Hotel Film and the Erotics of Adjacency

Abstract

Every day in every hotel, dirty linen is transformed into clean sheets. The traces of the previous night’s bodies are removed. Through such processes of effacement, hotels sanction fleeting and anonymous intimacies. The injunction “Do Not Disturb” refers not only to the unwanted incursion of housekeeping staff into private rooms, but it also signals a broader principle of hotel governance: discretion. In his essay “Sex and Hotels”, Geoff Dyer makes a case for the hotel as a space of heightened eroticism. However he will argue that the sexiness of this space is not in fact predicated on any positive qualities; rather, the hotel’s sterility, impersonality, and starched white sheets gives its occupants carte blanche to engage in whatever they desire: “The sheets are clean, the toilets are clean, everything is clean, and this cleanliness is a flagrant inducement to—what else?—filthiness.”1 Dyer goes on to note how this blankness and impersonality creates a “cocoon” that is “sealed off from the outside world,” where the minds of its occupants are focused squarely on bed-based activities. The temporary suspension of identity, as one relinquishes their passport, he argues, confers upon the hotel occupant “an ethical equivalent of diplomatic immunity” and a “moral weightlessness.”2 While the political implications of Dyer’s account of hotel sex might trouble us insofar as they leave untroubled the implications of the “moral weightlessness” of the guest (frustratingly, his writing models the very same ethical equanimity that he confers on this essay’s object), his tautological suggestion that hotel rooms “generate a special subset of room behavior that one might term hotel room behavior”—which he will then go on to name as “sex”—is a claim that I want to explore here.