Gabrielle Sinclair Compton
Discussions of dollhouses in horror and cultural theory return to questions of power, control, and scale. The dollhouse operates as a structure of miniature domination – and creepiness inheres in this imbalance of scale and agency, where the miniature world serves as a site of surveillance, containment, or control. The fourth season of TBS/HBO Max’s Search Party (2016–22) expands and complicates that which renders the dollhouse disturbing – not only its structure of power but also its deployment of the aesthetic of cuteness and uselessness that mirrors a character’s inner reality and also infects and spreads. In the case of Search Party, this sense of cuteness and uselessness is deployed in the mirroring of Dory’s anxieties about the hollowness of Millennial adulthood as performance. Applying Sianne Ngai’s theory of cuteness as a minor aesthetic category, I want to understand the terror that cuteness can inflict on both character and space.
In the final moments of Search Party’s third season (2020), the show’s anti-heroine, Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat), has just been acquitted for murder despite a mountain of evidence and her actual guilt. She is guilty of the murder for which she was charged as well as the murder of her neighbor (which no one saw). In this moment, she breathes. She will not be locked up in prison. She got away with it, and she’s home. At that moment, though, her unnamed stalker attacks her, knocks her unconscious, and kidnaps her. Horror is a site of boundary collapse, and that collapse has been in motion since the first episode of the show.
Dory awakens twice within the first five minutes of Search Party’s season four premiere (2021), first in a zipped-up bag in the trunk of a car, struggling to breathe. The second time, she awakens in a dark unfinished basement marked as distinctly creepy. Her head is now shaved, her arms are chained to a chair. Her body is spectacularly tethered to more than a dozen large bike chains that extend out to the walls. The level of performative restraint here is excessive, theatrical, such as one might use for a movie monster like Hannibal Lecter. It is unclear at first glance who is more dangerous, the woman in chains or the person standing in the shadows watching her. In this season premiere episode of Search Party, entitled “The Girl in the Basement,” there are three monsters, all capable of performance and change on a dime: the girl in the basement, the “twink” who puts her there (Chip), and the monstrous basement itself. Dory and Chip operate as each other’s mirror, and the basement prison, performing “home,” mirrors the hollowness and uselessness of her own domestic space.
The stalker in the shadows says to call him Chip. Performed by Cole Escola, Chip’s dual personalities of monster and megafan switch without warning, shifting between ominous and obsequious. He greets her with breathless intimacy. “I can’t believe it. You’re right here with me.” He displays his fist with “DORY” tattooed across his knuckles, echoing the Preacher (Robert Mitchum) in Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Like Annie (Kathy Bates) in Misery (Rob Reiner, 1991), he is a stalker, he is there for care, and he is Dory’s number one fan. When Dory asks what he wants, he answers simply, and earnestly: “Friendship!” When she asks whether she is being kept forever, he denies it. “Of course you get to go home.” She asks for water, he brings her a glass to drink from, and she passes out. Sometime later she awakens a third time, disoriented, now on a bed. The multiple acts of “awakening,” along with the drink of water, make it unclear if this is reality, a dream, or a hallucination. Dory seems to be back in the safety of her own home, her apartment in Brooklyn. As she moves through the hallway, the wall seems gives under her touch; her fingers leave marks. When Dory touches the wall a second time, she feels the boundary is not stable but soft, rotting, impermanent.
Dory’s felt apartment
“The monster is difference made flesh,” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen declares in his “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monsters are tangible embodiments of a society’s unspoken fears, anxieties, and prejudices toward anything understood as “other.” In Search Party, the monster is difference made felt. The “windows” of this space look out over a small, stylized, homemade and plastic skyline. A “plant” that mirrors Dory’s plant at home easily bends and falls at her touch. A metal door resists opening. She calls out for help, but no one responds. Dory rushes through the space in horror, trapped in a sort of funhouse art installation of her domestic life, in what is not her home and the objects within it, screaming in terror at a “table’s” touch as it softly falls on her. She opens a felt “refrigerator” to find plush performances of carrots and blueberries. In the un-bathroom, a shiny fabric mirror gives no reflection, and a felt tub performs “water” hanging limply from a felt shower head. A shelf mirroring one in her real apartment holds colorful felt books and albums with titles wrought in felt lettering.
Dory hides beneath the false kitchen’s soft, nonfunctional sink. A bell interrupts the panic. “Real” food, though heavily processed, is deposited on a tray through a slot in the door: an apple, chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes. “This is a better version of your home,” Chip says through a small window with a sliding door. “A better version of your life. And I am a better version of your friends.”
The show makes a mirror of Dory’s life, specifically with its curated bespoke horror shaped by an empty cuteness and absence of use. If this “home” can be understood as a body, then Cohen’s analysis applies for Dory’s torture: “The disturbing suggestion arises that this incoherent body, denaturalized and always in peril of disaggregation, may well be our own.” (9)
Cute home, cute adulthood
The felted basement mirrors Dory’s home in bright colors, soft textures, and handmade craftsmanship that evokes childhood, safety, and intimacy. Yet this “home” cannot function as a home. There is no running water, no flushing toilet, no edible food. It is a surface without substance, a domestic space defined entirely by appearance. It is also a space of radical uselessness: objects imitate function, replacing use-value with decorative simulation. The felt apartment is perhaps more an homage to Dory’s apartment than a replica in felt. It is distorted, smaller. This near-recognition produces an uncanny effect where familiarity does not resolve into reality.
Cuteness, Ngai writes, involves an “exaggerated passivity,” in which objects are rendered small, soft, and manipulable. The felt apartment extends this logic spatially. This home is not a space to inhabit, but a space of display. Softness becomes containment. What should shelter instead encloses. Quoting Walter Benjamin, Ngai continues, “Both cute kitsch and folk art have a ‘primitive’ quality that solicits a powerful centripetal pull or even a phantasmatic ‘incorporation’ of the aesthetic subject into the object” (74).
Ngai further draws on Benjamin to explore how kitsch absorbs the subject, just as the cute basement absorbs Dory. The intimacy of the kitsch, seems to “‘address him only,’ and the aesthetic subject does not perceive it from a contemplative distance ‘like a bystander’ but rather experiences or inhabits it like an atmosphere, one enveloping him like a coat or pulled over his head like a mask” (Ngai 75). Ngai continues the quote Benjamin, writing that while “‘art teaches us to look into objects,’ folk art and cute kitsch ‘allow us to look outward from within objects’” (Ngai 75). In Search Party, this almost magical effect of kitsch objects becomes weaponized by Chip as a means of containment and horror.
The objects and the house are made useless. The show thus touches on an anxiety of uselessness. Sara Ahmed’s “queer use” explains how the act of queer use – sites marked as “useless” like feminist, queer, and anti-racist theory – are key to dismantling oppressive structures. Whereas in Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), Annie’s miniatures reflect the horror of her mother’s “secrecy,” enabling the film to “dissociate female privacy from the delicate and sentimental, linking it instead to the grotesque and horrific” (Briefel 316), Dory’s felted home reflects back her own lies, dissociating “home” from a place of safety where one enters freely to somewhere one is put and kept on display.
Cute care, cute friendship
Chip quickly establishes himself as a non-serious villain (his full name is Chip Wreck). Before he has a name, he is “The Twink.” Comedian Cole Escola, who plays Chip, has spoken of the character as queer-coded, with the show using a queer lens to reappropriate the trope with a queer actor. In later episodes, it is revealed he is a wealthy heir to a cinnamon bun fortune. He is obsessed with tracking down a chocolate he remembers but can’t name. And everything about him seems up for debate as to whether it is performance or real.
Chip insists on care as the organizing logic of the space, where care is also an aesthetic rather than a moral or ethical act. The apartment/cell, tediously handcrafted, detailed, attentive, is presented as evidence of his devotion. The care is detached from need and from use, producing objects that signify “care” precisely by no longer doing anything at all. He feeds Dory infantilizing and ultimately unnourishing food—apple, chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes—as a prison guard who speaks as a parent. As anyone who has had the experience of hearing their ideas called “cute” can recall, cutification has an almost paralyzing or objectifying effect. “With its exaggerated passivity,” writes Ngai, “there is a sense in which the cute thing is the most reified or thinglike of things, the most objectified of objects or even an ‘object’ par excellence” (Ngai 93). Becoming an object of care renders one an object full stop.
Chip’s version of Dory is one that can be safely loved precisely because she is diminished. The felt environment enacts this reduction continuously. “Revolving around the desire for an even more intimate, ever more sensuous relationship to objects already regarded as familiar and unthreatening,” Ngai writes, “cuteness is not just an aestheticization but an erotization of powerlessness, evoking tenderness from ‘small things’ but also, sometimes, a desire to belittle or diminish them further” (Ngai 5). Vulnerability is the condition for attachment, the condition for “friendship.”
The purpose, of course, is to sustain a symbolic order for Chip, an order which can only truly be sustained without corporeal disruption. The delicate felt structures within the nightmare space only hold up when you avoid touching them. The corporeal consequences of a “toilet” and “water” will commingle dread and stench with weightless illusion. Dory’s body and absence of care will create filth and waste. Her corporeal humanity will spoil, soil, and stain Chip’s ideal system of “rest” that requires a living body to become an uncanny doll. But for now, in this season premiere, Chip’s symbolic order holds.
Dory is not an influencer, an actress. Rather than an influencer who’s “always on,” who loses the ability to distinguish self from her brand, Chip’s parasocial boundary crossing fractures Dory’s inner curated persona. The disturbing “home” feels strangely personal, like a gift, while remaining entirely controlled. The experience of one-sided friendship is also diminished as cute, the act of pretending and playing at, of imitating, intimacy while losing any semblance of the “real.” Although the feelings of intimacy are genuine, they have nowhere to go, no way to transform. Ngai writes that cuteness transforms the speech of the subject imposing it (88). Cuteness contaminates Chip’s power even as he imposes it onto the space and onto Dory. And as he systematically pursues replacing Dory’s friend group with himself, her actual “real” friends throw a party in her “real” home, selling tickets to other “friends” for $35, and leaving a voicemail on her phone declaring their anger and belief that she deserves horrible things.
Conclusion: Cute justice?
“The Girl in the Basement” ends with Dory willingly returning to her cell/“home.” The door shuts, and as she and Chip share a look, the window closes. Although Chip has not set up her experience as punishment for the murders (if anything he wants her to learn a lesson about friendship), the disturbing space functions as a site she might understand as being deserved. Justice, like everything else in this space, is made cute, displaced into the unseen abject space of the basement. Justice itself is a travesty, replacing a prison with a decorative moral system to fit the crimes that seem to include Dory’s entire failed adulthood. The aesthetic softness of the environment obscures its coercive structure.
The felt non-apartment miniaturizes Dory’s world, and it softens, de-functionalizes, and aestheticizes it. This “dollhouse” mirrors the uselessness of Dory’s anxieties about her life’s meaning and then stores her within it. By focusing on these aesthetic logics, Search Party deepens its broader, seasons-long interrogation of Millennial adulthood as a curated but hollow performance. This dollhouse is a mirror of life itself under late capitalist aesthetics: softened, arranged, and emptied of use, in the pursuit of giving one’s individual narrative coherence and meaning. Search Party introduces us to captivity through the horror of aestheticization.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Duke University Press, 2019.
Briefel, Aviva. “The Terror of Very Small Worlds: Hereditary and the Miniature Scales of Horror.” Discourse, vol. 44, no. 3, 2022, pp. 314–27.
Clark, Jason. “How ‘Search Party’ Created That All-Felt Basement Apartment for Season 4.” The Wrap, 22 June 2021.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 3–25.
“The Girl in the Basement,” Search Party, season 4, episode 1, HBO Max, 14 Jan. 2021.
Murphy, Chris. “Search Party’s Cole Escola on the ‘Grotesque Entitlement’ of Chip Wreck.” Vanity Fair, 25 June 2021.
Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard University Press, 2012.
