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Erica Stein

Housing Crimes: Only Murders in the Building and the Upper West Side on Screen

Like many contemporary location-shot television series, Only Murders in the Building features myriad paratextual tie-ins that promote the series by selling its setting, and vice versa. In the case of Only Murders, the live immersive events, “36 hours in” features and “live like” listicles consistently emphasize two things about Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where exteriors for the series are shot. First, that it is a bastion of authenticity, here defined by both the presence of long-resident, unchanging specialty businesses and the kind of public spaces (e.g. parks) and building scale (a mix of brownstones and medium-rise pre-war apartment buildings) associated with urban village, 15-minute-city discourse. Second, that its building stock, like the fictional, eponymous Arconia in Only Murders, is extremely luxurious and aspirational. Both of these characteristics are hallmarks of many earlier films and series set in the neighborhood, such as Annie Hall (1977) and When Harry Met Sally (1989), and they offer the fantasy that this kind of socially stable neighborhood and economically extravagant housing can co-exist. Notwithstanding its marketing materials, however, Only Murders undercuts this fantasy. It instead dwells on the precarity of its central characters’ lives in the Upper West Side, especially in regard to housing, which it consistently ties to illegality and criminality. In doing so, Only Murders not only begins to weave together the violent, interpersonal crime that gives the series its title with the systemic, entirely legal, injustices that undergird the American housing market, it also intersects with a very different screen history of the Upper West Side. This tradition, sought to redefine urban redevelopment – especially the threat it posed to housing – as criminal (Garbage, 1967), and the unsanctioned occupation of residential buildings as a public good (Break and Enter, 1973). Utilizing markedly different generic tropes and aesthetics, Only Murders builds on this tradition by thematizing the Arconia’s status as a cooperative, a governance structure that has historically allowed the Upper West Side to resist forces of gentrification and displacement – a different kind of authenticity and luxury than the series’ marketing lauds.

Erica Stein is an associate professor of film at Vassar. Her research addresses the intersections of mediation and urbanization, particularly how capital lays claim to physical and social space through specific visual strategies, and how certain moving images resist those strategies. Her first book, Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York, was published by SUNY Press (2021). With Brendan Kredell and Germaine Halegoua she edited The Companion to Media and the City (Routledge, 2022). Her research has appeared in Camera Obscura, Journal of Film and Video, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, as well as other journals and edited volumes. She is currently working on her second book, Property/Crime: Real Estate, Infrastructure, and Environment on Screen. Prof. Stein is the past co-chair of the Urbanism, Geography, and Architecture Scholarly Interest Group. She co-founded Mediapolis: a journal of cities and culture, where she currently serves as treasurer. Mediapolis publishes peer and editorially reviewed short-form, multimedia, and/or collaborative scholarship.