Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television

Conclusion: There Goes the Neighborhood

212 Conclusion There Goes the Neighborhood I began this book with descriptions of the opening moments from two prominent suburban narratives: American Beauty and Desperate Housewives. These two examples, along with the other films and television programs discussed throughout the book, have much in common with respect to their depiction of suburbia. They all offer images of tasteful single-family homes in visually appealing neighborhoods with tree-lined streets. The sizes of the homes, as well as their interior and exterior designs, suggest comfortable middle-class status. While these neighborhoods might be an economic step up from the reality of most viewers, they are still within the realm of possibility for those who believe in the American Dream. These are also exclusively residential communities. Aside from a few drug dealers and real estate agents who work within their own neighborhoods, most of the characters with paying jobs commute somewhere else to work, because they live in spaces that are separated from industrial, corporate, and retail districts. This image of a purely residential, middle-class community is very common in popular media, but it is clearly not the only image of suburbia in circulation. The 1999 film Office Space offers a very different vision of suburbia. The film opens with a shot of a freeway interchange. There are clusters of midsize office buildings on either side of the road and an overpass taking cars across the freeway from one cluster to the other. The sizes and arrangements of the buildings, along with their placement CONCLUSION 213 straddling the freeway just off the overpass, suggest that this is a development that has sprung up along the outerbelt freeway of a larger city. Traffic on the multilane freeway is bumper-to-bumper and barely moving . Characters from the film are shown sitting in the stalled traffic or jockeying for position in an attempt to find a lane where the cars are actually moving. Their eventual destination is the office of Initech, a generic technology company housed in a large flat building that spreads outward rather than rising upward. Adding to the sprawling feel of the building are the large parking lot and vast green lawn that expand the company’s geographic footprint and indicate the presence of cheap real estate. The Bravo reality series The Real Housewives of Orange County (2006–) offers another, very different picture of suburbia. The first episode opens with a montage of images that immediately suggest wealth: enormous houses, country clubs, expensive cars, and fancy jewelry. The images are accompanied by a series of voiceover comments from the titular housewives like “Life is different in a gated community,” “The land here is a million an acre,” “When you’re not behind the gates, you don’t know what you’re missing,” and “It isn’t just a place to live, it’s a lifestyle.” This is followed by the opening title sequence, which begins with a shot of the sun rising (or perhaps setting) over the horizon, along with onscreen text announcing that “7 million families live in gated communities .” The next shot is a pan of hundreds of rooftops in a vast residential development. The program’s title is introduced in the third shot, appearing in between the two opening halves of an enormous wrought-iron gate. The rest of the title sequence uses a montage of images to introduce the various housewives that are featured on the series. The women are shown engaging in a variety of activities such as driving sports cars, riding horses, shopping for jewelry, and receiving Botox injections. As the title sequence ends, there is a shot of the enormous gate sliding shut, followed by a final shot of the five women smiling at the camera. The opening sequences of Office Space and The Real Housewives of Orange County are quite different from the images analyzed in most of this book. The world of Office Space is dominated by traffic-filled highways , office parks, chain restaurants, and apartment complexes instead 214 LOOK CLOSER of single-family homes. And unlike the deliberately typical families that populate most onscreen suburbs, the “real” housewives are exceptional in many ways. Their comments and activities suggest that their gated community is elite, exclusive, and populated by extremely affluent families . These examples serve as a reminder that, despite the familiarity of...