Minanne, Mitch, Sarah and Jeremy on the latest episode of The Block NZ: Villa Wars.
Minanne, Mitch, Sarah and Jeremy on the latest episode of The Block NZ: Villa Wars.
Mental health warning: The Block will make you hear voices in your head, writes Steve Braunias.
The scaffolding got taken down on last night's The Block NZ: Villa Wars. It was a moment to savour. In years to come we will all remember where we were when the scaffolding got taken down, and revealed what the four houses looked like without scaffolding.
They looked like houses without scaffolding.
Of course it was boring, but in a deeply profound way. The Block operates as an analysis of the meaninglessness of life. It tells us that the New Zealand obsession with home improvement is void of any spiritual or moral value, but that it works to barricade us against personal anxieties and social uncertainties. It's why Mark the host sounded so worried last night when he asked the deathless question, "Is it the right decision to use the same tiles in every room?"
That nagging, insistent voice of his has a haunting quality. It gets inside your head. It's a kind of blockwashing. Watching the show night after night these past eight weeks does things to the state of your mental health, and I've begun to hear Mark's voice as I go about my everyday business. It's as though my life now has a soundtrack, or a running commentary, with Mark providing the voice-over.
I walk into the kitchen and make a cup of tea. I can hear Mark's voice saying, "Is it the right decision to choose that particular cup? He might want to reconsider." I go online to pay the bills. Mark is looking over my shoulder, and says, "This could be a game-changer. Will he regret not paying the full amount?"
Cat struggles to make a decision during a shopping expedition.
No doubt viewers all over New Zealand are hearing Mark's voice nagging and bitching in their heads. He should take it as a compliment. He's a lot better at that kind of thing than The Wolf. As the foreman of the nation, The Wolf is a man of few words; the fewer, the better. "Everyone who doesn't have the floor laid in their kitchens," he raved last night, "all they'll be cooking is a recipe for disaster".
In other developments, Cat creaked, Brooke sneered, and Hayden freaked out at the state of one of his barricades against personal anxieties and social uncertainties. He discovered a rotten weatherboard. It's always fun watching Hayden respond to stress. He follows a pattern. He puts his head down, stomps off on angry legs, and says: "BEEP." Beep this, beep that, all throughout the series; he's a bad-ass gangsta NWA mofo, straight outta Sandringham.
A rare smile from Hayden on The Block.
But you could understand his rage. "The furniture of home," as WH Auden put it in one of his greatest poems, builds a kind of fortress. "Lest we should see where we are," he writes. "Lost in a haunted wood."
No one wants to be lost in a haunted wood. The reason it's called The Block is because the show instructs us how to block out our deepest fears. Our homes are our forts. We may as well make them look nice. The last thing anyone wants is a rotten beeping weatherboard.
Only one week remains until Sunday week's grand finale, when the houses go for auction. Anything could happen but nothing has ever gone right for Sarah and Minanne, and Jamie and Hayden are placing all their bets on selling their house for a lot of money to a likeminded bad-ass gangsta NWA mofo.
Brooke from The Block NZ: Villa Wars.
That leaves New Zealand's nicest couple, Jeremy and Cat, versus Brooke and Mitch, who stand for free market greed and the need to beep everyone else over. The two apostles of neoliberal economics go into this final week as favourites to win.
They're chasing an all-time Block record of six room-reveal wins. They've worked hard. They've designed each room to the highest standards of awful middle-class taste. "Hayden and Jamie might think we're boring with our house," Brooke said last night, "but it works." Boring, in a profound way.
