Greed and the Watcher

Would you plunge all your life savings into a dream house, so you could fulfill a lifestyle you have been chasing all of your life? One man did. Well, at least fictionally.

Based on a true story, The Watcher is a 2022 Netflix mini-series mystery. The story revolves around Nora Brannock (played by Naomi Watts) and Dean Brannock, (played by Bobby Canavalle) who are seeking to move their three children from their New York apartment into suburban living.

The family travels to Westfield, New Jersey, Nora’s childhood hometown, an hour away from the city where they attend an open house on 657 Boulevard. It is there that Dean becomes completely spellbound by the six-bedroom colonial style home worth 1.3 million dollars. Despite not financially in position, he risks all the family’s assets behind Nora’s back to purchase it.

Additionally, Dean sinks thousands of dollars into renovations while they are settling into the home, placing the family deeper into a financial hole. We learn from Nora that the last time Dean became obsessive, which was 10 years prior, it resulted in a significant bankruptcy from which they are still recovering.

And then, things go horrifically wrong for The Brannocks.

They begin to receive mysterious letters in their mailbox from an anonymous person who claims they have been watching the house for decades, and will be studying their every move. Their family unit begins to fracture as the pressure mounts from the threatening letters. They eventually move out, but not before a copious amount of social and psychological damage they inflict on each other and those in the community into which they tried hard to fit. It became evident almost from the beginning of the series that there are several neighbors who watch the house, or covet if you will, including the Brannocks who begin watching the house after they move out.

The series is based on the true account of Derek and Maria Broaddus. They bought the property on 657 Boulevard in 2014, but after threatening letters from a mysterious stalker, they eventually sold the house in 2019 for $400,000 less than what they paid. In fact, they did renovations before moving in, but never actually did so because of the letters. So, for five years the Broadduses paid the mortgage and property taxes on a house they never occupied.

The Watcher was never apprehended, and no one knows why the letters were sent. The current owners of the house say they never received such letters. And thus, the true mystery continues:

https://www.thecut.com/article/the-haunting-of-657-boulevard-in-westfield-new-jersey.html

The dramatized version lays out an ethical issue: how far would you go to obtain a material possession, and are you willing to deal with the consequences? Is it worth it? As with descriptive and normative ethics, there is a difference between the thing itself, and what you ought to do about the thing.

Whether it be an extravagant home, luxury automobile, or membership into an exclusive club, there are things we desire that are a bit out of our reach, that for the sake of appearances we will sacrifice everything to get.

This is nothing new. According to National Geographic, we became civilized social beings between 4000 and 3000 B.C.E., when we began domesticating seeds, and through agriculture and trade we developed societies that allowed us to create professions, social structures, and other mechanisms to reflect our civilizations. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/key-components-civilization/

Since that time, we have generated great skill in science, technology, engineering, math, the arts, and other disciplines, with peak periods like the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and our current information age.

We also began engaging in very unwise social practices such as “keeping up with the Joneses”. That phrase has been related to a true story of the family of writer Edith Jones, who became Edith Wharton, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921 for her novel The Age of Innocence, the first woman to do so. The Whartons were wealthy New York socialites, who bought a grand villa in the Hudson Valley. Soon after others did the same, even trying to outdo each other. Thus, the phrase, keeping up with the Joneses.

Hence, people over the decades have painfully sacrificed in the hopes of keeping up, with not only little reward, but grave consequences including failed relationships, bankruptcy, illness, even death.

Perhaps the question becomes, what is so lacking within a person that they become obsessed with material possessions? Reasonably, people would say that society has placed such a value on them that it would cause those to pursue them with almost reckless abandon. But many more in society place such things in their proper context, and choose discipline and living within their means over such prizes.

It is the allure, often through mainstream media that sells this. Brilliant marketing strategies cause millions of Americans to plunk down their credit cards, only to call the companies later in the hopes of extending their credit, as well as applying for more credit cards to expand their resources. In fact, going into credit card debt is not just commonplace, one could say it is the American way.

A salesman once said, “If I can sell you a lifestyle, I can sell you anything.”

Even in social media, people will sacrifice their integrity to create false personas that will attract to them massive likes and followers. It is that kind of greed for attention that will eventually sink their self-esteem and self-worth, because that kind of activity cannot be maintained forever, and will most assuredly have dire consequences. Today, though we have more access to wealth and leisure than any time in history, we are more clinically depressed, self-harming, even suicidal.

In the film, Fight Club, the protagonist Tyler Durden reflects, “I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct,” the idea that each item bought for his apartment brought him that much closer to perfection.

And then he destroys it all, and begins a life diametrically opposed to such slavery.

The perfect house, the perfect car, the perfect social life. It is this pursuit of perfection, the fantasy of something attractively abstract, that can destroy everything that makes us, us. In reality, perfection does not exist. There is no perfect life. There is just life. Those who can afford the trinkets of near perfection do possess them, and only they know whether they control such trinkets, or if the trinkets control them.

In his greed for the million-dollar dream home on 657 Boulevard, Dean believed he drew to himself and his family a Jonesian lifestyle. Instead he drew a horrifying series of events: a stalker who would cause paranoia, chaos, fragmentation and destruction, and even more poignant, the exposure of the demons that dwelled within them, followed by their evacuation from the home of their supposed dreams.

There are adverse circumstances that occur even when we are doing the right thing, but for those with ulterior motives, the results are exponentially frightening. Perhaps the moral to the story is to live the dream you can manage, or face the nightmare you cannot.