Jeanne Dielman Reimagined

How Kokohome’s Cozy Housekeeping Videos Celebrate Routine

Discussed: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Kokohome, routine, self-care, housekeeping, chores, beige-fluencing, writing, keeping a diary, “women’s work”

When I first happened upon Kokohome’s 5AM Diaries, I was utterly transfixed. Each 20-minute video features the vlogger, a beautiful young wife and mother, who shares her daily routines and her contemplations about life. Set to soft, soothing music, each video unfolds like a dream. We join Kokohome as she watches the sun rise from her stunning apartment, follow her as she does self-care activities like yoga and journaling, and continue to watch as she does her daily housekeeping: vacuuming the floor, cooking, cleaning dishes, carefully dusting and organizing the items in her home. Each moment is lovely and sensual. We hear the sound of eggs frying in a pan when she is cooking, the gentle purr of her cat who is watching her read.

Her identity is pieced together through fragments: we see the back of her head as she watches the sunrise, the bottom of her face as she smooths lotion on her chin. It’s the video equivalent of a writer using the 2nd person; we’re invited to see Kokohome as a protagonist in her own story and to also imagine ourselves in her shoes.

The cozy depiction of domestic life is the inverse of the drudgery found in Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which, over the course of a deliberately slow three hours and twenty-two minutes, focuses on a beautiful and lonely widow who repeats a series of highly regimented chores. We watch as our heroine boils water, slices potatoes, folds laundry, scrubs the bathtub, serves dinner. The film deliberately eschews sensuality: when Jeanne takes a bath, she roughly scrubs her skins until it turns red. When she brushes her hair, she gazes at herself unsmiling in the mirror, each rigorous yank at her head purposeful and not at all pleasant. The lighting is harsh and scenes are often silent, except for the sound of her work.

The stark realism of Jeanne Dielman may on the surface appear to be a more authentic look at “women’s work” but I believe that Kokohome’s 5AM Diaries offers a compelling counterpoint to the omnipresent narrative that housekeeping kills creativity. One of the primary ways that Kokohome reimagines women’s work is through her use of the camera itself. Kokohome often reflects on the process of creating videos and we are even invited to watch as she sets up her camera. The art of taking videos is also presented as simply another practice, an intriguing premise that makes the audience wonder about the creative potential of every aspect of our daily routine. 

Some critics frame this popular online content that “romanticizes” ordinary moments to be insipid. In a July article for the Guardian, Sarah Manavis argues that this trendy embrace of our daily routines is somehow not just boring but morally suspect. The “beige-fluencers” as she cheekily calls them encourage blandness and conformity, which comes at the expense of building a creative and intellectually rigorous life. She worries that young people in particular are being lulled into a state of compliance as they sit around sipping tea in their sweatpants.  For Manavis, the obsession with routine isn’t light. It’s a dystopia.

Perhaps some “beigefluencers”do churn out repetitive content to lull us into a state of inaction, but I think the appeal of aesthetic videos that embrace routine is not just their soothing tone, but their insistence on celebrating the wonder and joy of our soft interior worlds. Kokohome’s videos are less an argument for a return to a “tradwife lifestyle” than they are a celebration of the life of the mind. While Jeanne Dielman’s troubled inner world is revealed slowly and methodically through her obsessive housekeeping, Kokohome’s experience is rendered earnestly through her reflections on her daily experiences. Rather than speak her feelings, Kokohome’s thoughts appear on the screen through short simple sentences that give the viewer the experience of having access to a private journal.

Perhaps I’m especially drawn to Kokohome’s calming videos because it inspires me to see the little things I do every day with greater insight. When I watch,I don’t just feel more peaceful; I also genuinely start to appreciate the tenderness with which I make the bed or pour a cup of coffee or fold laundry or sit in front of my laptop and type. The appreciation of a daily routine that feels substantive is not a rejection of the greater world outside the individual home. It’s a recognition that the way we spend our time matters and that what we often still think of as “women’s work” is not at all unimportant. In the world of Kokohome, it’s the very pulse of a meaningful artistic life.