American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema
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Summary
The suburban landscape is inseparable from American culture. Suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept, but also describes a cultural space incorporating people’s hopes for a safe and prosperous life. Suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. <br>The widely held idealized image of suburbia evolved in the 1950s. Today, reality deviates from the concept of suburbs projected back then, due to e.g. high divorce rates and an increase of crime. Nevertheless, the nostalgic view of the suburbs as the “Promised Land" has survived.<br>Postwar critics object to this perception, considering the suburbs rather as depressing landscapes of mass-consumption, conformity and alienation. This book exemplifies the dualistic representation of suburbs in contemporary American cinema by analyzing Pleasantville, The Truman Show and American Beauty. It examines how utopian concepts of suburbia are created culturally and psychologically in the films, and how the underlying anxieties of the suburban experience, visualized by the dystopian narratives, challenge this ideal.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
2
Before analyzing fictional representations of suburbia, it is necessary to first look at the
historical development of the suburbs and to explore how the cultural space of suburbia has
been formed in the course of history. As I will discuss in the following chapter, the rapid
suburbanization of the USA was mostly triggered in the aftermath of the Second World War,
when suburbia promised the returning soldiers and their young families a peaceful life in
homogeneous and green communities outside of the ever growing metropolises. For the
veterans who were financially supported by the government, the suburbs proposed an
opportunity to raise their children in decent, quiet and safe environments while nevertheless
being able to have their jobs in the big cities. As a consequence, homeownership and
suburban dwelling became closely linked to the American Dream in the postwar period.
More than fifty years after the war, the contemporary suburbia deviates from the concept
of the suburbs projected in the 1950s, particularly due to high divorce rates and the increase
of crime facing not only urbanites but also the residents of suburban areas. Nevertheless, the
nostalgic view of the suburbs as the "Promised Land", an image closely tied to the postwar
era, has survived in the minds of many Americans until today. As Hayden puts it, suburbia is
still the "landscape of the imagination where Americans situate ambitions for upward
mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and private property, and longings for
social harmony and spiritual uplift"
5
. Postwar critics have long objected this view,
considering the suburbs rather as overly controlled, depressing landscapes of mass-
consumption, conformity and alienation. The reasons for this criticism are to be found in the
"vision of the suburbs defined by endless malls, tidy streets with manufactured lawns, and
houses with little character"
6
and therefore in the uniformity of suburban landscape design in
general. Hence, today the suburbs are mostly regarded as "either utopian models of
community or dystopian landscapes of dispiriting homogeneity" and therefore "remain a
contested, if only superficially understood, terrain"
7
. The explanation of the utopia/dystopia
dichotomy in terms of the representation of suburbia in fictional works is the focus of interest
in the third chapter of this book.
After an evaluation of films as narrative spaces in general and their potential to shape the
spectators' perceptions of spaces in the fourth chapter, I will exemplify the dualistic
representation of suburbs in contemporary American cinema by analyzing Gary Ross's
Pleasantville (1998), Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998) and Sam Mendes's American
5
Hayden, Dolores. Building Suburbia. Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000. New York: Pantheon
Books 2003, p. 3
6
Baxandall, Rosalyn; Ewen, Elizabeth. Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. New York: Basic Books
2000, p. xv
7
Beuka, Robert. SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and
Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2004, p. 7; emphasis added.
3
Beauty (1999). As postmodern texts, these films critically examine the tension between
utopian and dystopian perspectives on suburbia and question the validity of the mystification
of the suburb as a space incorporating the American Dream. All three of them can be
categorized as satirical (comedy-) dramas focusing, generally speaking, on their male
protagonists' search for the sense of life in a dysfunctional suburban landscape. By studying
these films in terms of narrative techniques, cinematic realization and the portrayal of the
suburban spaces presented on screen, I will explore the depicted divergence between the
nostalgic, utopian ideal of suburbia and the dystopian concept connected to the problems of
contemporary suburban living, like the collapse of the nuclear family, the breakdown of moral
values, and particularly the occupation of private life by modern technology. By relating these
fictional works to both the historical development of the suburbs and the significance of
suburbia as a cultural artifact of the USA, I will examine how utopian concepts of suburbia
are created both culturally and psychologically in the films, and how the underlying anxieties
of the suburban experience, visualized by the employed dystopian narratives, challenge this
ideal.
4
2.
Suburbia as physical and cultural space in the USA
2.1
The history of the suburbanization of the USA
The origins of the suburban structure found in the USA today can be traced back to the first
half of the nineteenth century, when "America's largest cities underwent a dramatic spatial
change"
8
. New transportation devices such as the steam ferry, omnibuses and the commuter
railroad resulted in a first wave of mass immigration which literally transformed urban
landscapes, leading to substantial rethinking and the urge to separate "work and residence in
American cities".
9
The emergence of the first suburban homes was developed by a number of
well known publicists in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly by Frederick Law Olmsted
who inter alia designed Central Park in Manhattan, the educator Catherine Beecher and the
landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. Olmsted drew his inspiration for his later
landscaping and suburban planning projects from his trip to Birkenhead Park near Liverpool,
a park area that "was surrounded [...] by a picturesque suburb"
10
. He claimed that "leisure
and metropolis were mutually exclusive"
11
and that conscious and careful planning of
suburban neighborhoods was necessary to ensure decent dwelling for residents. At the same
time, the first typical American suburban houses were designed by Beecher and Downing,
being "promoted by small builders and the editors of women's magazines"
12
. Beecher's
Treatise on Domestic Economy, published in 1841, served as "the first American book to
offer plans for the practical dwelling"
13
and became the central work to portray American
domestic philosophy.
The first true suburban boom took place in the 1920s, when the automotive revolution and
the expansion of electricity gave "working and middle-class people the opportunity to move
from congested cities to spacious suburbs"
14
. From this time onwards, the car functioned as
"the connective tissue between home, work and [...] consumption"
15
and therefore marked a
central element of the suburban development. Alongside the automotive revolution, there was
also a profound change in the real-estate sector, as housing in the outer areas accessible only
by car became much cheaper than in the cities. The rise of the advertising industry also played
8
Jackson 1985, p. 20
9
Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books 1987, p. 116
10
Ibid., p. 104
11
Kenyon, Amy Maria. Dreaming Suburbia: Detroit and the Production of Postwar Space and Culture. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press 2004, p. 149
12
Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life. New
York: Norton 2002, p. 38
13
Jackson 1985, p. 62
14
Baxandall and Ewen 2000, p. 41
15
Ibid., p. 48
5
an important role in the expansion process of suburban areas, as "advertisers promoted the
private suburban dwelling as a setting for other purchases"
16
, depicting the single house as the
true center of a happy family life. As a response to the technological changes, a group of
intellectuals, among them urban planners, social critics and architects, formed the Regional
Plan Association of America (RPAA), a collective that focused on new models of community
planning and organization. Their central vision was to build communities "with well-made,
efficient, affordable houses and space for both pedestrians and cars"
17
, mixing parks and
leisure areas with modern road systems, which would make it possible for residents to
combine their private and working lives effectively. The group performed innovative
experiments in planned housing particularly in the outer areas of New York, for instance by
designing the suburban communities of Sunnyside Gardens in Queens and Radburn, New
Jersey. Although these projects could not solve the problem of "one third of a nation
remain[ing] ill-housed in tenements and slums"
18
, their ideas were visionary as they shaped
public views of community planning and dwelling and also had a great influence on the New
Deal programs of the Roosevelt Administration to follow.
When the Great Depression took place in the 1930s, many Americans suffered from mass-
unemployment, poverty and homelessness in a way they had never experienced before. As a
reaction to the desperate financial situation, the government around President Roosevelt
installed the so called New Deal, a series of strategies that aimed at helping the USA to
recover economically. With regard to the housing sector, the two schemes that had the most
influential effect for suburban development were the Home Owners Loan Corporation
(HOLC), founded in 1933, and the Federal Housing Administration (FDA), founded in 1934.
The HOLC, in short, "[protected] defaulting homeowners against foreclosure"
19
by sending
more than $3 billion to regional banks to refinance millions of homes.
20
FHA made it possible
even for citizens with low income to buy houses by ensuring that "private capital could flow
into the home construction industry"
21
. Although the Depression slowed down the actual
progress of suburban construction, the New Deal laid ground for a new standard of American
suburban living, as it "put in place an apparatus of financial security that allowed private
money to build post-war suburbia"
22
.
16
Hayden 2002, p. 50
17
Baxandall and Ewen 2000, pp. 39-40
18
Ibid., p. 49
19
Kennedy, David. "What the New Deal Did". In: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 124, No. 2, 2009, p. 257
20
Baxandall and Ewen 2000, p. 56
21
Kennedy 2009, p. 258
22
Ibid.
6
The years after the Second World War, particularly the 1950s, marked the most crucial
suburban boom in the history of the USA, which resulted from several intertwining
phenomena. When the soldiers returned to their mostly young families, there was an
"unprecedented demand for affordable housing"
23
. At the same time, the government
approved a new kind of compensation that granted money to the veterans only for specific
uses, especially for education and homeownership. As a result, although renting would have
seemed the safer option, considering the economically bad years of Depression and war, the
government encouraged them to help reshaping the American economy by buying homes in
suburban areas.
24
Being aware of the newly gained financial potential of returning soldiers,
the private housing industry also focused on veteran families as their main target group, often
luring them by offering houses for cheap rents in order to eventually transform them into
buyers. Both the advertising industry and the national policy portrayed homeownership in the
suburbs as the ultimate American way of life, representing not only freedom and
independence, but also status and wealth. Post-war suburbanization was furthermore boosted
by the increasing popularity of credit financing that came with the end of the Great
Depression, which made "purchasing a house seem as easy as buying a toothbrush"
25
. As a
consequence, the number of people living in American suburbia rose from 35 million in 1950
to more than 102 million in 1980, and by 1990 more than half of all Americans resided in
suburban areas.
26
In the last three decades, the suburbs have developed into a new urban form, which Robert
Fishman calls the "technoburb"
27
, a term relating to the significant influence of technological
innovations on the modern suburbs, such as the "proliferation of freeways, [...] and the
development of sophisticated communication networks"
28
. Whereas in earlier times, people
had to commute to their work places which were usually located in the cities, now factories,
offices and laboratories offering a range of different jobs are also present in the suburbs.
Consequently, these new suburbs are often indistinguishable from the cities. The enormous
impact of new technologies is also present in the so called gated communities, a specific
private housing option within the framework of suburban structures. The "[desire] for safety,
security, community and `niceness'" is inherent to a lot of American citizens who decide to
23
Kenyon 2004, p.30
24
Cf. Hayden 2002, p. 54
25
Baxandall and Ewen 2000, p. 111
26
Cf. Kenyon 2004, p. 19
27
Fishman 1987, pp. 190-207
28
Girling, Cynthia; Helphand, Kenneth. Yard, Street, Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space. New York:
Wiley 1994, p. 146
7
live in "secured residential enclaves"
29
, predominantly because of the increasing crime rates
in both cities and suburbs. As Baxandall and Ewen note, the estimated number of gated
communities was 20,000 with about 3 million households in 1997
30
, while between 2001 and
2009, the number grew by 53%, leading to "more than 10 million housing units [located] in
gated communities"
31
in 2009. The communities are usually protected by private security
guards and studded with cameras, leading to full surveillance across the enclosed
neighborhoods. Moreover, the residents often have to obey "rigidly enforced rules and
regulations"
32
created by the private founders. Despite the significant criticism the founders
and inhabitants of gated communities are subject to, the extensive growth of such secured
neighborhoods can be regarded as a good indicator of the problems suburban areas are facing
today, which I will elaborate on in the course of this book.
2.2
The concept of suburbia as a cultural space
As Bennet Berger already noted in 1962, suburbia is not only an "ecological term" that
distinguishes suburban areas from cities or the countryside, but at the same time also a
"cultural term, intended to connote a way of life"
33
. Berger calls this cultural concept the
"suburban myth", as it contains rituals as well as "sacred symbols" and "articles of faith"
34
.
According to Berger and others, the visual elements of this myth, which describe the surface
structure of suburban landscapes, are the typical T-shaped single-homes with neat front lawns,
"winding streets"
35
, large garages and picket fences. For Berger, the mythical vision of the
suburbs is moreover characterized by homogeneity among its inhabitants, all being in the
same range of age, having comparable jobs and sharing a similar family life. Accordingly,
suburbia is often imagined as an ideal form of communal living. Other critics, like for
example Tom Martinson
36
and Amy Kenyon, call the concept "American dreamscape",
making it clear that the landscape of suburbia is particularly linked to and inseparable from
America. Combining the connotations of these two terms, myth and dreamscape, the concept
of suburbia can be understood as a sacred but also mysterious and not fully grasped landscape
29
Low, Setha. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York:
Routledge 2003, pp. 9-10
30
Baxandall and Ewen 2000, p. 252
31
Benjamin, Rich. "The Gated Community Mentality". New York Times Magazine; March 30, 2012; New York
Time, p. A27
32
Baxandall and Ewen 2000, p.252
33
Berger, Bennet. Looking for America: Essays on Youth, Suburbia and Other American Obsessions.
Englewood: Prentice Hall 1971, p. 151
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., p. 154
36
Cf. Martinson, Tom. American Dreamscape: The Pursuit of Happiness in Postwar Suburbia. New York:
Carroll & Graf Publishers 2000
8
of the mind. In simpler words, it represents a longing for a better life, a space in which the
grass is greener and life is calm and peaceful, "the site of promises, dreams and fantasies"
37
.
Kenyon even goes one step further by calling suburbia the "spatialization of the American
Dream"
38
. Especially in the era after the Second World War, the central elements of the
Dream, like the pursuit of happiness, economic wealth and individual freedom, were all
mapped to suburbia, turning the suburbs into America's postwar "Promised Land". The idea/l
of suburbia is therefore closely intertwined with both the history and the national identity of
America, which makes it possible to legitimately calling it a cultural phenomenon.
For the purpose of this book, the most persuasive way to describe suburbia is to call it a
cultural space, as a space is always both "experienced and created"
39
or, to put it in Michel de
Certeau's words, "space is a practiced place"
40
. The term therefore classifies suburbia as the
manifestation of the interaction between its physical form and the ideas and visions that
people map to it: The space of suburbia does not exist on its own, but is constructed
"according to the subject's affective and instrumental relations with it"
41
. It is important to
note that the relationship between spaces and the subjects moving in them is interdependent.
Not only does the construction of spaces result from the subjects' relations to them, but, as
Grosz demonstrates, spatial reference is at the same time important for the subjects' identities:
"It is our positioning within space, both as the point of perspectival access to space, and also
as an object for others in space, that gives the subject a coherent identity [...] in space"
42
.
Returning to the initial discussion of the cultural concept of suburbia, one can conclude
that whenever Americans experience suburban living or look at representations of it in
literature, art and film, their inner vision of suburbia, culturally informed by the myth or
dreamscape explained above, is always actively shaping their perception. For this reason,
Kenyon regards the American perspective on suburban existence as "the irresistible spatial
arrangement in a culture of avoidance"
43
, as people's perception of the suburban space is at all
times distorted by a collective nostalgic imagination. She points out that the concept of
suburbia is flagged by different layers of detached spaces, for example the one between
suburban areas and the city or the detachment caused by the open spaces between suburban
37
Hayden 2003, p. 3
38
Kenyon 2004, p. 1
39
Dickinson, Greg. "The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia". Western
Journal of Communication, 70, No. 3. (2006), p. 213
40
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press 1984, p. 117
41
Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge 1995,
p. 92
42
Ibid.
43
Kenyon 2004, p. 45
9
houses.
44
Following this line of argumentation and combining it with the precedent discussion
of space, I would argue that the most problematic form of detachment happens on the meta-
level, caused by the divergence between today's complex, geographical space of suburbia in
the USA and the people's continuous longing for the suburban dream.
As a number of contemporary critics argue, this deviation between the real and the
imagined suburban space can be read a logical consequence or byproduct of postmodernism:
Dickinson notes that in postmodern America, due to "[massive] migrations, new
transportation and communication technologies, and shifting [...] economic and political
relations", the physical spaces of the suburban landscape are changing radically, causing
"deeply felt anxieties"
45
in suburbanites. Postmodernism, as Fredric Jameson argues, is
characterized precisely by "the effacement of some key boundaries or separations"
46
: The
same way as the distinction between high culture and mass culture is distorted in
postmodernism
47
, the fast expansion of suburbia and the transformation into what Fishman
calls technoburbs can be considered as the collapse of suburbs and cities into one another,
thus erasing the reference spaces Americans need to locate themselves within individual and
also national identity. Jameson describes this phenomenon as a postmodern dilemma:
[This] latest mutation in space [...] has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual
human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and to map
cognitively its position in a mappable external world. [This] alarming disjunction between the body and
its built environment [...] can itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma,
which is the incapacity of our minds [...] to map the great global, multinational and decentred
communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.
48
As a reaction to this inability to locate themselves within the quickly transforming physical
spaces, individuals try "to create private and public spaces that feel safe"
49
for their better
orientation. Concerning the public aspect, the implementation of gated communities can be
read as one way to cope with postmodern anxieties, particularly as the gates or walls that
fence these planned communities create comprehensible settlements within the otherwise
undefined technoburbs. With regard to the private aspect, the individuals' cherishing of the
mythical view of suburbia as the American dreamscape can be interpreted as another,
psychological way to counteract the postmodern disorientation in space. As I will point out in
my analyses of contemporary American movies, this orientation towards the nostalgic space
of suburbia functions as an attempt to gain psychological stability, but also leads to further
44
Cf. ibid., pp. 45-68
45
Dickinson 2004, p. 216
46
Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society". In: Jameson, Frederic. The Cultural Turn.
Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. London: Verso 1998, p. 2
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid., p. 16
49
Dickinson 2004, p. 216
10
alienation caused by the strong divergence between the imagined and experienced suburban
spaces.
11
3.
Utopian and dystopian narratives of suburbia
As suburbia marks a culturally important and at the same time extremely complex and
ambivalent space for Americans, its depiction in fiction is often highly ambiguous as well.
Before starting with a detailed analysis of the utopian and dystopian perspectives on suburbia
in contemporary American movies, it is necessary to first give a general definition of the
concepts of utopia and dystopia as well as an explanation of how these concepts will be used
in the further discussion of this book.
The term "utopia" was firstly introduced by the author Sir Thomas More in 1516, when he
published his book Utopia in which he described an imaginary state on an Atlantic island.
Borrowed from Greek, the word utopia is "ambiguous in its derivation"
50
, as its origin can be
both ou-topos, meaning `no-place', and eu-topos, which can be translated as `good place'.
Thus, the term describes an ideal, perfect society does not exist in reality. Accordingly, utopia
is a place that is, in Fern's words, "desirable, perhaps, but at the same time unattainable"
51
.
The typical utopian narrative tells the story of "a visitor's guided journey through a utopian
society which leads to a comparative response that indicts the visitor's own society"
52
,
providing him
53
with the image of a possible alternative to his own culture. Thus, the
relationship between the protagonist's society and the portrayed utopian culture is always
significant for the moral of these stories, as the main character always judges the utopian
society by the standards that are inherent to the culture he belongs to. Whether the utopian
ideal is, in relation to the protagonist, a wishful vision for the future or represents the longing
for "[images] of lost paradises and golden ages"
54
of the past, it is always locally separated
and distant from his actual society. Therefore, access to this perfect world is usually granted
to the protagonist only once, making the experience even more precious and significant.
With regard to the function of the presentation of such a utopian society, giving a
comprehensive analysis would certainly go beyond the scope of this book. In Krishan
Kumar's opinion, the purpose of utopian fiction is "to overstep the immediate reality to depict
a condition whose clear desirability draws us on, like a magnet"
55
. As regards the film
analyses to follow, I argue that fictional works on utopia on the one hand criticize the actual
culture by showing a perfect society in which the problems found in the real world do not
50
Ferns, Christopher. Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press 1999, p. 2
51
Ibid.
52
Baccolini, Raffaella; Moylan, Tom. "Introduction. Dystopia and Histories". In: Baccolini, Raffaella; Moylan,
Tom (Eds.). Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. London: Routledge 2003, p. 5
53
Most critics agree that the protagonist of the typical utopian story is male.
54
Levitas, Ruth. "The Archive of the Feet: Memory, Place and Utopia". In: Griffin, Michael; Moylan, Tom
(Eds.). Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice. Peter Lang: Bern 2007, p. 19
55
Kumar, Krishan. Utopianism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1991, p. 3
12
exist. On the other hand, these stories also embrace the actual society in the end, as it is made
clear that the utopian culture it is compared to is a mere product of fantasy. For that reason
one could regard utopian fiction as both experimental and educational, as it explores possible
alternatives to the actual state of being in an abstract and fully imaginary space, while in fact
leaving the real society untouched. Within the story, it is the informed visitor who, returning
to his own society, can decide how to use the insights gained in utopia, while viewing from
the outside, the readers or spectators are invited to critically examine their own society
according to the standards presented in the fictional world.
The concept of dystopia can be read as a countermovement to utopian literature, as
dystopian fiction openly criticizes the "existing social conditions or political systems"
56
.
Whereas utopian fiction explores the differences between the invented and the actual world,
the dystopian world is usually depicted as "the nightmare future [being] a possible destination
of present society"
57
. The portrayed dystopia can therefore be interpreted as the logical
consequence of the deficiencies found in contemporary society. In contrast to most utopian
stories, in which the main character travels to the utopian civilization and then returns to his
`real' society as an enlightened individual, the dystopian text "usually begins directly in the
terrible new world"
58
, focusing on the protagonist's alienation of the dystopian society. In
Film und Utopie, André Müller notes that the three main topics in dystopian fiction are the
function of modern technology as a means of total control over the individual and society in
general, the use of biological or psychological manipulation techniques in order to ensure the
people's obedience and the citizens' alienated relationship to nature.
59
Accordingly, dystopian
fiction draws on the readers' or spectators' anxieties resulting from the nuisances of their
actual society, particularly the fear of total control and their loss of individuality. For the
subsequent discussion of contemporary American movies, the first motive Müller mentions is
the most significant one. As Ferns argues, the "emphasis of on the extraordinarily public
character of life"
60
is the common denominator of most popular dystopian works, as the
dystopian society is characterized by clear hierarchies and control, forcing its inhabitants to
conform to the strict standards it proposes: "[A]ll resources of modern technology are
employed to ensure that privacy is kept to an absolute minimum"
61
.
56
Booker, Marvin Keith. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press
1994, p. 3
57
Ferns 1999, p. 107
58
Baccolini and Moylan 2003, p. 5
59
Cf. Müller, André. Film und Utopie: Positionen des Fiktionalen Films zwischen Gattungstraditionen und
Gesellschaftlichen Zukunftsdiskursen. LIT: Münster 2010, p. 59
60
Ferns 1999, p. 112
61
Ferns 1999, p. 113
13
A number of critics (e.g. Sargent, Moylan) differentiate between the terms dystopia,
meaning simply the negative of utopia or the ultimate bad place, and anti-utopia, often used
"to describe those works that use the Utopian form to attack either Utopias in general or a
specific Utopia"
62
. Others (e.g. Booker, Ferns) use the term dystopia for both phenomena,
claiming that "dystopian fiction [combines] a parodic inversion of the traditional utopia with
satire on contemporary society"
63
. With regard to the film analyses to follow, I will favor the
latter definition of dystopian fiction, thus considering dystopian perspectives as a direct
reaction to and criticism of utopian thought. As Gordin, Tilley and Prakash note, dystopia can
be considered "utopia's twentieth-century doppelgänger", identifying a "utopia that has gone
wrong"
64
. According to this interpretation, any form of dystopia presented in a fictional text is
logically dependent on the underlying utopian ideal that is attacked and inversed.
With regard to the depiction of suburbia in American fiction, any utopian portrayal of it is
closely connected to the nostalgic, mythical feeling many Americans still have about the
suburban space, resulting from its intertwining with the American Dream as discussed above.
Thus, a utopian representation of suburbia often focuses on idealized images of the surface
structure of suburban neighborhoods, like the integration of nicely built single homes in
"uncluttered, contiguous, parklike landscapes", creating the "utopian ideal of perfect
community"
65
, security and an economically safe life. Many social and literary critics
question exactly these virtues, as they consider suburbia rather as a "landscape of mass-
produced, uniform tract housing"
66
constituting a "hotbed of conformity"
67
. The dystopian
depictions of suburban dwelling in the fictional works to be discussed in the following
chapters draw precisely on this criticism, focusing on the destructive forces resulting from the
utopian idealization of the suburban space: The utopian view of suburban community, safety
and self-realization is inverted in dystopian fiction as it portrays the suburbs as "inauthentic
consumption centers and conformity factories"
68
, making their residents subject to total
control and surveillance.
62
Sargent, Lyman. "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited". Utopian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1994), p. 8
63
Ferns 1999, p. 105
64
Gordin, Michael; Tilley, Helen; Prakash, Gyan. "Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time". In: Gordin,
Michael; Tilley, Helen; Prakash, Gyan (Eds.). Utopia/Dystopia. Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton:
Princeton University Press 2010, p. 1
65
Beuka 2004, p. 5
66
Kenyon 2004, p. 72
67
Beuka 2004, p. 6
68
Halper and Muzzio 2002, p. 543
14
4. Suburbia in contemporary American cinema
4.1 Film as narrative space
Before turning to the films to be discussed, it is interesting to first clarify the impact of filmic
images of suburbia for the spectator and for society in general. As illustrated in the preceding
chapter of this book, suburbia marks a complex and dynamic cultural space that is shaped by
the individuals moving in it. As Michel de Certeau argues in his essay "Spatial Stories",
narration plays a crucial role in the formation process of spaces, as it is precisely storytelling
that creates spaces in the first place
69
. For him, any space is defined (in a mathematical,
axiomatic way) by its limitations and interconnections to other spaces, and it is the process of
narration that articulates these boundaries:
"[Where] stories are disappearing, [...] there is a loss of space: deprived of narrations, [...] the group or
the individual regresses toward the disquieting, fatalistic experience of a formless indistinct and
nocturnal totality. [...] The story's first function is to authorize, or more exactly, to found.
70
In this sense, one can regard films as a very efficient type of spatial stories, as they are rich
cultural texts that combine sight and sound and offer a multisensual experience
71
. In his essay
"Narrative Space", Stephen Heath assigns an even more central role to cinematic
representations of spaces, claiming that reality itself is "the match of film and world"
72
. By
watching movies, according to this interpretation, the spectators actively engage with the
spaces perceived on screen by connecting them to their mental images of physical spaces:
"[T]he structure of cinematic perception is readily translated into that of natural perception, so
much that we can rely on information we construct in viewing films to supplement our
common perceptual knowledge"
73
. Coming back to suburban spaces, one can conclude that
movies do not merely depict suburbia, but that "rather the cinematic images are part and
parcel of the ways in which we actually live and act"
74
in it. The establishing shot can be
regarded as a simple example of this phenomenon: With the help of this technique, films can
show the spectators a landscape, e.g. a suburban neighborhood, from above, a perspective
they are usually denied in everyday life. Thus in films, as Siegfried Kracauer notes, "many
material phenomena which elude observation under normal circumstances"
75
are made visible
by methods of perspective, framing and focusing. Be it very small or big things the human
69
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press 1984, p. 123
70
Ibid., pp. 123-124
71
Cf. Halper and Muzzio 2002, p. 544
72
Heath, Stephen. "Narrative Space". In: Rosen, Philip (Ed.). Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory
Reader. New York: Columbia University Press 1986, p. 385
73
Andrew, Dudley: Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press 1984, p. 41
74
Dickinson 2004, p. 214
75
Kracauer, Siegfried. "The Establishment of Physical Existence". In: Braudy, Leo; Cohen, Marshall (Eds.).
Film Theory & Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009, p. 265
15
eye usually cannot grasp, transitory movement normally unseen or even familiar scenes we do
not pay attention to in our everyday life, "films alienate our environment by exposing it"
76
.
For these reasons, movies play a significant role in our shaping of suburban spaces. As Burgin
states when investigating the space of the city, "[t]he city in our actual experience is at the
same time an actually existing physical environment, and a city in a novel, a film, a
photograph, a city seen on television"
77
. To transfer this statement about urban areas onto
suburban spaces, one can infer that whenever we actually move in suburbia, our experience is
always influenced by the ways in which we have looked and are still looking at the
representation of suburbia in movies and art in general. At the same time, when watching
suburban movies, our perception of the spaces shown on screen is also filtered by our actual
experience of suburbia.
4.2 The invention of reality: Simulations, simulacra, suburbia
As one can conclude from the preceding paragraphs, the mythical or utopian concept of
suburbia is in a way "immortalized by its simulated representation on television, arts and
literature"
78
. It is important to note that the postwar suburbanization of the USA virtually
coincided with the entry of television into the American home, so the TV-set was the center
of the living room of the typical suburban house. As a consequence, already in the aftermath
of the Second World War, TV-shows "provided an illusion of the ideal neighborhood [as just]
when people had left their life-long companions in the city, television sitcoms pictured
romanticized versions of neighbor and family bonding"
79
. Accordingly, the actual suburban
experience was significantly affected by the images of the utopian representations of suburban
communities on the television screen already in the 1950s, the time when the idealized
concept of suburbia emerged and to which the collective nostalgic imagination is still usually
directed to. As a consequence, as Spigel notes, "the lines between electrical and real space"
80
were already distorted in the 1950s. Therefore, it is questionable whether the suburbia shown
on screen has indeed ever simulated the actual suburban spaces found in the US, or if it is in
fact "`the real' [that] appears as simulation"
81
, as Michael Smith states in Reading Simulacra.
Concerning the impact of television and technology in general in postmodern culture, he
76
Ibid., p. 269
77
Burgin, Victor. In-different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press 2000, p. 28; His emphasis.
78
Harvard Law Review (Author unknown). "Locating the Suburb". Harvard Law Review, Vol. 117, No. 6 (Apr.
2004), p. 2003
79
Spigel 2001, p. 43
80
Ibid., p. 44
81
Smith, Michael. Reading Simulacra: Fatal Theories for Postmodernity. Albany: State University of New York
Press 2001, p. vii
16
argues that these innovations "have brought about a new social order in which simulations
and models interpenetrate our experiences of the world so deeply that the difference between
reality and appearance evaporates"
82
. This statement echoes what Fredric Jameson writes
about the collapse of key separations in postmodernism as cited above, and is based on Jean
Baudrillard's theoretical approach of simulations and simulacra. Henry Lefebrve argues in a
similar way, claiming that "the space born in the second half of the twentieth century is
reproduced [...in] a world of combinations whose every element is known and recognized"
83
.
For Baudrillard, America as such is characterized precisely by the fact that reality and fiction,
simply speaking, are inseparable: "[American reality] was there before the screen was
invented, but everything about the way it is today suggests it was invented with the screen in
mind"
84
. Following his definition of simulacra, suburban spaces as portrayed on screen can
thus be read as "models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal"
85
. Accordingly,
following this interpretation, suburbia as an ideological construct has been merely invented,
and always been imposed by television and other media, in such a way that it seemed real for
Americans. While sitcoms of the postwar period enforced this suburban ideal by presenting
the nuclear family and perfect neighborhood as the norm, many postmodern texts challenge
this view by revealing the very fictionality of the mystified suburban space. In the succeeding
film analyses, this postmodern theory of suburbia as simulacrum will be discussed more
closely.
4.3
Suburbia as setting and center of contemporary American Films: Introduction to
the film analyses
As living in the suburbs is the standard for most US citizens, it is no surprise that the portrayal
of suburbia is found in a great number of contemporary American movies and TV-series. The
continuing success of series like Weeds (2005-today), Desperate Housewives (2004-2012)
and The Simpsons (1989-today) give proof of the ongoing public interest in critical cinematic
representations of suburban existence. At the close of the twentieth century, several
commercially very successful movies focused on the problems associated with life in
American suburbia, as for instance SuBurbia (1996), Ice Storm (1997), Happiness (1998), as
well as the movies to be analyzed in the course of this book, namely Pleasantville (1998), The
Truman Show (1998) and American Beauty (1999).
82
Ibid.
83
Lefebrve, Henri; Moore, Gerald (Transl.); Brenner, Neil (Ed.); Elden, Stuart (Ed.). State, Space, World.
Selected Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2009, pp. 212-13; Emphasis added.
84
Baudrillard, Jean. America. New York: Verso 1989, p. 55
85
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: Mich. University Press 2010, p. 1
