Sound in the (Unheimlich) Home
The power and popularity of the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings stem in part from the type of home (or rather homes, since Eddie and Mitchell’s apartment is captured along with Peter and Raymond’s) documented on tape. As stated earlier, the story of “Shut Up Little Man!” unfolds following Eddie and Mitchell’s move from their middle-class midwestern homes into a low-income housing complex where they encounter sonic traces of its residents. Peter and Raymond’s alcohol-fueled arguments were loud and violent, regularly disintegrating into screaming matches and physical altercations. The soundscape captured on Eddie and Mitchell’s tapes thus reveal neither a loving and peaceful domestic interior nor even a benignly tranquil one. Instead, the recordings offer an aural glimpse into Peter and Raymond’s toxic domestic space – a space that challenges notions of “home” shaped by the ideologies of bourgeois domestic idealism and enters into an uneasy relationship with the figure of the apartment.
Thus, the “Shut Up Little Man!” recordings are a study of the tension between the homely (heimlich) and its intimately related counterpoint, the unhomely (unheimlich). In his writings on “the uncanny”/the unheimlich (the original German word that translates more directly to “unhomely”), Freud elucidates the nuances of this term, the complex set of feelings encompassed by it, and its psychoanalytic origins. He begins his interrogation by unpacking the definition of the unheimlich’s apparent opposite: the heimlich. Heimlich can be defined as “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, dear and intimate, homely […] arousing a pleasant feeling of quiet contentment […] of comfortable repose and secure protection, like the enclosed, comfortable house” (Freud 2003: 126–127). Simultaneously, it refers to that which is “concealed, kept hidden, so that others do not get to know of it or about it and it is hidden from them” (Freud 2003: 129). Although the unheimlich was often deployed as the mere opposite of the heimlich – something strange, unfamiliar, or monstrous – the relationship between these two terms is far more entangled and ambiguous. According to Freud, what makes something unheimlich is precisely its relationship to the heimlich. It is the familiar rendered strange, the comfortable turned uncomfortable, the safe made ghastly, and the hidden revealed. The objects most associated with the unheimlich are those in which the heimlich has slid into the unheimlich – the haunted house, a dead body, an animated severed limb, an unsettling moment of recurrence, a like yet unlike double. For Freud, “heimlich thus becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merges with its antonym unheimlich” (Freud 2003: 134).
Given this connection, domestic space occupies a privileged position in the aesthetics of the unheimlich. As art historian Anthony Vidler contends, the unheimlich is intimately bound to notions of house and home. Following Freud, he argues that “lurking behind” and “erupting” through every image of domestic “happiness […] there is the burden of what is definitely not heimlich” (1992: 24). Although Vidler’s analysis focuses on the image of the haunted house, Peter and Raymond’s apartment represents another kind of unheimlich – a domesticity ruptured not by ghosts or hauntings but by the conditions of poverty and violent interpersonal conflict. Everything the audience of “Shut Up Little Man!” learns about Raymond and Peter’s lives is, of course, only partial, gleaned from recordings – which, as mediations and remediations, do not simply reflect reality but create it – or from the narratives and interviews presented on Eddie’s website and in the 2011 documentary. When consuming these sources, however, one does form an impression of Peter and Raymond’s domestic life that can be characterized as distinctly unhomely. Judging by the content of their arguments and the photos on Eddie’s website, their apartment is messy and run down. Their relationship is fractious, violent, and explosive, exacerbated by tensions over money, alcohol, sexuality, and domestic expectations.
The unheimlich brewing within Peter and Raymond’s apartment is distilled by the audiotapes, which focus almost exclusively on moments of conflict. In most of the tracks, Peter and Raymond are both drunk and angry. The triggers to fight can be small, such as Raymond being too drunk to eat dinner or Peter not wanting to buy him cigarettes, or more significant, such as Raymond believing that Peter stole his wallet or Peter not being able to pay rent. The recordings typically start mid-way through the fight. Raymond, whose expressions of rage take the form of mumbled homophobic rants, during which he regularly threatens Peter and calls him a “piece of shit” and “goddamn cocksucker,” are nearly always eclipsed by Peter’s vocal grandeur (Peter and Raymond 2008). Unlike Raymond, Peter is loud and often articulate in his insults. Being gay himself, he dismisses Raymond’s homophobic name calling and murderous claims with sarcastic and contemptuous insults expressed with (what eventually becomes) iconic force. He easily drowns out Raymond’s speech with his booming cries of “Shut up little man! Shut up little man!” All of the name calling and insults Peter delivers – designating Ray with a series of different women’s names (e.g., “Mabel” or “Alice”), barbs about him getting kicked out of the army, and digs at his being on welfare – are delivered in a loud clear voice and a sarcastic, camp tone that cuts through Raymond’s slurred mutterings (Peter and Raymond 1993). Occasionally a third man, Tony Newton, a forty-year-old itinerant laborer and apparent sexual partner of Peter, enters into their disputes. A rather perplexing figure, he appears as the often-silent witness of their conflicts, occasionally offering a few sentences or serving as a point of tension but rarely engaging as an audible participant.
Over the span of the recordings, it becomes clear that Raymond and Peter’s verbal altercations sometimes turn physical. While listening to the tapes, one hears more than only voices. One can hear feedback from the microphone, traffic from the road, the low murmur of voices or music coming from a TV set, music emanating from the street or Eddie and Mitchell’s apartment, and sonic traces of people’s movements as they interact and intersect with physical objects and bodies. There are several recordings in which the yells are punctuated by thuds and crashes, by objects breaking and limbs making contact. These sounds, though sometimes difficult to decipher, function as indices of physical violence. They are included in the album tracks and presented as part of a distinctly unheimlich comedy. Thus, the violence that permeates Peter and Raymond’s domestic life, along with their voices, is transformed into an auditory Punch and Judy sketch for the entertainment of “Shut Up Little Man!” fans – a sketch created and circulated without the consent of its protagonists.
In 1992, Raymond passed away, leaving Peter and Tony alone in the apartment. The most you hear Tony speak is in an interview with him and Peter conducted by a New Zealand radio producer a few months after Raymond’s death (Peter and Raymond 2008). In this interview, Tony jokes about Raymond and Peter’s fighting, talks about their dogs, and creates the impression that his home with Peter is loving, tranquil, and expressly heimlich. While much of their conversation is good-humored, a far cry from the verbal explosions of Eddie and Mitchell’s recordings, Tony does mention that he regularly beat-up Raymond. This disturbing allusion to Tony’s violence and the role he might have been playing in their home is further underscored by the harrowing interview between Peter and the San Francisco Police, transcribed on Eddie’s website (Sausage “Peter Haskett, Interviewed by the San Francisco Police Department”). In this interview, Peter describes how Tony dragged him out of bed naked, punched and kicked him repeatedly (while wearing steel-toed boots) and told him that he was going to kill him and would enjoy watching him die. Following this incident, which reasserted the ultimate unheimlich lying beneath the claims of homeliness made in the interview, Tony went to prison, and Peter left Steiner Street to spend the rest of his life in a tenement house.
The fights, shouts, slurred speeches, homophobic rants, constant threats, sounds of bodies hitting the floor, limbs making contact, and objects being smashed dominate the recorded soundscape of the “Shut Up Little Man!” audiotapes. All this – combined with the histories of Peter, Raymond, and Tony told through Eddie’s website and the documentary – work to construct the impression that life in apartment three was anything but safe or comforting. Yet, the unheimlich embodied in the “Shut Up Little Man!” audiotapes emerges not only in apartment three’s audible violations of domestic security but also due to its function as an “uncanny” double of Eddie and Mitchell’s home. Although Eddie and Mitchell are fundamentally different from their neighbors (they are young, middle-class college graduates who move to the city for bohemian adventure), they cannot be completely disarticulated from those dwelling in the units around them. Where fans whose access to Peter and Ray is structured by layers of mediation and remediation – the tapes, CDs, or Spotify albums, the tracks that made it onto YouTube (some of which are accompanied by animations or a puppet show), comic strips, a stage play, and, of course, a documentary – hear an unheimlich comedic duo, Eddie and Mitchell experienced these fights in person. Regardless of their subsequent cultural life, the tapes are first and foremost records of Eddie and Mitchell’s lived experiences. The sounds and home(s) they mediated encapsulate their memories revealing an uncomfortably close relationship between their makers and their subjects.
Like Raymond and Peter, Eddie and Mitchell are two men who live together. They shop at the same liquor store and buy cigarettes at the same Walgreens. Each apartment echoes the other with matching doors, a shared balcony, similar floor plans, the same general structure, and identical shoddy building materials. Although the tapes are compiled to emphasize the penetrative power of the sounds generated in Peter and Raymond’s apartment, one can assume that Eddie and Mitchell’s voices may also have penetrated the thin boundary of their apartment walls. While the root causes of their poverty are different – Peter and Raymond are caught in an inescapable poverty exacerbated by age, while Eddie and Mitchell are experiencing a temporary state of being broke, a normal stage following graduation and relocation – they all suffer from economic constraints at this particular moment. That they are able to make these recordings at all is due to their proximity – physical and, to some degree, social – to Peter and Raymond.
In dealing with Peter and Raymond’s sonic assaults, Eddie and Mitchell begin their own never-ending struggle, not against each other, but with Raymond and Peter. The recordings themselves are evidence of this conflict. They embody Eddie and Mitchell’s attempt to reclaim their agency over their own domestic soundscape. Their tape recorder lays territorial claim to the sounds that invade their home; it offers a means to regain control of their domestic space when it proves impossible to silence them. But by recording Peter and Raymond, Eddie and Mitchell are also recording themselves. Throughout the tapes one can hear Eddie and Mitchell yelling at their neighbors to be quiet or banging on their door (Peter and Raymond 2008). The fact that the voices, bodies, and outbursts of Eddie and Mitchell themselves are caught on tape, rendered as audio performances for their audiences, places them in a kind of relational and sonic proximity to Peter and Raymond. Their voices, reactions, and responses are part of the unheimlich soundscape, integrated into the domestic tragicomedy documented on the tapes.
Even as you, the listener, anticipate the dramatic exchanges between Raymond, Peter, and Tony, Eddie and Mitchell’s sonic traces cannot be ignored. The bump of a microphone, a burst of laughter, or an echo of punk music all announce that you are listening not only to Raymond and Peter’s apartment but Eddie and Mitchell’s as well. Peter and Raymond, then, do not necessarily represent the pure opposites of Eddie and Mitchell. Rather, they emerge as Eddie and Mitchell’s dark, unheimlich double, an uncomfortable and unsettling expression of what they might become. Their domesticity embodies that which lurks not only beneath Eddie and Mitchell’s home, but haunts all domestic life, an unhomely that hides in the corners, waiting to emerge. In mediating and remediating the sounds of both apartments, the recordings extract a personal sonic encounter and struggle for acoustic control and mold it into an unheimlich spectacle to be consumed by a public far removed from the conditions and lived realities of Steiner Street.