Abstract
There is a contradiction at the heart of narrative film representations of the suburbs. The films that are most often remembered as being “about” the suburbs are typically critiques of the landscape, driven by cynicism and a sense of superiority. However, many other, usually more popular, films are set in the suburbs; these are typically cheery family comedies and uplifting coming-of-age stories. These films do not explicitly take the suburbs as their subject, but rather use the setting as a mere backdrop for character and narrative development.1 In their survey of suburban films, Muzzio and Halper distinguish between movies that are suburban-centered (narratively or thematically they are about the suburbs) and those that are suburban-set (in which setting does not appear crucial to the plot; the movie could have been made elsewhere).2 Suburban-centered films are almost always characterized by sarcastic critique, while suburban-set films by affectionate idealization—as if to suggest that to openly acknowledge the defining qualities of suburbia is to expose them to ridicule and disdain.
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Notes
Nathan Holmes, “Playing House: Screen Teens and the Dreamworld of Suburbia,” in A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home, ed. Murray Pomerance (London and New York: Wallflower, 2008), 248–62.
Douglas Muzzio and Thomas Halper, “Pleasantville? The Suburb and Its Representation in American Movies,” Urban Affairs Review 37, no. 4 (March 2002): 543–74.
Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century, Census 2000 Special Reports, Series CENSR-4 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2002), 33.
Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 161.
Robert Beuka, Suburbia Nation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David R. Coon, Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014); Robert Beuka, “‘Cue the Sun’: Soundings from Millennial Suburbia,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (Fall 2003): 154–71; Richard Porton, “American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares,” Cineaste 20, no. 1 (July 1993): 12–15.
Coon, Look Closer; Beuka, SuburbiaNation; Roger Webster, “Introduction: Suburbia Inside Out,” in Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives, ed. Roger Webster (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 1–13.
Vivian Carol Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1987), 87.
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003); Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991); Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias.
Shaun Huston notes that Office Space (1999) is a significant exception. Shaun Huston, “Filming Postbourgeois Suburbia: Office Space and the New American Suburb,” The Journal of Popular Culture 42, no. 3 (2009): 497–514. Other examples include Clerks (1994), SubUrbia (1996), and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004).
John Rennie Short, Bernadette Hanlon, and Thomas J. Vicino, “The Decline of Inner Suburbs: The New Suburban Gothic in the United States,” Geography Compass 1, no. 3 (2007): 641–56; Coon, Look Closer, 113.
Ruth Frankenberg, “Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 5.
Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen, “Introduction,” in New Suburban Stories, ed. Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 1–13; Coon, Look Closer, 13, 16.
Coon, Look Closer, 10. Roger Silverstone agrees, writing of the “suburban imaginary”: Roger Silverstone, “Introduction,” in Visions of Suburbia, ed. Roger Silverstone (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 13.
Edward C. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), 51.
This aesthetic is also noted in a study of late-twentieth-century suburban photography; Glisson emphasizes the theme of the macabre and the aestheticization of the quotidian. James Glisson, “Photographing Sprawl: Picturing the Contemporary Suburb,” Afterimage 35, no. 4 (February 2008): 13–17.
Rupa Huq, Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 43.
Lilly Ann Boruszkowski, “The Stepford Wives: The Re-Created Women,” Jump Cut 32 (1987): 16–19. The film ranked fifty-fifth in Variety’s end-of-year domestic box office rankings; “Big Rental Films of 1975,” Variety, January 7, 1976.
Elyce Rae Helford, “The Stepford Wives and the Gaze: Envisioning Feminism in 1975,” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 2 (2006): 145–56.
Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
Beuka, SuburbiaNation; Simone Francescato, La Donna È Mobile: Portraits of Suburban Women in 1970s American Cinema (Bethesda: Academica Press, 2011).
Michael Pollan, “The Triumph of Burbopolis,” The New York Times, April 9, 2000, sec. 6. See also Daniel Lea, “Urban Thrall: Renegotiating the Suburban Self in Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and High Fidelity,” in Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives, ed. Roger Webster (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 141–59.
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).
Bridget Gilman, “‘Nothing Seemed Familiar, yet Everything Was Very, Very Familiar’: Rethinking Bill Owens’s Suburbia,” in New Suburban Stories, ed. Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 125; quoting from 1972 edition of Suburbia.
Wilbur Zelinsky, Not Yet a Placeless Land: Tracking an Evolving American Geography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 11.
Dolores Hayden, “The American Sense of Place and the Politics of Space,” in American Architecture: Innovation and Tradition, ed. David G. DeLong et al. (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 185.
James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 131.
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London and New York: Verso, 1995). Relph, too, associates placelessness with the “modern” (implied European and North American) world. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 79–80.
The fear of suburban inauthenticity can be linked to works of postwar science fiction, which show false towns in which protagonists are duped about the reality of their neighbors and their environment appear in postwar science fiction like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959) and then later in The Truman Show (1998). See James B. Mitchell, “Cul-de-Sac Nightmares: Representations of Californian Suburbia in Science Fiction During the 1950s and ’60s,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (Fall 2003): 115–27. Related are “narratives of depersonalisation and body replacement” such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), which go further than considering the environment to be false, actually fearing the loss of identity to mass production (Bernice M. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture [Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009], 71).
Richard Combs, “No Bigger than Life: Ordinary People,” Sight and Sound, Spring 1981; Gary Arnold, “Redford’s ‘Ordinary People’: Dire Straits in the Suburbs,” The Washington Post, September 26, 1980, sec. Style.
Richard Schickel, “Nuclear Explosion in Chicago,” Time, September 22, 1980; emphasis in the original.
France Winddance Twine, “Brown-Skinned White Girls: Class, Culture, and the Construction of White Identity in Suburban Communities,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 214–43.
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
See Thomas W. O’Brien, “Love and Death in the American Movie,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 9, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 91–93; and Nina C. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
Mikita Brottman, “Apocalypse in Suburbia,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (Fall 2003): 13.
William Dobriner, Class in Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 9; cited in Laura Morowitz, “The Monster Within: The Munsters, the Addams Family and the American Family in the 1960s,” Critical Studies in Television 2, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 37.
Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse.
James S. Duncan and Nancy G. Duncan, “Sense of Place as a Positional Good: Locating Bedford in Space and Time,” in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, ed. Paul C. Adams, Steven D. Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 41–54.
John Hartley, “The Sexualization of Suburbia: The Diffusion of Knowledge in the Postmodern Public Sphere,” in Visions of Suburbia, ed. Roger Silverstone (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 189.
Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: The Man Who Made Howard Hughes Sing and The Iron-Butterfly Mom,” The New Yorker, October 13, 1980, 185.
Ibid., 186.
Cart., “Ordinary People,” Variety, September 17, 1980.
Clifford Terry, “Robert Redford Goes Behind the Camera for a New Image,” The New York Times, July 27, 1980, sec. 2.
Vincent Canby, “Redford’s ‘Ordinary People,’” The New York Times, September 19, 1980.
Timothy Aubry, “John Cheever and the Management of Middlebrow Misery,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (Fall 2003): 64–83.
This can also be related to the increasing importance of suburban movie theatres; as downtown theatres closed, the population continued to shift toward the suburbs, and Hollywood prioritized family-oriented films. Chris Jordan, Movies and the Reagan Presidency: Success and Ethics (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 8.
Nigel Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (London: Wallflower, 2007), 84.
Ibid., 85.
Janet Maslin, “Maverick Tales Add Spice to Summer,” The New York Times, July 21, 1985; Richard Corliss, “This Way to the Children’s Crusade,” Time, July 1, 1985; Stanley Kauffmann, “Traveling to the Past,” The New Republic, August 5, 1985; Andrew Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
Richard Corliss, “Steve’s Summer Magic,” Time, May 31, 1982; Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: The Pure and the Impure,” The New Yorker, June 14, 1982; Lester D. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 117.
Lloyd Rose, “Child’s Eye, Adult’s Hand,” Atlantic, October 1982, 102.
Kenneth R. Hey, “E.T., The Extra Terrestrial,” USA Today, September 1982, 66.
William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, “Bold New City or Built-Up ‘Burb? Redefining Contemporary Suburbia,” American Quarterly 46, no. 1 (March 1994): 22.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1961), 494.
Ilsa J. Bick, “The Look Back in E.T.,” in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles L. P. Silet (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 71–90.
Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate, Back to the Future (London and New York: BFI: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 61.
Ibid., 48.
Elizabeth McCarthy, “Back to the Fifties! Fixing the Future,” in The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films, ed. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), 133–56.
Andrew Gordon, “Back to the Future: Oedipus as Time Traveler,” in The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films, ed. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), 29–48; McCarthy, “Back to the Fifties! Fixing the Future”; Shail and Stoate, Back to the Future.
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, “Introduction: It’s About Time,” in The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films, ed. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), 1–28.
Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: Living Out a Song,” The New Yorker, July 29, 1985, 58.
Michael Johns, Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 91.
Zelinsky, Not Yet a Placeless Land, 264; Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
Bernice M. Murphy, “‘You Space Bastard! You Killed My Pines!’: Back to the Future, Nostalgia and the Suburban Dream,” in The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films, ed. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), 49–61.
Christopher Justice, “Ronald Reagan and the Rhetoric of Traveling Back to the Future: The Zemeckis Aesthetic as Revisionist History and Conservative Fantasy,” in The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films, ed. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), 190.
Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (New York: Garland Publishers, 2000).
Frank P. Tomasulo, “The Gospel According to Spielberg in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 3 (2001): 277; Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light, 90.
Other scholars have also made connections to the need these events, in addition to trying to compensate for the hawkish foreign policy of the era. John W. Wright, “Levinasian Ethics of Alterity: The Face of the Other in Spielberg’s Cinematic Language,” in Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Book, ed. Dean A. Kowalski (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 60; Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light, 87.
David Wittenberg, “Oedipus Multiplex, Or, The Subject as a Time Travel Film: Two Readings of Back to the Future,” Discourse 28, no. 2&3 (Spring and Fall 2006): 51–77.
Mark Winokur, “Black Is White/White Is Black: ‘Passing’ as a Strategy of Racial Compatibility in Contemporary Hollywood Comedy,” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, ed. Lester D. Friedman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 202.
Claire Perkins, American Smart Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 143.
David Breskin, Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 332.
Gabriel Snyder, “Turning on New Light for ‘Darko,’” Daily Variety, April 21, 2004, 1.
Jennifer Soong, “Not Successful? Become a ‘Cult Phenom,’” MovieMaker, Summer 2004, 82.
Noah Robischon, “Bad Hare Day,” Entertainment Weekly, November 9, 2001; James C. Beck, “The Concept of Narrative: An Analysis of Requiem for a Dream(.com) and Donnie Darko(.com),” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 10, no. 3 (2004): 55–82; Paul Booth, “Intermediality in Film and Internet: Donnie Darko and Issues of Narrative Substantiality,” Journal of Narrative Theory 38, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 398–415.
Peter Mathews, “Spinoza’s Stone: The Logic of Donnie Darko,” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 25, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 38–48; Randolph Jordan, “The Visible Acousmêtre: Voice, Body and Space across the Two Versions of Donnie Darko,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (June 2009): 47–70.
For references to Carolyn as one of a parade of emotionally and sexually unavailable suburban wives/mothers, see Gary Hentzi “American Beauty” Film Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Winter 2000–2001): 46–50; and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn “‘Too Close for Comfort’: American Beauty and the Incest Motif,” Cinema Journal 44, no.1 (Fall 2004): 69–93.
David Germain, “‘American Beauty’ Parlays Oddball Premise into Oscar Gold,” The Associated Press, March 27, 2000; Katherine Gazella, “‘American Beauty’ Runs Deep,” St. Petersburg Times, November 1, 1999, sec. Floridian. Also see Casey McKittrick, “‘I Laughed and Cringed at the Same Time’: Shaping Pedophilic Discourse around American Beauty and Happiness,” The Velvet Light Trap 47 (Summer 2001): 3–14.
Julie Clarke, “All Too Human: Edward Scissorhands,” Screen Education, no. 50 (Winter 2008): 94–5.
For geographic sources on suburban preoccupation with the house and yard as opposed to public space, see Hayden, Building Suburbia; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; David Jacobson, Place and Belonging in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Judith A. Spector and Katherine V. Tsiopos Wills, “The Aesthetics of Materialism in Alan Ball’s American Beauty,” Midwest Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 279–96; Adam Potkay, “The Joy of American Beauty,” Raritan 25, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 69–86; David L. Smith, “‘Beautiful Necessities’: American Beauty and the Idea of Freedom,” Journal of Religion and Film 6, no. 2 (October 2002): n.p.
This contrasts with Alan Ball’s original script, which had a far more cynical frame story in which Ricky and Jane are falsely found guilty of Lester’s murder; see Wayne Booth, “Is There an ‘Implied’ Author in Every Film?,” College Literature 29, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 124–31.
See Gates, “The Way We Live Now: Bashing the Burbs”; and Yi-Fu Tuan, “Place and Culture: Analeptic for Individuality and the World’s Indifference,” in Mapping American Culture, ed. Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 27–49.
Giselle Benatar, “Cutting Edge with Edward Scissorhands,” Entertainment Weekly, December 14, 1990, 25.
James Walters, Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms (Bristol, UK; Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2008), 110.
Richard Kelly and Kevin Conroy Scott, “Asking Cosmic Questions,” in The Donnie Darko Book (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), xxxviii.
Eric Savoy, “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 6.
Bree Hoskin, “Playground Love: Landscape and Longing in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides,” Literature/Film Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2007): 214–21.
Michael P. Moreno, “Consuming the Frontier Illusion: The Construction of Suburban Masculinity in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (Fall 2003): 85.
David Wellman, “Minstrel Shows, Affirmative Action Talk, and Angry White Men: Marking Racial Otherness in the 1990s,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 311–31.
Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 181.
Cameron McCarthy et al., “Race, Suburban Resentment, and the Representation of the Inner City in Contemporary Film and Television,” in Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society, ed. Michelle Fine (New York: Routledge, 1997), 163.
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© 2015 Amy Lynn Corbin
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Corbin, A.L. (2015). “Home” Turns Otherworldly in the Suburbs. In: Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47971-6_5
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