Invisible Walls: The Mundanity and Metatext of Terrace House

"... six strangers live in a house together while their interactions are observed by a panel of hosts as well as ourselves, the viewers."Every time I tell someone about Terrace House, I am met with the same responses. They tell me they’re four episodes in and they can’t go on. They shy away from the show’s pacing (slow), the show’s tone (chill, boring), and its direction (aimless). Others tell me they’ve already seen it, and we talk about the way it revels in passivity and in the “unscripted” ordinary lives of people. Some, however ambivalent, are willing to give it a shot, intrigued by my selling pitch: a Japanese reality TV show where six strangers live in a house together while their interactions are observed by a panel of hosts as well as ourselves, the viewers.Terrace House first ran for eight seasons on Fuji Television in Japan. Since it was rebooted by Netflix, the show has gained a wider, more global audience, and a reputation for being metatextual but otherwise devoid of that necessary, reality-TV-trademark: drama.I admit it. Compared to The Real World, Terrace House is boring. There is no money prize at the end. There are no challenges in between each segment. No one gets voted off. Members come and go as they please, each one joining Terrace House for personal reasons that range from investigating what it’s like to live with others in a new city (or country) to advancing their own careers. The most taxing drama in the first season on Netflix, Boys & Girls in the City, hinges on stolen meat—or rather, the misunderstanding represented by that meat. And yet, despite this lack of drama, it’s clear that in this show, as in life, each housemate is looking for connection, a sense of comradeship, and sometimes even a romantic partner.Some things do happen. They hang out, cook meals, play video games and catch up. They go on dates in restaurants and museums, to the movies, at the beach. In some ways, Terrace House dissolves the threshold between boredom and leisure. It depends upon the ordinariness of the individual lives that exist beyond the show’s reach. These people are part-time baristas, aspiring artists and actors, designers, models, hairstylists, dancers, and students. Arman Bitaraf, a half-Iranian, half-Japanese expat from Hawaii, spends the first season of Terrace House as an “aspiring firefighter” while working as a landscaper and surfing in his spare time.In his New Inquiry essay, “Ordinary Boredom,” Rob Horning points out that labelling something “boring” intrinsically makes it more interesting. For Horning, boredom conjures nostalgia and desire, a sense of luxuriating in idleness and comfort. He writes: “If boredom feels like an accomplishment, it helps explain ‘boring’ entertainment like slow TV, or otherwise aimless reality shows, programming that does little other than remain undemanding—or rather, just demanding enough that we feel a friction in our attention, so that it feels like hanging out with people.” Or, for a show like Terrace House, a show that feels undemanding enough that we grow comfortable being mere spectators looking through windows into other lives.

The thing that separates Terrace House from other reality TV shows is the way it plays with the fourth wall, constantly reminding us that it is a show.

I spent the last nine months of 2017 watching six people live in a beautiful minimalist house. It has become part of a routine between my partner and I—a way to kill time at the end of the day, during the weekends, before the sleepiness sets in. We huddle in the bedroom, under the sheets, and hum along to the opening credits as a montage plays aerial shots of the city in cool-toned, soft filters. At the climax point of the “Meat Incident” arc in the first season, I refused to watch the show for the next several weeks. I had been too stressed and deeply affected by how it had all unfolded. Minori finds a special meat given to her boyfriend, Uchi, by one of his clients, and eats it with the other housemates without his permission. This devastates him to his core and leaves him incapacitated in his bed, curled up and misunderstood. He then becomes a joke to the rest of the housemates and even the panel of hosts who occasionally comment on the show, mediating its events for us. If others turn away from the show’s slow pacing and boring tone, I turned away from its most stressful moments. Ironically, it is this mundanity that cuts to the ridiculous wads of conflict between people, making their feelings and their relationships feel intensely real.In the most recent season, Aloha State, I witnessed a professional surfer, Guy, and a university student, Niki, navigate the awkwardness of dating. This storyline was replete with the distinct tensions of liking someone enough to enjoy their company but not enough to be anything more than friends—not to mention the ease of saying goodbye when things inevitably come to an end. Getting lunch together turns into cuddling in the living room while watching movies. It is here that we catch the couple at their most painfully intimate. Their bodies carefully inch closer together as they shift from one sitting position to the next, until they’re both laying on the floor sharing a bowl of Japanese curry. He falls asleep and moves from the seat to the floor, and she follows him. Their bodies awkwardly find each other under the blankets. It’s a scene that builds up, slows down, and halts when he kisses her; the screen turns black and the closing credits roll in.While the goings-on of an individual’s personal relationships pull the viewers closer, this brand of reality TV still functions by way of a certain degree of distance. It’s a distance often marked by the camera—the way it moves in a scene; the wide shots, the close-ups. It sits and lingers at an expression, a movement, and stills time. In shows like Terrace House, whose only premise is to follow the lives of people (think MTV’s Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, its spin-off The Hills, or the BBC’s Made in Chelsea), the camera frames and moves the narrative. It’s all about the fourth wall—a theatre convention that makes possible what Konstantin Stavinski calls “public solitude”: the ability to behave as one would in private, playing out the theatrics of the domestic space despite knowing you’re being watched by an audience. It allows us to look into their lives, but at a comfortable distance broad enough to locate desire in ordinariness.

Terrace House’s metatextual nature disrupts our suspension of disbelief, even when the show’s banality gives us something more 'real' than what reality TV often affords.

The thing that separates Terrace House from other reality TV shows is the way it plays with the fourth wall, constantly reminding us that it is a show. There’s the panel of commentators (three men, three women) who sit in and watch the show with us. They appear every now and then to react and speculate, behaving like proxies for the viewers at home. Even the show’s cast members are transparent about the show’s existence in their own lives. New cast members are sometimes seen explaining to friends, family members, or current employers that they’re moving to the house—acknowledging and discussing the show’s reputation on the show itself. Around the house, cast members are seen watching the show on their own televisions. Sometimes, they do this explicitly to study a potential partner they are romantically interested in who’s been in the house longer than they have. By the time Aloha State is filmed, the first season is already on Netflix, and the contestants spend air time asking each other how much they’ve watched, whether they’ve caught up, and what they know.Taishi Tamaki, a member of Aloha State, spends his entire stay in the house looking for a “love worth dying for.” While each individual person in the house has personal goals (often tied to professional and personal growth), Taishi makes a game out of it that feels much more reminiscent of The Bachelor. He shows interest for each girl in the form of thoroughly planned and curated dates—horseback riding and a picnic, rock climbing, a walk along the beach and dinner. Call it diligence. It’s no easy feat in real life, but on reality TV, it feels even harder and more forced. After all, what are the chances of meeting “The One” on a highly produced show, after they were pooled from hundreds of others and several auditions?His “love worth dying for” turns first into a curious topic for the panel of commentators and then into a running joke. When the girls don’t quite make their mark as “loves worth dying for,” Taishi find himself outside by the poolside with a bokken (a wooden samurai sword). By the end of the series, this “guilty samurai” becomes a meme. Like most of the cast members passing through Terrace House, Taishi eventually gets what he wants. But unlike the rest of the cast members, Taishi carries himself with an uncanny awareness of where the camera is; he angles himself before he sobs over goodbyes, laughs with his head tilted back, and walks off on the beach to do last minute push-ups and sit-ups. At one point, he looks off into the distance at his potential bride, as if hinting at a future he’s already envisioned. “He is the most scripted part of this show,” a commentator once said. By the end of Aloha State, Taishi is left alone in the house with Chikako Fukuyama—and he’s won the Terrace House game.Taishi’s performativity makes him one of the most memorable housemates in Terrace House. However authentically inauthentic he seems on camera, he milks the series for its worth as a show capable of making him famous.Terrace House’s metatextual nature disrupts our suspension of disbelief, even when the show’s banality gives us something more “real” than what reality TV often affords. It is telling that it’s taken me nearly a whole year to get through two seasons—I spread out the episodes for when I needed them most. When real life proved too taxing, too fraught, and too difficult, all I wanted to do was watch the seemingly undemanding lives of others unfold before me, as if isolated from the rest of the world. I projected my own desires of something more normal onto the screen: Wouldn’t it be nice to go to Tokyo? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be under the sun in Hawaii? I want so badly to only worry about the weather, if I can go hiking, and nothing else. I want so badly to just be. After all, what is more real than desire—specifically the desire to escape?