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

Introduction: Welcome to the Neighborhood

1 Introduction Welcome to the Neighborhood In an early scene from the 1999 film American Beauty, the protagonist, Lester Burnham, offers a narration that plays over an aerial shot of a suburban neighborhood. The image reveals rows of large, single-family houses, neatly arranged on tree-lined streets. As the camera slowly moves closer to the street, Lester’s narration sets up the film’s story. “My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood. This is my street. This is my life. I’m forty-two years old. In less than a year, I’ll be dead.” As the image changes to a shot of Lester in his bed, waking to the sound of his alarm clock, his narration continues. “Of course, I don’t know that yet. And in a way, I’m dead already.” In the next few scenes, Lester reveals that, despite the pleasant image created by their elegant home and charming neighborhood, the members of the Burnham family are anything but happy. The pilot episode of Desperate Housewives (2004–2012) echoes the opening of American Beauty, but exchanges the male narrator for a female. The first image is a crane shot of another typical suburban street. A school bus winds its way down the cul-de-sac as people walk, bike, and jog along the sidewalks. The camera moves down to ground level and along a white picket fence, before pushing into a shot of a woman exiting her front door to stand on her porch. As the woman looks out at her neighborhood, she provides a voiceover narration to set the scene. “My name is Mary Alice Young. When you read this morning’s paper, you may come across an article about the unusual day that I had 2 LOOK CLOSER last week. Normally, there’s never anything newsworthy about my life. But that all changed last Thursday.” As she continues to narrate, she is shown going about the business of a typical day. She feeds her family breakfast, works on household chores and projects, and runs errands. After all her routine activities, she walks to the closet, pulls out a revolver, and shoots herself in the head. Although they come from different sources—one a film drama, the other a television comedy—these scenes contain striking similarities. They both open with visual images of seemingly normal, serene, pleasant suburban neighborhoods. And through the voiceovers and actions of their dead narrators, they both reveal that these images are only part of the story. Beneath the charming surface of suburban life lies a darkness that leads to the murder of one narrator and the suicide of the other. Both American Beauty and Desperate Housewives draw on previous Hollywood-produced images of suburbia in order to make their first impression. In particular, family sitcoms from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963) and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–1966), helped to develop an onscreen image of suburbia as a utopian space filled with desirable homes, happy families, and troublefree lives. While American Beauty and Desperate Housewives both open with a familiar image reminiscent of these earlier images, they waste no time undermining that vision of simple tranquility, offering up a version of suburbia that is loaded with complexity and contradictions. American Beauty and Desperate Housewives are just two examples of a broader trend in recent Hollywood productions that interrogate and subvert conventional images of American suburbia. The 1997 release of the critically acclaimed The Ice Storm was followed closely by the commercially successful Pleasantville and The Truman Show in 1998, and the Oscar-winning American Beauty in 1999. These four high-profile films helped kick off a wave of cinematic explorations of the complexities of suburban life. Films like Happiness (1998), The Virgin Suicides (1999), Traffic (2000), Far from Heaven (2002), The Hours (2002), The Incredibles (2004), The Stepford Wives (remake—2004), The Cookout (2004), Garden State (2004), The Pacifier (2005), Fun with Dick and Jane (2005), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Over the Hedge (2006), Little Children (2006), Disturbia INT RODUCT ION 3 (2007), Lakewood Terrace (2008), Revolutionary Road (2008), Lymelife (2008), The Joneses (2010), and The Watch (2012) have also taken the American suburb as more than just a backdrop. Using suburbia as a space and a way of life that is integral to their thematic and/or narrative development, these...