The Hero’s Journey package at Bathhouse Flatiron purports to offer guests the “ultimate experience”—an eighty-minute massage and a fifty-minute scrub, plus a day pass. Rockwell Group incidentally cited the “hero’s journey”—Joseph Campbell’s narrative arc of self-discovery—as a point of reference for the design. The main character energy of the marketing is topped by claims that the 35,000-square-foot facility—nestled in the former shell of an underground parking garage on 22nd Street—is heated with recycled Bitcoin mining emissions. Self-care, evidently, is a virtuous quest worthy of legend.
Curious, then, that the Bathhouse aesthetic leans so hard on villainy. The dimly lit spa is punctuated by sharp geometric forms, recalling Baron Vladimir Harkonnen’s lavish bathing chambers in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies (2021 and 2024). The achromatic gloom that permeated this inmost cave was tempered only by the pools themselves, glowing bright blue like Fremen eyes. Had I been cast as the hero in the Bathhouse franchise? But as I mulled the question, the ear-splitting clang of an errantly toppled S’well bottle—a Fremen-esque water-saving device—stirred a dark force within me. “Everyone out,” I bellowed to my fellow soakers as I felt myself levitate above the ablution area. I wanted the baths all to myself, with uniformed concubines at my disposal. And I wanted my admission fee back—if the thermae really did run on blockchain runoff, why was I rewarding this murky mining operation? Twin observations from Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals (2020)—that “the totalization of production leads to the total profanation of life,” and that “rest, too, is made to serve production and is degraded into leisure and recreational time”—cast light on my monomythic musings. Dune spoiler alert: The heroes are Harkonnens, too.