Intervention, Hoarders & Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne

I watch with morbid fascination, like peeling back the wet dressing of a wound.

“I’m cold; the thought that they are warm irritates me. I could leave — in an hour maybe, they will go to La Colomba and then return to their room — but I stay. I don’t want to have to imagine, to guess.” — Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne

For the last few weeks I’ve oscillated between the Hoarders and Intervention 24-hour channels on my television, watching endless footage of people across North America being pushed to their absolute emotional limit. By this point, I’ve watched so many episodes that I’ve seen repeats. Especially for a show like Intervention, I’m constantly asking myself: Is this ethical? Is this safe? Is this legal? And the answer is most definitely no.

Trying to explain why I like either show is hard, because I don’t really know why. I like stories about real people, and their stories are compelling. Not only that, but both Hoarders and Intervention scratch a voyeuristic itch for me. It makes me think of Sophie Calle’s art book Suite Vénitienne, where the photographer follows a man named Henri B. for however long through Venice. Calle would often follow strangers for a certain period of time, photograph them, and move along, all without them knowing. “For the pleasure of following them,” she writes. “Not because they particularly interested me.” Henri B. was the first person she followed to another country. She flew to Venice and searched the city for days before she found him.

From Calle’s notes:

4:00 p.m. I settle on my bench at Piazza San Marco. Venice is preparing for the carnival. Children are already in costume. I watch at length a little boy with a feathered headdress who’s tirelessly chasing pigeons with a knife. I would like to see him kill one.

So, I’m thinking: what makes us want to see, to watch? Like when a friend has a nasty wound and asks if you want to look underneath the bandage. Disgusted, you say: “Ew. Yes. Show me.”

While they were cleaning out my grandmother’s house, she kept digging through garbage bags to save this paper Happy Birthday sign, originally purchased at a discount party store over 30 years ago. It was disintegrating, held together by Scotch tape and paper clips. My mom would throw it away, but it kept reappearing in drawers, cupboards, and closets until she and her siblings filled the last dumpster. Rosemary was prepared to burn bridges over what everyone else had deemed garbage.

A large part of Hoarders involves a psychologist/extreme cleaning specialist duo to help and assist the hoarder and their family in dealing with both the physical and emotional hoard. At least that’s what Dr. Robin Zasio would say, gently and without judgement. I don’t think my grandmother’s hoarding was bad enough to call in an intervention, but it was enough to frustrate her children and leave the rest of us going, “How the fuck can one woman collect so much stuff?”

Everything is either about control or is a response to being controlled. Whatever the issue is, when it’s ignored it will always inevitably transcend the personal and interpersonal into a material (or legal) issue. As extreme cleaning specialist Matt Paxton would say, “We’re all one step away from becoming a hoarder.” Hoarding and addiction are incredibly common, and watching shows like this are scary and fascinating because it’s not so hard to recognize your family — and, scarier still, yourself — in them. Most of the time, these behaviors are brought on or exacerbated by some kind of traumatic event which triggers a compulsion to hoard or numb yourself to the world. We watch these people go through the most intense emotions of their lives on camera — often for the first time — and when the crew leaves, then what? That alone must be traumatic.

Ashley Mazziotti, who was the subject of an Intervention episode over a decade ago, told Vanity Fair in 2022 that when she relapsed after treatment it was “so much worse” than before the show. She said, “Once the whole world sees it, you just feel shame and you don't wanna talk to anybody.”

Each episode is presented as a character driven story. A&E has a show to make, so both shows are edited to be dramatic and snappy with character and narrtative arcs, “villains” and “heroes.” It’s reality television at its core, dramatizing aspects of “regular” life for entertainment purposes — the producers have a show to make, a job to do, and ultimately both shows profit off the exploitation of the mentally ill. The difference between shows like Hoarders or Intervention as opposed to, say, a Real Housewives franchise is that people on the former shows are actually regular, with needs and responsibilities that have been neglected.

There’s a fan-site that keeps a list of post-show deaths for Intervention, and many of the faces I recognize from the show. The other night, I spent over an hour trying to track down Katherine from Buffalo, a tragic figure who reminded me of someone I couldn’t place and relapsed shortly after she agreed to go to treatment. I couldn’t find anything about her on the internet: no social media, no full name, and no obituary.

Li Charmaine Anne writes in their 2020 essay, “Intervening on Intervention,” that they “get extremely attached to the addicts themselves,” which is one of the things the series has going for it, offering a relatively “non-judgemental” look at the disease of addiction. When you’ve watched as many episodes of Hoarders and Intervention as I have, you kind of settle into the narrative, and what was at one point shocking — like watching a train wreck, or a car crash — begins to lose the sheen of the uncommon. What comes through after is a deeply human look into some of the most vulnerable communities in North America, ravaged by addiction, poverty, and homelessness, and how the system has failed them so completely that now they must rely on a reality television show to save them. What could be more American than turning your life into a sideshow in order to save it?

“Which other medical conditions have we normalized the use of public-media exposure during a vulnerable symptomatic time period as a coercion tool to gain consent prior to treatment?” Corrie Vilsaint, PhD, of the Recovery Research Institute, tells Vanity Fair in 2022.

I watch with morbid fascination, like peeling back the wet dressing of a wound, as a 29-year-old ties off her arm to inject black tar heroin with her children watching.

Vilsaint adds: “People’s perception of the disorder will influence their willingness to support efforts to save lives.”

I am always agog at a hoarder’s indignation in the face of material consequences. With the city threatening to demolish her family home and throw her in jail, Vula from Indiana can’t seem to let go of a greeting card covered in rat shit. Extreme cleaning specialist Matt Paxton is digging fossilized cat skeletons out of your foyer by the shovel-full and you’re telling him not to track mud on the carpet. And there I am, on the edge of my seat, eating it all up.