by R. M. Schindler, provided the most insightful and critical commentary. Andersen accuses Hollywood of defaming the great tradition of modernist residential architecture that can be found all over Southern California in his 2003 documentary, “Los Angeles Plays Itself.” The “clean modern machinery for improved living” designed by Schindler and Neutra are cynically transformed into “dens of depravity.”

The demonization of mid-century modernism fits well with other well-established populist tics of Hollywood. When bad guys aren’t marching icily through a Lautner open-plan space, they might be looking icily at an abstract painting or listening icily to classical music. They frequently have a hazy gay effect or talk with a faintly Continental accent. Regular joe heroes shudder at such un-American behaviour. In “Lethal Weapon 2,” Mel Gibson goes so far as to pull down one of the Garcia House’s pylons using a cable fastened to his muscular truck, completely destroying the structure. Gibson jumps about with frat-boy joy as the building crumbles. Andersen draws attention to a fundamental lie in the show: Joel Silver, the film’s producer, has purchased and repaired Wright homes. The hoi polloi are regarded as unsuited for what the culture-industry élite deems suitable.

But the pattern goes deeper than just hypocrisy in Hollywood. The visual language of modern design is already present in 1920s French and German movies. An aristocratic diva and a necromantic engineer live in Cubistic homes designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens in Marcel L’Herbier’s arty science fiction film “L’Inhumaine.” A criminal mastermind by the name of Haghi plans from inside an oppressively geometric bank building in Fritz Lang’s “Spies.” These varyingly beautiful and evil images reflect societal ambivalence toward modernist aesthetics and related technological progress. They also reflect the ambivalence of cinema, where both directors and architects have an extraordinary ability to shape our perspectives. In his 1963 film “Contempt,” the late Jean-Luc Godard skillfully incorporated these ideas, in which a vulgar Hollywood producer commandeers the brick-red, trapezoidal Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri. Lang is also present, performing as himself.

Such themes frequently developed as a result of the directors’ own passions. The German architect Hans Poelzig, who helped create the sets for the horror classic “The Golem: How He Came Into the World,” is cleverly honoured by the name of the devil in “The Black Cat.” (The Black Cat’s director, Edgar G. Ulmer, got his start in German cinema.) The head of design of M-G-M, Cedric Gibbons, promoted the Art Deco and modern movements; among other films, “To Live and Die in L.A.” features his own home. It appears like the camera is pulled automatically to straight, clear lines. Large windows with steel framing serve as screens for the drama of human life. With his masterful parodies of contemporary architecture in “Mon Oncle” and “Playtime,” Jacques Tati made the most of this impact. In the latter, families watch television in an apartment building behind plate-glass windows that include additional screens.

In the example of the director Josef von Sternberg, who in the early 1930s hired Neutra to construct a retreat in the San Fernando Valley, the cliché of the International Style villain becomes delectably self-referential. A sleek battleship-style home designed by Neutra is surrounded by waterways that resemble a moat and is bordered on one side by a curved metal wall. Later, he made up unbelievable stories about his work with the director. Sternberg was known to be eccentric and dictatorial, but it’s unlikely that he requested an electrified moat to keep off intruders or the removal of bathroom door locks to prevent insane ladies from killing themselves on the property. Ironically, the architect is concocting his own version of a villainous plot, one that would later be used as the basis for James Bond films.

When modernist homeowners aren’t downright crept, they frequently err on the side of moral ambiguity, vacillating between right and wrong. No normal, well-adjusted person seems to have ever lived in Wright’s enormous neo-Mayan pile in Los Feliz, despite it having been featured in more than twenty movies, from “House on Haunted Hill” to “Blade Runner.” The siren call of mid-century design can entice a righteous person into the shadows. In “High and Low” by Akira Kurosawa, Kingo Gondo, a brutal but morally upright shoe industry boss, enjoys panoramic views from a stark villa perched on a hill. He quickly learns that the view is not just one way: the resident below, a deranged medical intern, becomes fixated on the overlord and exacts revenge on him. Although Toshiro Mifune portrays Gondo as a nobleman, the character doesn’t become heroic until he is forced to leave the villa and adopt a simpler way of life.

A few contemporary films have abandoned the villain cliché and provided wholesome counternarratives, as though in response to Andersen’s criticism. In the 2011 film “Beginners” by Mike Mills, the Lovell Health House is given up to a gay museum director who came out much later in life. This director’s free spirit thrives in Neutra’s light-filled spaces. According to Mills’ script, the main character resided not far from Harry Hay, a pioneering gay rights activist former,’s home. This alludes to the fact that Schindler and Neutra routinely accepted commissions from individuals such as left-wing activists, labour lawyers, theatrical critics, music educators, poets, and professors. These mansions didn’t become pricey showpieces until many years later.

The L.A.-based crime drama “Bosch,” which stars the stern, unyielding detective hero Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch, is another option for architecture enthusiasts. Bosch lives in a cantilevered home on Blue Heights Drive, high in the Hollywood Hills. We are told that one of Bosch’s cases served as the basis for a lousy cop movie, which allowed him to purchase the location. A modernist icon from 1934 is right around the corner—the aerie that Neutra created for German-born art patron Galka Scheyer. When the Blue Four—Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky—arrived in California in the 1920s, Scheyer nearly single-handedly established an American audience for their art. She had the street named in the artists’ honour when she moved into her new house. Even if Scheyer and Bosch come from different ages and realities, it is comforting to think of them as neighbours.

The Hollywood modernist psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” helmed by Olivia Wilde, is rewritten by framing it in terms of gender and sexuality. A female director gives rooms that had previously been the purview of male architects and male directors a cool eye. The Kaufmann House and the contemporary ranch-style residences that surround it are revealed to be a sick construct where women are maintained in a state of cosy subjection and are always accessible for carnal pleasure.

The situation is eerily similar to current academic research on the psychology of mid-century architecture. Sylvia Lavin, a historian, has identified connections between Neutra’s writings and those of Wilhelm Reich, who proposed the presence of “orgone energy”—a kind of libidinal force field—and created “orgone boxes” to amplify it. “Provide a decent sex life,” “guarantee the generation of psychically healthy offspring,” “avoid bodily anguish and sickness,” and “ecologically improve the environment” are just a few of the goals Neutra reportedly had in mind for his structures, according to Lavin. His bright bedrooms had an exhibitionist feel to them because sex is no longer kept secret in dingy Victorian quarters. Harry Styles and Florence Pugh’s characters in the song “Don’t Worry, Darling” break into a bedroom in the Kaufmann House and fight it out against a dresser, which is made possible by the lack of protruding drawer handles. This scene epitomises the idea of an aphrodisiac house. It turns out that Frank, the head of the capitalist cult, is spying on them.

The sensual accuracy of the movie’s visual surfaces, which were created by Katie Byron for production design, Erika Toth and Mary Florence Brown for art direction, and Rachael Ferrara for set decoration, has an alluring effect throughout. We can still appreciate the groove-handle drawers, the inlaid turntable, the disappearing glass corners, and the seamless transition between the interior and exterior even when Styles’ acting abilities are pushed to the limit. Although the Kaufmann House is intended to be a tool of cunning control, the message is undermined by the exquisite decor. No matter how obscene the behaviour on exhibit, some sort of indirect tribute is being paid, which is a trait of arch-villain architecture across the decades.

Analysis by: Advocacy Unified Network