A refuge for creativity or the first prison of patriarchy? As time goes by, the meaning and value of the bedroom also change.
A new internet star was born in 2017. The musician, whose real name is Claire Cottrill and known simply as Clairo, filmed the music video in her bedroom, in front of a laptop webcam. The song ‘Pretty Girl’, which came out like that, instantly became famous. She, who was a nineteen-year-old girl at the time, said, “That day (the day of filming), her hair was bald and her skin was not good. She had nothing to wear. She didn’t want to move one step from the bed. “I chose this filming method for myself,” she recalled. Six years later, the music video reached a whopping 95 million views and was featured in a British weekly magazine. <옵저버>called her ‘a voice representing the generation.’
This case is not much different from the actions of other musicians, such as Billie Eilish, who started making music in her bedroom. For teenagers, the bedroom is not only a sacred place where privacy is guaranteed, but it is also a kind of small creative ‘hub’. Let’s think about it. Our bedrooms are filled with all kinds of dolls, movie and concert posters, unique clothes and our most personal and secret items. Is there any other place where ideas arise more than this?
Another musician who captures both the aesthetic and social aspects of the bedroom well is Olivia Rodrigo. Her second album released last September
This is not a phenomenon that only occurs in the music industry. Youth is the main character <유포리아>and <오티스의 비밀 상담소> In the same series, the bedroom is literally expressed as ‘a layered world where anything can happen’, and is depicted as a space that shows the contrasting aspects of their lives and emotions. It is an extremely ‘fetish’ place for a set designer. movie <퀸카로 살아남는 법>You can understand this just by thinking about the bedroom of Regina George, a character who appeared in . “We wanted to show the room of the world’s most naughty girl,” said production designer Patricia Cuccia, who worked on the 2004 production. “So that it can be further compared to the rooms of other main characters in the movie.” A huge canopy bed with curtains, expensive furniture colored in pink, and a spacious space that can accommodate all of this. All of this was intentional.
Regina George’s bedroom in the movie ‘How to Survive as a Queen’. YouTube
On the other hand, the bedroom can also become a terrifying prison. Emma Donoghue’s first novel and also made into a movie. <룸(Room)>(2015) is like this. In the movie, a young girl, Joy (Brie Larson), is kidnapped by a man and locked in a small room. And there, he gives birth to and raises a son, isolated from the world. Even if it’s not a newsworthy crime, the bedroom can always be a suffocating space.
In 1977, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber published a study titled ‘The Culture of the Bedroom’, which analyzed the positive and negative aspects of bedroom culture. The two scholars started by empirically observing the American education (parenting) system. According to them, many parents encourage boys to participate in outdoor or outdoor activities that help with socialization, including sports. On the other hand, girls were made to stay in the bedroom as much as possible. The reason was to ‘protect’ children from external dangers such as sexual crimes. In this way, the bedroom became the center of the girls’ world and the most lively and creative place. A place where you can party all night with friends, try on makeup for the first time, listen to music, read magazines, chat on the Internet, and express yourself to your heart’s content.
In this way, various studies on the ‘expressive’ function of the bedroom have been conducted from the 1980s to today. In 2007, scholar Mary Celeste Kearney wrote an essay <생산적 공간(Productive Spaces)>also talked about the bedroom and the true cultural productivity of teenagers. But there were also opposing voices. It mainly took place from a feminist perspective, and they pointed out that double standards inevitably exist at the origins of this aesthetic and creative movement. As mentioned earlier, unlike men, women were restricted in their outside activities and were forced to be domestic.
Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ (1998). Nick Ansell – PA Images/Getty Images
Bedroom culture maintains a very delicate balance. Recently, young artists seem to be using the bedroom as a means of expressing indifference, while at the same time viewing it as a cozy and warm place to protect themselves from the chaotic world and loud outside noise. This phenomenon may also be influenced by the unstable international situation, including COVID-19. But the bedroom can be rejected, overturned, and exploded at any time. The installation work ‘My Bed’ by Tracey Emin in 1998 represents this well. She showed the world a bed covered in traces of her depression and alcoholism (liquor bottles, cigarette butts, used condoms, stained tampons, etc.). Ultimately, the bedroom is the first place where every young woman can exercise her control, power, and freedom of expression, whether positively or negatively. Here we can dream of who we want to be and decide what to do.
