In Eustache’s The Mother and The Whore, Alexandre sleeps on a mattress on the floor. I recently saw Roman Coppola’s CQ, and while it isn’t a French film, it takes place France in the 1960s, and the main characters sleep on a mattress on the floor. Is this just a coincidence, or was there some kind of no-bed-frame trend in France at the time?
I don’t know about France,but the * flower children * seemed all to have the mattress on floor thing,in the 60s/70s
Well, I sleep on a mattress on the floor. Guess it’s just a holdover from my hippie upbringing. Or, maybe it’s my wife’s bad back that needs that extra-firm foundation…
I sleep with my mattress and boxspring on the floor. I’m not French or anything, just lazy. I moved recently and don’t feel like putting the frame and headboard together.
As a man who lived through the '60s and slept on mattresses on the floor, I can say that most did it because it was so much cheaper to get mattresses than full-fledged beds or furnished apartments. You could get an unfurnished room for $20-$30 bucks a month and a friend usually had an old mattress he or she would let you have and there you have it.
Once I had my entire place (three rooms), except for the bathroom, covered with mattresses. Changing sheets was a royal pain but other than that it was one of my more practical apartments.
TV
I was thinking about this question since my last post, and I remembered some relatively well-off individuals of the 60s that had their mattresses on the floor too. I think it was part of the times and the rejection of materialism (and for that matter accepted norms) that the younger people of the 60s identified with. The mattress on the floor could create at least a symbolic identification with the non-establishment and a rejection of the materialistic side of society.
TV
I used to do it. Now I have a big girl bed.
Plus, have you ever tried to move a box spring up three flights of stairs? My God. I’m never moving again.
I sincerely doubt this has anything to do with a philosophy; people did, and still do, use mattresses without frames or boxes because it’s cheap and convenient. Full beds are hideously expensive and difficult to move, and young people/students have little money and move a lot. The marginal cost and inconvenience of a box spring and frame is very high, but unless you CARE what your bedroom looks like, they offer little tangible benefit.
The recent version of this phenomenon, of course, is the futon. Futons are insanely popular among students/young people, a craze that started in earnest around the early 90s, mainly because they’re cheap and easy to move. It’s the same thing as the mattress-on-the-floor thing.
I don’t suppose this is definitive answer one way or another, but I lived in an apartment in Paris for ten years and damned if I didn’t sleep on a mattress on the floor. For some reason, it’s almost impossible to find cheap bed frames in France, so I made do without.
My girlfriend sleeps on a mattress on the floor. Her parents were not able to transport the bed she wanted from ikea in their car all the way to Austin. It’s the only bed she’ll have, so bitterness has kept her from buying a bed and box spring. She hung up some of the chinese paintings her grandfather did, and tries to pass it off as asian themed.
I still sleep on a mat on the floor. Kinda like when you took naps in kindergarten.
I slept on a mattress on the floor (in Santa Cruz) for about a year. It beat sleeping on the pile of blankets/pillows/dirty clothes that served as my bed before that. The mattress was a gift from my neighbors as they moved out. The left the whole bed outside with a “free” sign on it. Someone got to the frame and boxspring before I noticed, so all I got was the mattress.
And once you have a mattress to sleep on, it’s hard to justify spending the someodd hundred dollars that an actual bed and boxspring setup would cost.
Recently I changed over to a futon (a couch/bed convertable on in permanent “bed” posistion) because it is bigger than my twin mattress and has some storage space under it, but only costs a hundred bucks (used)- cheaper than any bed anywhere. I figure that in the future if I ever get a bigger place with real furniture, the futon has more of a chance of being useful (and not thrown out) than any other junky piece of furniture I could afford to buy right now.
Now that I think about it, almost everyone I know my aqe sleeps on a futon.
Were you putting up some buttonmen for the Corleones?
My daughter, who turns 3 this February, has her mattress (albeit with a box-spring) on the floor. My wife and I mainly did this out of concern for her safety: we cannot keep her from jumping on the bed like a hyperactive kangaroo on crack.
We need the box-spring underneath to provide some give, so she won’t wear out the mattress in a year, but we decided to forego the frame, since adding another 4-6 inches to the height could be seriously dangerous if she fell off.
I spent about three years sleeping on a blanket on the floor (no mattress of any sort). Very cheap, very convenient, and - in my opinion - very comfortable.
We finally decided to get a bed, but made sure to get the firmest they sold.
The only real reason I see for a bed frame in the first place is so that you can use the space under the bed for storing big boxes.