In the suburbs, the good people of America water their peonies, clean their estate cars, barbeque their steaks and talk about the price of gas. Sometimes there are minor infractions – someone’s garage broken into, a car stolen and upended at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. And sometimes, the body of a teenager is found, warped beyond recognition in a ditch, or the nice young man from down the street harbours dreams of killing, and that quiet girl from across the way plans to bludgeon her boyfriend to death. In cinema, these things exist on a continuum. Their cool depravity represents one end of a spectrum defined by domesticity at one extreme, and violence at the other. Following this logic, human bloodlust is somehow indivisible from the silent fury of the recently divorced Father, or the scorned local councillor. A taut and inexplicable natural order pervades the American suburb, predicated on deviancy, shame and boredom. Or so the myths of cinema would allow us to believe. Why is it that for the past 50 years, cinema has been obsessed with depicting the attending horror and lethargy of the American Suburbs? Ever since Joyce Carol Oates penned her queasy ode to suburban violence ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ in 1966, various iterations of its casual horror have popped up on the silver screen – from arthouse to the mainstream. 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN SUBURB

The Suburb is not an exclusively American phenomenon. As with many things, it has become distilled and rarefied through cultural medium, and is now as essentially American as say, the Motel or The Drive Thru. Where it deviates is through its adaptation as a liminal space, as opposed to merely a facet of town planning, or corporate enterprise. In his essay ‘Urban Anthropology’, Gary W. McDonogh suggests that ‘suburbs haunt American cities with their temptations and threats, presence and absence’ – presenting suburbs as psychological spaces as well as municipal ones. 

To see this in practice, one need only consider the seismic impact of two films released in 1999. Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Sam Mendes’ American Beauty are arguably two of the most treasured and polemic feats of filmmaking of the late 90s – inspiring reactions ranging from blind rage or reverent applause depending on who you ask. If you asked me, I’d say these two films are the gatekeepers of the Suburban Gothic genre; their contrast of muted, winsome aesthetics with insidious elements of sex, violence and death establishing the stylistic cornerstones of the genre.

In these films, the people are white, the houses are big and the problems manifold. Suicide, lust and envy abound in the tree-lined avenues. In American Beauty, Lester Burnham becomes infatuated with his teenage daughter’s best friend, his obsession reaching its transgressive pinnacle as he imagines her in a bathtub surrounded by rose petals. His desire radicalises him; it is a depth-charge that blows his suffocating existence wide open, allowing us to watch gleefully as he sabotages his comfortable suburban life. In The Virgin Suicides, the systematic deaths of the Lisbon sisters rattle a quiet Michigan suburb with tangible results. The suburb is altered irreversibly in the eyes of its narrators, its curated perfection replaced by a treacherous, swampy wilderness with a bilious scent. In both films, the natural order of the suburbs is warped by shame, stemming from desire – the logical end point of which, we are told, is death. In these films, we learn the following things; that outwardly, white Americans want stability, that secretly, white Americans hate stability, and that what white Americans actually want is wild, unmitigated, ravenous chaos, whether that be via sex, or … actually it’s mainly just sex. And lastly, that, in denying themselves this, the only appropriate route is violence or demise. 

In the cinematic suburbs, Black people don’t exist. The less glamorous societal ills, such as unemployment, hunger, police brutality and racketeering don’t exist either. The problems of the suburbs are restricted to the psychosexual, the deeply private frustrations of the white middle class. In cinema, the suburbs are allowed to fulfil a function that is both critical of the white middle class, and perversely obsessed with it. We watch Lester Burnham and the Lisbon Sisters like bugs under a glass. We hate them and yet, we can’t resist watching them twist and writhe before us. Critic Martin Dimes pointed out the suburbs ‘represent an idealized past removed from the challenges of the present.’ If that sounds dubious, it’s because it is.  

These depictions of the American suburbia are also distinctly female – their sensibilities and aesthetics playing into the palatable, appealing version of femininity that has long hounded cinema – the blonde cheerleader, the waifish virgin. They are also subversions of this archetype, the fierce sexual agency of Lux Lisbon and Jane Burnham and the beyond-their-years nihilism they exhibit distancing them from the more corrosive elements of the cliché. If the suburbs can be read as physical manifestations of America’s desire to eclipse its unsavoury reality with brash displays of uniformity and perfection, what could be more subversive than an untamed subculture of young women, lusting after their friend’s father and rutting on the roof of the family home?

TROUBLE IN PARADISE 

If The Virgin Suicides and American Beauty are ostensibly concerned with sex and death in the suburbs, then the next three films offer a perspective of violence and death in the suburbs that is if not quite as alluring, then undeniably more unnerving. Gus Van Sant (the Godfather of Suburban angst) offers a dreamy Portland suburb, a serious young boy, and a sporadic act of life-altering violence in his 2007 film Paranoid Park. The film is elliptical in structure, presenting various sequences in a random order before looping back and giving them retrospective logic. It is spliced with snippets of random conversation and noise; some things are misremembered while others reverberate with urgency. In The Virgin Suicides and American Beauty, transgression and arousal were stoked by the palpable constraints of the suburb (itself becoming almost like an agent of chaos), whereas, in this slew of films, the characters act against their backdrops, seeking (albeit unintentional) acts of violence to remind themselves of their corporeal selves. 

Needless to say, the protagonists of this subsect of films tend to be white males. Without the direct threat of incarceration, the teenage boys that populate these films are free to flirt with homicide, assault and questionable moral decisions with indemnity (and so, the implicit privilege persists…). In Richard Kelly’s cult classic Donnie Darko, Jake Gyllenhaal’s teenager loses the ability to differentiate between real life and the increasingly disturbing apparitions that cloud his vision. Randomised acts of chaos seem to follow him and the literal end of the world hangs over him like the proverbial Sword of Damocles. In Gregg Araki’s chilling 2004 film Mysterious Skin, the thorny issue of childhood sexual abuse is meted out through a metaphor of alien abduction. And in Paranoid Park, the protagonist parses his guilty conscience before burning the letter and presumably, continuing with his life. While disparate in terms of actual content, these three examples perfectly encapsulate the incidental nature of violence as presented in the American suburbs on screen. Where Suburban Gothic, by design, allowed for the active participation of its characters (even while flailing in their surroundings), in this sub-genre, the young men are mere pawns in a Russian Roulette of threat and violence.  What are we being told? That the transient, unregulated nature of the suburbs in some way encourages acts of aggression? That boys will be boys? This was the early 2000’s after all. America was slap bang in the middle of a protracted war in the Middle East, 9/11 had destroyed the age of innocence for many Americans, and the afterglow of post-war American prosperity was disappearing like headlights on a freeway.

THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT …

Evidently, the advent of the new millennium brought with it a wealth of films about capricious, uneasy teenage subjects. Larry Clark’s Bully (2001) and Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003) for example, both present teenagers as capable of idle cruelty and transgression, flailing in the sweet spot before adult socialisation. Since the 2010’s however, there has been a noticeable dearth of films in the same category. Is it naive to imagine that in the suburbs of America, all the teenagers have joined Bible Study and thrown in their Slipknot hoodies and proclivity for the perverse? Most likely not. But there has been a definite shift in what these suburbs now represent. Take 2008’s Juno for instance, or 2007’s Superbad – these are the suburbs, but not as you know them. Life here is quirky. It’s tragic - but in an endearing way. There’s love here as well – in the families and the long-suffering friends. The young people armour themselves with wit and camaraderie and face the inertia of their neighbourhood without fear. Is it possible that this shift represents a rejection of the suburb stereotype, which flared up in the early 2000’s and momentarily upheld the popular notion of the suburbs as America’s subversive underbelly? Or will cinema ever be truly free from the peculiar allure of the American suburb? After all, it is a nation historically obsessed with frontiers and otherness - and what better place to cosplay the casual violence and alien properties of the frontier than in the leafy commuter towns across the country, just out of reach of metropolitan correctness? 

These films are intrinsically American; their subjects concerned with yet-unrealised perfection and success. Their appeal lies in their apparent normality, their convincing domesticity – doting parents, a swish video console, the latest designer jeans. When their protagonists transgress (which they inevitably do) we lean closer to watch them, partly out of pity, partly out of horror, but always out of pleasure.