It’s a nice trailer, in a nice trailer park… No, it’s not like the trailer park that Eminem lived in.

— Minnie Driver
“Friday Review”
September 2004 The Guardian

Why It’s Moronic

Minnie simultaneously said she lives in a trailer park and made a class distinction between hers and the lowlife kind. I generally don’t have a problem with Minnie Driver (she’s talented, seemingly brainy, and a good interviewee), but this seemed like a really weird thing to say. I mean, even if you have the Maserati of trailer homes, you still only have about three square feet of space between yours and the next.

I know what trailer park she’s talking about, too: When I first started seeing Malibu foreclosures for an astoundingly low $200K (where the average home price is well over $1 million), I had a big “Aha!” moment once I figured out they were trailers. I was shocked that Malibu would allow trailers—even the rural farming town of 1,200 where I grew up didn’t allow trailers—and consequently thought they must be some newfangled fancy kind. Nope. They’re just trailers. Check out the listing photos yourself.

Don’t fool yourself, MD: Even in Malibu, across the street from the Pacific, trailer-park life is trailer-park life... whether you’re a 2004 Minnie Driver or a 1994 Eminem.