How to be Heroic: A Roundtable Discussion of Hoarders

Randy's "duplicates" from Hoarders Season 4, Episode 5: “Randy and Vicki.”Together in a living room on a chilly January evening, past and present Puritan publicity staff watched Hoarders, a reality series well known for its portrayal of abjection and misery. Each episode focuses on two different hoarders, gathering a team of so-called professionals to help the sufferers out of forced eviction and resulting consequences. Famously, the show exposes gruesome symptoms of this disordered compulsion to collect material things. Below, read a conversation between Rudrapriya Rathore, Hannah Leadley, Kathryn Stagg, Amy Oldfield, and Pamela Dungao directly following a screening of Season 4, Episode 5: “Randy and Vicki.”

Hannah Leadley: I actually have a personal connection here because my grandmother was a hoarder. I mean, not to this level, but a pretty bad level. There’s definitely something about Vicki being demonized right away and speaking as a mouthpiece for so much of the whole family’s sickness. My grandmother had a really traumatic childhood and she’s the oldest of 12 children in an abusive family where all the kids got sent off to foster care. She basically did her best to keep the family together, got married, had the three children she was supposed to have according to convention, and then when her youngest was nine she just cracked. She couldn’t leave her room, she had severe depression, and eventually when everyone left her alone in this big house that my grandfather was paying for her to live in, she just filled it. She filled it up with just the weirdest stuff.

Rudrapriya Rathore: What did she collect?

HL: Everything. The thing that I remember most distinctly from my childhood, because she eventually just moved out of the house, is that I’d go into her room and there’d be frogs everywhere. Stuffed frogs, little ceramic frogs, frog stickers on the mirror—just everything frogs. She had children’s toys and things like that in the basement, too. I remember when we had to move her out of that house it was just chaos. My aunt probably spent two years going through everything.

RR: Where did they move her to?

HL: A nursing home. She’s still there.

RR: Was she really upset to leave her house?

The clean-up crew is there like, we’re here for the husband, we’re here for her son and for her daughter. But Vicki? No ...

HL: Oh, yeah. Like, devastated. An extreme level of devastated. Angry and confused and not able to understand. There was just that level of brokenness.

Pamela Dungao: My grandmother, too. She’s a hoarder. She’s kept so many things in her house and the first time I visited her in the Philippines, there were just dolls, toys, and ceramic figures in rooms collecting dust. She’s kept all my great-grandmother’s things too, her mother. She kept all our clothes from when we were younger—uniforms from when we went to school in the Philippines and she’d take care of us. I asked her why she kept all these things and she said because when we left, it was all she had. So, there is a level of brokenness attached to it, a trauma. They do it in the show. Randy’s problem stems from a traumatic experience of being excluded as a kid and Vicki’s is the death of her father.

HL: And that’s why I think with this show, there’s so much history there that the audience is just not seeing beneath these characters’ trauma. They don’t get it, when they’re saying things like, “She’s a bad mother, she’s a bad wife.”

PD: Like, in that way Vicki is the problem, no? Her hoarding is the problem but it’s hers, so it is affecting others. And when she lashes out, she looks bad because we see everyone else reacting to her anxiety and her anger.

Amy Oldfield: Yeah, and it’s a good point, what you said earlier about how all the family’s story is concentrated on only this one problem of Vicki’s, as though it’s the source of all dysfunction. Like it’s the rotting part that’s bringing the whole family down.

Kathryn Stagg: Vicki seems not even to be the main focus of the team, honestly. The clean-up crew is there like, we’re here for the husband, we’re here for her son and for her daughter. But Vicki? No, Vicki’s, you know, just a mess.

HL: And Vicki’s actually the one who is being the most vulnerable. She actually seems like the most emotionally healthy person there because she’s having an appropriate reaction to what’s happening around her! Even if her life is disorganized and distorted.

AO: She’s very open, yes. At the beginning, she says, “Yes, I’m broken, I’ve been broken since my father died.” She’s very open to the fact that she’s had a mental breakdown and can’t deal with it.

RR: For all of the so-called “psychology” that’s supposed to happen in these episodes, like bringing the doctors in, bringing the moving crew, having that little documentary moment where the doctor tells the camera what’s going on—there’s actually no real explanation or attempt to help you, the audience, empathize with the hoarder. They’ve obviously put their life’s meaning into these objects they’ve collected, and it’s this attempt to shore up the emotional value of your life. There’s no attempt to understand that aspect of the hoarding! It’s just like, look at how much shit she has!

They frame your story for you and frame the cuts and organize all that to create a narrative.

AO: I remember watching one about this guy who would keep collecting all of his dog’s hair, because keeping it meant that his dog wasn’t going to die. He was actually able to articulate that issue with the dog’s mortality, so the camera could capture it. But that was somebody who had a very specific problem that they could articulate. All of these people have similar issues but it’s like, if you can’t articulate it very quickly in a superficial clip—RR: They articulate it for you. They frame your story for you and frame the cuts and organize all that to create a narrative. That’s how they produce it. I mean, there were so many times when they said, “Vicki’s so angry, Vicki’s going into a violent rage. She’s so horribly angry.” They’re crafting that narrative as they film the show, so that the viewer knows exactly what they’re supposed to be feeling and thinking.HL: The contrast then serves to demonize her, even though the very comparison between them has so many layers to it. There’s the misogyny, to begin with, and the class divide—I mean, Randy has the money for all of that storage space, he doesn’t have any family to take care of, he’s not trying to hold people together, so he has the funds to basically buy an arcade space for his vintage machines.RR: They’ve obviously spun their narratives in a deliberately contrasting way. Even the text that comes up at the end of each of their stories is so different. “Randy heroically steps up to help move the machines when no one else could! He really stepped up, and that’s why he was able to open an arcade!”(Laughter.) PD: The tension between Randy and Matt—the mover—was crazy and so typically male. Like, “I’ll move this huge thing by myself and I’ll show you all!” It’s so ridiculously arrogant.KS: I mean, I think there’s something much more heroic about what Vicki’s doing. Supposedly, the attempt to clear out her house failed, and so the attempt to fix her failed, but it’s a hugely heroic thing to go up against years of trauma and try to face that in a matter of days.

I think on shows like this there’s a tendency to go beyond the specific act of hoarding and find a way to make the habit stand in for the person.

AO: None of us would enjoy having someone come into our house and go through all of our stuff. That’s so invasive even if you’re not on television, even if you’re not a hoarder. And that’s where all of her trauma lies.

KS: I think there’s something happening with the way they value her things, too. Like, they throw out all of her stuff with no care. And that’s a running theme throughout the show, because breakdowns always occur right after something’s been thrown out. It’s this idea that just because of the quantity of things she has, nothing could possibly have value, and it’s all trash.HL: At one point, Randy literally says, “These machines are my friends.” He describes this feeling where he has a personal rapport with these vintages machines, and yet he’s not seen as having a problem. They’re setting Vicki up for moments where she very publicly has to turn to the camera to answer questions like, “Do you think you’re a good mother?” They very much lean into every temptation to humiliate her—I mean, why is no one asking Randy whether he’s being a good friend to his arcade machines?

RR: I want to go back to when you were saying that Vicki’s more heroic, Kat. The opening scenes of both Randy and Vicki’s segments are so telling: the first thing you hear in the former is Randy saying, “I’m the world’s foremost collector of amusement park memorabilia.” He literally frames himself as an expert in something. And the first shot of Vicki’s section is her daughter saying, “My mother has a problem.” And the camera pans to Vicki as she says, “I know that I’m helpless, I know that I need help right way.” And it’s so strange, because they clearly want the audience to feel otherwise, but I actually think that Randy’s problem is way more disturbing, because he never does admit that he has a problem. He never does face it.

PD: He also refuses to get help in the end, when they show what happens after the filming. Vicky does.

AO: Yeah. They make a spectacle out of throwing away Vicki’s stuff, but they actually help Randy lovingly move his items to another location. According to his orders! Isn’t that just indulging his sickness? I get that his stuff is worth more money, but still.

RR: It’s like the perceived monetary value of his stuff just transfers power and value to him. Whereas the value of Vicki’s life—her worth, basically—is perceived, like her possessions, to be nil.

HL: If you go into any therapist’s office and mention that your partner is throwing out or damaging your belongings, the therapist’s next question will always be, “Have they hurt you?” Because if you’re abusing someone’s stuff, you’re possibly also abusing that person. And that’s completely ignored by the show!

RR: I hate asking this question, but I always come to this question with reality TV. We know the show is sensationalizing events, we know that’s its purpose. Do we think that the show is aware of how it’s gendering the stakes for each of these people? I mean, Vicki’s going to potentially lose her home and her family—Child Protective Services are going to come for her children, she’s lost her husband by the end of the show, because he divorces her—and then Randy’s stakes are like, about the public not getting to see his valuable machines showcased the way he likes them. And he fights these stakes by literally lifting the machinery to the point where everyone says it’s unsafe. Is there anything more flagrant in terms of a display of masculinity?

... there’s no attempt to even address that origin of trauma or get her a grief counsellor. They just slap a Band-Aid on everything.

KS: I don’t know that the show is aware of how it’s gendering the stakes, as you say. I would say that there are certain narratives that already exist in our culture that are very prevalent and very strong. And you can, as a producer, simply cash in on them and play into them and make these characters more compelling by leveraging those stereotypes. As soon as we see Vicki, we’re already primed to believe that she’s a bad mother. It’s an archetype, so people are already going to see that happening. It’s low-hanging fruit for the producers.

AO: I totally agree. I think that if the positions had been reversed, audiences would be wondering why Vicki didn’t have children, and they’d probably decide that her obsession resulted in her being unmarried and childless with an unnatural love for machinery. Though—I do think it wasn’t a coincidence that Vicki’s assigned therapist was so conventionally attractive and so damn mean. It was very deliberate. They were actively putting these two bodies in the same frame to make it look like Vicki’s was less feminine.

KS: I think on shows like this there’s a tendency to go beyond the specific act of hoarding and find a way to make the habit stand in for the person. At one point, someone turns to Vicki and says, “You’re a mess.” And they’re not talking about the house, or the stuff everywhere, or her problem. They’re talking about her, like, you as a person are a mess.

AO: That’s anti-therapy, basically, like: You are your problems!

HL: I have to say that at the beginning of the episode, I was really excited and I made a lot of Randyland notes because I thought, "Oh my God, they’re going to tear him down, they’re going to expose his toxic masculinity and his horrible narcissism …" and it never happened! I thought for sure when he showed them all his “duplicate Randys,” like all his mannequins of himself, that they’d at least dig a little deeper there! I mean, the guy’s literally saying, “I have to reproduce myself, here’s my own hair on this doll.”

KS: Yeah, it’s a museum of arcade games, which feels sort of academic or historical at first. But then he names it after himself, it’s full of mannequins of himself, and somehow, it’s still treated with respect!

RR: He also says things like, “These machines are what make me interesting. I would be nothing without them.” And you realize that he has this deep-seated fear of some emptiness lurking behind this narcissistic museum. He literally says it, and the therapist never even explores that!

PD: I feel like the therapist went in there and thought, yes, Randy has a hoarding problem but he seems functional overall. Which is not true, because she’s not getting the whole picture of it.

RR: Yeah. Vicki literally says, “Yes, this started happening when my father died,” but there’s no attempt to even address that origin of trauma or get her a grief counsellor. They just slap a Band-Aid on everything. And at the end of her segment, they’re just like, “No one moved on from anything here. The house is just emptied enough to be liveable, but it’s likely to fill again. Our resources have gone unused.” Excuse me, what resources?

Like how the Kardashians have huge rooms that are just their closets. That’s got to be hoarding too, right? They don’t wear the same thing twice!

HL: So, what’s the ultimate purpose of the show?

RR: I mean, to me the purpose is definitely for you to watch it and feel a distinct and perverse pleasure about not being as disgusting or as messed-up as these people, because you don’t feel any desire to keep every strand of hair you shed. It’s literally so you can look at people who are framed as lower than you.

AO: Like, even if your life isn’t too great, you’re still not that.

HL: Or it’s just the way it’s pitched! I mean, imagine watching an episode of CRIBS that takes place in a 600,000 square foot apartment and there’s excessive stuff everywhere. The owner is like, “Well, I need these six Lamborghinis, actually, to feel okay.” Like how the Kardashians have huge rooms that are just their closets. That’s got to be hoarding too, right? They don’t wear the same thing twice!

RR: That’s extremely interesting. If it wasn’t for the lighting and the camera’s cuts and the glamour and the way they talk to these people, it wouldn’t be all that conceptually different, except that we look enviously at one and with distaste at the other.

KS: I always find it really ironic that we live in a capitalistic world that is always begging you to buy things, and Hoarders is broken up by commercials trying to sell you things, and here are some people who’ve filled their lives up with things, which is what we’re told we’re supposed to do! But we think of them as sick and grotesque. They’ve done exactly what was asked of them. But a lot of the stuff here looks used or old, so it’s ugly.

PD: It definitely feels exploitative, the way the show differentiates between mental health and illness. There’s a moment in the show where the “professionals” are in the process of moving things around and point out that we should watch out for how these hoarders react when their things are being touched or moved. When they get angry, when they’re rattled, we’re supposed to be turned off by that behaviour. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We all have an emotional connection to material things.