Treasures, Trash, and the Litter of the American Dream
At the beginning of Luna Carmoon’s 2025 film debut, Hoard, a little girl falls asleep in a shopping cart full of trash. Her mother, young, glamorous, dressed up in a faux fur coat and heavy makeup, is out digging through rubbish bins for discarded treasures. The next day at school, constantly yawning and reeking of garbage, she is punished and humiliated by teachers and fellow students alike. At home, where she is surrounded by teetering mountains of stuff, her life has the surreal quality of a dream.
This is working-class London in the 1980s and no one is talking about mental health. Hoarding in the film is depicted as grotesque, neglectful, and disordered, but the camera also lingers on the ruined house with unexpected tenderness. Maria and her mother fall asleep in the bath together and enact bizarre and intimate rituals. When a pile of trash finally falls on her mother and Maria is put in foster care, she cannot shake the obsessive fervor for collecting. A decade later, she tries to burrow back into her symbolic cocoon, piling up trash in her new home, and restaging traumatic memories with another former foster child, who immediately grasps her pain and fear and nostalgia.
Hoarding lends itself to dramatization in a way that few mental illnesses do. Not only does it have a macabre horror movie effect for the viewer, but it also touches something deep and private in the hoarder’s unconscious, a core relational disorder. In traditional psychoanalytic theory, as children develop their sense of self, they learn to replace their infant attachment to their mothers through a process of displacement onto inanimate objects, often a toy or a blanket. When the child develops a disorganized attachment style, their relationships to other people and to inanimate objects will similarly develop in a disorganized way. All the stuff you accumulate can become personified. It can trigger the same fears of abandonment, the same feelings of grief or rejection that another person would.
And yet, hoarding is also a quintessentially modern problem, driven by the mass production and consumption of cheap goods. We are all encouraged to consume excessively and endlessly. Influencers on social media flaunt clothing hauls that feature piles and piles of fast fashion, supermarkets sell limitless variations of the same foods, branded and packaged differently. Advertising tells us what will keep us slim, what will keep us beautiful, what will make our children smarter and healthier, what will make us more efficient, more productive, what will hack our lives to make them simpler. It is perhaps a matter of circumstances who will fall prey to this messaging by racking up credit card debt, who will participate in an MLM pyramid scheme, or who will cram their house so full of stuff that it will start to fall apart. In her landmark book on mental illness, Strangers to Ourselves, Rachel Aviv writes that the “divide between the psychic hinterlands and a setting we might call normal is permeable, a fact that I find both haunting and promising. It’s startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.” Any of us, in other words, could be hoarders.
By the time my grandmother died in 2017, my parents had known she was a hoarder for several years. My father let himself into her house after she was hospitalized with a stroke and found it irreparably damaged, filled with heaps of trash. She had lived alone for more than a decade in the wooded hills of the East Bay. Together, my parents tried to convince her to move out and when she refused, they tried to get power of attorney. Both attempts were futile. My whole family lived with my grandmother until I was five. But after we moved out, she never invited us over again. She put padlocks on all the doors, took pains to conceal her hoarding from others.
My grandmother’s world was shifting and mercurial, yet she remained lucid. She found meaning in everything, some kind of alignment of the universe that no one else could see. On hikes through the wooded trails near her home, or on occasional trips to thrift stores, she would tell me stories about how our family was descended from Swedish nobility who settled in Russia in the 18th century. Her own grandmother, she told me, lived on an estate in Ukraine. She had drowned herself one day in one of its deep ponds. I grew up imagining this distant ancestor as a Madame Bovary-like figure, dying of unrequited love, or a deep depression I could only grasp at.
In my childhood memories, my grandmother is warm, prickly, curious about everything. She indulges my childhood obsessions with fairy tales, with flashy, frilly clothing, and with the wooded hills of the Tilden Nature Area. She filled her house with books and Salvation Army thrifted jackets and absolutely anything acquired for free (plastic cutlery, straws, brochures, and so on). She would tell me and my siblings over cans of baked beans, her preferred snack, that America was a land of promise, but also a land of excess. Consumerism still made her dizzy sometimes. She had grown up in the lean years of the Soviet Union and had starved during the Second World War. Something as simple as going to the grocery store could provoke a disordered reaction in her, a desire to overconsume, to scrimp, to hoard, an impulse that was simultaneously generous and ascetic.
In Russia, hoarding is referred to as Plyushkin’s Syndrome, named after a particularly miserly character in Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls. Plyushkin is so stingy and obsessed with hoarding useless things that he lets his estate waste away, his family ties also withering. He leaves a molding Easter cake in his pantry, scraping off the rot and serving what parts are salvageable to his unsuspecting guests. He will eventually try to serve it to the novel’s protagonist, Chichikov, along with a bug-infested decanter of liquor. Chichikov declines, earning Plyushkin’s admiration for his seeming abstemiousness.
In Dead Souls, Chichikov is engaged in an elaborate money-making scheme throughout the novel to buy up the legal records of serfs whose deaths have not yet been recorded in the census. By owning these records, he appears to be wealthy, which allows him to secure a loan against the serfs, using their perceived value as collateral. This elaborate speculation will enable him to rebuild his fortune. Like Plyushkin’s hoarding, Chichikov’s grift challenges conventional notions of value as stable and inherent to objects, suggesting that it is instead temporally limited and context specific. The dead serfs only have value to Chichikov. As soon as his scheme collapses, they will lose their value.
Hoarders in the modern sense emerge at the dawn of mass production. Newspapers, a perennial hoarding favorite, became widespread during the 19th century, made possible by the printing press. Mass production also begot cheap and accessible goods. Hoarding is a perversion of our economy of commodities, a logical extension of its total, decontextualized fetishism of the object. Unlike other kinds of accumulation, hoarding is considered disordered because hoarders keep things that are broadly determined to be worthless.
The disorder was first named in the medical lexicon as syllogomania (from the Greek súllogos or “assembly”) and as a form of “Diogenes’ Syndrome,” a colorful term coined in a 1975 Lancet article to designate extreme self-neglect. This name refers erroneously to the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, who was known for living in a large storage jar, rejecting material possessions, and so it is widely considered a misnomer. But hoarding disorder was only added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as its own, distinct category of mental illness after it was vaulted into popular consciousness by the eponymous A&E reality show, Hoarders.
Hoarders debuted in August 2009. It would go on to run for twelve non-consecutive seasons and was, at its debut, A&E’s most-watched show. It is difficult to overstate how influential it was in shaping the popular image of the disorder. “I cannot remember whether I knew what compulsive hoarding was before 2009,” wrote Alyse Burnside for The Atlantic in 2021. “Likely not.” TLC launched its own competitive reality series in 2010 titled Hoarding: Buried Alive that would run for five seasons, and Animal Planet, not to be outdone, also created a series about people who collect too many animals and live in their filth (Confessions: Animal Hoarding).
Hoarders had a pseudo-psychological veneer from the start. The episodes are staged as “interventions,” called in by the friends and family of the hoarder and offering a compassionate, tough-love approach. The entire clean-up process fits neatly into a single TV episode: Hoarders are assigned a team consisting of a psychologist, a “closet organizer,” and several cleaning specialists. The show’s psychologists usually offer some version of cognitive behavioral therapy, a standard front-line treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. Each episode is brief and goal-oriented, as “patients” focus on symptom management at the possible expense of larger psychodynamic breakthroughs. The show is never especially interested in the source of each subject’s symptoms, what underlying trauma or cycles of consumption might have led them to these behaviors. Instead, it focuses on interpersonal drama, the harm they have caused their horrified friends and families, the smell, the clutter, the gruesome affect of their homes. In this telling, hoarding is a kind of manipulative narcissism, a disease of denial and willful disregard.
Hoarders, and the version of the disorder that it broadcasts, offers a simple and instantly recognizable narrative about consumption, excess, and metabolic waste. Dorothy Breininger, one of the show’s self-styled “Professional Organizers,” has launched a career offering a whole slate of clutter-reducing services that include life coaching, digital cloud cleanup, and something called “Cancer Concierge” for people who have both cancer and clutter. In a book she wrote inspired by her experience on A&E’s Hoarders, Stuff Your Face or Face Your Stuff, she details how the show clarified her relationship with her own “Body Clutter,” leading her to a dramatic weight loss. To her, the compulsiveness of overeating mirrors the compulsiveness of hoarding. The treatment, aggressive self-management and CBT, is also similar. With enough conditioning, the over-consumer will learn to regulate their unruly appetites.
Breininger suggests that eating, like hoarding, is a form of avoidance. “Food noise” or “body clutter” drowns out the ordinary sound of her life, just as going to a yard sale or dollar store muffles the hoarder’s latent trauma. Both can be fixed by self-control. But food is also pleasurable, rich with its own moments of association and desire and dreaming. Lauren Berlant remarks in Cruel Optimism that to eat is to participate in ordinary life, a welcome break from the feedback loop of trauma. “Inhabiting such dense moments of sensuality stops time, makes time, and saturates the lived, imagined, and not-yet-imagined world,” she writes. Eating is, in Berlant’s terms, an act of optimism that your body can consume food and feel pleasure, both of which sustain you. It is optimistic—even when it inhibits your flourishing.
Perhaps, then, hoarding is also an act of optimism. It is also born from fantasy—of consumerism, of a sacred space born out of the comfort of one’s own home, of preservation, of nostalgia, and of control. By some estimates, as many as one in forty Americans are hoarders, many of them over the age of sixty. Randy O’Frost and Gail Sketekee profile a sample of hoarders in their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things and find that most grew up without significant material deprivation, have close relationships, and have coexisting diagnoses like OCD, anxiety, or eating disorders. They are ordinary people looking for ordinary happiness. Like Plyushkin, they’ve spent their lives earnestly striving toward wealth, stability, and happiness, and in that pursuit, they have let everything wither around them.
While very little demographic information is available about hoarders, it is possible to make various inferences. First, in order to hoard, you must have a home. Second, renters are more likely to be evicted for hoarding behavior; if you live in an apartment, neighboring tenants are more likely to be disrupted by the smells, pests, and structural damage. Thus, it follows that hoarding thrives among homeowners living in detached suburban houses, especially those over sixty—the bulk of homeowners in the United States.
But if homeownership is the ideal of 20th century social achievement, hoarding represents its horrifying inversion. It devastates property value, destroying plumbing, floors, walls, and yards. Many of the hoarders on A&E’s series are behind on property taxes, utility bills, and mortgages, risking foreclosure and eviction. Perhaps it’s fitting that the show debuted in 2009, in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Steven Kurutz writes in The New York Times that housing reality shows were collateral damage of the crisis, including A&E’s “Flip This House,” which was canceled in 2009. They would be replaced by shows about home restoration such as “Fixer Upper” or “Flip or Flop,” which featured innovative approaches to upgrading modest housing. In this context, Hoarders functions as a kind of cautionary tale, a visual representation of the litter and wreckage of the American Dream.
My grandmother was especially prone to hoarding food, perhaps because she experienced starvation in her childhood. She was born in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and was given the birth name “Internationale” by her mother and father. Both teachers and devoted communists, they were torn apart when her father, my great-grandfather, was sent to a labor camp in the Ural Mountains. This was during Stalin’s infamous purges, and my grandmother and great-grandmother were exiled to a small village near Ukraine. It was a very poor village. My grandmother used to tell the story of eating her first orange when someone in the village acquired one and divided it up into tiny parts to be shared amongst all the villagers. Since no one had anything, they shared everything.
All of this changed when the Nazis came. Their invasion must have seemed like the end of the world in those small rural settlements, so far from the nexuses of power that were Moscow and Leningrad. One of the Russian villagers interviewed in Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of the Soviet Union, Secondhand Time, recalls that they arrived “in huge vehicles and their three-wheeled motorcycles. I’d never even laid eyes on a motorcycle before. […] They painted a message on the wall of our schoolhouse: “The Red Army has abandoned you!” My grandmother used to tell a story about taking a train across Central Europe at some point during the war when she started to feel faint and dizzy. She begged her mother to come with her to stand between the cars and get some air. When they returned, their seats were riddled with shrapnel from aerial bombardment. She would attribute this life-saving dizziness variously to karmic or divine intervention. She became attuned to portents, to the subtle messaging of the universe. She believed everything was a sign. At the end of the war, when they were reshuffled into a displaced person’s camp, my great-grandmother tried unsuccessfully to drown herself and my grandmother in a lake.
Despite repatriation agreements between the USSR and the United States, after a stint in a DP camp, my grandmother and great-grandmother were sent to New York City. They arrived on October 13th, variously Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day, when immigration was closed for the holiday, and had to spend 24 hours waiting on their ship outside the Port of New York. Once settled in the city, my grandmother quickly learned English and got an undergraduate degree at Queens College. At a smoke-filled party in her early 20s, she spotted my grandfather across the room and decided she would marry him.
In 1968, a young mother living in Geneva, my grandmother returned to the Soviet Union for the first time since the war, ostensibly to look for her father. With the aid of Soviet archives, she found him, but he was a stranger to her by then. Their meeting was apparently uncomfortable and awkward. Their life experiences had diverged immeasurably. In the years that followed, my grandmother often wondered vocally if he had not really been her father at all.
In a series of Super 8 home videos filmed on that trip, she wanders around Moscow, pointing out monuments like the Tsarist palaces near Red Square and glistening bridges above the river that moves through the city center. In one video, she demonstrates how to use a free drinking water station, her Jean Seberg pixie cut and glasses giving a sophisticated impression. This city, of which she had no childhood memories, must have been strange to her.
“Not everyone was prepared for all this,” says one of the interlocutors in Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Secondhand Time about the end of the USSR. “Most people were not anti-Soviet; they only wanted to live well. They really wanted blue jeans, VCRs, and most of all, cars. Nice clothes and good food.” The endurance of this cliché conceals its ordinariness. Most people want nice things, even when those things may destroy their wellbeing. “Regular people don’t care about history,” says another of Alexievich’s interviewees, “they’re concerned with simpler things: falling in love.”
In popular imagination, the end of the USSR is strongly associated with the influx of blue jeans and rock music and the simultaneous deprivation of mass privatization and economic shocks. In the 2003 film, Good Bye Lenin!, about the final months of the GDR, an East German woman falls into a coma right before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and wakes up after it. The sweeping changes to the new, reunited Berlin are portrayed in visuals of gaudy consumerism, with billboards, advertisements, and a wealth of new brands and goods flooding the former GDR. Afraid the shock of German reunification will kill his fragile mother, her son, Alex, sets up a controlled environment around her, keeping the news from her and painstakingly transferring pickles into recycled jars.
Like the compulsive daughter in Hoard, Alex also ends up rooting through the trash, trying to recreate a safe and womb-like world, one in which nothing will ever change. His accumulation of obsolete and worthless items is less motivated by attachment to them and more by a desire to freeze time into eternal and comforting stasis. In this sense, hoarding mirrors the endless loop of traumatic memory, which constantly resets at the moment of the traumatic event. Every moment is a potential rupture.
One theory of hoarding is that it is driven by fear of waste, a metabolic overcorrection. We live in a world that is fantastically wasteful. The earth is dotted with small mountains and rivers of decomposing trash, many of them in the Global South. The afterlife of synthetic clothing is astonishing; it can take up to two hundred years to decompose. Eleven million tons of textile waste is produced each year from clothing alone. This consumes 93 billion cubic meters of water and occupies seven percent of all landfill space. These numbers are staggering and so large as to feel abstract. They are both close to us, contextualizing the clothing against our skin, and far away from us, describing a vast global system of disposability.
Daisy Hildyard designates this problem “the second body” in her 2017 book of the same name. “The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of the emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another.” In our present of global trade and labor networks where the items we consume are manufactured, assembled, and produced all over the world before finding their way into or onto our bodies, this physical connection imbues objects with a different kind of symbolic meaning. The plastic we throw away may end up in a landfill halfway around the world, the plastic shed from our clothing may sink to the bottom of the ocean, our emissions drive the mercurial warming of our planet and its attendant crisis. In this formulation, objects, the clothes we wear, the water bottles from which we drink, the plastic gloves a doctor uses to handle us, are more intimately connected to our bodies than we might initially imagine. They possess the kind of weightiness with which hoarders routinely imbue them.
In Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell, the tortured souls of greedy, materialistic people are doomed to push heavy weights back and forth and yell at each other, “Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?” Ovid explains to Dante that they are rapacious hoarders, people who cared too much about their possessions while on earth. Their belongings ultimately did not hold them back from death. “All sins are attempts to escape time,” writes Simone Weil in La connaissance surnaturelle. “Virtue is to endure time.”
I wonder, looking back on the final decades of my grandmother’s life, what a material ethnography of these times would look like. I imagine a museum of 21st-century American capitalism to in some ways resemble her overstuffed and decaying home. We live in an ocean of commodities that are increasingly overinflated, disposable, and worthless in terms of use function. In this sense, hoarders have shrewdly understood that value is not fixed, that no commodity is really fungible in an imagined future of collapse, that one man’s trash, as the aphorism goes, is another’s treasure.
Although my grandmother’s house was full of trash when she died and had severe structural damage, she had her own obscure but apparent sorting method. The rooms where my siblings and I had lived when we were small were clean and empty, along with some of her treasured belongings from her own youth. I have fond memories of playing in the grassy, uncultivated yard of that house, of the huge redwood tree that had snaked deep roots by the front door, of the wisteria that hung along the fence where my mother had buried my placenta after I was born. I remember how the morning light fell in the bedroom I shared with my sister, pale and dreamy, and how we’d watch huge banks of fog roll in from the ocean out of the westward-facing windows of the living room. Among the things I have inherited from my grandmother’s cache are Soviet educational books, a series of tailored dresses from the 1960s, a Cyrillic Olivetti Valentine typewriter, and a wooden Orthodox Marian icon that now hangs on the wall of my apartment. As for her own mortal form, she used to say that she wanted her ashes baked into a brioche when she died and fed to the seagulls, a full metabolic recycling. Instead, my parents scattered them on the highest peak in the Berkeley Hills among the shrubs and native trees that she loved so much. I like to think she is at peace there, finally freed from the weight of material belongings.
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