Giving name to the thing we all retreat to when embarrassment or generally unpleasant/traumatizing situations take hold, Only Murders in the Building’s fourth episode, “The White Room,” ferries us on a journey to the place where angels surely would fear to tread. If for no other reason than the fact that they have their own “white space” with which to retreat to all the time. And it’s one that doesn’t involve essentially “blacking out” in order to be in said “white place” (no allusion to Texas intended). For Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), the white room arrives early on in the episode, when he’s expected to perform a rousing musical number (a.k.a. patter song) about how one of three babies in Oliver Putnam’s (Martin Short) play-turned-Brodway extravaganza, Death Rattle, is the primary murder suspect.
To set the tone for Charles’ mentally manufactured “safe space,” the episode opens with Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) entering a literal white room posing as an apartment (if one can call four hundred and sixty feet that). All the while, Cinda Canning (Tina Fey), whose role is never really over, narrates about the many pratfalls of living in New York (as Charles, Mabel and Oliver did in the series’ first episode, “True Crime”). So it is that, as Mabel enters the apartment she’s being shown by another drop in the bucket of real estate agents, Cinda muses, “New York. It’s not exactly famous for self-care. In this city, we push, we shove, we occasionally urinate on one another. But do we spend enough time loving ourselves? Maybe not. But you can create a sanctuary.” Of course, it won’t be a tangible one, because no real person can actually afford that, in New York or otherwise. So you’ll have to do the next best (/cheapest) thing and create that sanctuary more metaphorically speaking.
This includes not just tuning out unwanted sounds or “presences” in one’s living space, but perhaps especially in one’s working life. This being what Charles is forced to do when Oliver insists that he rehearses his patter song in front of the entire cast. Scandalized by the notion, Oliver reminds Charles, “You’ll be performing this in front of thousands, so you might as well get used to the eyeballs.” And so, reluctantly, Charles attempts to sing his rendition of “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” But it doesn’t take long for him to start swearing like a sailor as his mind then “fades out” the scene before him so that he doesn’t have to process how much he’s embarrassing himself. And who amongst us hasn’t done something similar in order to keep going? Keep functioning? Emotional self-preservation, after all, is at least ninety percent of survival. And that includes doing whatever it takes to stave off any encroaching memories of one’s humiliation. Ergo, “blotting them out” altogether. Or, in Charles’ case, “whiting them out” as he takes an actual paint roller while in the white room and proceeds to keep painting it whiter.
When he emerges from his white room coma after completing whatever egregious “performance” he gave, he sees that he’s left the people in the room absolutely horrified. Having no idea what he’s just done (only that his pants have been removed and he’s now sitting in one of the bassinets formerly reserved for the Pickwick triplets), he asks if he’s dead or on drugs or both. The other theater actors have to explain that he went into “the white room.” As fellow cast member Jonathan (Jason Veasey) explains it, “[It’s a] stage thing. In TV, if you screw up, you get another take. In theater, there’s no net. You blank out, that’s it. You’re a polar bear in a global warming documentary hanging on to a tiny piece of ice in the middle of the sea, waiting to die.” Charles asks how he’s supposed to stay out of the white room if it’s instinctual, to which Jonathan vaguely replies that he should try going to his “happy place” instead. But what is the white room if not its own happy place? Apparently, a little too dissociatively happy though. No, people want Charles to at least be aware of what he’s doing onstage so that he can have some modicum of control over it. Thus, his latest “lady friend”/live-in girlfriend, Joy (Andrea Martin), tells him he should try making one of his “gorgeous omelets” to decompress and unlock this alleged happy place.
Alas, Charles finds the process so soothing that he wants to keep using it as a crutch onstage. Although Joy warns him that’s “no bueno,” he tries to use the same maneuvers he does in omelet-making while singing his jaunty patter song in front of Oliver again. Only to be met with what amounts to a “hell no” from “Olly” as he tells Charles to keep his hands behind his back and sing the damn song. Obliging the request, Charles once more enters the white room, only to reemerge having offended anew the diminished audience of Oliver, Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton) and Tom (Joel Waggoner), the “Christian” pianist. Perhaps even more than the first time. Sensing that something “deeper” is going on with Charles, Oliver takes him into his office and suggests that what might be amplifying Charles’ stress level about the song is the fact that Joy has moved in so abruptly, and that Charles is “meant to be alone,” as he suddenly realizes while talking it out with Oliver. And that, all this time, his “dissociation as survival method” has ultimately been about something more troubling in his life: the notion of domesticated monogamy.
As we’ve seen with Charles’ dating history, he doesn’t do that well with women. Not only in terms of “accommodating” them, but picking them, to boot. Just from the ones we know, there was Emma, the unseen woman who had a daughter named Lucy (Zoe Colletti) that Charles seemed to grow more attached to than Emma herself. Then there was Jan (Amy Ryan)—whose name is just a stone’s throw from “Joy”—the woman that turned out to be the murderer of Tim Kono (Julian Cihi) in season one. So obviously, Charles is more “gun-shy” about women than he might have previously acknowledged. And this is why allowing one to move in with him so fast has caused something of a psychological break.
And yet, when Oliver effectively gives him “permission” to end things with Joy because he insists, “Maybe you don’t need to change. Maybe you are who you are, and that’s enough,” Charles still can’t bring himself to “perform” the breakup. Thus, he enters the white room even while trying to tell Joy that it’s over. When he comes out of it, he’s somehow managed to propose to her during the brief “white-out period.” And that’s when the “dissociative delights” of the room become the dissociative dreads in that he never even knows what he might do in his personal life while “out to sea.” And yes, the third time he goes into the white room, there are fish outside the windows…a result of Joy’s influence, as she’s set up a tank in Charles’ living room filled with sixty-two finned friends and a barrage of accompanying “decor” for them to enjoy. Charles, sadly, can’t say the same of his own “enjoyment,” nor can he account for the major life decision he made while in the white room.
Unfortunately, many need that kind of “crutch” regardless of the consequences they might wreak (including, as Jonathan said, “coming to” at a Papa John’s in Yonkers). For the pain of “staying present” just doesn’t seem worth it compared to the comfort of that soothing white room we’re all capable of creating as our “sanctuary” from the reality right in front of us.
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