As an avid fan of Tom Hanks’ 1980s romantic comedies, there’s a film I genuinely laugh out loud at every time I think about it. “The Money Pit” is the story of a fixer-upper where the needed repairs grow increasingly extensive and expensive, and if you’ve ever seen it you’ll know about the scene where the bathtub falls through the ceiling and Hanks’ character, Walter, laughs hysterically at the floor. He’d just gotten burnt by the fire he started in the kitchen after turning a light on, and since the water in the house didn’t work, they had to fill up buckets from the water fountain outside. When Walter and his fiancee, Anna, go to pour the water in the tub, it falls through the ceiling, breaking into pieces and flooding the floor downstairs. This was also after he’d just climbed the ladder to the second floor (because the stairs fell apart too) for the third time in a row. So, as I’m sure you can imagine, the timing of the tub falling through the floor was not just comedic for the watchers but incredibly upsetting for Walter, who had just taken out an incredibly large loan to buy this house.
The first time I saw the film was over winter break, which was right before I declared my creative writing major and took my first class in Oddfellows Hall. I’d been in the building once before this semester for an office hours appointment, but I didn’t think anything of the state of it, despite the smell of rotting wood and the fact that the stairs creak so loudly you can hear them from virtually everywhere. But when I started my English career at Allegheny and ended up being in the building five days each week, I started noticing the Oddfellows version of the house in “The Money Pit.”
My first couple of weeks in Oddfellows were strange because I actually had no idea that the building was actively falling apart, but I did notice that it wasn’t nearly as nice and well put together as the other buildings I was in. The funniest days are when I go from Oddfellows to Bentley Hall because one building has fancy, automatic glass doors with an elevator and the other one has masking tape holding the main entrance door’s wood together. It’s like spending one night away at a luxury hotel with complimentary breakfast and then spending the next in a tent with one blanket and a roll of toilet paper.
My first week of the semester, the building was so cold that I had four layers on and had to keep my coat on. Then the next week the radiators in my classrooms were so loud that I was listening to my professor try to yell over it and I still couldn’t totally hear him when he was right next to me. Then, the radiators got so hot that the boiler room set off the fire alarm, and as if that wasn’t enough the infamous slime mold was discovered soon after.
One of the most golden parts of “The Money Pit” is when Walter and Anne ask the architects when the renovation will be done, the response is always “two weeks.” The project takes a year total, and Walter ends up putting many thousands of dollars into this house that they both hate. Eventually Anne is using a bathroom without walls and Walter falls through the floor when he steps on a hole that was covered by a carpet. When I think of Oddfellows I think of the floor and the carpet; instead of addressing the fact that professors are being leaked on in their offices from how run-down the ceilings are, we’re just going to put some sort of tape on the issue and keep telling ourselves it’ll be just fine when the department gets moved (please let us into Alden, we’re begging you!) The “two weeks” for the English department seems to actually be years, but we’ll watch the building rot together as if it’s our life.
At the end of the film, Walter and Anne get into a huge argument because Anne’s ex-husband convinced her they slept together when she was drunk (they didn’t by the way, but that’s the magic of rom-coms.) They decide they’re going to sell the house after it’s finished and move on. But of course, there’s the cliche that they actually decide they love each other at the last minute, and they want to live in this house forever and never let it go. Let’s look at Oddfellows Hall in this context; Walter is the English department and Anne is Oddfellows, and the weird ex-husband is the philosophy department (they’re not weird, to be clear, but they escaped Oddfellows so they’re the butt of this joke). The English department loves Oddfellows, really, but they’re in this huge fight because Oddfellows is falling apart on them and replacing them with alien slime molds. The philosophy department is secretly whispering to Oddfellows to do these things so English leaves too, but unlike philosophy, English doesn’t actually have anywhere to go right now. At the end of the day, though, English will always talk about how much they love their silly little building despite its major and potentially dangerous flaws, so the students and the professors all gather around the disgusting slime molds and nurture it like it’s their child because this is their building and no one’s going to take it away from them!
Now, the biggest difference between Walter and Anne and Oddfellows is that the couple actually had a plan; right now, all we know is that the building is being torn down one of these days. I aspire to be that couple, to know where I’m going to be next. Maybe, the department will get one of those old trailers from the early 2000s. It will have a bathroom with no slime mold and that will be the new Oddfellows Hall.