Scenes from the Suburbs: The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television 9780748691678

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Scenes from the Suburbs

Scenes from the Suburbs The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television

Timotheus Vermeulen

© Timotheus Vermeulen, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9166 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9167 8 (webready PDF) The right of Timotheus Vermeulen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction: Scenes from the Suburbs Pleasantville: The Suburb as World Happiness: The Suburb and Film Style The Simpsons and King of the Hill: The Suburb as Texture Desperate Housewives: The Suburb as Social Space Teen Noir: The Suburb as Lived Space Conclusion: ‘Upward Yet Not Northward’

1 21 55 81 109 135 170

Bibliography 175 Filmography 189 Teleography 192 Index 194

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3

Pleasantville early in the film 38 Pleasantville later on 38 Medium close-up of David asking a girl out 41 Medium close-up reaction shot of the girl shyly nodding her head 41 The film pulls back the camera and sharpens the focus 42 Happiness. Mid shot of Helen stepping out of the car 57 As the camera closes in on Allen, he looks down . . . 59 . . . to see Helen’s legs stepping out of the car 59 The film connects Allen and Joy through use of the split screen 64 Andy and Joy are separated by a flattened, hollow space 69 The face of King of the Hill’s protagonist Hank 86 Medium long shot of Hank 87 The Simpsons watching TV from their couch 97 Homer watching TV from the couch 98 Desperate Housewives’ Gabrielle seduces her young gardener 121 The camera tracks back from the balcony into the bedroom . . . 122 . . . revealing Gabrielle’s naked legs 122 Medium shot of Susan 126 A few minutes later, Susan’s body speaks another language 127 Chumscrubber. Terri looks up to Dean . . . 139 . . . while Dean, at ease, bemusedly looks down at Terri 140 The parking lot in Brick 162

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many people for helping me, each in their own way, and at various stages of the process, in writing this book. In no particular order: Alison Butler, Tom Brown, Charlotte Brunsdon, Lucy Fife, Reina Loader, Chris Niedt, Jo Gill, Alastair Philips, Ceri Hovland, Eirini Nedel, Bernadette Kester, Rian Johnson, James MacDowell, Geri Solomon, Peter and Agnes Keijzers, Lucy Royle, Bert Verbunt, Sergio Rigoletto, Faye Woods, Stella Bruzzi, V. F. Perkins, James Zborowksi, Olga Wagner, Dieter Wagner, Tanja Wagner, Philip Fleischer, and my colleagues at the University of Nijmegen. I am indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Reading for funding the PhD of which this book is the direct outcome. I am also really grateful to my editors at Edinburgh University Press, Gillian Leslie, Rebecca Mackenzie, Eddie Clark and Jenny Peebles, for making the process as easy and enjoyable as possible. Special thanks go to my brother Daan and my sister Anne, my dear friends Martin Dines, Robin van den Akker, Gry Cecilie Rustad and James Whitfield, and my mentors Jonathan Bignell and Simone Knox, who have all at various points read and commented on the manuscript. My wonderful parents Jan Vermeulen and Elsemieke Leijh deserve a massive thank you for their everlasting support. Finally, I wish to thank the wonderful Ines Wagner, whose love, patience, intelligence and wit have been indispensible, both in the writing of this book and in every other aspect of my life. If you allow me to dedicate a book as ­untypically romantic as this to you, Ines, then consider this yours.

Introduction: Scenes from the Suburbs

As America moves to the suburbs, the motion pictures move with it. In the past two decades there have been more films and television programmes set in suburbia than ever before. Films such as American Beauty (Mendes, 1999), Far From Heaven (Haynes, 2002), Brick (Johnson, 2005), Juno (Reitmann, 2007) and Lakeview Terrace (Labute, 2008), and television shows like Arrested Development (FOX, 2003–6), Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–12), Weeds (Showtime, 2005–present), and Modern Family (ABC, 2009–present) have won commercial as well as critical acclaim, drawing large audiences to the cinema or the couch, picking up nominations for Oscars and Sundance Awards, Emmys and Golden Globes, and almost without exception receiving glowing reviews. ‘There is’, as the social theorists Douglas Muzzio and Thomas Halper have remarked, ‘nothing odd about this. With most Americans living in suburbs by the mid-1990s – and many more hoping to – preoccupation with suburbia is natural.’1 Indeed, the only thing that is odd is that the artistic fascination for suburbs has so far appeared to have passed by media scholars and film critics unnoticed. To date, only a small bookshelf of books, articles and reviews have been published that discuss suburban narratives; moreover only a very small percentage of that bookshelf exclusively concentrates on film and/or television.2 ‘In the still-developing history of the postwar United States,’ the historians Kevin Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue point out, ‘suburbs belong at center stage.’3 But they rarely do. This book is concerned with redressing this injustice by looking at the representation of suburbs in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century film and ­television across a variety of genres and contexts. One of the reasons, perhaps, that suburban film and television have thus far been given such short shrift is that there is a sense among scholars that the tradition is as uninteresting, as mediocre as its subject was long thought to be. As the literary scholar Catherine Jurca has observed in her canonical study White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century

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American Novel, the suburban canon is commonly associated with ‘tropes of typicality and ‘mediocrity’, and a focus on the ‘safe, shallow and shadowless’.4 Indeed, a browse through some of the critical literature on suburban fiction quickly renders terms like ‘two-dimensional’, ‘limited’, and ‘boring’. Another word that keeps popping up is ‘clichéd’. The otherwise so nuanced film scholar Andrew Britton has even gone as far as describing suburban fiction as ‘anaesthetic’: a tradition that is as distasteful as it is desensitising.5 The typical view of the suburban story is that it critiques the pretence of the middle classes – their taste for the tacky, their social conformity, their blandness, the absence of a moral compass. It is the kind of tale in which the pretty white picket fence secretes a graveyard, or the spectacular picture window hides abuse in plain sight. As Robert Beuka remarks: mere mention of the word ‘suburbia’ [. . .] will call to mind for most Americans a familiar string of images – the grid of identical houses on identical lots, the smoking barbecue, the swimming pool – loaded signifiers that, taken together, connote both the middle-class ‘American dream’ as it was promulgated by and celebrated in popular culture in the postwar years and that dream’s inverse: the vision of a homogenized, soulless, plastic landscape of tepid conformity, an alienating ‘noplace’.6

Franco Moretti has written that ‘each space determines, or at least encourages, its own kind of story.’7 If one is to believe the critics who have written about suburban stories over the past century, the suburb encourages a two-dimensional, dualist story that finds it fit somewhere between Dante’s purgatory and Sigmund Freud’s thesis on civilization and its discontents. Over the past few years numerous scholars have sought to problematise these kinds of assumptions. The most common response has been to simply turn the attention to other kinds of stories and other kinds of suburbs. Beuka, for instance, has argued for closer examination of suburban narratives that divert from the typical route so as to show that there is more to the suburban story than Dante, Freud or Marcuse.8 Film scholar Shaun Huston has pleaded for research into different types of suburbs, such as post-suburbia, edge cities and exurbs.9 And the historian Benjamin Wiggins has suggested that numerous suburban texts are concerned with ethnically diverse sets of characters that deserve further critical investigation.10 Such studies are certainly imperative for broadening our appreciation of the tradition. They show us that the typical view of suburban stories is selective. But they do not fundamentally deepen our understanding. They are not concerned with demonstrating that the standard view is also reductive. On the contrary. When Beuka writes, for

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instance, that he only discusses texts that ‘offer compelling evidence of the heterotopic nature of suburbia’ in contrast ‘to the more simplistic visions of suburbia from postwar television and the recent spate of antisuburban films’, he draws attention to the extent to which the typical view is selective whilst acknowledging that it does apply to many texts.11 In order to deepen the understanding of the suburban story this book therefore does not so much look away as look awry. It looks at the clichéd suburban story but from another point of view. As Slavoj Žižek has demonstrated in his discussion of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533), perspective is corollary to meaning.12 Seen frontally, The Ambassadors is simply a portrait of two learned diplomats. Viewed from the side, however, a skull appears. From this angle, the intellectual pursuits of the diplomats are less a celebration of life than a contemplation on mortality. Merely by taking a step to the side, the viewer completely changes the meaning of the painting. Thus far, most scholarship that has looked at suburban film and television has scrutinised the tradition’s thematic concerns and dualist plot motifs. But film and television are more than novels with illustrations. Meaning is produced not simply by dialogue, but by the relationship between dialogue, colour, composition, editing, rhythm, acting, space and so on. Sidestepping, I wish to look at the tradition’s stylistic register more broadly in order to see how the typical suburban story’s tropes interact with, are related to, the tradition’s broader aesthetic palette. This does not mean that I wish to reconceptualise the notion of the suburban ‘anaesthetic’ into something of a vulgari eloquentia, a celebratory poetics of the everyday, of the commonplace, as is increasingly common. Over the years, the suburb has encouraged texts both ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, complex and simplistic, challenging and clichéd – just as any other environment has. While being sympathetic to the aims of such eulogies (for these gestures often prove necessary for rendering a cultural practice a ‘worthy’ object of study)13 and while certainly being sensitive to the particular aesthetic qualities and quirks of the suburban narrative, I am not interested in canonising the suburban narrative, writing it into the broader literary or cinematic annals, but rather in capturing its nature within its own possible terms (which comes closer, perhaps, to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s project of minor literatures).14 It is also not my intention to compare the historical or geographical development of the suburban narrative to processes of suburbanisation – or, for that matter, post-suburbanisation. I certainly appreciate the merit in relating cultural practices to the economical, political and socio-cultural realities they emerge from – I will, indeed, situate a number of films and series within western modern and postmodern discourses – and naturally

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I am aware that such practices in turn inform those realities; yet I do not see the point in measuring representations to ‘reality’ along the lines of true and false, objective and subjective, ‘realistic’ and unrealistic, and so on. Representation and ‘reality’ dialectically influence each other, but are not of the same order. As years of Derrida-, Barthes- and de Saussureinflected film studies have established, the qualities of texts should be measured as differences within the discursive realm, not through their similarities to referents in the phenomenal realm commonly referred to as ‘reality’. (Either way, I feel the latter kind of research, the kind of research prevalent in suburban studies, would be more befitting of a cultural ­historical, sociological or anthropological study.) In this book I examine the ways in which the space of the US suburb is produced in the stories it produces. I look at five types of texts, each of which is industrially, medially, generically, topically, and geographically distinct from the others: Gary Ross’s 1998 top-grossing Hollywood family film Pleasantville; Todd Solondz’s independent ‘smart’ film Happiness (1998); the popular ABC post-feminist drama Desperate Housewives (2004–present); FOX’s postmodern animated sitcoms The Simpsons (1989–present) and King of the Hill (1997–2010); and the three high school noirs Brick (Johnson, 2005), Chumscrubber (Posin, 2005), and Alpha Dog (Cassavetes, 2006).15 I look at the ways in which the suburb is produced in suburban narratives through three distinct yet overlapping lenses: the suburb as fictional world (Chapter 1); the suburban mise-en-scène (Chapters 2 and 3) and the cultural geography of the suburb (Chapters 4 and 5). Throughout the book, I will also take into account issues of transmediality and medium specificity (all chapters, but particularly Chapters 1 and 3), texture (Chapter 3), genre (all chapters, but particularly Chapters 1 and 4), geography (Chapter 2), ethnicity (briefly in Chapter 4) gender (Chapter 4), and age (Chapter 5). In what follows below I elaborate on the particular scope of the book, explain my methodology, account for my choice of films and television programmes, and give a brief outline of each of the chapters.

Some Notes on the Book’s Scope One of the key reasons for concerning myself exclusively with contemporary suburban narratives is that thus far, the few studies that have engaged themselves with suburban stories have been histories. To my knowledge, there has been no in-depth study of contemporary US suburban films and television programmes. From Jurca’s canonical study of the suburban novel to Beuka’s account of the suburban habitus, from Edward

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Dimendberg’s excellent study of the suburbanisation of film noir to Martin Dines’s equally insightful account of suburban queer literature,16 and more or less all books, essays and reviews in between, discussions of suburban stories have been almost exclusively historical, tracing the development of the suburban chronotope across the nineteenth and twentieth century. To be sure, such historical studies have been invaluable in establishing the suburban narrative as a canon worthy of critical examination, and have provided insightful historical contextualisation of contemporary trends and tendencies. One widespread belief that Jurca especially has proven wrong and that deserves special recognition here is that the suburban critique originates in the 1950s. As recent studies by Mark Clapson and Muzzio and Halper show, this belief remains particularly persistent. In his otherwise impressive 2002 study Suburban Century, Clapson still begins his history of suburban criticism by citing Lewis Mumford’s 1961 now clichéd polemic against the ‘multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group’17 before discussing Lionel Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man.18 Muzzio and Halper, too, cite Mumford (and, unsurprisingly, the same segment), after which they mention the likes of Richard Yates, Sloan Wilson and John Keats.19 With respect to film, according to the film scholar Stanley Solomon, ‘[m]ovie attitudes towards the suburbs turned negative in the 1950s’.20 John Archer has suggested that ‘Hollywood [. . .] offered darker takes’ only from Nunnally Johnson’s 1956 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit onwards.21 In White Diaspora Jurca has traced the historical roots of the thematic preoccupations and representative categories that the critiques of the likes of Riesman, Yates and Johnson are typically structured around – architectural homogeneity, class uniformity, racial exclusion, gender ­ inequality, alienation and despair – to discover that they go back as far as the beginning of the twentieth century. Among the earliest works she discusses are Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt from 1922 and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, published in 1912. As she concludes, resistance to the suburb is nothing new. [. . .] [V]eneer stripping has been a mainstay of the suburban novel since the twenties. Suburbanites have long been characterized by alienation, anguish, and self-pity. The literary treatment of suburban masculinity, in other words, has never really had a bright side for contemporary novelists newly to refute. Writers since the 1960s have not invented a tradition so much as carried on and reworked the legacy of suburban homelessness that emerged so insistently in Babbitt.22

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I do not intend to write a history of suburban film or television here, but I suspect that further study would reveal that suburban films and television programmes, too, ‘never really had a bright side’. Edmund Goulding’s 1939 melodrama Dark Victory, for instance, already meditates the vicissitudes of suburban life through tropes of mundanity and repetitiveness, while Frank Capra’s screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1934) is themed around status anxiety, conformity, boredom and alienation. I feel one might even convincingly contend that a number of suburban films and shorts produced in the 1920s and 1910s were covertly critical of their subject. William A. Seiter’s 1926 comedy Skinner’s Dress Suit, for example, presents the suburbanite as an undistinguished, emasculated commuter; in an earlier melodrama like Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915), the suburban wife is portrayed as bored, isolated and (sexually) frustrated. Indeed, criticism of suburbia had already been so widespread in the years before the Second World War, that by the time the poet Phyllis McGinley wrote her wonderful appraisal of suburbia in Harper’s Magazine in 1949, the condemnation of suburbia (as ‘a symbol of all that is middle-class in the worst sense, of smug and prosperous mediocrity’) had already become something of a ‘cliché’.23 Another reason I will concentrate on films from the last twenty-five years, one that I already touched upon, is that the relatively short time span allows me to look in more detail at issues of style. Jurca has rightly noted that most criticism of the suburban canon, perhaps precisely because it has been historical, has been characterised by an emphasis on sociology rather than aesthetics.24 Critics read the suburban text as parable of the American Dream, as an allegory of the bourgeoisie, or a study of human frailties. But they rarely take into account the stories’ particular poetic and aesthetic qualities. In ‘reviews and popular references’, Jurca writes, ‘the significance of Babbitt, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and the Rabbit novels, among others, has been cast in terms of the truth and utility of their insights into assessments of American Society rather more often than in terms of aesthetics.’25 Cain’s Mildred Pierce, for instance, is praised for its ‘anthropologist’s tenacity’ and ‘invaluable gloss on Middletown’,26 while Babbitt is described as a ‘portrait of an American Citizen’, ‘fiction only by a sort of courtesy’.27 Unfortunately, Jurca herself does little to redress this critical imbalance, nor do any of the other critics. But just as Jurca deems it pertinent to ask whether in suburban prose and poetry there is such a thing as a suburban rhythm, form or vocabulary, I think it rather relevant to the study of suburban film and television whether there is such a thing as suburban editing, a suburban cinematography, a suburban colour palette, or a suburban mise-en-scène, a suburban performance,

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in troduct io n: s ce ne s f ro m th e s u b u r b s 7 and so forth. In this book I consider suburban television programmes and films not merely as illustrations of or reflections upon a certain Zeitgeist, but also as a particularly salient moment in a larger aesthetic tradition.

Methodology (Between the two Lefebvres) [E]very society produces a space, its own space . . .

Henri Lefebvre28

Over the past few years, the number of studies within the field of film and television scholarship that have set out to integrate one or another tradition of textual analysis with a particular strand of thinking about or through space has increased exponentially. Indeed, I think it is legitimate to speak of a ‘spatial turn’ in film studies and to a lesser extent television scholarship comparable to that in cultural studies a quarter of a century ago. Some of these studies turn to space in order to examine film or television. Scholars like Deborah Thomas, Gilberto Perez and George Wilson, for instance, examine space in order to understand the epistemology and fictional ontology of the cinematic apparatus,29 while the likes of Edward Dimendberg and Lynn Spigel have examined space primarily so as to comprehend the aesthetic of a genre or representative modus.30 Others turn to film or television so as to interrogate space. Film theorists such as Charlotte Brunsdon, Mark Shiel and Paula Massood examine textual elements so that they can come to grips with the spatial representation of a place, most often a city but sometimes the country.31 Although I have written this book in the latter tradition, and certainly do not wish to give the impression that this study holds its own as an integration of the two disciplines, I do have the hope that this study – my analyses of Pleasantville (Chapter 1), Happiness (Chapter 2), and The Simpsons and King of the Hill (Chapter 3) in particular – will be as helpful in thinking about cinematic and televisual space as they will be in contemplating the nature of media, genre, texture and style. Methodologically, this study oscillates between two analytical discourses: on the one hand the kind of close textual analysis proposed by the likes of V. F. Perkins, Robin Wood and Laura Mulvey in Movie and more recently critics like Sarah Cardwell, Andrew Klevan and Martin Lefebvre (the first of the two Lefebvres); and on the other hand, what the Anglo-Saxons call cultural geography and on the continent tends to be referred to as spatial theory, linked to the work of Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Edward Soja, and above all Henri Lefebvre (the second Lefebvre). However, there is much between these two discourses, among

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them fictional world theory (Chapter 1), urban studies (Chapter 4), architectural theory (Chapter 4), phenomenology (Chapter 1), and thoughts on narrative space (Chapter 2). I discuss the two extremes of the continuum below, but one should not assume that these theorists and theories are the only ones I will draw on throughout this book. Indeed, although this book is held together by a shared theoretical concern – cinematic and televisual spaces of the suburb – it is not held together by an all-encompassing methodological framework. I hope that part of the strength of this book is precisely that each of the individual discussions makes use of a different set of tools in order to consider the spatiality of the suburb. The work of the late French philosopher Henri Lefebvre has been indispensible to my thinking about space. As Foucault has remarked, ­academia – and film and television studies are no exception – has traditionally been preoccupied with time.32 Up until the 1980s, if there was any notice of space at all, it was as an existential a priori at the least or a mathematical formula at the most. Lefebvre was among the first thinkers to turn his attention to space as a social construct, anticipating what is now commonly referred to as the spatial turn in cultural studies. The social, Lefebvre argued, is intrinsically spatial, while, vice versa, space is social: ‘[s]ocial relations [. . .] have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing the space itself.’33 What Lefebvre means by this is that space is both the condition for social relationships, in the sense that space concretises the relationship, and its consequence, in that the space is shaped in the image of those people controlling it. As Edward Soja, who calls space spatiality, has put it: Spatiality is a substantiated and recognizable social product, part of ‘second nature’ which incorporates as it socializes and transforms both physical and psychological spaces. [. . .] As a social product, spatiality is simultaneously the medium and outcome, presupposition and embodiment, of social action and relationship. [. . .] The spatio-temporal structuring of social life defines how social action and ­relationship [. . .] are materially constituted, made concrete.34

In his magnum opus The Production of Space Lefebvre ponders the possibility of what he terms ‘spatiology’ or ‘spatio-analysis’35 – a ‘unitary theory’36 of the construction of space.37 Lefebvre’s definition of spatiology differs from chapter to chapter, from paragraph to paragraph, and requires much more attention than I am able to devote to it here. For argument’s sake it suffices to describe it here simply as the attempt to come to an understanding of the ways in which social reality (usually the domain of the field of sociology), space (a concept exclusive to studies of

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in troduct io n: s ce ne s f ro m th e s u b u r b s 9 geometry) and one’s everyday experience of the world (the sine qua non of phenomenology) presuppose and produce one another. As Lefebvre puts it himself, spatiology should provide a ‘language common to practice and theory, as also to inhabitants, architects and scientists’:38 The aim is to discover or construct a theoretical unity between ‘fields’ which are apprehended separately, just as molecular, electromagnetic and gravitational forces are in physics. The fields we are concerned with are, first, the physical – nature, the Cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; and, thirdly, the social. In other words, we are concerned with logico-epistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias.39

I share Lefebvre’s aims to come to, if not a unitary, then at least a prismatic understanding of ways in which the space of, in my case, the cinematic and televisual suburb is constructed. I seek to provide a language common to film and television studies and critical theory and spatial studies; a language that allows for studies of the ontology of a particular spatiality (Chapter 1) as much as for analyses of the editing, cinematography and mise-en-scène connoting space (Chapters 2 and 3) as for observations of social discourses and performativities inferring a certain sense of place (Chapters 4 and 5). I realise that the discipline of spatial studies has developed since the publication of The Production of Space in 1974. Even today, however, Lefebvre’s writings remain something of a lingua franca in spatial studies. Each of the contemporary critical theorists and cultural geographers I engage with in this book, for instance, from Massey and David Sibley to Michel de Certeau, still return to Lefebvre in order to, respectively, come to terms with the socio-economic, ethnic and gendered differentiation of space, understand postmodern spatialities, or rethink the spatiality of everyday life in general and the relationship between place and space in particular. I, too, albeit mostly implicitly, return to Lefebvre’s writings, not as a book of rules or, to use a spatial metaphor, a route planner by which to review space, but rather as a map outlining the numerous ways in which one may or may not approach the construction of space in film and television. Each of the chapters is informed by and interrogates numerous theories of space. In Chapter 1 for instance, I take into account theories of fictional world making, while in Chapters 2 and 3, I consider theories about cognitive mapping, rhythm and graphic space. The other Lefebvre the title of this section refers to is the French film scholar Martin Lefebvre. While Henri Lefebvre represents the critical

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discourse of spatial theory, I take Martin Lefebvre to represent the critical discourse of textual analysis. I purposely use the phrase ‘critical discourse’ to describe the practice of close textual analysis here, because there is, as I come to discuss shortly, much debate about what the practice might entail. In his essay ‘Between Landscape and Setting’, Martin Lefebvre distinguishes between space as landscape and space as setting. With setting he intends ‘above all else the space for story and event: it is the scenery of and theatre for what will happen’.40 One might think here of, say, the whole of the fictional world of the American Pie trilogy (1999, 2001, 2003), as well as of specific ‘sites of action’ such as the school, the home, the bedroom, and so on. Lefebvre describes a landscape, on the other hand, as ‘space freed from eventhood’.41 A cinematic landscape is a space that is presented not merely as a condition and container for presence, but rather, as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has put it elsewhere, is ‘itself the entire presence’.42 With landscapes one might think of the prairies in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), but also of the temps morts in Antonioni’s films.43 In this book, I concern myself exclusively with texts that present the suburb not merely as setting, but also as landscape. Thus far I agree with Lefebvre. I too believe there are shots that further the plot and shots that do not contribute to the development of plot. I disagree with Lefebvre, however, with respect to his treatment of setting and landscape as narrative principles. According to Lefebvre, setting ensures narrative progress, while landscape ‘halts the progression for the spectator’.44 He further suggests that shots that do not further the plot can only be interpreted as spectacles or moments of contemplation. What Lefebvre and I disagree on is that, for Lefebvre, plot and narrative are one and the same thing, whereas for me plot refers purely to the Aristotelian concept of structuring actions whereas narrative relates to the film’s complete development, including tone, rhythm, the audio-visual field, sense of place, and mood of the world. In this sense, I would suggest that although they might not further the plot, landscape shots do contribute to the narrative’s unfolding. For instance, I would be inclined to assert that in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), one of the films Lefebvre talks about, the landscapes are never merely moments of spectacle or contemplation, but rather narrative instruments in creating a rhythm and a ‘mood’ that contribute to the film’s project. My disagreement with Lefebvre may seem like semantic pernicketiness but it is, in fact, a disagreement about the ontology of the cinematic apparatus as such. For Lefebvre, working within the tradition of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, space and narrative, which here

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in troduct io n: s ce ne s f ro m th e s u b u r b s 11 resembles plot, are distinct categories.45 As Gary Cooper has written in a ­commentary on Bordwell, this tradition treats plot as a ‘dramaturgical’ entity abstractly distinguishable from the medium, and the story we infer on its basis even more so. Thus, although Bordwell takes pains to point out that no movie story could exist without spatialization, he leaves the impression that such tales are not themselves immanently spatial. They happen to occur ‘in’ space, but film narrative itself may be defined otherwise.46

Another tradition, however, linked to the work of Movie critics such as Perkins and Klevan, suggests that narrative encompasses space and plot and everything in between. Here, narrative space is not necessarily plotted, but plot is always spatial. As John Gibbs has noted, space is not merely a container for plot, but also the condition for it: without space, a story cannot take place.47 Indeed, Katherine Shonfield describes narrative simply as ‘the story of how a space is used’.48 As again Cooper writes: Rather than simply happening ‘in’ the time and space of its single shot, the plot springs from the juxtaposition of discrete spaces, from the unfolding relationship between regions of the frame that communicates cause and effect. The story does not happen in space so much as to space.49

As I stated at the beginning of this section, I intend my writing about space to constantly oscillate between the vocabulary of the various spatial theories and the idiolect of mise-en-scène criticism. I use the word ‘oscillate’ very deliberately here. I feel that scholarship should not be modelled, as it so often is, on a balance, distributing weight evenly across the various critical discourses, methods and insights making up the argument. Rather it should be modelled on a pendulum, fluctuating between the numerous constituents, now following this observation, then tracing that line of thought. I do not simply wish to apply the spatial theories of Lefebvre or De Certeau to close textual analyses, or employ analyses to illustrate theories. Instead, throughout my writing, theoretical inquiries will be informed and interrogated by close textual analysis, while, vice versa, analyses will be contextualised and cross-examined by theories. Daniel Rubey complained in his preface to Redefining Suburban Studies: Searching for New Paradigms, an edited collection of interdisciplinary research published in 2009, that there should still, at this moment in time, be no perspective that studies suburbia in its own right and not simply as a sub-field of urban studies. [There is a need for] scholarship that no longer simply saw the suburbs as bedrooms for urban workers but as a valuable culture in its own terms. [. . .] Our vocabulary and conceptual

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frameworks for understanding suburban issues had become dominated by the subordination of suburb to urb; terms such as sub-urban, ex-urban, exo-burbs, urban sprawl, and edge cities kept us from approaching suburbs as multifaceted phenomena in their own right.50

In this book I aim to provide such a language for contemporary US cinematic and televisual suburbia. At times, this language resembles the conclusions the New Suburban Historians have come to in their research into actual suburbs; at times it vindicates the assumptions of all those critics dismissing the suburb as a two-dimensional dystopia. But a language is never a closed system with fixed meanings; by putting into words the suburban films and television programmes’ choices in style and syntax, I hope to provide a language that has thus far remained unwritten, which complicates the above conclusions as it enables them, and which also allows for alternative interpretations.

Choice of Texts I should say a few words here about the texts I have chosen to discuss in this book – as well as about those I have chosen to omit from the discussion. As I indicated above, I will discuss eight texts: Pleasantville, Happiness, The Simpsons and King of the Hill, Desperate Housewives, and Brick, Chumscrubber and Alpha Dog. I feel that together, these texts, which are all structured around what industry and press have termed a suburb, represent the most prevalent or pervasive trends within contemporary suburban film or television. I take Pleasantville to represent at once the suburban time travelogue, which includes films like Blast from the Past (Wilson, 1999), Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985), and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Herek, 1989), and what one might call the suburban ‘mise-en-abîme’ narrative, including The Truman Show (Weir, 1998), Far From Heaven (Haynes, 2002), Bewitched (Ephron, 2005) and the sitcom Honey I’m Home (Nick @ Nite, 1991–2). Happiness for me represents the suburban ‘smart’ film (a postmodern genre of film which approaches its subject from an ironic distance), a label that also applies to films like American Beauty, Election (Payne, 1999), Trust (Hartley, 1990) and The Safety of Objects (Troche, 2001). The Simpsons and King of the Hill represent, as may be obvious, the postmodern suburban animated sitcom. Desperate Housewives represents the suburban postfeminist narrative, other examples of which are Weeds (2005–present), Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97), the remake of The Stepford Wives (Oz, 2004), and perhaps even The Last Seduction (Dahl, 1994). And finally, the three high school noirs

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in troduct io n: s ce ne s f ro m th e s u b u r b s 13 represent the popular suburban juvenile delinquency film in particular, and the ever-present suburban teen film in general. I realise that my selection of films and television programmes by no means represents all current trends in suburban cinema and television. It does not account, for instance, for suburban subgenres like science fiction, fantasy or horror, nor does it account for suburban semi- or nonfiction texts such as reality shows, game shows and documentaries. It only intermittently accounts for films that are set in deprived suburban neighbourhoods or peripheral housing projects, like Boyz ’n the Hood (Singleton, 1991) and Quinceañera (Glatzer and Westmoreland, 2006). It rarely accounts for suburban gay and lesbian narratives. And it only very sporadically accounts for films and television programmes centred around ethnic minorities, the integration of ethnic minorities, and/or the ethnic divide, like Lakeview Terrace (Labute, 2008), Nothing Like the Holidays (De Villa, 2008), and Guess Who? (Sullivan, 2005). Here, the selection process has been less one of preference than of practicality. To include films representative of all trends within suburban fiction would broaden the scope of this study beyond the space of a single book. It is especially unfortunate, however, to exclude films and television programmes set in deprived suburban areas, and texts centred around ethnic minorities. It is unfortunate in the first place because it would be interesting to look at the extent to which the chronotope of the diverse suburb has itself become diversified over the past few years. I would be keen, for instance, to compare a suspense thriller about a wealthy, well educated, mixed couple living in Los Angeles, like Lakeview Terrace, to the web series The Suburbs (2008–11), documenting the lives of middleclass African-American teenagers in Mount Vernon, Westchester. The second reason why the exclusion of these texts is unfortunate is that there is always the risk that by excluding working-class people or ethnic minorities from representation, one is simply mimicking the exclusion they face in so many suburban films and television programmes as well as in actual suburbs. As Andrew Wiese put it, by and large ‘historians have done a better job excluding African Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites’.51 I hope this is a lack I might be able to address in a ­subsequent research project. As the reader will understand by now, this book takes into consideration both suburban films and televisual suburban narratives. I do not have the space to focus in detail on the similarities and differences between the media of film and television. It seems self-evident that their respective medium-specific qualities have at least some bearing on the nature of the narrative. Film, for instance, can expect and cater for a more intense

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audience engagement (although this distinction is, of course, problematised by a recent spate of both visually and cognitively demanding television shows), while television tends to have more time to pick out and unpick various plot developments and character traits. It is often assumed that television is an essentially suburban medium: like the suburb, television is perceived as a product of 1950s consumer culture; it is considered to diffuse the boundaries between the public and the private sphere; it is thought to differentiate between men and women; and, finally, it is felt to promote a withdrawal from social life, and promulgate a detached, disembodied, isolated and anxious view of the world.52 Film, in contrast, is thought to have much more in common with city life. Indeed, if postwar suburbanisation boosted the sales of television sets, it also halted the ticket sales at inner-city cinemas.53 One may therefore have expected that film and television approach the suburbs in rather different ways – as some would argue they did throughout the 1950s and 1960s, with domestic sitcoms providing an altogether more forgiving picture of suburban life than family melodramas did. Surprisingly, however, the films and television programmes under discussion here appear to differ very little in their approach to suburbia. There are films that are particularly complex, like Brick, and there are television programmes that are somewhat less intricate; there are slow films, like Happiness, and hurried shows, like Desperate Housewives; films that are sympathetic towards their milieu, and television series that seem to hate it, and so on. Whatever their medium specificities, suburban film and television each seem characterised by the same kind of ‘structure of feeling’: a tentative yet firm, judgmental yet understanding attitude towards its own material. Throughout the book, I pay attention to the qualities of the respective media; but I will always do so through the lens of this structure of feeling.

Chapter Outline In this book I discuss five films and three television programmes. In Chapter 1 I concern myself exclusively with the Hollywood fantasy Pleasantville. Chapter 2 considers the indie ‘smart’ film Happiness. Chapter 3 concentrates on FOX’s popular animated sitcoms The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Chapter 4 focuses on the allegedly postfeminist dramedy Desperate Housewives. And Chapter 5 looks at three recent ‘highschool noirs’: above all, Brick and Chumscrubber, but also Alpha Dog. I should state clearly here that although I have chosen texts that I feel are each representative of a principal or particularly pervasive discourse or trend, I discuss each film or television programme exclusively on its own merits.

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in troduct io n: s ce ne s f ro m th e s u b u r b s 15 The obvious problem such an approach poses is that by forsaking too many comparisons or too much contextualisation, the analyses might be seen to have little validity beyond their individual application. I have, however, intended these analyses less as claims about the trend they represent, than as examples of how close textual analysis and theoretical reasoning might help us gain a more thorough understanding of our experience of certain trends within suburban fiction as well as of fictional suburbs. As I have suggested on numerous occasions throughout this introduction, I feel that studies of suburban fiction have thus far devoted too little attention to close textual analysis of individual poetic and aesthetic qualities. By taking the time to analyse each film and each television programme in detail, by devoting an entire chapter to one or at the most three texts, I hope to make a start on redressing this critical imbalance. In the first chapter, I examine how Pleasantville presents the nature of the suburban fictional world. Each film or television programme postulates its own fictional world, which in turn delineates the possibilities for, and limitations of, the plot. The fictional world of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson, 2001), for instance, allows for very different plot developments than the fictional world of Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995). In the former, plots may come to include wizards, elves and hobbits, resurrections and afterlives, whereas no such creations can ever populate the story world of Jane Austen. In this chapter I look at what kind of world the cinematic suburb might be: what are its natural laws, what is its internal logic, what can and cannot happen there? Looking at the relationships between genre and style, temporality and worldhood, I argue that Pleasantville, the film’s eponymous suburb, is characterised by an intrinsic ontological instability that renders narrative by definition unpredictable, contradictory and essentially open-ended. Chapters 2 and 3 are concerned with the suburban mise-en-scène. In the second chapter I examine how Todd Solondz’s 1998 controversial ensemble film Happiness uses editing, composition and tone to create a particular spatiality – which I will call, following Peter Sloterdijk, foam – as well as a particular sense of place. Suburbs are often criticised for lacking a sense of place. In this chapter I argue that in Happiness placelessness functions precisely as a distinct and unmistakable sense of place. In the first section I look at the ways in which editing is used to maintain narrative coherence and visual consistency while simultaneously creating a sense of geographical dislocation, discontinuity and isolation. In the second section I analyse two scenes in terms of their composition. I show that these scenes are composed visually, as well as in terms of the plot, in such a way so as to create a space that is at once communal and isolated,

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transitory and permanent. Finally, in the third section I discuss how the film negotiates stylistic register and diegesis in order to create a particular tone, or feeling, that the film associates directly with its environment. The third chapter looks at two animated sitcoms – The Simpsons and King of the Hill. In popular culture as much as in criticism, the suburb is often perceived as a sort of flatland. For many people, the suburb literally lacks dimensions: it is culturally bland, socially conformist, emotionally shallow, or architecturally homogenous. Taking my cue from the philosopher David Kolb, I take issue with these assumptions. By looking at the ways in which two explicitly two-dimensional programmes negotiate the generic properties of the sitcom with the medium-specific qualities of animation, such as flatness and elasticity, I examine how they problematise the correlation between flatness, superficiality and simplicity, and open our eyes to another figuration of complexity. In the public mind, there is a correlation between women and suburbs. ‘Women and suburbs,’ Susan Saegert notes, are thought ‘to share domesticity, repose, closeness to nature, lack of seriousness, mindlessness and safety.’54 Sociologist Barry Schwartz has even suggested that suburbs are an essentially feminine environment.55 In the fourth chapter, drawing on close textual analysis of camera movement, plot and performance, I present a reading of the gendering of space and the social construction of womanhood in the popular dramedy Desperate Housewives. Often praised as a prime example of a liberated postfeminist culture, I argue that, on the contrary, Desperate Housewives naturalises the suburb as a female retreat, restricts and manipulates the movements of its female protagonists (and explicitly condemns those who are mobile), and stimulates an inhibited performativity and self-consciousness. In the fifth and final chapter I look at the ways in which three teen suburban noirs – Brick, Alpha Dog and Chumscrubber – engage with the suburban environment. Drawing on the work of Marc Augé and Michel de Certeau as well as close textual analysis, I argue that these films, each in its own way, present the suburb not as a static, depthless non-place, but on the contrary as a space that can be experienced, extended and ­appropriated – in short, as a lived space.

Questions and Answers Finally, there are two questions which I have thus far assumed but neither explicitly asked nor straightforwardly answered. These questions are: what do I understand by the suburban narrative? And what do I understand by the fictional suburb? The reason I have not yet attempted

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in troduct io n: s ce ne s f ro m th e s u b u r b s 17 to come to terms with these questions is that they are the two questions this book is concerned with, and it would seem disingenuous to suggest I have an answer already, especially since part of my argument is that the suburb produced by the suburban narrative is less a consistent and coherent iconographic structure than a complex and oscillating ‘structure of feeling’. Let me, however, at the outset give two working definitions. By the suburban narrative I understand, as I hope has become clear by now, narratives that are not merely set in, but also structured around and by, the suburb. By the suburb I simply mean, for now, cinematic and televisual settings that have been described as suburb by those involved in making the film or the television programme, by those involved in distributing and marketing the film or the television programme, and by those reviewing them. For indeed, what interest me is what it is in the rendering of these places that denotes them as suburbs in terms of space, in terms of mise-en-scène, in terms of cultural geography, and, as I discuss in the next chapter, worldhood.

Notes   1. D. Muzzio and T. Halper, ‘Pleasantville? The Suburb and Its Representation in American Movies’, Urban Affairs Review 37: 4 (March 2002), p. 544.   2. Compare R. Beuka, ‘Imagining the Postwar Small Town: Gender and the Politics of Landscape in It’s a Wonderful Life’, in: Journal of Film and Video 51: 3–4 (Fall 1999), pp. 36–47; R. Beuka, ‘ “Just One Word . . . Plastics”: Suburban Malaise, Masculinity, and Oedipal Drive in The Graduate’, Journal of Popular Film & Television 28: 1 (Spring 2000), pp. 13–21; R. Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in TwentiethCentury American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); P. C. Dolce, ‘Suburbia: A Sense of Place on the Silver Screen’, in D. Rubey (ed.), Redefining Suburban Studies: Searching for New Paradigms (Hempstead: Hofstra University Press, 2009), pp. 159–66; L. Felperlin, ‘Close to the Edge’, Sight and Sound, vol. 7, n. 10 (October 1997), pp. 14–18; T. Gournelos, ‘Othering the Self: Dissonant Visual Culture and Quotidian Trauma in United States Suburbia’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 9: 4 (2009), pp. 1–24; S. Huston, ‘Filming Postbourgeois Suburbia: Office Space and the New American Suburb’, The Journal of Popular Culture 42: 3 (2009), pp. 497–514; C. Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); K. Knapp, ‘Life in the ‘Hood: Postwar Suburban Literature and Films’, Literature Compass 6: 4 (July 2009), pp. 810–23; D. Muzzio and T. Halper, ‘Pleasantville?’, pp. 543–74; R. Porton, ‘Suburban Dreams, Suburban Nightmares’, Cineaste, vol. 20, n. 1 (1993), pp. 12–15; S. Solomon, ‘Images of Suburban Life in American Films’, in

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R. Panetta (ed.), Westchester: The American Suburb (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 411–41.   3. K. M. Kruse and T. J. Sugrue, ‘Introduction: The New Suburban History’, in K. M. Kruse and T. J. Sugrue (eds), The New Suburban History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), p. 1.   4. C. Jurca, White Diaspora, p. 4.   5. A. Britton, ‘Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment’, in B. K. Grant (ed.), Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), p. 145.   6. R. Beuka, SuburbiaNation, p. 4.   7. F. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 2007), p. 70.   8. R. Beuka, SuburbiaNation, p. 15.  9. S. Huston, ‘Filming Postbourgeois Suburbia: Office Space and the New American Suburb’, in: The Journal of Popular Culture 42:3 (2009), pp. 497–514. 10. B. Wiggins, ‘Re-placing Black Suburbia: Culture Industry Geographies of South Central Los Angeles’, unpublished conference paper, presented at the conference The Diverse Suburb: History, Politics, and Prospects (Hempstead, 22–4 October 2009). 11. R. Beuka, SuburbiaNation, p.15. 12. S. Žižek, ‘Looking Awry’, October, vol. 50 (Autumn 1989), pp. 30–55. 13. Similar attempts have legitimised the study of media – such as television’s ‘qualitative’ turn, cinema’s inscription into artistic discourses, photography’s alleged problematisation of representative discourses and the novel’s turn to a ‘descriptive realism’ – and genres – from the soap opera to daytime television, melodrama to the blockbuster, the snapshot to the novella etc. – in the past. 14. See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London and New York: Continuum, 2004): 256–341; and G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 16–27. 15. I will come to explain what I mean by each of these terms – ‘smart’ and ‘quirky’, postmodern and postfeminist – throughout the book. 16. E. Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); M. Dines, Gay Suburban Narratives in American and British Culture: Homecoming Queens (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). 17. L. Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Progress (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 553. 18. M. Clapson, Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the USA (New York: Berg, 2003), pp. 5–6. See also L. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); and W. H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

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in troduct io n: s ce ne s f ro m th e s u b u r b s 19 19. D. Muzzio and T. Halper, ‘Pleasantville?’, pp. 556–8. 20. S. Solomon, ‘Images of Suburban Life’, p. 429. 21. J. Archer, ‘Suburbia and the American Dream House’, in D. Rubey (ed.), Redefining Suburban Studies: Searching for New Paradigms, p. 18. 22. C. Jurca, White Diaspora, p. 161. My emphasis. 23. P. McGinley, ‘Suburbia: Of thee I sing’, Harper’s Magazine (December 1949), pp. 78–82. McGinley added: ‘I have yet to read a book in which the suburban life was pictured as the good life or the commuter as a sympathetic figure’. 24. C. Jurca, White Diaspora, p. 5. 25. Ibid. p. 15. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. p. 48. 28. H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 53. 29. See G. Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); D. Thomas, Reading Hollywood: Spaces and Meanings in American Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2001); G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 30. See E. Dimendberg, Film Noir; and L. Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 31. C. Brunsdon, London in Cinema: The Cinematic City Since 1945 (London: BFI, 2007); P. J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); M. Shiel, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London: Wallflower Press, 2006). 32. M. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16: 1 (Spring 1987), p. 22. 33. H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 129. 34. E. Soja, ‘Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 129. 35. H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 404. 36. Ibid. p. 11. 37. It is not unthinkable that Lefebvre’s use of these terms is slightly ironic, since elsewhere in The Production of Space, as well as in his previous work The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre takes elaborate issue with linguistic (‘semiology’) and psychoanalytic theories of space. See H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), especially pp. 45–76. 38. Ibid. p. 64. My emphasis. 39. Ibid. pp. 11–12. 40. M. Lefebvre, ‘Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema’, in M. Lefebvre (ed.), Landscape and Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 20. 41. Ibid. p. 22.

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42. J.-L. Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 58. 43. S. Chatman, Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 125–31. 44. M. Lefebvre, ‘Between Setting and Landscape’, p. 29. 45. For critical discussions of the Bordwellian tradition of close textual analysis, see J. Gibbs, ‘It Was Never All in the Script’: Mise-en-scène and the Interpretation of Visual Style in British Film Journals, 1946–1978, unpublished PhD thesis (1999), pp. 167–76; and D. Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 103–15. 46. M. G. Cooper, ‘Narrative Spaces’, Screen 43: 2 (Summer 2002), p. 143. See also S. Heath, ‘Narrative Space’, Screen 17: 3 (1976), pp. 68–112. 47. J. Gibbs, Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 5. 48. K. Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film, and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 160. Original emphasis. 49. M. G. Cooper, ‘Narrative Spaces’, p. 143. Original emphasis. 50. D. Rubey, ‘Preface’, in D. Rubey (ed.), Redefining Suburban Studies, p. xii. 51. A. Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 5. 52. R. Silverstone, ‘Introduction’, in R. Silverstone (ed.), Visions of Suburbia (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–25; R. Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London and New York: 1994), pp. 55–72, 159–75; L. Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse, pp. 2–59. 53. R. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd edn (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 157–86. 54. S. Saegert, ‘Masculine Cities and Feminine Suburbs: Polarized Ideas, Contradictory Realities’, Signs 5: 3, Supplement (Spring 1980), p. S97. 55. Ibid.

C H A PT E R 1

Pleasantville: The Suburb as World

Part postmodern parable, part political pamphlet; part parody of media culture, part exercise in media literacy; part historical revisionism, part fairy tale in the tradition of Back to the Future, Through the Looking Glass and The Wizard of Oz, part biblical retelling; part family saga, part ­coming-of-age dramedy; part 1950s domestic sitcom, part 1940s film noir; part family melodrama, part something else altogether: pleasant and peaceful though it may seem, the fictitious 1950s sitcom suburb Pleasantville1 which provides the setting for Gary Ross’s 1998 film of the same name, is, quite literally, a battleground of themes, tropes, genres and critical debates. When the teenagers David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are magically zapped into Pleasantville, their progressive mores soon conflict with the conservative principles of the 1950s domestic sitcom. As they try to liberate the town from its generic restraints and emancipate its inhabitants from their scripted roles, the town becomes a combat zone of genres and styles. On Main Street, 1940s film noir battles with the small-town movie; at the local soda shop, Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935) clashes with Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951); while at home, the 1950s domestic sitcom tussles with Sirkian family melodrama. In this chapter I discuss how these discourses influence, and are influenced by, the nature of the suburban fictional world – that is, the ontology of the semantic universe which is at once the consequence of, and the precondition for, the suburban narrative. I argue that whereas cinematic and televisual suburbs are often thought of as stable and fixed worlds, Pleasantville is defined precisely by the extent to which stasis is problematised, the degree to which ‘here’ is always already somewhere else. I will pay particular attention to the relationships between genre and the suburban fictional world, the relationship between the suburban fictional world and history, and the relationship between place and worldhood, that is, between geography and phenomenology. Naturally, since time, genre and space are intrinsically connected, my discussions of

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their individual relationships to the suburb as fictional world will inevitably overlap. But by viewing Pleasantville from another point of view each time, indeed, by occasionally looking at the exact same scene or instance from three different angles, now relying on close textual analysis, then drawing on contextual study, I hope to offer the kind of multi-faceted insight which does justice to the fictional suburban world’s complexity and heterogeneity.

The Suburb between Parody and History At her first day of school in Pleasantville, Jennifer, or Mary Sue Parker as she is now called, asks one of her teachers (Lela Ivey), ‘What’s outside of Pleasantville?’ Her teacher looks confused. ‘I-I don’t understand . . .?’, she questioningly answers. She looks at the map she has drawn on the chalkboard. It consists of a vertical line which reads Main Street, a horizontal line which reads Elm Street, and a square representing the town hall. She turns back to Mary Sue. Other students also bemusedly turn their heads. ‘Outside of Pleasantville?’ Jennifer continues, hesitantly. ‘Like, what’s at the end of Main Street?’ The teacher begins to laugh, a bit too loudly. ‘Mary Sue!’, she smirks, ‘You should know the answer to that. The end of Main Street is just the beginning again’. The class sighs in relief. I will return to this scene throughout the chapter, discussing it for different reasons each time. What interests me for now is the scene’s narrative function within the film as a whole, and the narrative temporal logic it implies. About twenty minutes into the film, but no more than five into Pleasantville, the scene is part of a sequence of scenes introducing the viewers to the ways of the fictitious sitcom’s fictional world. The three scenes preceding this one have established the world, respectively, as monochrome (Jennifer remarking, disgustedly, that she is ‘pasty’), safe (firemen rescuing a cat from a tree), orderly (people walking on the streets in straight, steady lines, the Parkers’ rigidly compartmentalised, spick and span household), and affluent (the excess of food on the table). The scene that follows establishes it as perfect (by having basketball players achieve a 100 per cent score). The scene I am discussing here establishes that the world is hermetically closed by informing the viewer that there is nothing outside Pleasantville. However, precisely by explicating that the world is hermetically closed, the scene also informs the viewer that this closedness is something to be aware of and keep in mind. It thus says at once, ‘This world is safe, orderly, affluent, perfect’, evoking nostalgia for a particular idea of the 1950s, but also, ‘Bear in mind that you are looking at a world that purports to be safe, orderly, affluent, etc., but can only be so

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the s ub urb a s wo rl d 23 by disavowing, repressing and excluding the unpredictable, messy, poor, imperfect and open’, eliciting far less nostalgic sentiments. Advancing my discussion of genre and style, I would suggest that Pleasantville is, at least partly, a parody. It is also a coming-of-age film, since it is structured around the formative years and spiritual education of two teenagers, but I will come to that later. Parody, the adaptation of a person, phenomenon or practice for comic effect, is in effect a play between two languages: a language that parodies, and a language that is parodied.2 As Michael Bakhtin has explained, in parody: two languages are crossed with each other, as well as two styles, two linguistic points of view, and in the final analysis two speaking subjects. It is true that only one of these languages (the one that is parodied) is present in its own right; the other is present invisibly, as an actualizing background for creating and perceiving.3

What Bakhtin writes here is that parody is not simply a play of, say, scrabble between two languages; it is also a game of hide and seek, in which one of the languages, the language that is parodied, is visibly present, while the other language, the parodying language, is invisible. What he intends by this becomes clearer elsewhere in The Dialogic Imagination, when he writes that ‘parody is [. . .] a bilingual phenomenon: although there is only one language, this language is structured and perceived in light of another language.’4 In parody thus, the language that is parodied is seen through, and distorted by, the lens of the language that parodies. In Pleasantville, a language of particular textual conventions and diegetic properties and instances that is associated with the 1950s domestic sitcom (ranging from the light, monochrome palette to the static mise-enscène, the repetitiveness of the plot to the iconography of the white picket fence) is parodied, that is, is seen through and distorted by the lens of the language with which people have come to speak about that language. In the scene discussed above, the extent to which a sitcom like Father Knows Best rarely ventured beyond Springfield is filtered by a lens which makes it seem as if its unadventurous nature was not the result of an economical or technological limitation but a political choice without which its pleasant and peacefully white, middle-class world could not be sustained. But let me return to the scene with which I began my discussion. When Jennifer asks her teacher what lies beyond Main Street, she is making at least three enquiries: first, what is there outside Pleasantville? Second, what is there after today, that is to say, is there a tomorrow that is not today? And third, what is the nature of this world if there isn’t anything outside Pleasantville, if there is nothing after tomorrow, that is, if the world is neither spatially nor temporally continuous? When her teacher

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responds that there is nothing at the end of Main Street, she is also in fact giving three answers: first, that there is nothing outside of Pleasantville except for Pleasantville; second, that there is nothing after tomorrow but today; and third, that the nature of this world is circular and cyclical. My discussion of this scene raises two issues that I wish to address. The first issue – a key issue for an understanding of the film as such – is the role Jennifer plays here within the project of the parody. Within the scene I have described above, Jennifer acts as the embodiment of parody. She literally – through long shots depicting her alienation, through close-ups emphasising her surprise, by means of shots filmed over her shoulders, in shots taken from her point of view, by asking the kind of questions the viewer might wish to ask – takes the audience by the hand, showing them how she sees the world from her point of view, which is to say from the point of view of someone who is watching one semantic realm with the knowledge of another universe. In later scenes, David does the same. The film thus turns its metaphysical parodying voice into a character, an all too physical, almost Heideggerian presence within the film. That is to say, it separates parody from the textual realm and ascribes it to the world. Such is the film’s overall conceit: to mispresent technological, generic and aesthetic conventions as cosmic principles. As I will discuss in the remainder of this section, the film also blurs the boundaries between narrative time and the time of the world. In the next two sections, I will further discuss how Pleasantville wilfully confuses the sitcom’s black and white palette with its world’s colour spectrum; how it takes the show’s employment of bright light and light tones for one of the world’s intrinsic properties (it’s always sunny in Pleasantville); and how it assumes that the show’s ­iconography is a reflection of the world’s spatial configuration. The second issue – the central issue in this section – that I think needs addressing is the relationship the scene establishes between Jennifer, parody and temporality. When Jennifer asks whether there is anything beyond Pleasantville, she also enquires whether tomorrow is any different from today. Her question implies, thus, that she assumes that time is continuous and evolving. When her teacher answers that there is nothing outside of Pleasantville, she also replies that tomorrow is exactly the same as today. She thus takes for granted that time is circular and repetitive. The scene exposes that Pleasantville presents narrative time as a property of the world in two ways: it presents the coming-of-age film’s linear temporality as Jennifer’s progressive and accumulative orientation towards the world; and it presents the sitcom’s circular temporality as the cyclical calendar of that world. Moreover, since the film is a parody, it structures the second temporality through the first.

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the s ub urb a s wo rl d 25 The scene I have described above is only the first of a number of scenes that parody Pleasantville’s temporality by structuring it through another. At one point in the film, David arrives late for work to find his boss Mr Johnson (Jeff Daniels) compulsively cleaning the counter (it is interesting to note that he is making circular movements). ‘What’s wrong?’ David asks. ‘Well’, Mr Johnson says, ‘I-I always wipe down the counter and then you set out the napkins and glasses and then I make the French fries but . . .’ David looks at him questioningly. ‘But’, Mr Johnson continues, hesitantly, ‘you didn’t come, so . . . so I kept on wiping’. By asking Mr Johnson why he still performed chores that had already fulfilled their purpose, David divulges that he assumes time is developmental and causal. Mr Johnson’s answer to David’s question reveals that he experiences time as cyclical ritual or repetitive routine beyond which it is inconceivable to think, or impossible to imagine alternative futures. Again, the scene, now by means of David’s literal parodic look, exposes both David’s progressive and accumulative orientation towards the world, and (but only through David’s eyes) the cyclical nature of that world. Pleasantville establishes from the outset how it thinks its audience should understand the genre of the 1950s domestic sitcom it parodies. Its use of titles is exemplary. In the film’s opening credits, a number of Pleasantville episodes are shown in passing. The episodes are titled, respectively, ‘Trouble at the barbershop’; ‘Fireman for a day’; ‘The big game’; and ‘Bud gets a job’. Although the tone of this scene is certainly ironic and steers towards exaggeration, the episode titles are notably similar to many Father Knows Best (CBS, 1954–5, 1958–60; NBC, 1955–8) or Leave it to Beaver (CBS, 1957–8; ABC, 1958–63) episode titles. ‘Fireman for a day’, for example, bears quite some resemblance to ‘Junior fire chief’ (Leave it to Beaver (henceforth LB), season 4, episode 34); ‘The big game’ recalls ‘The big test’ (Father Knows Best (henceforth FKB), season 2, episode 9) and another ‘The big test’ (FKB, 6, 20) as well as ‘Beaver’s big contest’ (LB, 4, 6); and ‘Bud gets a job’ seems a rather ‘faithful’ re-appropriation of ‘Bud, the willing worker’ (FKB, 6, 10), ‘Wally’s job’ (LB, 1, 33) and ‘Wally’s weekend job’ (LB, 5, 6). By structuring the episode titles around simple, sincere and innocent situations – accompanied by light, black and white images of sunny and quiet shopping streets, close-knit communities, and people smiling while at work – and by closely resembling the titles of particular episodes from canonical domestic sitcoms from the 1950s, the film infers a manipulatively selective and narrow intertextual knowledge from its audience. For one, it invokes the idea that the 1950s domestic sitcom is, as Daniel Marcus has put it, ‘whitewashed history’.5 It also invokes the popular idea that the domestic sitcom ‘continually reiterated the

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fairness of American capitalism and the ease with which one could achieve financial success [. . .] that with hard work, a good education, thrift, and foresight, one can achieve anything in America’.6 It further evokes the extent to which the episodes of certain 1950s domestic sitcoms tended to be structured as a circle rather than a line, developing from status quo to situation and back, rather than progressing from A to B and eventually C and so on.7 Through the accompanying images it evokes the idea that ‘the domestic sitcom romanticized the suburb as an idyllic small town that was located not merely miles from the modern city but the better part of a century as well.’8 And, most interestingly for my purposes here, by emphasising that each title, that each situation is a mere variation on the same theme, the sequence implies that, as both David Grote and Nina Leibman have observed, the 1950s domestic sitcom was unique in that it never developed, never changed, and, indeed, actively resisted all change.9 Indeed, the world Pleasantville parodies is a caricature of the 1950s domestic sitcom world where people coexist pleasantly, peacefully and easily, and where pleasure and peace are not the products of human pursuit but natural givens. It is a world where, as the scene with Mr Johnson establishes, people take life as it comes not in the sense of some sort of Nietzschean Amor Fati but in the sense that they do not reflect upon it, and in the sense that they perform their routines without wondering why they are performing them over and over again. It is, as the film’s opening sequence informs us, a world of daytime and sunshine, of predictability, routines and stability; it is a world of plenty also, and of moderate consumerism, of family values, personal safety and safe sex (or no sex, rather). It has been well documented that such representations have little to do with the racist, gendered and sexually oppressive reality of the 1950s.10 To be sure, I feel I need to state here that contrary to popular belief, contrary even to what some scholars appear to believe, no sitcom, not even a domestic sitcom, and, indeed, not even a domestic sitcom from the 1950s, is as simple, sincere and innocent as Pleasantville implies it might be. Unfortunately I do not have the space to dwell on this, but let me briefly draw on one example from Father Knows Best. In the episode ‘Betty, girl engineer’ (2, 30), the Anderson’s eldest daughter, Betty (Elinor Donahue), applies for an internship as an engineer. Her teachers and parents try to talk her out of it; her friends and siblings deride her. Initially they tell Betty she is not tough enough; then they say she’s not clever enough. But after Betty passes the test, all they can muster, stumbling and stammering, is ‘But . . . but you’re a girl! You cannot be an engineer’.11 At work however, Betty is bullied to such an extent by her boss Doyle Hobbs

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the s ub urb a s wo rl d 27 (Roger Smith), who harshly and dismissively says things like ‘Why don’t you go home where little girls belong. [. . .] You’re a girl and a girl has an obligation to be one. A woman’s place is in the home’, that she quits on her first day. Later that evening, Mr Hobbs comes to the Andersons’ house to ask Betty out on a date. He explains that although he thinks Betty is a ‘fine’ girl, he just does not believe girls should work on construction sites. Indeed, he says, they should rather stay at home and take care of the household. Taking his words to heart, Betty, who had been wearing shirts, overalls and jeans, puts on a dress, poses on the stairs, and acts subserviently, batting her eyelashes, blushing, pitching her voice, mispronouncing words she had no problems articulating before. ‘Yeah . . . Yeah! This is more like it’, Hobbs beams. ‘I’m so happy you approve’, Betty responds in a mocking tone, ‘that I fit into your blueprint’. Oddly enough, Mary Ann Watson has described this scene as an archetypical happy ending, where ‘all is well’.12 I would suggest the contrary. Throughout the episode, Betty has been portrayed as a confident young woman, happy to take responsibility for her own choices, able to outwit her stammering parents, and quick to learn the trade. Here she is displayed as an insecure child, seeking approval from an unsympathetic man, agreeing with his every word. Her performance is extremely exaggerated and glaringly self-reflective: by posing on the staircase Betty inscribes herself into an iconography of the objectification of women; by seeking Hobbs’s approval, she inscribes herself into a tradition of female subjugation; by suddenly mispronouncing words she articulated correctly before, she draws attention to the fact that she is pretending. Indeed, far from showing a ‘happy’ end, the scene suggests Betty is just as unhappy as her contemporaries in family melodrama were, and indicates that she is all too aware of the irresolvable tragedy of the ‘problem which has no name’, of her fate as a woman.13 But let me return to Pleasantville. Daniel Marcus has suggested that Pleasantville’s particular presentation of its fictional world as an enclosed, cyclical utopia with which people are so satisfied they have no urges to look further is as much a parody of certain discourses around the 1950s sitcom as of the 1950s sitcom itself. According to Marcus, Pleasantville is above all a pun on the Republican rhetoric that has come to rely on a particular interpretation of the 1950s domestic sitcom as the principal metaphor in its argument. In the speeches of Republican politicians like Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, shows like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver came to symbolise a sort of earthly paradise of global dominance, economic growth and prosperity, domestic tranquillity and personal security that was lost amidst the civic unrest, sexual liberation and individualism of the 1960s.14 He notes that Reagan even tried to associate his own persona

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with the sitcoms, by casting his voice and poise after Jim Anderson, the patriarch of Father Knows Best, by flaunting his insider knowledge as a former actor, and, most tellingly, by asserting that his own personal development had come to an end in the 1950s, that is, at the point the American Dream had fulfilled itself.15 Similarly, Stephanie Coontz remarks that it is not uncommon for Republicans to plead for a ‘comeback’ of the Nelsons, or to call for a return to the Ozzy and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver family model, with its working father, stay-at-home mom, and 2.1 children,16 while John Archer has observed that preeminent conservative ‘models for suburban design today’, such as the New Urbanism and Disney’s gated communities, are modelled on 1950s sitcom suburbs.17 I agree with Marcus that Pleasantville parodies above all this particular Republican rhetoric. I would argue, however, that Pleasantville also parodies more broadly the idea that the suburb is the realisation of ‘the end of History’. In his 1989 article ‘The End of History’ and later in his book of the same name, right-wing social theorist Francis Fukuyama argued that with the advent of capitalism and the victory of (American) liberal democracy, History, that is ‘history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times’, had come to an end.18 Following Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and, above all, Alexander Kojève, who all in their respective times theorised and claimed the end of History, Fukuyama asserts that History ends when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. [. . .] This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.19

According to Fukuyama, liberal democracy, uniting liberty and equality, has fulfilled these longings. Of course, he writes, not all liberal democracies are as free as they could be and should be, and there are certainly quite a few democracies where the whole principle of equality appears to be taken rather lightly, but for Fukuyama, those are merely problems of ‘incomplete implementation’ that will be amended in time. The ideal itself, he writes, ‘could not be improved on’.20 Over the years, evangelists, apologists and critics of the suburb have come to alternatively celebrate the suburb as the realisation of the American Dream, or deride it as the simulation of the end of History. The renowned urban historian Lewis Mumford, for instance, called the suburb ‘an asylum for the preservation of an illusion [. . .] forgetful of the

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the s ub urb a s wo rl d 29 exploitation on which so much of it was based’.21 More recently, David Harvey wrote that [t]he multiple degenerate utopias that now surround us – the shopping malls and the ‘bourgeois’ commercialized utopias of the suburbs being paradigmatic – do as much to signal the end of history as the collapse of the Berlin Wall ever did. They instantiate rather than critique the idea that ‘there is no alternative’, save those given by the conjoining of technological fantasies, commodity culture, and endless capital accumulation.22

For Fukuyama, following Hegel and Nietzsche especially, History was a battleground of ideas and peoples. The end of History, then, also marks the end of battle.23 The reason that Mumford and Harvey – or people like Mike Davis, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, for that matter – describe the suburb in terms of ‘degenerate utopia’ and the end of History is that for them the suburb substantiates, in withdrawing itself from the battlegrounds of social reform and emancipation, in excluding from its walled enclosures those armed with diverging opinions, and in disavowing polymorphous desires, the belief that liberal democracy emerged as the victor. It is this idea – an idea, it should be said, no less selective and narrow than the Republicans’ interpretation of the 1950s domestic sitcom, since in reality there were social housing projects, communist communes and experiments with social diversity among the earliest suburbs – that is problematised and parodied in Pleasantville when the film presents the suburb as a hermetically closed, cyclical, monochrome world of pleasant peaceful routines and rituals rid of personal quirks or desires. For the world Pleasantville parodies is not a world where, as Hegel predicted, ‘slaves become masters’, or where Nietzsche’s Übermenschen push around the hands of time. It has much more in common with the world of Nietzsche’s ‘last human beings’, a world facilitating, as Bernard Williams writes in his introduction to The Gay Science, a ‘pleasantly undemanding and unreflective way of life, a dazed but adequately efficient consumerism’.24 Indeed, the resemblances between Pleasantville and the end of History Nietzsche described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra are remarkable. Images of smiling people at work, for instance, resonate with Nietzsche’s ‘[o]ne still works, for work is a form of entertainment’. The Pleasantvillers’ satisfied middle classness resonates with the last human beings’ adage ‘[o]ne no longer becomes poor and rich: both are too burdensome’, while their apparent egalitarianism calls to mind the last human beings’ ‘Who wants to rule anymore? Who wants to obey anymore? Both are too burdensome. No shepherd and one herd! Each wants the same, each is the same’. And finally, true to the convention of the parodied 1950s domestic sitcom

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to present easily solvable problems, Nietzsche has Zarathustra predict that ‘[p]eople still quarrel but they reconcile quickly – otherwise it is bad for the stomach’.25 It is not hard to imagine the Pleasantvillers saying, as the last human beings do in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘We invented happiness’.26 It is this post-Historical world Pleasantville parodies by bringing into it Jennifer and David’s Historical bodies, re-orienting, like shepherds, the Pleasantville herd, questioning their definition of ‘happiness’ (‘There is something else than pleasant’, David tells his adopted mother), doubting the fun in work (David makes Mr Johnson quit his soda shop to become a painter), disturbing egalitarianism (not only do David and Jennifer make the teenagers rebel, they also prompt the adults, especially the men, to establish an autocratic rule of law), provoking violent conflict (as one reviewer put it, the townsmen re-enact their own Kristallnacht, including smashed windows, book burnings, the discrimination of ‘­coloureds’, and sexual assaults).27 To summarise, Gary Ross’s film problematises and parodies the idea that the suburb represents the end of History, by perceiving the postHistorical world – that is, the circular, repetitive temporality of the 1950s domestic sitcom – through the experience of Historical bodies, that is, through bodies orientated towards the linear, progressive, accumulative time of the coming-of-age drama. The film thus creates a world that is not simply post-Historical, but, impossibly, at once post-Historical and always already Historical. Pleasantville’s temporality is both circular and linear, immanent and transcendental, amnesic and accumulative, ritualistic and causal. Indeed, Pleasantville returns to History precisely at the moments it instantiates the end of that History: David’s interrogation of Mr Johnson exposes both his own Historical orientation and Mr Johnson’s post-Historical outlook, while Jennifer’s question and answer with her teacher reveals both her linear, transcendental thinking and her teacher’s circular, immanent mindset. Examining Pleasantville’s representation of the suburb in temporal or indeed historical terms, one might say thus that the  film draws attention to the extent to which representation of the suburb as a historical configuration is impossible since every time it articulates the audio-visual ‘word’ for suburb, the word changes form and sound; what it draws attention to is that the suburban world dissolves the moment it takes shape, emerges the moment it disappears. As I hinted in the introduction to this chapter, the 1950s domestic sitcom is far from the only genre Pleasantville problematises. Once it has parodied Pleasantville to the extent that it no longer resembles a 1950s domestic sitcom, or indeed a sitcom at all, that is to say, once Jennifer and David have liberated Pleasantville from precisely those principles by

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the s ub urb a s wo rl d 31 which it is conditioned, the film begins to take apart film noir and melodrama until it settles with what appears to resemble the early 1960s as they were seen through the lens of the nouvelle vague. One should not mistake this state as an alternative end of History however, a materialisation of the social democratic utopia of Gary Ross (previously a speech writer for Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton). By allowing Jennifer to remain in Pleasantville, the film draws attention to the extent to which this utopia too is fictional, or else seriously problematic (for what would her mother in the world of the coming-of-age film think?). But more importantly still, by turning each genre into a subsequent stage in David and Jennifer’s personal development, the film implies that History, at least in this suburb, is ongoing.

Suburbia and Genre: the World as Zone of Exception Something I have thus far implicitly acknowledged but have not yet explicated is the relationship Pleasantville establishes between genre and the nature of the fictional world. The film suggests, by separating textual qualities from the textual realm and ascribing them to the world, that each genre infers its own world. Because the film literally zaps back and forth between media, genres and (historical) traditions, it is therefore not only difficult to say to which genre Pleasantville belongs, but also what kind of world Pleasantville is. Family saga or coming-of-age dramedy, time travelogue along the lines of Back to the Future or media enquiry in the tradition of the mise-en-abîme film, piece of historical revisionism or a biblical retelling; whatever the generic logic the film adheres to, it will determine the limits of, and possibilities for, storytelling within its world. In this section I will argue two things; first, that Pleasantville, even if it resembles in many senses the coming-of-age narrative or Bildungsroman, does not belong to any genre in particular, but exists in what I will call, following Georgio Agamben, a generic ‘state of exception’; and second, in correspondence with that, that its fictional world is an unstable, conflicted composite of other fictional worlds, where the rules and natural laws, the structure and the logic are never what they seem. As I suggested in the early pages of this chapter, Pleasantville’s overall narrative structure – two teenagers forming an understanding of themselves and developing a responsibility towards the world around them – resembles perhaps above all the tradition of the coming-of-age film or the Bildungsroman. Like the coming-of-age narrative or Bildungsroman, Pleasantville is concerned with the formative years and spiritual education of a young person; like the Bildungsroman it changes scenery to set off this

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Bildung; like the Bildungsroman also it approaches this Bildung as a process of trial and error, both due to the protagonist’s own inexperience and the society’s inflexibility; and like the Bildungsroman, it: includes the idea of reciprocal growth or change in which the individual and his environment are engaged in a process of mutual transformation, each shaping the other until the individual has reached the point where he or she experiences a sense of harmony with the environment.28

Indeed, Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s index of Bildungsromane like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Brontë’s Jane Eyre reads like an inventory of Pleasantville: ‘childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation and a working philosophy’.29 The film has especially much in common with a particular strand of the Bildungsroman that is sometimes called the Entwicklungsroman (the ‘developmental’ novel) and which Mary B. O’Sheary has recently called the ‘Huckleberry Finn’ motif (it is certainly no coincidence that the book is mentioned in the film as one of the revolutionary new books). The Finn motif is founded, she writes, not only in youth but also in his [Finn’s] social class and his fundamental isolation, his alienation allows a critical vision and therefore a shifting of the coming-of-age narrative, making it about not only the molding of the individual but also the remaking of the world. He is thus a vehicle for both collective and individual redemption through nostalgia, an archetypical outsider whose clear vision of the society he is entering allows for it to be reordered and healed.30

O’Sheary asserts that in Huckleberry Finn and narratives like it, the protagonist has a ‘critical’ and a ‘clear vision’ of the world precisely because he is alienated and isolated from it. In other words, the Finn figure is someone who looks at the world awry, from aside, as it were, from another semantic realm, and therefore sees something that others do not see and indeed cannot see. It is here that Pleasantville merges the coming-of-age narrative with parody. I have already mentioned Pleasantville’s conceit to present generic conventions as cosmic properties. Another one of the film’s many conceits is to present parody as part and parcel of a coming-of-age narrative and to reciprocally present the particular coming-of-age narrative almost exclusively through the form and function of parody, that is, as tone rather than style. In terms of genre, the film rarely employs the coming-of-age narrative in its own right. The film’s Finn motif has no one distinct aesthetic, for instance. It structures and reflects upon the stylistic conventions of

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the 1990s teen film, the 1950s domestic sitcom, the film noir, the family melodrama, and, to a lesser extent, the French nouvelle vague, but it never exposes any stylistic features of its own – or it would have to be Jennifer and David’s numerous interrogations of Pleasantville’s status quo. Take the scene in which the teenagers are zapped into Pleasantville. In terms of the film’s plot, this scene marks the moment Jennifer and David’s Bildung towards self-understanding and social responsibility takes off. Stylistically however, the film oscillates between the conventions of what one may at this point assume is the 1990s teen film (since it has thus far been structured around themes like the generation gap, high school popularity, odd friendships, secret love and sexual experimentation, and stock characters such as the love-struck girl, the jock and the geek) and those of the 1950s domestic sitcom with which it is intercut. ‘Presentville’, as Greg Dickinson has called it,31 is signified by pale hues and a colour palette consisting of yellows, beiges and browns, by the darkness of the evening outside and the gloominess of the atmospheric lighting inside, by a rather intense tone (exemplified by Jennifer and David’s aggressive argument over the remote control), by quick editing, rapid camera movements and a great variety of angles, by an open and eclectic décor centred around the television, and by typical 1990s teen film costumes and appearances: oversized T shirt, jeans and messy hairdo for David; miniskirt, lipstick and blonde hair for Jennifer. Pleasantville, on the contrary, is signified by bright hues, a monochrome palette, the light of day outside and flat, high key lighting inside, a withheld, inhibited tone (illustrated in particular by Bud and Mary Sue’s polite conversation and mannerisms), sparse and slow editing, static images and straight angles, a closed, rigidly ordered setting centred around the fireplace, and the kind of costumes characteristic of 1950s domestic sitcoms (just look at the promotion photographs for new seasons of Father Knows Best): baseball cardigan, plaid shirt and dark trousers for Bud; white woollen cardigan and long skirt for Mary Sue. Pleasantville’s coming-of-age narrative also lacks an individual poetic rhythm. The film’s narrative rhythms, too, are determined by the other genres it employs. To once again take the above discussed scene as an example: the scene’s rhythm is alternately determined by the quick-paced editing of the post-MTV teen film, and the unhurried, even sluggish tempo of the 1950s domestic sitcom. Nowhere in this scene can one discern an aesthetic or narrative poetic rhythm which is indicative beyond a doubt of the coming-of-age narrative. Indeed, even the few stylistic choices used to signal David and Jennifer’s transmedial foray into Pleasantville, which marks the beginning of their coming-of-age journey, call to mind other genres and traditions, from science fiction (the digitisation of David and

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Jennifer the moment they travel from one world to the other) to fantasy (heightened extradiegetic ominous tones, thunder and lightning, flickering lights, a mysterious stranger with seemingly superhuman qualities). If genre, as Fredric Jameson has asserted, is a set of contracts between fiction and reader whose rules are explained in the text’s aesthetic and poetic conventions,32 it remains unclear what it is precisely that the reader, or viewer in this case, has signed up for when watching this film. To summarise, the film is not simply a postmodern pastiche, an eclectic hotchpotch of genres and styles, as some critics have suggested.33 Instead, it is conditioned by and structured around a ‘grand’ narrative, that is, a linear, developmental coming-of-age narrative which functions and takes the form of a ‘minor’ narrative, i.e. parody. The coming-of-age narrative determines how all other generic narratives are perceived, as well as (since the film separates parody from the textual realm and ascribes it to the world) play out, but without itself being visible – except in the film’s overall tone, the formal sequence of events, and the protagonists’ orientation towards the world. Indeed, as I will argue in the remainder of this section, Pleasantville’s coming-of-age narrative prospers precisely by plotting itself as visual absence, as gaps as it were for other genres, for other styles, to fill. It instigates, for instance, the turn from the 1990s teen film to the caricature of the 1950s domestic sitcom so that David and Jennifer have more chances of developing an understanding of the world and a sense of themselves. It also encourages the tendency towards film noir so as to elicit in the teenagers a sense of responsibility. It encourages melodrama to incite a longing for freedom. And it introduces nouvelle vague to create a world in which David and Jennifer can find harmony. I am inclined to describe such a paradox, in which narrative circumscribes a narrative space in which it takes no part in order to further its development, as what the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called, following Carl Schmitt, a ‘state of exception’.34 When a state or sovereign calls a state, or indeed zone or space of exception, Agamben writes, it momentarily, or locally, suspends the law precisely in order to constitute itself in legal terms. He points out that the sovereign is thus at once inside and outside the juridical order. The sovereign is inside it, since he has the ‘legal power to suspend the validity of the law’, yet he is outside it in that he ‘legally places himself outside the law’.35 Agamben has pointed here to extreme situations like the Nazi extermination camps, pogroms and, most recently, Guantanamo Bay. But one may also think of legal hiatuses that allow for the temporary exploitation of workers and human rights, or, vice versa, the external humanitarian interventions into countries’ interiors. Without wanting to compare it to a camp or a humanitarian zone, it is in

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this sense that Pleasantville, which is structured by one tradition or genre but seen through others, belongs not to any genre in particular, nor to no genre at all, but should be understood as a generic zone of exception. The question, of course, is what kind of implications this has for the nature of its world. Let me examine the relationships Pleasantville establishes between narrative, genre and world in some more detail by looking at how two decisive moments in the film’s coming-of-age narrative are played out as conflicts between genres and, by implication, contradictions within the world’s ontology. The first moment I will look at is the moment Jennifer and David learn to be responsible. This instance is both the cause and the effect of the state of a particular generic exception, the transition between the 1950s domestic sitcom and what appears to resemble Sirkian family melodrama. The second moment I will look at is the moment the teenagers learn to overcome difficulties. This moment is mirrored in the transformation from the 1950s domestic sitcom into film noir. The transition from the sitcom to melodrama is signified above all by the metamorphosis from a monochrome palette to a colourful texture. All the scenes explicitly caricaturing conventions and tropes associated with the 1950s domestic sitcom are in black and white, while all of the scenes concerned with that typically melodramatic tension between what is expected of someone and what one secretly yearns for, between sexual frustration and sexual desire, are in bright, full imitation Technicolor.36 Cultural theorist David Batchelor has argued that black and white and colour derive their respective identities from their comparative relationship to one another, but pertain to incomparable stylistic registers and aesthetic modalities. Black and white, he writes, is ‘precise, limited, palpable and constant’, precisely because in comparison colour is vague, unlimited, intangible and changing.37 In a black and white painting or drawing, for instance, the lines clearly delineate the boundaries between separate planes and phenomena, whereas in, say, a colourful painting, gradations of colour, hues, tints and shades diffuse the borders between the various fields and figures, and to an extent even foreground and background. Black and white and colour do not simply represent different stylistic registers, they represent different modes of seeing the world. In this sense, one may say that black and white represents seeing the world in terms of binaries and oppositions. In contrast, colour here represents perceiving the world as a continuum. In Pleasantville, black and white and colour pertain not merely to different registers of experiencing the narrative but also to different modes of being-in-the-world. Indeed, the first thing Jennifer remarks after being

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zapped into Pleasantville is ‘I’m pasty!’ In black and white, places are clearly defined (the bedroom is for sleeping, the kitchen for eating, the lawn for sprinkling, the pavement for walking, the soda shop for drinking a soda), spaces are rigidly compartmentalised (the rooms are abundantly decorated, full with heavy furniture and fragile objects which cannot be moved around easily), costumes are simple and straightforward, and performances are withheld, inhibited, almost so as to stay within the lines. In colour, however, places are less clearly defined (the bathroom is a place for taking a bath as well as for masturbating, the kitchen is for cooking but also for secrecy and sadness, the lawn is for sprinkling but also for running across, the soda shop is for sodas but also for dancing to rock and roll and painting), spaces can be reordered (in the soda shop, tables and chairs are slowly but surely being moved around), fashion differentiates, and performances are continual, in the sense that they seem unaware of forms or outlines. In broader terms, black and white instils clarity, order, unicity, purity and boredom (‘pasty’, for instance, does not only mean pale but also dull and boring), or, as Paul Grainge has put it, ‘sexless, sanitized, nicety’,38 while colour evokes chaos, plurality, diversity and ambiguity. By mixing the palettes, however, the film suggests that its world adheres to two incompatible ontologies. Pleasantville is a world which can apparently be at once exclusively black and white and always already in colour, binary and yet always already continual, limiting and open, clear and vague, pure yet impure. Its inhabitants might expect a certain space to be intended and organised for one thing, only for it to be used for something else altogether. Or vice versa, they might think they can behave in one way, only for it to be chastised as transgressive. Far from the stable and static place many seem to assume it is, the suburb is here thus signified as a place of ontological imbalance. Pleasantville’s rules, and the natural laws of the world, are unstable, unsteady and, above all, unclear. They might be one thing one moment, only to be its opposite the next. Pleasantville’s coming-of-age narrative circumscribes any number of generic zones of exceptions from which it remains excluded. The other zone of exception I wish to discuss here is the conflict between, or the transformation from, the 1950s domestic sitcom and the film noir. This transformation is signified primarily through lighting. Conventions and tropes associated with the 1950s domestic sitcom are consistently linked to bright, high key lighting, whereas those associated with film noir, such as off-angle and uneven compositions, deep focus photography, the sound of sirens, abandoned back alleys and derelict properties, broken windows and torn curtains, intimidation and alienation, are linked to dark, low key lights.39 In line with the film’s overall conceit, light and dark are treated

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the s ub urb a s wo rl d 37 not as textual qualities but as ontological properties. When David and Jennifer are zapped into Pleasantville, for instance, they switch from a world where it is night to a world where it is day. There is no narrative rationale for the time of the day to change. Indeed, the film is so eager for the audience to recognise the change’s narrative illogicality, its unreason in terms of the plot, that it denies every cut, ellipse or fade that could suggest the passing of time: David and Jennifer’s move from the gloomy Presentville to the bright Pleasantville takes place in one single shot. Similarly, the transition from the bright light of the sitcom to the darkness of the film noir signals a stylistic shift as much as an ontological one. Both discursively and in terms of its intrinsic qualities (if these two are ever separable), brightness connotes openness, clarity and predictability, in the sense that bright light enables seeing at a distance and in detail. Darkness, however, connotes closedness, obscurity and suspense, in the sense that it prevents one from seeing (night vision excluded) what is coming. For instance, in its repeated representations of the 1950s domestic sitcom clichéd motif ‘Honey I’m home!’ (its return to the motif itself suggesting the temporality of the sitcom, returning in circles to the same scenes, spaces and situations), the film shifts from bright high key, frontally lit shots, highlighting the father while effacing his shadow (see Figure 1.1), to dim, low-key, kick-lighted shots, under-lighting the character while putting the shadow in the limelight (Figure 1.2), turning the sequence from a ritual of homeliness into a rather unheimlich moment of suspense, for the viewer as much as for the characters involved. Indeed, the last time the film returns to the cliché, ‘Honey I’m home!’ is no longer a statement but a question. In the sitcom sequences the world is a benevolent, predictable and pleasant closed circuit. In contrast, in the film noir sequences the nature of the world is far less certain, it is unpredictable, not necessarily pleasant, and open-ended. Merely by shifting genre, or indeed, merely by darkening, the film changes the natural laws of the world. Of course, colour and lighting are only two elements in the overall make-up of genres. But what I have wanted to draw attention to by examining the relationships Pleasantville establishes between colour and black and white, light and darkness is that because the film plots Pleasantville as a generic zone of exception, in which there is no generic hierarchy but in which each genre can be equally influential, Pleasantville is thus a world that can be at once one thing, but also always already something else altogether. It can be light, open, clear and predictable, and always already dark, closed, obscure and unpredictable; colourful, continual and vague, and black and white, binary and precise. Deborah Thomas, in her study of Hollywood fictional worlds, writes that

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Figure 1.1  Pleasantville shifts register in order to express the world’s ontological instability. Early in the film, the aesthetics of the sitcom are used to connote a world of safety, happiness and certainty.

Figure 1.2  Later on, however, elements of film noir are employed to create a sense of danger and anxiety.

the world of comedy appears to be safe partly because we perceive it as a fictional world with a benevolent director pulling the strings. In contrast, the oppressiveness of the melodramatic world seems to be inherent in its social fabric and conditions rather than originating in a malevolent figure outside. For characters in comedic films to know that they are safe, they would need to be aware that they are characters in a comedic film, whereas melodramatic characters can feel the weight of their oppression without the same degree of self-consciousness.40

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the s ub urb a s wo rl d 39 Although, as Thomas notes, there is no such thing as a pure comedic world or a world that is exclusively melodramatic, it also seems impossible, if only because of fiction’s set of contracts with its audience, for a comedic world and a melodramatic world to coexist simultaneously. No fictional world, it appears, can be benevolent and malevolent at the same time. It is unimaginable, for example, that in the world of Father Knows Best one protagonist violently murders another main character, or even that in the world of a more contemporary sitcom like Everybody Loves Raymond (CBS, 1996-2005) or a romantic comedy like, say, Notting Hill (Michell, 1999), one protagonist dies in a gruesome, gory car accident. At the most, a benevolent world and a malevolent world can exist next to each other, like for instance Bedford Falls and its alternative Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946), or the public life of the small town and the private sphere of bars and strip clubs in Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock, 1946). In Pleasantville, however (as well as a number of other recent suburb films and programmes), where the contract with the audience is signed on terms of the coming-of-age genre but allows space for exceptions, the two worlds, impossibly, coexist simultaneously. Pleasantville is as sitcomic as it is always already a world of film noir, or, indeed, of Sirkian melodrama, or nouvelle vague, or something else altogether; it is as light as it is dark, as black and white as it is colourful, as circular as it is linear, as static as it is in flux, as open as it is closed. It is at once benevolent and malevolent, at once perfectly innocent and corrupted, safe and dangerous. It is a world that is intrinsically schizophrenic, that is not only epistemologically but also ontologically unstable. In the following sections, I will take my discussion of Pleasantville’s ontological instability to its logical conclusion, by focusing on that aspect of worlds that is generally most concrete and most tangible (but, as it turns out, is here not so tangible at all): space.

Borders and Frontiers In his introductory essay on suburban films, Philip C. Dolce writes that the suburban sense of place [. . .] is an overwhelmingly closed, visual construction focused in the single family, detached house and the middle-class, nuclear family. This sense of place is so powerful that even when severely tested it resists change. In Pleasantville, two 1990’s [sic] teenagers become part of a 1950’s [sic] television suburban community. They disturb the black and white TV world by introducing sex, rock and roll, and modern art. Above all, they disrupt the predictability and continuity of day to-day life in this stable, suburban world. While these factors cause turmoil and add vivid color to the residents’ lives, in the end, Pleasantville is still a white,

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professional, middle-class community composed of single-family, detached houses and nuclear families.41

Dolce makes a number of assumptions about the suburban film and the cinematic suburb that, as I hope will have become obvious by now, seem problematic to me, at least with respect to Pleasantville. First, he argues that the suburban sense of place corresponds to a closed and stable visual construction. Second, he asserts that this particular sense of place is so powerful that it resists change of whatever kind. And third, Dolce believes, seemingly beyond doubt, that Pleasantville’s social fabric has resisted all change throughout the film. In this section I take issue with each of the three respective assumptions, arguing that the cinematic suburb is neither n ­ ecessarily closed nor stable, let alone purely a visible construct. Having discussed the relationships between genre and fictional world and temporality and fictional world, I will here concern myself primarily with the relationship between space and worldhood. I will return to Dolce’s assumptions, which are still a commonplace in suburban studies, throughout the book. I wish to begin this discussion by, ironically, looking at the film’s opening scene. In their textbook Studying American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis, Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland have suggested that a film’s opening scene ‘sets up the terms of the [semantic] system’. It poses, they write, the enigma, the dilemma, the paradox, to which the film as a whole will appear to give the answer, the resolution. Openings of classical films are somewhat like manuals. The manual is what one finds when unpacking the box of a new appliance. It belongs to the package, but it is also at one remove from the package: a meta-text, to use a word one would not normally employ for a manual. Similarly, the opening of a film could be regarded as a special case of a meta-text. It is separate from and yet part of the narrative, in that it usually establishes setting, place, and time, as well as introducing the main protagonist(s). But it is also a kind of meta-text in the sense that by introducing us to the rules of the game, it shows us how a film wants to be read and how it needs to be understood.42

Of course, Pleasantville is not a classical Hollywood film, however much it has in common with some of them. Consequently, not all of Elsaesser and Buckland’s criteria apply. The scene does not, for instance, explicitly pose the enigma or dilemma the film will try to resolve (although in a sense it does, of course, by positing teenage isolation and indecision as a problem that needs to be overcome). Nor does it establish the film’s principal setting (although, again, one might say that the high school is, at least metaphorically, the principal setting of the coming-of-age narrative). What it does do however, is introduce one of the protagonists. More

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importantly still, it introduces the audience to what Doug Pye has called ‘tone’: ‘the ways in which the film addresses the spectator and implicitly invites us to understand its attitude to its material and the stylistic register it employs.’43 The film informs the audience how it wants to be viewed and understood, at least with respect to its treatment of space. In the opening scene, which, to be sure, is set in Presentville, David is pictured talking to a girl. He makes a joke (see Figure 1.3), she laughs. He asks her out, she shyly nods in agreement (Figure 1.4). Or so the audience

Figure 1.3  Medium close-up of David asking a girl out. The soft focus obscures the time and place.

Figure 1.4  Medium close-up reaction shot of the girl shyly nodding her head in agreement. Again soft focus is used to block out the wider world.

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Figure 1.5  The film pulls back the camera and sharpens the focus to reveal that David and the girl are apart, problematising the relationship between style and meaning.

is led to believe. Because as a long shot (Figure 1.5) finally discloses, the two are a schoolyard apart. By using the formal conventions of shotreverse-shot medium close-ups (which draws attention to their respective emotions), eye-line match (which suggests an interaction between them), and shallow focus (which obscures the surroundings), the film has tricked its viewers into seeing an interaction that could not take place, but it has also changed the nature of space itself. For if Pleasantville had not eventually looked with the eye of parody, that is, revealed the spatiality of the schoolyard it had concealed before, David and the girl would have interacted, at least as far as the viewer is concerned. A slight and partial revision of space here thus completely changes the nature of the film’s world. Indeed, it turns into a comedic and pathetic fiction something that had been a dramatic and spirited fact before. The film thus introduces the audience both to its attitude towards its style, meaning and universe, and the nature of that fictional world itself. With respect to its attitude, it informs the viewer that it will problematise the extent to which the representation of a space determines the nature of that space, and complicate what goes without saying and what needs articulating. In terms of the ontology of the fictional world, it raises awareness that the fictional world’s geography is incoherent and unstable. At the same time – and I will return to this in more detail later on – the scene elicits uncertainty in the viewer, or at least this viewer. For if every relationship between text and world may potentially be problematised, if the world is by definition unstable, then how should the viewer create in his or her mind an image of how that world looks and what it is about?

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The film problematises the relationship between Pleasantville’s textual topography and Pleasantville’s spatiality on numerous occasions. I have already mentioned the scene in which Jennifer asks her teacher about the geography of Pleasantville. Jennifer asks whether there is anything else besides Pleasantville, to which the teacher responds that there is not. Since, or so the film implies, the kinds of 1950s domestic sitcoms on which Pleasantville was modelled, like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver, never showed anything outside of Springfield or Mayfield, this is taken to mean that there literally is nothing outside Pleasantville. Later in the film, there is a scene in which Jennifer opens the door to a toilet to find there is no toilet bowl inside. In 1951, the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (the NARTB, later the NAB) published a code of practice that prohibited ‘obscenity, smut and vulgarity’, and compelled networks in friendly yet firm words to avoid ‘emphasis on anatomical detail’. The code further stated that ‘the use of locations closely associated with sexual life or sexual sin must be governed by good taste and delicacy’.44 Although the code did not, contrary to popular belief, explicitly put a ban on toilets, most shows excluded them from view anyhow. The film suggests that because toilets were rendered invisible in 1950s domestic sitcoms, or any 1950s shows for that matter, they do not exist in Pleasantville. Yet another one of the film’s spatial conceits relates to the space of books. When Jennifer first wants to read a book, she is surprised to find out that the pages are blank. Again, the film’s message is that because allegedly 1950s domestic sitcoms never showed the contents of books, the books did not have any content. As an aside, I should clearly state here that I do not wish to suggest that Pleasantville is at any point simply a counterfeit of any one particular fictional world – quite the contrary. As the philosopher Kendall Walton has noted, if someone, or in this case something, contemplates a painting or, indeed, a film or a television programme, he or she does not create in his mind the same fictional world as the world created in that painting itself.45 His or her distance to the world, the function of the world in his contemplation, and the logic he imbues the world with vary. Although ‘there is considerable overlap between the propositions fictional in a boy’s game [of make belief] and those fictional in [the painting] La Grande Jatte’, Walton writes, some of the former are not among the latter. It is fictional in Richard’s game, I will argue, that he sees a couple strolling in a park. But this is not fictional in the painting. Richard is not among the characters in the painting he is looking at. So the two worlds are distinct.46

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However familiar Pleasantville may seem at times, few people will be able to pinpoint its whereabouts or origins. Initially, for instance, it is reminiscent of 1950s domestic sitcoms’ territory. But it is difficult to say of which sitcom’s territory precisely. Is it Father Knows Best’s Springfield? Or is it Leave it to Beaver’s Mayfield? Or is it some fictitious elsewhere still? Of course, this indeterminacy is as much due to these sitcoms’ scarcity of detail as it is to Pleasantville’s lack of specificity. For with which landmarks (other than perhaps the Anderson’s house) is Springfield to be evoked? And which icons could bring to mind Mayfield? However characteristic its tree-lined streets, however typical its white picket fences, its picture windows, its bright hallways, its fireplaces, they are as prominent in virtually every other fictional suburb or small town ever conceived. One could argue that Pleasantville merely exploits the indeterminacy so characteristic of many cinematic and televisual suburbs. Indeed, in this sense its fictional world does here, paradoxically, seem a rather faithful adaptation of either Springfield or Mayfield. But to assume there is some kind of mimetic relation between Pleasantville and Springfield or between Pleasantville and Mayfield would be to miss the point. Pleasantville is indistinct primarily because it has no single specific source world (just like neither Springfield nor Mayfield has one specified referent in reality). Just as Pleasantville is neither an imitation nor a reinterpretation of Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver but rather the interpretation of a show that operates according to what are now thought to be similar generic ideology, syntactic tropes and semantic traits, early Pleasantville is not so much a recreation of a fictional world that already exists (that is, Springfield or Mayfield), as it is the creation of a world that could possibly exist in its discursive realm; a world with similar natural laws, logic and properties, yet another world altogether nevertheless. The same goes for melodramatic Pleasantville, noir Pleasantville, nouvelle vague Pleasantville, and whatever other genre by which the world may come to be structured. But let me return to my discussion of the ways in which Pleasantville renders its fictional world incomplete. Now, no fictional world is ever complete. ‘Represented objects’, the literary theorist Ruth Ronen notes, ‘are never fully determined in all their aspects; spots of indeterminacy are never totally absent from fictional objects’.47 As Thomas G. Pavel observes, a world’s incompleteness may be maximised or minimised depending on the time (he asserts that ‘cultures and periods enjoying a stable world view will tend to seek minimal incompleteness’, whereas ‘periods of transition and conflict tend to maximize the incompleteness of fictional worlds’)48 or the genre (according to Pavel, a genre such as, for instance, realism is ‘not merely a set of stylistic and narrative conventions,

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but a fundamental attitude towards the relationship between the actual world and the truth of literary texts’),49 but annulling it is impossible. In fact, the slavist scholar Ludomir Doležel has asserted that ‘gaps [. . .] are a necessary and universal feature of fictional worlds’.50 ‘To construct a complete possible world’, he writes, ‘would require writing a text of infinite length – a task that humans are not capable of accomplishing.’51 To some extent, stories render their fictional worlds incomplete because there is no narrative necessity for them to complete the worlds. As Doležel writes, citing Nicholas Wolferssdorf: ‘We will never know how many children had Lady Macbeth in the worlds of Macbeth. That is not because to know this would require knowledge beyond the capacity of human beings. It is because there is nothing of the sort to know.’52 To another extent, a story does not articulate each and every detail, property or natural law of its fictional world because many of them go, as V. F. Perkins puts it, ‘without saying’.53 Walton has very clearly illustrated this principle, which he calls ‘indirect’ or ‘implied generation’, by discussing a scene from Goya’s series of etches The Disasters of War: Goya’s No Se Puede Mirar from The Disasters of War shows the bound victims of an execution by firing squad and the muzzles of guns pointing at them. It does not show the soldiers wielding the guns; they are outside the picture frame. Yet there can be no doubt that there are soldiers (or anyway people) holding the guns. We know that there are because of the position of the guns. It would be perverse, a willful ­misinterpretation, to maintain that the guns are hanging in midair.54

Walton suggests that it goes without saying that there are soldiers holding the guns, even if they remain invisible, because he assumes, with the knowledge of his own world, that guns cannot ‘hang midair’. Similarly, one might assume that although it remains invisible, the victims will die when they are stabbed or shot by the soldiers holding the guns, ‘because such causality corresponds’, as Tzvetan Todorov once put it, ‘to a common probability’.55 One may also assume that both the victims and the soldiers need to breathe, drink and eat in order to stay alive; that their veins contain blood; and that they, like people in the actual world, are capable of having thoughts, being in love, and so on and forth. One may assume all these things, because they all correspond to one’s u ­ nderstanding of one’s own world. Ronen has observed that ‘we are seldom aware of any gaps or spots of indeterminacy’ while engaging with a work of fiction.56 The reason is that we take the nature of these gaps for granted. Pleasantville, by problematising the relationships between the on screen and the off screen, in frame and out of frame, between types of shots, compositions and focus, questions

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what ‘goes without saying’ and what apparently needs to be articulated; it questions the principles of indirect or implied generation, of mutual belief and common probability, of logic and natural laws. I am reminded here of Heidegger’s notion of ‘revealing the world’. In Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that people only become aware of the world, of the ways in which it operates and the ways in which they are in it, the moment something they normally have ‘ready-to-hand’ goes missing. At that moment, Heidegger writes, ‘one sees for the first time what the missing article was ready to hand with, and what is was ready to hand for. The environment announces itself afresh.’57 What Heidegger means here, put simply, is that by looking at the world from awry, the world ‘reveals’ itself in a different guise. As Hubert Dreyfus explains, in his study of Dasein: The world, i.e. the interlocking practices, equipment, and skills for using them, which provides the basis for using specific items of equipment, is hidden. It is not disguised, but it is undiscovered. So, like the available, the world has to be revealed by a special technique. Since we ineluctably dwell in the world, we can get at the world only by shifting our attention to it while at the same time staying involved in it.58

Pleasantville, by problematising the relationships between the on screen and the off screen, that is, by revealing that Pleasantville is hermetically closed off, by exposing that there are no toilets, and by exposing that the pages of books are empty, suggests that the world is always already about to be rediscovered, revealed anew. The film’s problematisation of relationships between what is visible and invisible, of what goes without saying and what needs articulating, thus renders the world as a particularly unstable place, where the world is never necessarily as it seems but is always already something else, waiting to be revealed. It is here that the function and with that the conceit of the opening scene becomes apparent. In one sense, the scene discloses certain information, for instance that the film will problematise the relationship between text and world in general and between the textual geography and the cosmic spatiality in particular, or, for example, that the viewer should not take anything for granted. At the same time, however, it opens up as many if not more uncertainties, precisely by informing the viewer not to assume anything. For what still goes without saying, and what does not? I can only speak of my own experience watching the film, but when I first watched Jennifer’s interrogation of Miss Peters expose Pleasantville’s geography, I was simultaneously prepared and surprised. I was prepared in that the opening scene had informed me to take into account the possibility that Pleasantville is not like the world I live in. Yet I was also surprised, since

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the s ub urb a s wo rl d 47 until the town’s geography was shown, I had assumed nonetheless that the world was structured like my own. For one cannot simply discard all epistemological uncertainties, as then it would be, as Perkins suggested, impossible to begin a story at all. Similarly, when I first viewed the shot, from Jennifer’s point of view, that exposes Pleasantville’s lack of toilets, I had anticipated it, yet was still taken aback, for much the same reasons I described above. The film thus encourages the viewer to anticipate inconsistencies and instabilities in the representation of its world but without informing the viewer what these might be, thereby turning the viewing experience itself into an inconsistent and unstable process, constantly oscillating between a distancing and an attraction, between disbelief and the suspension of disbelief necessary to watch a film at all. What further complicates Pleasantville’s instability is that as one generic aesthetic turns into another and then another, the world’s spatial dimensions and ontology, its existential logic, change accordingly. At the end of the film, when the film’s aesthetic resembles the style of the nouvelle vague, characterised as it is by quick editing, jazz music, coffee houses, leather jackets and cigarettes, Jennifer takes the bus to another town. The film here implies that Pleasantville is only one of many towns in the fictional realm, contradicting earlier explicit messages that Pleasantville was the only town making up the fictional world. Similarly, minutes after it is established that there are no toilets in Pleasantville, the film shows one of Pleasantville’s inhabitants bleeding. I had assumed after being made aware of the world’s lack of toilets that bodily fluids would be excluded from the world. After all, arguably blood pertains to the same ‘obscenity, smut and vulgarity’, and ‘emphasis on anatomical detail’ as excrement. The film here draws attention to the extent to which its world is not only ontologically incoherent and unstable, but also illogical, in the sense that whatever its internal logic might be, it is not explained, nor can it be related to the laws of probability in the real world. Dolce asserts that suburban films represent the suburban sense of place as a closed, visual construct, which is so powerful that it never changes. He illustrates his argument by pointing at Pleasantville. I hope it is clear that Pleasantville is neither closed nor stable, and far from exclusively a visual construct. Even if only in terms of space, Pleasantville is unstable in that its ontological principles and natural laws change constantly, inconsistently and, to an extent, illogically; in that its geography is subject to constant change; in that the meaning and social function of its spaces change constantly; and most of all, perhaps, in that it generates an unstable experience, both for those inhabiting it and for those witnessing it from across the screen. Even towards the end of the film, it is by no means clear

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by which principles and laws Pleasantville is guided. It is still impossible to tell, and perhaps even more so, for instance, where the world ends and where it begins, or whether one may get pregnant, and, if one may get pregnant, whether that is from sexual intercourse or from reading a book or planting a tree in the garden. Pleasantville is also most certainly not closed, for not only has it at the end of the film sprawled far beyond its initial boundaries, the film’s interplay between presence and absence always already announces another expansion. It appears to be, impossibly, at once closed and open, simultaneously closed in by impermeable boundaries and opened up by porous frontiers. And finally, Pleasantville is not exclusively, or even primarily, a visual construct. As I hope to have shown, its identity, its nature, is defined precisely by the constant tension between what is visible and what is invisible or, rather, not yet visible but what might or might not become visible at any one point. Indeed, the suburb is defined as much by what it looks like, as by the variety of ­alternatives imaginable simultaneously. I wish to make one last, brief remark about the town’s social fabric. Dolce suggests that Pleasantville’s social fabric has not changed. In spite of all the turmoil, he writes, Pleasantville is still a ‘white, professional, middle-class community composed of single-family, detached houses and nuclear families’. I agree with Dolce that Pleasantville is still a white community, although certainly the – admittedly rather problematic and inconsistent – metaphor of ‘coloureds’ is intended to evoke racial or ethnic diversity. The other claims seem rather precipitate however. There is absolutely no reason to believe Pleasantville is still professional, for instance. True, there is also no explicit suggestion that it is no longer professional, but the lush colours, rapid, rhythmic editing, jazz, coffee houses and casually dressed kissing people that define the world at the end of the film are less markers of the worlds of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Johnson, 1956) and Bigger than Life (Ray, 1956), of an office environment and the organisation man, than of free time, parties and students. Similarly, it seems to me to be rather difficult to maintain that the idea of the nuclear family is not problematised when the mater familias has an affair and the son of the family takes his own life, at least metaphorically (but in a sense, since in Pleasantville metaphors are taken literally, also physically), by departing to another world.

The Suburb as World In the above, I have argued that Pleasantville presents the ontology of its fictional world as unstable, inconsistent, incoherent and illogical. The

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film’s fictional world sways back and forth between various forms, functions, modalities and situations. It inconsistently fluctuates between the end of History and History, between instability and stasis, benevolence and malevolence, darkness and light, closedness and openness, clarity and vagueness. In this chapter I have described this fluctuation in terms of worldhood. In the following chapters I will return to similar tensions and dynamics in relation to mise-en-scène and cultural geography. I here, finally, wish to make some suggestions as to how one should understand Pleasantville in terms of fictional world theory. Doležel has argued that fictional worlds can be distinguished into four types or states, or as he calls them, implying a historical hierarchy, stages. The first type of world is ‘the world of states [. . .] constituted by static objects with stationary physical properties and fixed relations’. It is a ‘closed, atemporal [. . .] realm of stillness and silence, where nothing changes, nothing happens’.59 The second type of world is the world of ‘states and nature force [sic]’. The world of states and nature force is a ‘dynamic world’. It is subject to natural events, events that continuously alter the course and nature of that world. The third kind of world is the world of states, nature force and person. This world is subject not only to natural events, but to personal intentions and actions as well. The fourth and final state of world resembles the world of states, nature force and person, but is inhabited by more than one person. It is subject to personal interactions, whether they be physical or verbal, of a semiotic nature.60 According to Doležel, only the worlds of states, nature force and person(s) can be the subject of and accommodate fiction. After all, he maintains, ‘stories require the presence in the fictional world of at least one person-agent’.61 One could debate whether this is true at all (just think of artistic traditions like landscape painting, recent abstract art, and music videos), but I think it is particularly problematic with respect to Pleasantville. It seems to me that Pleasantville oscillates between all four worlds. The Pleasantville of the 1950s domestic sitcom is a world inhabited by agents rather than subjects, functions or modalities which are as static and, in their predetermined patterns, rhythms and rituals, even as stationary relative to their surroundings and one another, as the world’s objects and props are. One may well argue that the same goes for the Pleasantville of, say, the film noir or the nouvelle vague. However, at the moments these worlds collide they change due to natural events. Here the world is of the second type. The Pleasantville of the coming-ofage film, finally, is also inhabited by agents. However, these agents follow paths which are nowhere literally paved, as I have suggested in the second section (since the coming-of-age narrative has no style or rhythm of its

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own). They walk in invisible patterns and rhythms as it were, routines that cross and transgress those of the other genres. It is only here, thus, that the world, due to conflicts between persons and their surroundings and between persons and other persons, is, strictly speaking, of the fourth category. Sometimes these types of worldhood follow each other one after the other, but most of the time, they all exist, impossibly, simultaneously. When Jennifer asks her teacher about the geography of Pleasantville, the world is at once a sitcomic world of states and a coming-of-age world of states, nature force and person(s). Another scene I have not had the chance to discuss, in which David alerts the fire brigade to a fire by shouting ‘cat!’ (since they have never seen a fire yet, they don’t know the word for it) is at once a sitcomic world of states (the word ‘cat’), a noir world of states (the fire, the darker hues, uneven angles, and off-angle compositions), a generic exception world of states and nature force (the conflict between ‘cat’ and fire), and a coming-of-age world of states, nature force and persons. I would argue that it is precisely this oscillation between types and stages, epistemological inconsistencies and ontological uncertainties, that renders the fictional suburb ontologically unstable, incoherent and illogical, fluctuating between generic styles and rhythms and logics. To be sure, the film’s point is not to question its own credibility here, to present itself as an unreliable narrator in the sense in which puzzle films and mind game films tend to, but much rather to put into doubt the ontology of the world itself, the a priori of all representation. Noel Carroll has written that a ‘narrative fiction film will be credible or not according to whether its images are consistently derived from the fictional world it depicts’.62 In Pleasantville, the relationship between text and world seems by and large consistent but it is the world itself that is inconsistent. When watching Pleasantville, viewers mentally and emotionally immerse themselves in a world in which they are never sure what can and cannot happen, or where the plot might or might not go, not because the relationship between text and world is unstable, but precisely because the textual-cosmic realm in its entirety is incoherent, because the world itself is illogical. There is widespread belief that the suburb encourages a dualistic narrative. In the minds of many people, the suburb lingers somewhere between heaven and hell. In some respects, one might say that Pleasantville, too, reads as a dualistic narrative. After all, it dislocates the myth of the pictureperfect postwar suburb (or rather, perhaps, since the film postulates a myth that very few people still actually believe in, the myth of the myth of the picture-perfect postwar suburb) and replaces it with its opposite. However, what I hope to have shown is that simply calling this film dualistic does not

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the s ub urb a s wo rl d 51 begin to describe the complexities and intricacies of its narrative, let alone the peculiar nature of its fictional world. Pleasantville oscillates between at least five different genres or registers, each corresponding to another set of ethic modalities and natural laws. The film’s dualisms – conflicts and contradictions in the plot or between plotlines – in fact signify a more multifaceted, and fundamental problematic: a narrative which could potentially go everywhere; a world that is ontologically unstable. In the Introduction I discussed the difference between the Bordwellian tradition of textual analysis and the Movie school. The difference between the two, I suggested, is that Bordwell looks at films exclusively as plotoriented narrative forms, while the Movie school allows for the possibility that films are not plot-oriented. It may be that we need to look differently at suburban films than one would look at a city film or small-town movie. I would suggest that we should not understand suburban films in terms of dualisms, but as films whose fictional ontology generates multi-faceted tensions, some of which may play out as dualisms. Each of the subsequent chapters engages with one or more of these tensions: Chapter 2 engages with tensions between style and the diegesis, Chapter 3 engages with tensions to do with texture, and Chapters 4 and 5 are concerned with tensions of social nature.

Notes   1. I will use, by exception (so as to preclude an otherwise confusing nomenclature), italics and underlining to distinguish, respectively, the film Pleasantville from the fictitious sitcom Pleasantville and the fictional town Pleasantville. In every other instance, I will conform to the conventions of scholarly presentation, italicise both films and television programmes, and quote episodes.   2. L. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 29.   3. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), p. 76. My emphasis.   4. Ibid. p. 75.   5. D. Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 25.   6. N. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 109.   7. See D. Grote, The End of Comedy: The Sit-Com and the Comedic Tradition (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1985), p. 68.   8. D. Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 53.

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  9. D. Grote, The End of Comedy, pp. 61, 67; N. Leibman, Living Room Lectures, p. 49. 10. See S. Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 11. It would be especially interesting here to compare Betty’s verbal eloquence to her parents’ stammering and repeated silences. 12. M. A. Watson, Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience in the 20th Century, 2nd edn (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), p. 62. 13. Of course, as with discussions of Sirkian melodrama, it is always questionable how the 1950s audiences would have interpreted Betty’s behaviour. I would suggest, however, that her performance is so out of sorts with the rest of her and the others’ behaviour that it leaves little doubt that it is something the show wants to draw attention to. 14. D. Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years, p. 39. 15. Ibid. p. 67. 16. S. Coontz, The Way We Never Were, p. 23. 17. J. Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 344. 18. F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992), p. xii. For a discussion of the end of History in relation to media studies, see J. Bignell, Postmodern Media Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 61–85. 19. F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, p. xii. 20. Ibid. p. xi 21. L. Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Progress (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 563. 22. D. Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 168. 23. F. Fukuyama, The End of History, pp. 143–52, p. 189. 24. B. Williams, ‘Introduction’, in F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. xiv. 25. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 10. 26. Ibid. 27. P. Grainge, ‘Colouring the Past: Pleasantville and the Textuality of Media Memory’, in: P. Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 206. 28. S. A. Gohlman, Starting Over: The Task of the Protagonist in the Contemporary Bildungsroman (New York: Garland, 1990), p. x. 29. J. H. Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 18. 30. M. B. O’Shea, ‘Crazy from the Heat: Southern Boys and Coming of Age’, in M. Pomerance and F. Gateward (eds), Where the Boys Are: Cinemas

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of Masculinity and Youth (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), p. 85. 31. G. Dickinson, ‘The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia’, Western Journal of Communication, 70: 3 (July 2006), p. 221. 32. F. Jameson, ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, New Literary History 7: 1 (Autumn 1975), p. 135. 33. See for instance K. M. Booker, Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange (Westport: Praeger, 2007), pp. 173–7. 34. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 35. Ibid. p. 17. 36. One scene which links the Sirkian melodrama to colour in particular is the scene in which Betty Parker has turned colour after a secret love affair with Mr Johnson, and David helps her hide it by covering up her face with monochrome make-up. The mother is in tears, sad because she realises that she can never be happy: not when performing her part in the community because she then cannot be with Bill; not when acting out her desires for Bill because she then will be ousted from the community. The distinction between black and white (the same as others but literally ‘colourless’) and colour (‘colourful’ but different from everyone else) is an expression of this double-bind. For a discussion of colour and melodrama, see M. B. Haralovich, ‘All that Heaven Allows: Color, Narrative Space, and Melodrama’, in P. Lehman (ed.), Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism (Florida: University Press, Florida, 1990), pp. 57–72. 37. D. Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 28. 38. P. Grainge, ‘Colouring the Past’, p. 205. 39. See P. Schrader, ‘Notes on Film Noir’, in A. Silver and J. Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), pp. 53–64; and J. Place and L. Peterson, ‘Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir’, in A. Silver and J. Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader, pp. 65–77. 40. D. Thomas, Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy and Romance in Hollywood Films (Moffat: Cameron & Holls, 2000), pp. 12–13. It should be noted that Thomas thinks in terms of ‘moods’ rather than genres. She distinguishes two moods, two fictional logics: the melodramatic, characterised by a malevolent or indifferent universe, and the comedic, characterised by a benevolent ­universe. Film noir, for Thomas, belongs to the melodramatic mood. 41. P. C. Dolce, ‘Suburbia: A Sense of Place on the Silver Screen’, in D. Rubey (ed.), Redefining Suburban Studies: Searching for New Paradigms (Hempstead: Hofstra University Press, 2009), pp. 159–160. 42. T. Elsaesser and W. Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 47. 43. D. Pye, ‘Movies and Tone’, in J. Gibbs and D. Pye, Close-Up 02 (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), p. 7.

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44. National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters, ‘Code of practices for television broadcasters’ (15 January, 1951), p. 363; http://www. tvhistory.tv/SEAL-Good-Practice.htm (accessed 1 October 2010). 45. K. L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 58. 46. Ibid. p. 59. 47. R. Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 108. See also T. G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 105–13; and L.  Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 169–84. 48. T. G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, pp. 108–9. 49. Ibid. pp. 46–7. 50. L. Doležel, Heterocosmica, p. 169. 51. L. Doležel, ‘Possible Worlds of Fiction and History’, New Literary History 29: 4 (1998), p. 794. 52. L. Doležel, ‘Possible Worlds of Fiction and History’, p. 795. 53. V. F. Perkins, ‘Where is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction’, in J. Gibbs and D. Pye (eds), Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 27. 54. K. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Belief, p. 140. 55. T. Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), p. 216. 56. R. Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, p. 108. 57. M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), p. 105. 58. H. L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 99. 59. L. Doležel, Heterocosmica, p. 32. 60. Ibid. pp. 32–3. 61. Ibid. p. 33. 62. N. Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 181.

C H A PT E R 2

Happiness: The Suburb and Film Style

In this chapter I examine how Todd Solondz’s 1998 tragicomedy Happiness represents suburbia by looking at how it uses editing and mise-en-scène in order to create space. By editing, I here mean the coordination of shots, including relationships of rhythm, tone, look, time and space. By miseen-scène I understand, following John Gibbs, ‘the contents of the frame and the way that they are organised’, including everything from framing, types of shots and lenses and camera movement, to composition, colour, lighting, décor, props, costumes and the performance of the actors.1 If I speak about ‘space’ here, finally, I speak of textual space: the space of editing, graphic space or of narrative space – as opposed to the fictional space I talk about in Chapter 1, the textural space I talk about in Chapter 3, and the cultural or social spaces I discuss in Chapters 4 and 5. I concentrate on three uses of editing and mise-en-scène in particular, corresponding to three distinct dimensions of cinematic spatialisation: the use of discontinuous editing to present the space of geography as sprawling, fragmented and incoherent; the use of disjointed compositions in order to present the space of human interaction as conflicted; and the employment of disconnected, tableau framing, stasis and deep focus in order to render the space of mind alienating. In the concluding section, I argue that in spite of the film’s particular stylistic choices, the cinematic suburb is here less a specific visual or narrative construct than what Raymond Williams once called a ‘structure of feeling’, a recognisable pattern or set of beliefs and sensibilities across a culture or community discourse at any one point in time or space.2

Editing and the Geography of the Suburb Giuliana Bruno has described cinema as an ‘atlas’.3 Similarly, Tom Conley writes in his study Cartographic Cinema, that film ‘by nature [. . .] bears an implicit relation with cartography’. What he means by this, is that

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cinema and cartography draw on many of the same resources and virtues of the languages that inform their creation. A film can be understood in a broad sense to be a ‘map’ that plots and colonizes the imagination of the public it is said to ‘invent’ and, as a result, to seek to control. A film, like a topographic projection, can be understood as an image that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators. When it takes hold, a film encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space. The same could be said for the fascination that maps have elicited for their readers since the advent of print-culture or even long before.4

Conley suggests that each film produces its own, distinct map. He notes, for instance, that a documentary tends to produce a descriptive relief map, detailing the depths of a particular area or locales, whereas a narrative film generally produces an ‘itinerary’, prescribing a route from one place to any number of other places. In this section I examine how and what kind of map Happiness produces by considering the film’s visual and narrative description of its setting as well as by paying attention to the various stylistic, narrative, temporal and spatial relationships it establishes between them. I argue that the film’s representation of suburban New Jersey (as a collection of places, rather than a town, i.e. one place in particular) delineates the suburb as an incomplete plan of forever unfinished and suspended journeys to nowhere, at once totalising and fragmented, arboratic and rhizomatic, static and in flux. ‘Geographers’, the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes, ‘study places’, that is, centres of meaning.5 Maps are first and foremost descriptions of places and the relative distances between them. Since Happiness is an ensemble piece, documenting the more and less intertwined lives of Lenny (Ben Gazzara) and Mona Jordan (Louise Lasser), their daughter Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) and her husband Bill (Dylan Baker) and their three children, Lenny and Mona’s daughter Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), their daughter Joy (Jane Adams), Helen’s neighbour Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and to a lesser extent Allen’s neighbour Kristina (Camryn Manheim) and the Russian cab driver Vlad (Jared Harris), the map the film produces features a variety of places. It features, among others, a two-and-a-half star restaurant, a fast food joint, a roadside café, a diner, a bar, a corner shop, an office/call centre, two psychiatric offices, a hospital room, a baseball pitch, two parking lots, an interstate, a few roads, a Path train, numerous car interiors, three houses, an apartment block, two one-bed apartments, a studio apartment, an elevator, a hallway and a lobby. In addition, the film’s map includes areas outside New Jersey: interstates, estate agencies, various apartment blocks, retirement homes and swimming pools somewhere in Florida, various roads and streetscapes, a school, a taxi cab, an apartment in New York, and a fictional dreamscape resembling a park.

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t he s ub urb a nd f ilm s ty l e 57 It is worth paying some closer attention to the relationship the film establishes between New Jersey and the wider world before discussing its presentation of the state itself. On the one hand, Happiness suggests that the suburb is continuous with the wider world. The film includes numerous scenes that are set in other states and counties, after all. It also introduces into its visual descriptions of New Jersey various references to New York. For example, in one long take which I will discuss in more detail shortly, a New Jersey apartment block is visually paired to the Manhattan backdrop and the Hudson river. On the other hand, the film also emphasises the distance between New Jersey and the wider world. The scenes set in Florida, for instance, are characterised by a full, neon colour palette, whereas the rest of the film is typified by pale, pastel hues. In the long take of the New Jersey apartment building, the Manhattan skyline and the Hudson river occupy less than a quarter of the image, are off centre, shot in soft focus, and remain visible only for a few fleeting seconds (see Figure 2.1). Let me give one more example. In a scene halfway into the film, Joy takes a cab from New York to New Jersey. The film suggests that city and suburb are connected by making the journey by cab. However, it simultaneously implies that the two places are disjointed. It cuts rather than tracks, for instance, suggesting not only that the journey is too long to be represented in its entirety, but also that the city and the suburb are discontinuous spatialities. The film also juxtaposes the vertical lines of New York’s skyline to the horizontal lines of New Jersey’s strip mall of roadside motels and car dealers. In correspondence with that, the camera

Figure 2.1  Happiness. Mid shot of Helen stepping out of the car. The Manhattan skyline is briefly visible on the left.

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pans down when leaving New York while rotating sideways when entering New Jersey State. The film also envisages New York by day while picturing New Jersey by night, implying that the journey takes at least a few hours. And finally, the cab makes a pit stop halfway, disrupting the flow of the scene as well as interrupting the journey, again inferring that the journey covers substantial distance. As the above list suggests, the New Jersey Happiness puts together is a surprisingly diverse environment. Numerous scholars have described cinematic suburbia as a narrow set of visual tropes and icons. Stanley Solomon and Kenneth MacKinnon have suggested that cinematic suburbs tend to be characterised by tree-lined roads, white picket fences, lawns with concrete paths, wooden frame houses, dens, and kitchens with screen doors.6 Dolce asserts that the cinematic suburb is centred around the detached single family house. The map Happiness presents, however, is incredibly diverse. True enough, its map includes tree-lined streets and a detached single family house. But it also includes interstates, roadside diners and fast food joints, industrial apartment blocks, one-bedroom flats and studio apartments. The film’s stylistic register changes accordingly, ranging from pastel colour palettes and bright, clean spaces to connote the detached single family home the Maplewood family inhabits to dark browns, sparse filtered lighting and crammed, filthy spaces to depict the studio apartment Allen lives in. In relation to this, the film’s map is sprawling. It is sprawling firstly in that it is spread out over more than twenty-five different places. It is also sprawling in that it lacks a well defined centre, both in terms of the narrative, in the sense that there is no hierarchy of relations – most places are shown a similar amount of times – and spatially, in the sense that there is no one place people journey to or from more than to others. Of course, part of the film’s dispersedness has to do with the fact that Happiness is set in an area rather than a place. Allen and Helen live close to New York, but considering the time it takes her to get to the city and back, it is unlikely that Joy lives nearby. The film presents the suburb not as a closed, isolated town centred around a town hall, main street or even shopping mall, but rather as a sphere or realm where various suburban settlements coexist and overlap. I am particularly interested in the nature of the relationships the film establishes between the various places it describes. Early in the film there is a cut from a scene set in a psychiatrist’s office to a long take of a parking lot that I think is illustrative of the ways in which the film links and disjoins the various places in which it is set. In the scene in the psychiatrist’s office, a psychiatrist, Trish’s husband Bill Maplewood, pretends to listen

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t he s ub urb a nd f ilm s ty l e 59 to his client Helen’s neighbour Allen talking about his sexual frustrations. In the subsequent long take of the parking lot, Helen steps out of a car and walks towards the apartment block in which she rents a flat. The film immediately establishes some interesting narrative relationships between the scene and the long take. The first scene opens with a close-up of Allen’s puffy, tense face, his eyes closed, his gaze directed inwards, his breathing heavy and his voice tortured (Figure 2.2). The next sequence begins (almost as if it were a delayed eye-line match) with a close-up of Helen’s slim, smooth legs, exposed for anyone to see (Figure 2.3). The

Figure 2.2  As the camera closes in on Allen, he looks down . . .

Figure 2.3  . . . to see Helen’s legs stepping out of the car, and the frame.

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scene in the psychiatrist’s office zooms out to reveal Allen’s passivity, with him set back in a chair, the pale browns and greys of his attire dissolving into the tepid hues of the office walls, while the long take of the parking lot zooms out to expose Helen’s activity, an independent woman dressed in an elegant black dress confidently striding away from the camera. In the former scene Allen is trapped within the frame; in the latter Helen liberates herself from it (moving in and out of its limits), forcing the camera to follow her lead. And whereas Allen is not even noticed by the psychiatrist who is paid to do so (the scene gradually tunes out from Allen’s lamentations about how boring he is, to Bill’s affirmative voice-over going over his groceries list), even the interim doorman knows who Helen is. In terms of the representation of space, the film establishes at least two resonances between the scenes. First, both the scene in the pyschiatrist’s office and the long take of the parking lot portray their characters on their own, in isolation. Bill and Allen never share the frame. When Bill is on screen, Allen’s voice is gradually tuned out, reduced to a mere murmur. His voice is literally inaudible in the public sphere, his thoughts do not translate to public interactions. Helen is shot from below, setting her up against the towering, dark brown apartment block closing the frame on all sides. Their loneliness becomes even more poignant in the ensuing scene, when they are revealed to be neighbours. In this scene they share the small space of an elevator together but they do not speak, barely acknowledge each other. Allen tries to speak, but again he stammers more than he speaks, his words turning stale in the thick air of the elevator shaft. Helen simply looks the other way, her eyes rolling to suggest her annoyance, sighing loudly so as to declare her boredom. Second, both scenes depict their settings as bland and impersonal. Both sites are without any recognisable local features or personal decoration like art works, photographs, plants, pillows or mugs. The apartment block does not even appear to have a name. In this sense, the places are made to seem what the phenomenologist Edward Relph has called placeless, ‘the casual eradication of distinctive places and the making of standardized landscapes that results from an insensitivity to the significance of place’.7 Bill’s office and Helen’s apartment building might be called placeless in that they appear indistinct in themselves, and indistinguishable from one another. In their indistinctiveness, however, the spaces resemble one another. Bill’s office, Helen’s car, and the lobby and hallways to the apartments are all deep sea green, grey and gloomy blue in colour. They are all characterised by even, measured lines. And they all feature sparse yet gleaming lighting. What these scenes share, and what they reinforce in one another, is a sense of subduedness, of being under water. It is no

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coincidence that the elevator features a small, round window resembling the window of a submarine. It is similarly telling that the one element contrasting with the colours of these spaces, is a bright red exit sign hovering, or floating indeed, above Helen and Allen’s head like a life raft. Here, the film at once renders its place indistinguishable, unidentifiable, in that it lacks any local or personal markers. Yet it bestows upon place precisely by way of that blandness a sense of place in terms of tone. I will return to the question of tone and sense of place in the third and final section of this chapter. What interests me about this particular editing sequence, is that despite the considerable amount of information mise-en-scène offers, the editing does not present any details on the whereabouts of these two settings. It is unclear where these two places are, where they are in relation to one another and where they are in relation to the other places. The film refuses a long shot, panning shot or tracking shot contextualising a block, a street or even merely a number of buildings. It furthermore denies access to diegetic implications of space or relation, such as road signs. And it never gives away a narrative clue, like a voice-over or title card indicating location, or a character referring to distance or direction. Indeed, the only hints the film gives are the New York skyline and the Hudson river in the previously discussed shot at the parking lot, but they define New Jersey by what it is not rather than what it is. Happiness thus simultaneously matchcuts spaces narratively – that is, relates them in terms of narrative coherence, graphic correspondence, and tonal and cosmic consistency – while jump-cutting them diegetically, in the sense that it disrupts plot, disjoints geography, and renders setting indistinct. In The Image of the City, urbanist Kevin Lynch has studied the ways in which cities are perceived by their inhabitants and visitors. He argues that cities are ‘read’ and articulated as if they were stories or narratives by their dwellers as they plan their ways around them – ‘I go from this point to that point via such and such spot, by way of such and such line, and then turn into that direction, across that space’ and so on. Lynch terms the extent to which a city can be read the ‘clarity or ‘legibility’ of the cityscape’: By this we mean the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern. Just as this printed page, if it is legible, can be visually grasped as a related pattern of recognizable symbols, so a legible city would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern.8

Lynch suggests that an image of a city is composed of a set of five core components: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks.9 Paths are the

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routes dwellers follow to move and measure the distance from one place to another. As examples of paths, Lynch cites streets, transit lines, railroads and canals. Edges are the ‘linear elements not used or considered as paths by the [dweller]. They are boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls.’10 Districts, of course, are areas or sections of some perceived common character into which the city is or can be divided. A district can be defined by its architecture, or by its history, or by its socio-economic status, and so on. Nodes are points of transition between elements, ‘typically either junctions of paths, or concentrations of some characteristic’.11 Examples of nodes (junctions) are rail stations, metro stations, crossroads and intersections, but also (concentrations) plazas, shopping centres or parks. Landmarks, finally, are places or objects that either because of their size or symbolic significance, have become valuable markers of location (and, especially for tourists, the identity of a city). Of course, no two cities are alike, at least not in the eyes (or minds) of their beholders. The perceived interrelationships between a city’s elements will thus inevitably vary, the priorities and emphases its dwellers bestow upon one or the other cannot but differ. In some cinematic cities, such as for example New York, districts and nodes might be perceived as the central organising elements (‘Gossip girl (CW, 2007–12) is set in the Upper East Side’, ‘Carrie goes shopping in the West Village’, or ‘Hannah met her sisters at 5th and Broadway’). The New Jersey of Happiness is not a location as easily legible as, say, Hannah and her Sisters’ (Allen, 1986) New York. In fact, Happiness at no point locates or identifies its various components. Bill’s psychiatrist’s office and Helen’s apartment are so lacking in signposts or personal decoration that they might be anywhere. The film also renders these places ambiguous in terms of function. For instance, by filming Helen from below, by enclosing the frame around the apartment building, and by presenting the apartment block as a dark brown, brick, nearly windowless wall, the film puts into doubt the function of the building. Is it a landmark, that is, a point of reference? Or is it an edge, an ‘impenetrable’ boundary?12 In fact, even the one site that is clearly discernible, the New Jersey turnpike, could just as well be a path as a node. Or is it a landmark? In Happiness the turnpike is seen exclusively against a Manhattan backdrop. If it is a path, then it might not so much be a path by which one navigates his or her way through New Jersey, as a path by which one steers one’s way out of it. And if the turnpike is supposed to be a landmark, then it is one that is as sprawling, as devoid of origin and future (as it is seemingly without beginning or end) as the state it symbolises is often perceived to be.

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t he s ub urb a nd f ilm s ty l e 63 One could argue that New Jersey is harder to read simply because it is a state rather than a city or suburb. But I would maintain that it is also related to the film’s refusal to link its narrative spaces to one another by way of paths. The film cuts from a two-and-a-half star restaurant to a cheap diner, from one psychiatrist’s office to another, from a McMansion to a one-bedroom flat without making the journey that would enable the viewer to relate the spaces and make sense of the pattern of the place they constitute. The four times that the film does follow one of its characters on a journey, it renders space as illegible as possible. The first time the film follows a journey, it shows Allen driving his car home. The film, however, captures Allen in close-up, and stays with the character throughout rather than the environment he is passing through. The second, third and fourth times the film follows a character on a journey, it shows Bill driving his car. The second and the third times it captures Bill in close-up. The second time the journey is made at night, so the carscape remains invisible. The third time the surroundings are rendered in shallow focus, so the places crossed remain obscured. Each of these scenes also problematises the idea of the journey as ‘going somewhere’. The scene with Allen shows him drinking alcohol and crying. He has just exposed himself to his neighbour, and does not want to go home. The scenes with Bill do have a direction, but that direction is paedophilia and the ensuing exclusion from the community. The first time he drives to a corner shop to buy a children’s magazine to gratify his sexual urges, the second time he drives home Johnny Grasso after he has raped him, and the third time he is on his way to Ronald Farber with the intent to molest him as well. So each scene in its own way signifies the journey not as a spatial going-somewhere, but as a discursive going-nowhere. In Happiness, the road is not a path to be taken, but rather an edge, a ‘boundary between phases’, a suspension (of pending doom). Another way in which the film problematises its itinerary is through the motif of the phone call as a means to connect while being spatially disconnected. I mainly discuss the dynamic of the phone call here. Almost all of the characters use the phone at one point to connect to a relative, a neighbour or a stranger: Lenny and Mona speak to their daughters on the phone to talk about their divorce; Joy calls Helen in order to ask her over for dinner; Allan calls Joy in order to harass her sexually; Helen calls Allen to be harassed sexually; the mother of one of Joy’s ex-boyfriends calls Joy in order to blame her for her son’s death; and Bill calls an information line in order to find the address of one of his future victims. What these phone calls draw attention to, however, is not the extent to which characters are connected but their isolation and emotional estrangement. When Joy calls

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Helen to ask her over for dinner, for instance, Helen gently but firmly declines the invitation and hangs up. Similarly, when Mona is talking to Trish about her divorce, Lenny takes over the phone to end the call without Trish being able to intervene. The film features two scenes in which phone calls do connect people. These are precisely the calls, however, that should have been disconnected. When Allen calls Joy to harass her, the film cuts to a split screen. The convention of the split screen is generally used to graphically connect places and suggest an emotional attachment between characters. Usually the shots match in order to emphasise this bond. Here, however, the shots do not link up. The left side of the screen shows a close-up of Allen’s face, while the right half displays Joy in mid shot. The effect is a sense of unevenness, of imbalance. It suggests the sides are not of the same order. The phone call brings two lives together that are incompatible. Indeed, the narrow close-up of Allen’s contorted, red and sweaty face symbolises an experience very different from the one suggested by Joy’s frightened, shivery body and tearful face (Figure 2.4). The other moment a call connects people is the moment Bill calls the information line to find the address of his next rape victim. There are numerous other motifs just like this one: the closed door, the shut window, a barred fence. Here, too, isolation appears preferable to connection. The few times people do open their door, for instance, they are robbed, assaulted or raped. In fact, every one of the film’s intimate scenes is uncomfortable: the embrace between

Figure 2.4  The film connects Allen and Joy through use of the split screen. The correlation of Allen’s perspiring, tense face to Joy’s fragile, agonised body creates a feeling of transgression and intrusion.

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Bill and Billy needs little explanation, but similarly uncomfortable are the spatial intimacy between Bill and Trish right after he has gratified his sexual urges (twice), between Joy and Vlad just before he subsequently steals a guitar and a stereo from her house, between Allen and Kristina just before she announces she has killed someone, and between Kristina and the doorman when he rapes her. What all of these motifs draw attention to are both the necessity and paradoxically the impossibility of the itinerary, of the journey. The car drive, the phone call, the closed door - each sets out to connect people without ever succeeding. Jurca has described fictional suburbia as a ‘white diaspora’, referring to the feeling of displacement characteristic of literary suburbanites.13 Through these motifs, the film literalises Jurca’s idea of the archipelago along the lines of Freud’s now almost clichéd book on Civilization and its Discontents. According to Freud, human beings are by nature instinctive, driven by various undifferentiated and undirected ‘polymorphous’ Triebe, or drifts. He calls these drifts Eros, the wild lust drive, and Thanathos, the uncontrolled, aggressive, death drive. But as Freud writes in Civilization and its Discontents, these instincts are, because they are uncontrolled, ultimately destructive.14 Civilisation, for Freud, is the process by which society seeks to repress and sublimate these instincts in order to prevent itself from self-destruction. The tragedy is that ‘by none of these paths can we attain all that we desire’.15 For when one acts out one’s instincts, one will self-destruct; yet when one oppresses and sublimates one’s instincts, one may avoid intense pains, but also miss out on intense sensations of pleasure. Happiness renders its map sprawling and disjointed precisely in order to be able to render the suburb at all. It implies that the moment it relates places and connects people, people act out their desires and archipelagic civilisation ceases to exist. Conley asserts that narrative films are comparable to itineraries. They are descriptions, he asserts, of journeys from one place to another. Documentaries, on the other hand, are similar to descriptive maps. They detail a place in all its facets and complexities. In this sense, Happiness is akin to both an itinerary and a descriptive map, and to neither of them. It sets out to describe the journeys of nine people as they try to find happiness but ends up detailing places of permanent dissatisfaction. The film presents its linear, developmental narrative through a series of episodic scenes, set in enclosed, isolated spaces. Bill’s paedophilia, for instance, is gradually revealed through a series of talks with his son that stylistically resemble the domestic sitcom: they are accompanied by a soft and simple tune, and characterised by a pastel colour palette, bright and warmly lights and a homely décor. In each of these talks, his son asks him a question

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about sex. In each of the talks, Bill answers in an incredibly inappropriate way. However, by presenting the question and answers through the conventions of the sitcom, including the father’s kind and understanding gestures and tone of voice and the son’s innocent contentment with the answer, the film suggests that the problem around which these scenes were structured has been solved and the status quo has been restored. Bill’s regression into his mental illness is encapsulated here in a series of linked yet disconnected, enclosed episodes. To summarise, by presenting its developmental narrative as a series of episodic stories, Happiness at once presents History as a series of discontinuous everyday routines, and the whole of New Jersey as a series of disjointed, isolated and enclosed places. Lynch distinguishes four types of cognitive maps, that is, four kinds of perceived structural relationships between the building blocks of built environments.16 In the first type of map, the components are perceived as distinct and firmly related. The map is easily navigable, and the dweller will be able to move freely in any direction and across any distance without getting lost as he or she is familiar with all the elements and their position and spatial relation to one another. In the second type of map, the components are ‘connected one to the other, but in a loose and flexible manner, as if by limp or elastic ties. The sequence of events [is] known, but the mental map might be quite distorted, and its distortion might shift at different moments’.17 This map is only navigable in so far as the elements are clearly visible. The dweller will only be able to move in the directions and across the distances he or she is familiar with. In the third type of map, the elements are ‘roughly related in terms of their general direction and perhaps even relative distance from each other, while still remaining disconnected.’18 This map is navigable only by way of searching, through trial and error. In the fourth type of map, there is no structure, there are gaps and spots of indeterminacy, and the elements are disjointed and obscure. This map is barely navigable, and the dweller is likely to feel lost and alienated. I hope to have convinced the reader by this point that Happiness’s map of New Jersey belongs to the fourth category. By locating its story across numerous, unidentified places in New Jersey, the film describes suburbia as a sphere or area rather than a particular locale. By simultaneously match cutting and jump cutting, it simultaneously coheres and disintegrates, relates and disconnects. By presenting its narrative through episodic scenes, it renders its places disjointed and closed off. By never showing signposts, landmarks or icons, by never showing places invested with locality, and by only rarely showing places invested with personality, the film draws attention to the extent to which places are obscure and

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interchangeable. And by problematising the relationships between paths, edges and landmarks, it turns its environment into an unstable, unclear territory of shifting meanings. I wish to make two final observations here. The first observation relates to the film’s narrative structure. One should not mistake Happiness’s narrative structure for what David Bordwell has called ‘forking path’ films or what Warren Buckland has termed ‘puzzle films’.19 Like Happiness, forking path films and puzzle films are structured around the indeterminacies and inconsistencies between plotlines, images and spaces. Like Happiness also, forking path films and puzzle films tend to ‘exclude’, as Brian McHale has put it, their middle.20 Unlike Happiness, however, these films are premised on the possibility of solution, a possibility without which they would remain incomplete and ultimately unintelligible, since a puzzle needs to be solvable for someone’s engagement to be worth the effort. As I have suggested above, Happiness’s narrative unfolding is not dependent on the exploration of previously undiscovered places or narrative connections. On the contrary, it is conditioned precisely on the disjunction of places. The second observation I wish to makes pertains to the tempo or rhythm of the editing. One unfamiliar with the film might be forgiven for deducing from my reading of the film that Happiness renders its setting as a dynamic and chaotic city. After all, as Stephen Barber notes in his recent volume on cinematic cities, it is not uncommon for cinematic cities to be presented as a spatiality that incessantly takes on and discards its multiple figures and manifestations, and, through to its last monochrome nuance or lurid pixel, its vital axis lies in ­contradiction – every one of the aims and strategies of the film city’s innumerable directors has been contested and refused, from the first moments of cinematic imagery. The film city’s texture comprises an unsteady amalgam of sexual and corporeal traces, of illuminations and darknesses, of architectural ambitions and their cancellation, and of sudden movements between revolution and stasis.21

Happiness, however, is characterised by a slow, at times even sluggish rhythm of editing. There are shots of around a minute, and there are shots of about five seconds, but no less than that. The average appears to lie somewhere around twenty seconds. What is more, the tempo of the sequencing does not seem to depend on either the nature of the place or the nature of the events on screen, nor does it seem to be (like extradiegetic music is) in any way related to the identity of a character. It appears to take its own time, its own measure. Lefebvre – Henri, that is – has argued that in a healthy society, the rhythms of everyday life are determined by

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the rhythms of the body.22 Here, however, in what Lefebvre would surely consider an unhealthy society, the rhythm of the editing follows its own, impersonal course. As he writes: When they [rhythms] are discordant, there is suffering, a pathological state (of which arrhythmia is generally, at the same time, symptom, cause and effect). The discordance of rhythms brings previously eurhythmic organizations toward fatal disorder.23

Indeed, I would argue that by rendering the suburb out of sync, sedate and foamy, Happiness presents it as a desolate place of quiet, random suffering. I unfortunately do not have the space here to draw on these thoughts further. I have only wanted to mention rhythm in order to highlight another way in which cinematic space can be observed and should be observed.

Proximity and Distance I have thus far discussed some of the ways in which Happiness employs editing and mise-en-scène to represent the geography of human habitat. I now look at the ways in which the film uses mise-en-scène to present the spatiality of human interaction. My focus lies with two types of compositions. In the first type of composition, the image is organised into three parts: a person on the far left, an empty centre in the middle, and another person to the far right. In this type of composition the distance between people is measured, I would argue, by spatialisation. The second type of composition I discuss consists of at least two parts: a person towards the left, and a person towards the right. What matters here is not the space between the two people, but the nature of the spaces they are in. In this type of shot, the distance between people is measured in terms of what one may call compartmentalisation. The first composition is epitomised by three medium long shots in the film’s opening scene. In these three scenes, Joy shares the image with Andy (Jon Lovitz). They are sitting on what appears to be a love seat in a two-and-a-half star restaurant. Joy has just ended her romantic involvement with Andy, and the awkwardness, sorrow and dejection are palpable. Joy looks downwards, her face tense, posture stiff, shoulders down, arms hanging weakly beside her body. Andy is crying. His face is red, his shoulders are down. He looks defeated. But what renders their awkwardness and sorrow most palpable is the empty, hollow space that separates them from one another (Figure 2.5). Several of the other elements in the composition draw attention to the space. Two half-full wine glasses visually

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Figure 2.5  Andy and Joy are separated by a flattened, hollow space, signifying both the distance between them and the permanence of that distance.

demarcate the boundaries between the characters and the space. Also, the centre of the space is brightly lit by a candle. Moreover, by thrice repeating this exact composition, each time lasting for about forty seconds, each time static and from the same distance, the film establishes the empty centre not only as the shot’s focal point, but also as the scene’s core, the difference around which and by which the other elements are structured. I am reminded here of Gilberto Perez’s distinction between proximate and distant vision. Drawing on José Ortega y Gasset’s seminal essay ‘On Point of View in the Arts’ (1913), Perez asserts that proximate vision and distant seeing not only differ in scale, but also diverge in what one may call haptic qualities. He explains: [i]n proximate vision we don’t merely see, we virtually seize hold of an object with our eyes, an object we apprehend as palpably rounded and corporeal against the blurred background of the rest. In distant vision no object stands out and our gaze instead spreads over the entire visual field, so that the central object of attention becomes the space between objects, the hollow space that reaches to our eyes as objects recede into the distance.24

In film, of course, proximate vision is most clearly epitomised by the close-up, while it is the long shot that exemplifies distant seeing. But Perez stresses that film offers plenty of ‘other means than close-ups for bringing the weight of a face or the body of an object into individual relief; and other means than long shots for rendering the ambient hollow fields in which things take place’.25 After all, seeing is not merely a matter of scaling, it is

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also a question of sensing, that is, of framing, composition, lighting and focus. Perez points to Ortega y Gasset’s distinction between the realism of Giotto and the naturalism of Velázquez in order to illustrate this nuance. This distinction between Giotto and Velázquez, between realism and naturalism, indeed, between the perspectivism of the Renaissance and that of the Baroque period, is not simply a distinction between close-ups and long shots, but between an aesthetic in which ‘everything, whether near of far, seems painted at close range’ and a style in which ‘everything seems distant and indistinct’.26 Following Ortega y Gasset’s distinction between two modes of painting, Perez suggests a division between what he perceives to be two kinds of cinema based on the haptic quality and focus of their vision: a cinema of what he calls ‘solid objects’, of ‘rounded corporeal individualities’, and a cinema of ‘thin air, of the passage, the interval, the transition’. In the cinema of solid objects – the cinema of Stroheim, Dreyer and Bergman – the image is definitive, complete. In films like Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the frame encloses the image, closes it off from and for the out-of-frame. The composition, structured around objects, is static and fixed and does not allow for diegetic interruption. Indeed, Perez asserts, ‘each shot [. . .] is a container of action, a space of performance constituted for our benefit’.27 On the contrary, in the cinema of thin air – the cinema of Ophuls and Murnau and German expressionism – the image ‘feels elusive and incomplete, threatened by the unseen, a composition in transit, an interval expectant of intrusion’.28 Here, the frame does not so much imply closure as postponement, possibility, of what is not yet visible but might become visible at any moment. In a film like Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (Wiene, 1920), for instance, compositions are often centred around hollow spaces, spaces in which nothing yet takes place but something can be expected to take place to fulfil the composition. The film, both in terms of plot and in terms of composition, thus invites diegetic interruption. It is always already waiting to be intruded – from the distance, from above, from below, from the side. Leo Braudy has made a similar observation.29 ‘In a closed film’, Braudy argues, the world of the film is the only thing that exists; everything within it has its place in the plot of the film – every object, every character, every gesture, every action. In an open film the world of the film is a momentary frame around an ongoing reality. The objects and the characters in the film existed before the camera focused on them and they will exist after the film is over. They achieve their significance or interest within the story of the film, but, unlike the objects and the people in a closed film, the story of the open film does not exhaust the meaning of what it contains. Everything is

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t he s ub urb a nd f ilm s ty l e 71 totally sufficient in a closed film; everything fits in. [. . .] The open film not only opens outward, but also allows other things into it. [. . .] In the closed film the frame of the screen totally defines the world inside as a picture frame does; in the open film the frame is more like a window, opening a privileged view on a world of which other views are possible.30

What Braudy’s account emphasises is the extent to which composition, framing and editing define our perception of the fictional world. The closed film defines its world as a series of disjointed, isolated theatrical locations. In contrast, the objects and people in the open film are never entirely signified by the plot. They possess a meaning independent from it, a meaning intrinsic not merely to the temporary frame but to the permanent world they are part of. What Happiness does, to my mind, is to apply the conventions associated with the cinema of solid objects, with the closed film, to the so-called cinema of thin air, the open film. By composing the shot around an open space, the film suggests space is continuous and in flux. Yet by repeating the shot without changes, it implies space is isolated and static. It attempts to enclose, close off and fixate the open (that is, incomplete) hollow space; it tries to make permanent a space that by its very nature is temporary and transitional. The choice of tableau-style cinematography is exemplary of this tension. It at once turns the visible, on-screen space into a theatrical stage and a coincidental moment in time, a snapshot of everyday life. It achieves the former by way of its stasis, its longevity, its consistent distance, its encapsulating composition and its frontal angle (the characters are positioned with their bodies and faces towards the viewers, as if they were set there for their benefit only). It accomplishes the latter through the independence of the camera and by drawing attention to the outof-frame – by including the invisible, off-screen sound of chatter and ­clattering cutlery, and inserting the momentarily visible, on-screen sight of a waiter passing through. The film thus manages, even in this single composition, to simultaneously present its overall pattern as a series of theatrical stages, that is, a series of isolated, discontinuous, disjointed spaces; and this particular element as a tripartite without a centrepiece, a divided and contradictory space that will never be unified. The second type of composition I want to concentrate on further illustrates this tension. This type of composition is epitomised by four medium shots shared by Joy and her sister Trish. The shots picture Joy and Helen talking about Joy’s problems. They are seated in Trish’s kitchen. The sisters are not positioned on opposite sides of the frame, as Joy and Andy were, but they are not placed too near to each other either. However, their relative distance is not so much measured by the space that

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separates them, but rather by their efforts to bridge it, and the respective, contradictory natures of their personal spaces. When Trish stretches out her arm to stroke Joy’s face, she needs to stretch it entirely; and when the two bend forward to hug, they incline uncomfortably. By drawing attention to the unease and unnaturalness of the attempts, the film paradoxically signifies once more that space is not a unified or even coherent whole, but is instead fragmented, a variety of disjointed spaces. The film further illustrates the extent to which this seemingly coherent place is fragmented by visually juxtaposing the character of the space that Trish occupies with the one Joy takes up. Trish’s space, the rather expansive, active space of the kitchen sink, is dominated by an abundant, overly joyous performance, but also, paradoxically, by blue tones and rigid, chequered lines. Joy’s spot, the narrow, passive space of the kitchen table, is dominated by introversion, yet also by soft yellows, cream whites and loose, undulated lines. I would suggest that Trish’s space denotes disavowal, a performative routine of rituals compensating for, and displacing, confinement and despair, a not-knowing-what-to-do-with-one’s-self; the space that Joy finds herself in signifies disillusion, an inability to take her fate in her own hands, of waiting in vain. However, the illusion or deception of unity and coherence is exposed primarily by the relationships these medium shots hold to the other shots and to the overall narrative they together are supposed to co-express. Joy is unhappy, and Trish tries to comfort her in the most impersonal and bland ways, uttering phrases such as ‘We always thought you wouldn’t amount to much, end up alone . . . but now I see we were wrong’, ‘Just because you hit thirty doesn’t mean you can’t be fresh anymore’, and ‘You have got to eat red meat’. Eventually, Joy gives in and expresses her change of heart, mumbling an embarrassingly unconvincing ‘I am so happy’. In the medium shots – shots that because of their recurrence at crucial narrative moments and indication of the location the scene is set in can be seen as the scene’s establishing shots – the two sisters share their illusory happiness. However, in the shot-reverse-shot close-ups of Joy, in which she cries, looks downwards or fidgets with her hair, her discomfort remains clearly visible. Thus the medium shot, the only shot showing space in its entirety, is signified as an illusory or deceptive shot. It is a shot that attempts to suture the fragmentation, perhaps even the schizophrenia that lies at the space’s core. These two types of composition draw attention to the extent to which even the most trivial space, the singular image of the suburb, might seem coherent and complete (after all, it is unified within the frame) but in fact is, and cannot but be, fragmented. Happiness’s editing style – a disjointed cutting – and composition

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t he s ub urb a nd f ilm s ty l e 73 – structured around a closed open centre, an objectified or solidified space of transition – might appear to have little or nothing in common with one another. However, what they share is an interruption (yet, paradoxically, also a sustenance) of the progression of the plot and spatial unity, or even mere coherence, which, I would argue, is one of cinematic suburbia’s defining features. They both draw attention to the extent to which the suburb – that is, an incoherent collection of indistinct spaces – is, and cannot but be, structured around an indefinable yet immanent, transitory yet permanent hollow space, an in-between, without which it would ­collapse, without which it would immediately disintegrate.

Tableau Dormant In this third and final section, I wish to discuss the ways in which Happiness uses mise-en-scène and cinematography to present space per se as indifferent and impersonal. I first discuss the film’s opening credits, before returning to a scene I have discussed at some length above: the scene with Andy and Joy in the two-and-a-half star restaurant. The opening credits, in aged black and white, immediately connote movies from a bygone era, probably silent ones. This sense of pastness is enhanced by the traditional handwriting and, even more so, the light, romantic tune. They prepare the audience for an experience of traditional values, romance and perhaps a bit of innocent humour. Yet at the same time they suggest, due to the frames, not unlike those framing family photos or snapshots, that what will follow are tableaus of everyday life. These two modes can coexist, for now; there is no hint that they will conflict, yet. However, the moment the last credit fades to black, and the tune yields to silence, the first of the set expectations is immediately thwarted, ostensibly for the sake of the latter. Instead of nostalgia for the past, the audience are presented with a melancholy of the present; instead of romance, they are given misery; and the humour one experiences is anything but innocent. Yet the sense of nostalgic romantic comedy that could have been is never entirely eliminated – and perhaps that is what makes the misery the more affecting. What we are experiencing here is not so much an unclassical unromantic comedy, as a classical romantic comedy gone wrong. Let me explain this in some more detail by way of a brief textual ­analysis. The scene depicts a rather conventional romantic event – a woman and a man having dinner together in a restaurant – in a surprisingly conventional way. It opens with shot-reverse-shot medium closeups of the two characters, to acquaint the audience with them and their respective emotions. Then it presents the viewer with a master shot of the

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two together, in this case a medium long shot, so one can see their interrelationship with one another and their environment. And then it turns, occasionally intercut by repeated establishing shots, to shot-reverse-shot medium close-ups in which both of them are visible – the type of shots usually employed to signify a relationship of some intimacy. Yet far from a marriage proposal, the event at stake is in fact a break-up. Instead of witty chitchat, there are extended silences, with both characters clearly at a loss for words (and when they do finally share some small talk, it is so obviously forced, it feels highly uncomfortable). Instead of a softly lit, warmly toned and tanned Grace Kelly in a velvet gown, the viewer is shown a harshly lit, pale and tired-looking Jane Adams in a worn-out whitish dress. And instead of the lean, smooth Cary Grant, one is exposed to a slightly overweight, perspiring Jon Lovitz. The master shot further enhances this sense of disappointment. Their bodies are defeated, their body language (stiff gestures, hanging shoulders, faces down) signifies submission. They are, as I have suggested above, so far removed from one another that the distance between them is in fact the shot’s focal point. And the moments the space of the medium close-up is shared by them, finally, are the moments he scolds at her. There is some intimacy here indeed, but certainly not the kind of intimacy we were anticipating. This sense of a romantic comedy gone wrong is also established by the collision between the register of the romantic comedic and another, second stylistic convention: tableau-style cinematography. This convention is never more visible than in the establishing shots: the static camera, it seems, just happens to be there, independently from what it films. It sees waiters passing through; it hears the chatter of the other guests, the clatter of cutlery. It relays what is happening in front of it ostensibly objectively and indifferently, unperturbed by a narrative, postponing closure of any sort. Jeffrey Sconce has called this style of filming ‘blank’. ‘Blankness’, he explains, ‘can be described as an attempt to convey a film’s story, no matter how sensationalistic, disturbing or bizarre, with a sense of dampened affect.’31 It signifies ‘dispassion, disengagement and disinterest’. The effect of this style, juxtaposing form and content, not prioritising one or the other (and thus suspending judgement), is once more that of discomfort, albeit now one of moral proportions – as it is the audience whose plight it now is to judge. As Casey McKittrick has aptly asked: should the audience laugh, be angry, cry – or, as he himself answers somewhat later, probably do all, simultaneously, and cringe?32 Sconce suggests blankness is a typical postmodern strategy, and there is much evidence to support that suggestion. Blankness expresses a rather postmodern irony towards a typically modern enthusiasm, and it distrusts

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t he s ub urb a nd f ilm s ty l e 75 Truth. And although it deconstructs the discourses that preceded it, it is careful not to construct its own, supposedly superior discourse. Indeed, much of the tone by which the cinematic suburb is presented can be explained in terms of postmodernism. As I have suggested before, many cinematic representations of suburbia are a criticism of what they appear to assume, problematically, is the modern utopia of suburban life presented in 1950s melodramas, sitcoms, advertisements or household magazines. Many are a commentary on the idyllic community spirit portrayed in small-town films. But they remain within these texts. They revisit their fictitious settings, they tear them down, but they do not build new towns on their ruins. Films centred on the suburb merely prioritise irony where they assume – wrongly – that melodramas chose enthusiasm. They do not cut enthusiasm off entirely. They just prefer melancholy where smalltown films expressed nostalgia – but there is still some nostalgia there. As Žižek would put it, suburban films look awry: Happiness looks at much the same suburb as a domestic sitcom like Father Knows Best did years before, but by relocating its point of view, by shifting its angle, it perceives something very different. Indeed, in this romantic comedy gone wrong, even comedy is not suspended. On the contrary, the film abounds in comedy – merely comedy of another order. It might not invite us to share in its modern enthusiasm, but that does not mean it does not encourage us to enjoy its postmodern irony. That is to say, we are not invited to laugh with the characters but we are instead encouraged to laugh about them. The film’s use of narrative space is crucial here. In the scene discussed above, the gravity of the plot is constantly undercut by the triviality of the setting; the tragedy taking place is repeatedly undermined by the banality of that place itself. In the shots in which the characters break up, for example, their solemn silences and sombre facial expressions are matched – or rather mismatched – with the kitsch and dreary design of their loveseat. In one shot, Jane Adams is coupled with a plastic red flower and a scruffy brown couch; in another, Jon Lovitz is paired with a pink plastic flower, and that same worn-out brown couch. Yet however little the mise-en-scène, the plot and its narrative space might have in common with one another, the characters do seem to belong there, and the setting does fit in with the restaurant on a whole. Indeed, this is the kind of seat a restaurant with two-and-a-half stars might have. I feel, finally, that the decision to locate this first scene in this restaurant rather than a location immediately recognisable as suburban is a very important one. The film, by way of the problematisation of the relationships between style and meaning, gradually introduces the viewers to

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a tone that they cannot wholly locate yet, a tone that belongs neither to comedy nor to tragedy but lingers somewhere between. That is to say, the viewers have been provided with a way to look at and interpret the remainder of the film without knowing what it is about. They have been made wary of its settings, without knowing where they are. To be even more specific, the viewers will already be distrustful of the sitcomic narratives the film will plot before they are acted out; they will already be disillusioned by the suburban spaces it will concern itself with, before it has actually engaged with them.

Conclusion: the Suburb as Structure of Feeling Some years ago, I presented a paper on Happiness at a film studies conference in the UK. At one point in my presentation, I described the film’s location as suburban. In the ensuing debate, a colleague voiced concern about that particular choice of term. Happiness, he commented, is set for a considerable part in a mid-rise wasteland, in what appear to be converted warehouses, in undersized one-bedroom apartments and studios. Since when are such sites suburban? When I asked him what kind of cinemascape he would consider suburban, he thought about it for a moment, before hesitantly answering, ‘You know, suburbia . . . shopping malls, tree-lined streets, undifferentiated rows of detached houses, white picket fences, single family households, garages, pavements, green lawns and mowers.’ I have begun my concluding section with this anecdote because I think it illustrates rather well some of the conceptual hiatuses and indeterminacies one encounters when writing about cinematic suburbia in terms of style. Although most people can finely distinguish what is suburban from what is not suburban, fewer will be able to put the distinction into words. With which criteria should one define cinematic suburbia, for instance? Should one define it in relation to other fictional suburbs, or should one rather define it in comparison with actual suburbs? Should one define the cinematic suburb in terms of mise-en-scène, or on the basis of its iconographic characteristics? Is the cinematic suburb defined through editing, or geography? Or should it perhaps be defined by something else altogether? As I suggested earlier, most film scholars and critics have thus far chosen to discuss the cinematic suburb in terms of its iconography. Some refer to the shopping mall or the white picket fence, others to standardised housing, yet others to sprawl, the picture window or carport. What is interesting here is that most of these critics turn to either the vernacular used to describe the Hollywood small town, or tend to the

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t he s ub urb a nd f ilm s ty l e 77 idiom associated with the cinematic city to delineate the suburb. Few use a language exclusive or even particular to the suburb. Stanley J. Solomon has maintained for instance that the cinematic suburb is ‘virtually indistinguishable physically’ from the small town.33 As Kenneth MacKinnon has observed, cinematic suburbs tend to be characterised by the same railroad stations, tree-lined roads, white picket fences, lawns with concrete paths, wooden frame houses, dens, and kitchens with screen doors that often typify Hollywood small towns (not in the least because many suburban films and small-town movies were historically filmed at the same studio lots).34 Similarly, I earlier cited Philip C. Dolce suggesting that the cinematic suburb’s defining feature is the ‘single-family, detached house’. As should be obvious by now, such definitions of cinematic suburbs in terms of iconography prove problematic. Contrasting with his suggestion that the suburban film is centred around the single-family detached house, Happiness is set in more than twenty different places, from restaurants to high-rise apartment blocks to call centres. In addition, of the three houses the film inhabits, only one house, the Maplewoods’ detached colonial, is explicitly shown to be a single-family detached home. And contrary to Solomon and MacKinnon’s observation that the suburb is physically indistinguishable from the Hollywood small town, Happiness’s landscape is dominated by industrial high-rise, highways, a corner shop, psychiatric offices, and one-bedroom apartments. An examination of the suburban style is not sufficient either. Happiness employs stylistic registers associated with a variety of genres and types of films, ranging from the domestic sitcom to melodrama and the smart film. Similarly, if one was to assess films like Far From Heaven (2002) and Trust (1990), or The Stepford Wives (2004) and SubUrbia (1996) on their visual language only, one would have to conclude they have little to nothing in common with each other. In some films, the mise-en-scène is even inconsistent in its depiction of one and the same space. Even the few consistencies one can discern – the pastel colour palettes, the deep focus photography, the long takes and the static mid shots – are more often than not an amalgam of conventions taken from other types of films as varied as horror (the aesthetic categories of the uncanny and the ‘abject’) and the sitcom (episodicality, deep focus photography, inconsistency of internal memory), film noir (duplicity) and melodrama (its use of frames within frames, pastel colour palettes), the city film (its disjointed editing) and the ‘small-town’ movie (slow pace, static composition). In Happiness, the suburb is neither necessarily an iconographic nor a stylistic phenomenon. What I would suggest instead is that, at least here, the suburb is primarily what Raymond Williams called a structure

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of feeling. By structure (emphasising fixity) of feeling (stressing flow) I understand here a ‘particular quality of social experience’ which ‘can be observed in manners, dress, buildings, and other similar forms of social life’, but, importantly, is not any of those buildings or manners ­themselves.35 As Williams put it: If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find other terms for the undeniable experience of the present: not only the temporal present, the realisation of this and that instant, but the specificity of present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may indeed discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always as fixed products, defining products. And then if the social is the fixed and explicit – the known relationships, institutions, formations, positions – all that is present and moving, all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the explicit and the known, is grasped and defined as the personal: this, here, now, alive, active, ‘subjective’.36

However different the techniques and methods Happiness uses to signify the various aspects of its spatiality may be, they all share a certain quality of experience, a certain sensibility: the underlying feeling that the suburb is an itinerary, but one that is impossible to execute, at once connected and isolated, heavy and light, permanent and transient. The particular structure of feeling that characterises both Happiness and its protagonist, the suburb, reminds me, finally, of Peter Sloterdijk’s project of the spheres, especially his third volume Schäume (‘Foams’), and it is on this note that I wish to end.37 Sloterdijk describes the current epoch as a period of bubbling, globulating foam. Today’s world, he writes, is like foam in that it is a unity consisting of a multiplicity of ‘co-isolated’ bubbles,38 of related yet separate life worlds, entities whose borders necessarily touch one another but whose borders cannot be permeated because they would burst; a foam that has a coherence but a coherence that is in constant flux, a foam that consists of interconnections but interconnections changing from one second to the next since bubbles burst and the foam reforms. As he writes, today’s glocalised worlds and ‘foam cities’ are built in a ‘Doppeltakt’, a dual process of the dismantling, or rather perhaps disassembly (‘Auseinanderlegung’) of ‘social conglomerates into individuated, complex entities and the recombination of these [entities] into cooperative ensembles’.39 I think that foam is a particularly apt metaphor to think about Happiness and its enigmatic protagonist, the suburb. Happiness renders its suburban setting almost as an unlearning of the vernacular of the city film and the small-town movie and the reacquiring of another language adapted to the suburb. This language is a language of places that are at once totalised and fragmented, related and disjointed, of human interactions that are

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t he s ub urb a nd f ilm s ty l e 79 characterised by desires that cannot and should not be fulfilled, and of a tense yet disaffected state of mind. Happiness’s suburbscape resembles foam in that it is a constantly changing substance of interlinked but ­necessarily isolated cells.

Notes   1. J. Gibbs, Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 5.  2. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 128–35.   3. G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002).  4. T. Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 1–2.   5. Y.-F. Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Arnold, 1977), p. 3.   6. S. Solomon, ‘Images of Suburban Life in American Films’, in R. Panetta (ed.), Westchester: The American Suburb (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 412; and K. MacKinnon, Hollywood’s Small Towns: An Introduction to the American Small-Town Movie (Metuchen and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 167–8.   7. E. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1996), p. ii.  8. K. Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974 [1960]), pp. 2–3. For a commentary on Lynch’s study, see F. Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 347–57.   9. K. Lynch, The Image of the City, p. 46. 10. Ibid. p. 47. 11. Ibid. p. 72. 12. Ibid. p. 62. 13. C. Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 8. 14. S. Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, in J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI: The Future of an Illusion; Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 74–6. 15. Ibid. p. 83. 16. K. Lynch, The Image of the City, pp. 88–9. 17. Ibid. p. 88. 18. Ibid. 19. Compare W. Buckland, ‘Introduction: Puzzle Plots’, in W. Buckland (ed.), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Chichester:

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Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 1–13; and D. Bordwell, ‘Film Futures’, Substance, 31: 1 (2002), pp. 88–104. 20. B. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 106–9. 21. S. Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 13. 22. H. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Time, Space, and Everyday Life (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 9. 23. Ibid. p. 16. 24. G. Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 135. 25. Ibid. p. 136. 26. Ibid. p. 135. 27. Ibid. pp. 137–8. 28. Ibid. pp. 136–7. 29. L. Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 37–103. 30. Ibid. pp. 46–8. 31. J. Sconce, ‘Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film’, Screen 43: 3 (Winter 2002), p. 359. 32. C. McKittrick, ‘ “I Laughed and Cringed at the Same Time”: Shaping Pedophilic Discourse around American Beauty and Happiness’, The Velvet Light Trap 47 (Spring 2001), pp. 3–13. 33. S. Solomon, ‘Images of Suburban Life in American Films’, p. 412. 34. K. MacKinnon, Hollywood’s Small Towns: An Introduction to the American Small-Town Movie (Metuchen and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 167–8. 35. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 131. 36. Ibid. p. 128. 37. P. Sloterdijk, Sphären III – Schäume (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004). 38. Ibid. p. 605. 39. Ibid. p. 607. My translation.

C H A PT E R 3

The Simpsons and King of the Hill: The Suburb as Texture

From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on each side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other. Italo Calvino1

In this chapter I study the ways in which two animated sitcoms – the popular FOX show The Simpsons, and Mike Judge’s critically acclaimed King of the Hill – make use of the qualities particular to their medium, genre, and especially their material, or texture, in order to signify their setting. I concentrate on three textural qualities in particular: what is often called plasticity or elasticity, that is, the extent to which animation can render its environment, objects and characters elastic; what I will come to call ‘in-betweenness’: the sense in which animation is an effect of the intervals between images rather than the images themselves; and, constituting the central part of my argument, flatness, pertaining to the fundamental two-dimensionality of drawn images. My argument is that these shows problematise each of these qualities by, first, contrasting these qualities with the conventions of the sitcom, and second, by reflecting upon these qualities in the tradition of what is often called ‘flat animation’, thereby – whether purposefully or unintentionally – problematising the spatiality of the suburb as well. Taking my cue from the philosopher David Kolb, who has suggested that seemingly simple places might too be structurally complex, I argue that The Simpsons and King of the Hill’s so called ‘flat animation’ need not necessarily be synonymous with superficiality and monotony but might very well indicate another kind of complexity.

The Rule of the Flat The resemblances and relationships between the medium of television and the suburb have been well documented. So have the relationships

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between the genre of the domestic sitcom and the suburb. The parallels between animation and suburbia are far less frequently drawn. As thinkers such as the cultural theorist Roger Silverstone and the television scholar Lynn Spigel have pointed out, television and suburbia, and the domestic sitcom and suburbia in particular, share the qualities of the ritual, the mundane and the domestic.2 Animation, on the contrary, is often thought to be characterised by its potential for the unexpected and especially the extraordinary. Think, for example, of the exploding body of Wile E. Coyote, the repeatedly stretched-out or flattened corpus of Tom in Tom and Jerry (CBS, 1965–72), or the mutating body of Barba Papa. Yet in spite of their differences, what the discourses of animation, or rather, to be precise, cartoon animation, and the suburb have in common are the texture- and surface-specific ideas of the ‘in-between’ and ‘flatness’. The concept of the ‘in-between’ is one of the most overused yet least defined notions in contemporary scholarly discourse. Conceived concurrently it seems by French philosophers, German media theorists and Anglo-Saxon theatre scholars in the 1990s, and associated with thinkers, artists and situations as diverse as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Greenaway and Pierre Boulez, the flash mob and Marcel Duchamps’ the fountain, it appears to mean at once difference in general, non-place, ‘espacement’, an ontological disposition (becoming, in fact), intermediality, interdisciplinarity, the distance between participant and practice, the answer to the question ‘what is art?’, and the interval from one compositional note to the next. I too adopt the concept in order to describe both the process of animation and the discourse by which we conceive and through which we perceive suburbia, since for now it remains the only term by which these processes are adequately signified. If it is any consolation however, I do so apologetically, already anticipating another terminology. I will seek to clearly define what I intend by the ‘in-between’ here. Paul Wells defines animation – which stems from the Latin animare, ‘to give life to’ – as ‘the artificial creation of the illusion of movement in inanimate lines and forms’.3 In this sense also, he approvingly cites the animator Norman Mclaren: animation ‘is not the art of drawings that move, but rather the art of movements that are drawn. What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame’.4 What Wells and Mclaren say is that the meaning of an animation lies not in a single frame, but in its relation to the one preceding it, and the one that follows it. The significance of a composition, or the essence of a character is – literally – exposed, and exposed only by the series of in-betweens, the series of transitions it overcomes or undergoes. Animation thus provides

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the s ub urb a s t e x t u r e 83 its viewer with an illusion of a totality, of a unity, created not only from scratch but also from fragments. As I hope to have shown in the previous chapters, the suburb is often presented as an in-between in the sense that it oscillates between History and the end of History, stasis and flux, and is always on the verge of becoming something else. When it comes to the suburb, the in-between most often means limbo, being in between two states. Both the animated cartoon and the suburb are frequently thought to be flat. Like the ‘in-between’, ‘flatness’ is an often used yet ill-defined concept. It can refer to, amongst others, a cultural state (superficiality), an emotional outlook (blandness), a state of mind (monotony), a physical environment (horizontality), or the cultural or material quality of an image (depthlessness). In animation, flatness means two-dimensionality. It refers to the to-be-animated two-dimensional forms and lines and dots, and the inanimate flat, self-referential surface. In the discourse of the suburb, flatness might refer to numerous things. In The Geography of Nowhere, for instance, the cultural critic James Kunstler describes the suburb as a ‘onedimensional’ non-place.5 According to Kunstler, the suburb’s geography is ‘monotonous’, its architecture ‘homogenous’, its culture depthless, its social interactions shallow, and its inhabitants exclusively middle-class, heterosexual and white – it literally lacks variations, variables and dimensions. Far from being an exception to the rule, Kunstler is only the latest in a long tradition of writers to describe the suburb as depthless. Other metaphors that have frequently been used in discourses about the suburb are terms like ‘superficial’, ‘shallow’, ‘façade’, ‘veneer’ and ‘flat’. As Laura Vaughan et al. point out, ‘the assumption of suburban one-dimensionality is deep-seated and perpetuates itself in various ways’.6 Books, newspaper articles, weblogs, film, fiction, poetry, popular songs – in the popular mind, suburbia is, geographically but especially culturally, a singularly ‘one-dimensional’ landscape. The suburb, in the words of the Canadian band Arcade Fire, is a ‘flatland’. Most, or at least most commercial, animation attempts to suture the ‘in-between’ and sew a perspective into the flat surface. It meticulously matches each cel, each image, to the next, it adheres to the Renaissance rules of perspective (colour, shade, focus, size and weight), and it adapts the Aristotelian poetics of plot, action and agent in order to create a sense of continuity and volume. Indeed, the purpose of, say, a Disney film such as Snow White (Cottrell, 1937), is to draw the viewer into the illusion of the metaphor and draw him or her away from the reality of the material. Ironically, most animation scholars have tended to term such animation ‘realistic’.7 As Wells writes, even though Disney, whose legacy has

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come to be the embodiment of animation realism, ‘dealt with what was a predominantly abstract, non-realist form, he insisted on verisimilitude in his characters, context and narratives’.8 Or, as Esther Leslie puts it, Disney’s animation might ‘exude magical radiance’, but it is ‘excessively detailed, pernickety realism’.9 What Wells and Leslie mean by realistic should rather be understood as a specific discourse of realism, namely that of mimesis. Mimesis is not simply imitation – as it is often translated into Anglo-Saxon discourse – but rather a particular system and signification of resemblances. It is a negotiation between poiesis and aisthesis, between the ‘ethical’ production and the aesthetic (understood in the most literal sense, meaning sensory) reception, a common or shared understanding, and sensibility, of causality, of time and space, of plot, action and agent.10 The Simpsons and King of the Hill, however, stress the inherent ‘inbetweenness’ of their texture, the intrinsic flatness of their surface.11 When one compares Snow White to King of the Hill, for instance, the differences between the mimetic approach and what one might for now call ‘materialism’ immediately become apparent (even if Snow White is dated, and even if King of the Hill is often considered the most realistic of today’s animated sitcoms). In Snow White, the movement is fluid and smooth; in King of the Hill, it is somewhat erratic and rough (although by no means as jerky as in Mike Judge’s previous production Beavis and Butthead). It seems as if one image never so much transforms in to the next, as that it transgresses it. One line never turns into the next, but instead turns against it; in a sense, every cut from one cel to another is a jump-cut. The shapes of character’s mouths, for instance, seem to skip a beat. When Hank talks, the two horizontal lines that form his mouth when it is closed are interchanged with the oval shape of his mouth when it is open, without showing the transition into, say, multiple lines, the connection of lines, or a rectangular shape. Similarly, facial expressions are simply expressed as the juxtaposition between lines on one height or in one angle, and lines on another height or angle. The line denoting Bill’s chin for instance, jerkily alternates between two heights rather than oscillating between them. Indeed, if Snow White is an animation about continuation, King of the Hill is about interruption. Furthermore, Snow White enhances this continuation between cels by way of the fluidity of the movement of and between figures and forms, characters and objects, and the round, circular shapes of those figures and forms. King of the Hill instead accentuates its interruption between cels by rendering the figures and forms static and angular, square even. Soft, circular shapes are open to transition and tolerance; hard, straight lines however invite ­juxtaposition and conflict.

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the s ub urb a s t e x t u r e 85 In similar vein, Snow White attempts to create an illusion of threedimensionality, of perspective from and onto its two-dimensional, flat surface. The film moves across space over the widest variety of axes: from left to right, from top to bottom, vertically as well as horizontally, straightforwardly as well as haphazardly. Its characters also circle around each other, from front to back and back to front. This strategy highlights scale as much as focus: when characters are in front they appear large, once they are at the back they seem smaller; near the front their features are in focus and discernible, the further back they move the softer the focus is and the less of them is recognisable. This strategy thus relates foreground to background, ties them together as parts of the same unity. The film also, finally, accentuates the three-dimensionality of its fictional world by shades and shadows, by changing the colour and gradation of faces and bodies depending on their position. Moreover it favours shapes over lines, and with that the open over the closed, the flexible over the fixed, the supple over the solid and, most importantly, the transient, mobile, over the permanent, the immobile. King of the Hill on the contrary, seeks to affirm the reality of the twodimensionality of its texture, the flatness of its surface. Both camera and characters tend to move across horizontal planes rather than vertical ones. They might move across the geometrical axis, that is, from bottom right to bottom left, or from top left to top right, but they rarely move over the geographical or spatial axis, that is, from the top on one side to the bottom on another. Contrary to Snow White’s figures, the characters in King of the Hill, except for, ironically, in the credit sequence, hardly ever circle around one another. Indeed, although they might differ in scale depending on their position on the vertical plane, one’s sensory perception of them does not appear affected by it. Faces, bodies and even backgrounds are as recognisable from afar as they are from up close. In the season two episode ‘Hank’s dirty laundry’ (2, 16) for instance, there is a multi-layered mid shot of Hank standing in front of a fence, which in turn is in front of a bush, which is in front of the sky (Figure 3.1). Hank’s face is drawn with the exact same precision (or simplicity) as the fence and the bush. Hank’s face is drawn from roughly ten lines at the most: two lines for his wrinkly forehead, three lines for his nose, two for his mouth. The fence and the bushes consist of a similar number of lines, if not more. In the bush for instance, the lines even create an additional sense of depth and volume. Later in the episode, there is a medium long shot of Hank, his boss Buck Strickland and his secretary looking at a computer screen (Figure 3.2). The shot is taken from behind the computer. It consists of surprisingly many layers, and even implies some depth. From front to back can be seen: the

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Figure 3.1  The face of King of the Hill’s protagonist Hank is drawn with the same precision and clarity as the fence and bushes in the background, drawing attention to the artificiality of Disney’s three-dimensionality.

off-screen plane in front of a table demarcated by the table’s edge; the plane of the computer on the table; the plane of the secretary, who sits in front of the computer; the plane of Hank, who stands behind her; the plane of Buck Strickland, who stands behind Hank; and the plane of a door that opens up behind them (which, indeed, implies another, off-screen plane even further back). Again, the focus and precision with which each of the characters is drawn is identical. One might even suggest that Buck Strickland is drawn with most precision. Without wanting to stretch my point, whereas Hank’s wrinkles are presented through two lines, Buck’s call for three lines. Similarly, while Hank is drawn in only four colours (the brown of his hair, the light pink of his skin, the light blue of his shirt, the white of a vest), Buck is detailed in at least seven, clearly demarcated colour fields (grey hair, pink skin, light grey suit, white shirt, black tie, dark grey belt, and pasty belt buckle). Whatever else this signifies, it draws attention to the extent to which King of the Hill presents foreground and background, the action and its surroundings, as equally important. In The Simpsons too the planes are flattened out. The season one episode ‘Some enchanted evening’ (1, 13), for instance, opens with a shot of the

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Figure 3.2  Medium long shot of Hank, his boss Buck Strickland and his secretary. The deep focus renders foreground and background equally important.

Simpson family having breakfast at the kitchen table. The camera films the scene from the fourth wall. That is to say, it films the scene from a fixed position outside the set rather than from a flexible place within the set. Whatever else this may suggest, it implies an ontological distance from a two-dimensional representation instead of immersion in a threedimensional reality. Moreover, each of the characters, objects or spaces is set apart from the others, first through the thick black lines of contour and second through the use of uniform colour rather than through gradations in hue or shadow or any other perspectival principle implying volume or depth. And most importantly, the features of Homer, in front, are as simplistic yet clearly distinguished as those of Marge, towards the back, or even the plates and mugs on the kitchen sink further back. Foreground and background are not distinguished from one another through volume, focus or clarity. Although the shot suggests depth and some extent of volume through the oval shape of the kitchen table and the two-sidedness of the milk carton, it thus works hard to keep the sense of three-­dimensionality at a minimum. I am reminded once again of Perez’s description of Giotto’s painting: ‘everything, whether near of far, seems painted at close range’.12 In King

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of the Hill, foreground and background are at once indistinguishable and apart, two similar but separate, unrelated planes. The programme furthermore draws attention to the two-dimensionality, the flatness of its surface by circumventing round forms, soft shapes and gradations in colour as much as possible, instead preferring straight, harsh lines and uniform, clearly demarcated colour fields. In this manner too it pre-empts the possibility of depth, prescribing everything, foreground and background, character and place, to the rule of the flat, the rule of the permanent. It is interesting to note that King of the Hill is often considered the most realistic of the animated sitcoms.13 For although neither The Simpsons nor other recent suburban animated sitcoms like Family Guy (FOX, 1999–present), The Goode Family (ABC, 2009), and The Cleveland Show (FOX, 2009–present), abounds in perspective, The Simpsons utilises a multi-plane camera set-up in its opening credits, exploring Springfield over a multiplicity of spatial axes and planes. In Family Guy, rapid cutting and swift camera and character movement renders the interruption – the interruption by which, paradoxically, movement is enabled in the first place – less visible. (However, one might suggest that in The Simpsons multiple planes are visible primarily to expose the fact that its world is a setting rather than a location in itself, secondary rather than equal, empty rather than full. Similarly, in Family Guy, the rapid cutting and swift camera movement often insert extra-diegetic places into its diegesis, which might not so much interrupt the illusion of the fictional world, but does interrupt the continuity of the narrative.) When critics call King of the Hill realistic, they thus presumably do not refer to the Disney realism of mimesis, of hierarchy and perspective, but to another system of verisimilitude. Let me briefly make some remarks here about realism before returning to my central discussion about flatness. It may seem that neither animation nor the domestic sitcom have anything in common with realism. Indeed, the qualities of animation appear to be the opposite of the intentions of realism – I will problematise the notoriously elusive notion of realism shortly, but for now I simply intend by it the intention to represent ‘reality’, regardless here of whether that is through verisimilitude or reference, Vorstellung or Darstellung, through tone or style or narrative structure or worldhood.14 After all, animation cannot but disclose artifice, whereas realism aims to disguise it. Similarly, whereas the former cannot but admit that it creates a world of fiction, the latter, simplistically put, pretends to create a world similar to ours. The conventions of the domestic sitcom are not necessarily comparable to those of the realism I am talking about here either. The conventions of the domestic sitcom are structured around closure, circularity and stasis,

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while few people today would be persuaded that that is how ‘reality’ works as well. Jason Mittell has written about The Simpsons and realism. He argues that it is precisely the interaction between the qualities of animation and the conventions of the domestic sitcom, between their respective liberties and restraints (from animation’s potential to exaggerate to the domestic sitcom’s need to provide closure) that produces a tension, a friction that many people experience as realistic.15 As I have suggested above, the realism of a show like King of the Hill or The Simpsons is not the mimetic realism of naturalism, nor even that of perspectivism. It might occasionally be what Bazin called the ‘dramatic realism’16 of the long take and deep focus, or the empirical realism of social setting and convention. But the realism Mittell is talking about is primarily the realism Ien Ang has described as emotional or psychological verisimilitude.17 As Ang puts it: ‘the same things, people, relations and situations which are regarded at the denotative level as unrealistic, and unreal, are at connotative level apparently not seen at all as unreal, but in fact as recognizable.’18 Ang speaks about emotional realism solely to describe the extent to which viewers of soap opera can relate to and often even identify with the life stories of characters in soap opera, even though their lives are in no respect alike. But the concept can also be employed to understand the particular resonance of The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Indeed, Mittell writes that ‘[t]he program’s realism emerges not in its adherence to norms of naturalistic live-action programming, but from its parodic dismantling of unreal live-action sitcom conventions.’19 What Mittell means to suggest here is that The Simpsons resonates with its audience as real, precisely because its use of the potential of animation exposes the unreal restraints (of closure, of coherence, of problem and solution) that the domestic sitcom is perceived to pose.20 Mittell suggests that the friction between animation and the (traditional) domestic sitcom is primarily visible in the themes and tropes that The Simpsons explores and its treatment of characters. With respect to the ways in which the friction is noticeable in themes, he asserts that: The Simpsons breaks the taboos of American television – portraying the threats of nuclear power, negative effects of excessive television viewing, and the ‘deceits perpetuated by American education’ – aspects of reality that may only be seen on television when rendered by a team of cartoonists. Whereas the standard sitcom traditionally reaffirms the family through its weekly restoration of the equilibrium, The Simpsons uses its cartoon form to pose problems, more akin to those of real life, that simply cannot be solved within a half-hour. The show then regularly solves these unsolvable problems in spite of itself, both parodying the artificiality of the sitcom

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tradition and demonstrating the power of animation to represent ‘realities’ which cannot be captured in a three-camera studio or before a live audience.21

With regard to the show’s treatment of characters, he contends that The Simpsons treats its characters in ways that (traditional) live-action domestic sitcoms are unlikely to treat theirs. The Simpsons consistently puts its protagonists through the most terrifying, traumatising and stressful situations while the (traditional) live-action domestic comedy tends to confront its family only with minor, trivial obstructions. Homer Simpson blows up the nuclear factory whereas Jim Anderson might have made a miscalculation in his accounting. Similarly, in the episode ‘Homer’s Odyssey’ (1, 3), Homer is made redundant, whereas Ward Cleaver might have had a minor fallout at the most. Bart consistently terrorises his teachers and parents, as opposed to the innocent banter of Mike Seaver in Growing Pains (ABC, 1985–92). Whereas the transgressive and the grotesque are structuring principles in animation, they have no place in the sitcom. In an animated cartoon, especially one as self-reflective as The Simpsons, situations are so evidently fictional, characters so obviously not real people, that the audience is easily able to suspend its belief in the laws and logic of nature (when you explode a nuclear power plant, you die; when you fall from a high building you die; and so on) and defer over-identification and empathy. Homer blowing up a nuclear plant is only feasible and funny in an animated sitcom. Even in a rather cartoon-esque real-life sitcom such as Married with Children, it is doubtful that Al Bundy blowing up the shoe store would be as enjoyable. In The Simpsons, the texture of animation is thus at once adopted to exaggerate the conventions of the traditional domestic sitcom (by magnifying its trivial problems and solutions) and to undermine them (by exposing the absurdity and incredibility of the problem-solution logic). By deconstructing the rules of continuation and perspective intrinsic to the metaphor of the sitcom in favour of what appears to be an affirmation of the rupture and flatness inherent to the material of animation, The Simpsons and King of the Hill could be alleged to align themselves with the modernism of the early twentieth century. To be sure, I by no means wish to imply here that these sitcoms’ eclectic and paratactic reflexivity should not be defined as postmodern.22 What I want to suggest is that these sitcoms are at once modernist and postmodern, that is, are indebted to the aesthetic discourse of modernism, and the historical paradigm of the postmodern. Postmodernism and postmodernity, or postmodernism and the postmodern, overlap and intertwine, but do not refer to the same reality. Postmodernism refers to what Raymond Williams so aptly termed

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a ‘cultural dominant’,23 a widely shared aesthetic sensibility, which has been associated with, among others, parody and pastiche, irony and cynicism, eclecticism, bricolage, parataxis, playfulness and depthlessness.24 Postmodernity on the other hand refers to a socio-political reality, characterised by late capitalism, neoliberalism, the consumer society, the network society and digital culture, to name but a few. The postmodern, associated above all with Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of grand narratives and truth claims, finally, relates above all to a discourse of knowing, a way of thinking about the ways of the world. In similar vein, modernism, modernity and the modern also each refer to an intertwined but separate phenomenon. Modernity refers to processes of the monopoly capitalism, the nation state, the metropolis, serial reproduction, cars, steam trains and so on. The modern can perhaps most concisely be compared to the Enlightenment beliefs in Reason and progress. I will discuss modernism in some detail below. Animation scholars such as Wells and Leslie have argued that all animation should be considered a modernist art merely by merit of its nature. As Wells puts it: with its impactive imperative [. . .] to address the mechanisms of expression and perspective [. . .] animation is the very language of the Modernist principle, often transcending linguistic necessity and enhancing fine art by practice by challenging compositional and representational orthodoxies.25

Leslie moreover has compared the language of animation with Apollinaire’s ideograph, the ‘word-image’. Animation structures the narrative as (a sequence of) image(s), not by logical association but by sensory alliance. Leslie argues that animation, like the ideograph, replaces the narrative grammar of discursive opposition with a non-narrative logic of spatial disposition.26 Animation thus – or rather, to be precise, cel animation – does by nature not so much progress or go somewhere, as suspend, go nowhere but potentially everywhere. I would argue that The Simpsons and King of the Hill appear to align themselves with modernism as an artistic practice, i.e. modernism as a specific discourse of perceiving and conceiving art (as opposed to, for instance, modernism in literature or modernism in architecture). They appear to associate themselves especially with the ‘flat graphics’ of the 1940s, which itself in turn was influenced by the abstract painting of the 1930s and 1920s. Leslie describes the flat graphics of the 1940s in terms of the abandonment of ‘the pursuit of the real [. . .] thin outlines stylised reality rather than imitated it’.27 Indeed, for both Wells and Leslie, modernism is characterised primarily by the concepts of self-reflection and

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flatness. They describe what they mean by modernism (a notoriously slippery and ambiguous concept) in remarkably similar and consistent words. Wells defines modernism in terms of ‘explorations of the limits of graphic space’, and ‘the surface of the painting itself as the locus of attention’.28 Leslie writes: This had always been the objective of modernism: to flatten out, to bring to the surface, in order to make the base show itself for what it is. [. . .] [T]he canvas must reveal itself to be what it is and nothing else: the site of pigment laid on a flat surface.29

Wells and Leslie’s conception of modernism is clearly indebted to Clement Greenberg’s canonical interpretations of modernist art. Greenberg rephrased his notion of modernism with about every piece of art he witnessed anew, and so it has become increasingly difficult to consistently summarise his point of view, but it seems most aptly expressed in two passages from his two most daring and influential essays, ‘Avantgarde and Kitsch’ from 1939 and ‘Modernist Painting’ from 1966. In ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ he writes: In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. The nonrepresentational or ‘abstract’ if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of common, extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art and ­literature. [. . .] Picasso, Braque, Mondrian [sic], Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.30

Some thirty years later he writes in ‘Modernist Painting’: ‘The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.’31 Indeed, for Greenberg, modernism was defined first and foremost by its engagement with its material – an engagement that was at once liberating (freed from the rules of mimesis) and restraining (bound to the qualities of the material). However, that is not to say that the whole system of mimesis, of plot and perspective, are necessarily absent (although they often are) from modernist painting, but rather that they are no longer a requirement. The spectator of modernist paintings, Greenberg famously

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wrote, ‘is made aware of the flatness of [. . .] pictures before, instead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains. Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first.’32 In modernism, plot and perspective are thus no longer ends in themselves, but they might still be possible means to another end – a double self-reflectivity, an acknowledgement of the method of (re)presentation, and an awareness of the materiality of the medium. Now, of course, The Simpsons and King of the Hill are hardly comparable to Picasso and Braque’s cubism, Mondriaan’s neo-plasticism or even Matisse’s fauvism in terms of their rupture (of the texture, the method) and flatness (of the surface, the material). This is certainly not a qualitative judgement, nor is it an epistemological one. After all, Greenberg’s characterisation that ‘one is made aware of the flatness of [. . .] pictures before, instead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains’ is as applicable to these animated sitcoms as it is to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). My division between the two stems, rather, from questions of self-reflection. For one, King of the Hill and The Simpsons remain a representative form, structured as much by animated images as by the narrative conventions of the domestic sitcom.33 For another, one could argue that they do not so much intend to discard mimesis in order to affirm modernism, dispose of the perspective of the metaphor so as to welcome the flatness of the material, but rather wish to abandon a set of conventions usually associated with children’s television in favour of one commonly associated with ‘high’ – that is to say, ‘adult’ – art. Animation as a children’s art form is often associated with a certain excessiveness and extravagance. Sometimes it is excessive in terms of style, as in Disney films. At other times it is extravagant in terms of plasticity (the extent to which characters like Tom and Wile E. Coyote can take on almost any single form and afterwards return to their prior state). Often, it is extravagant with respect to the plot (say, Tom and Jerry constantly trying to kill or torture each other). These conventions present the fictional world as a simplistic world of good and bad, conflict and resolution, and childish, uncultivated emotions. By reflecting upon these excesses, by exchanging these stylistic extravagances for a certain measuredness of form, King of the Hill and The Simpsons suggest they also replace the world of children’s television with a more complex, morally and emotionally ambiguous universe. Nevertheless, these contemporary animated sitcoms and the modernist paintings from the early twentieth century do have a number of qualities in common. For one, they each, to varying extents, draw attention to

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the methods with and the material onto which they have been created. In each, this self-reflectivity expresses itself by way of an interruption of continuity and a suspension of perspective, that is, flatness. And in each, I would argue, this leads to what the philosopher Jacques Rancière has termed an ‘equality’ of forms.34 We can here begin to perceive some of the similarities between Pleasantville, Happiness and The Simpsons and King of the Hill, and one can furthermore begin to grasp – sense, rather than understand – how these similarities effect their (re)presentations of their worlds, their settings. By interrupting the fluency, the fluidity of movement, the ease with which one image changes into the next, these animated sitcoms at once draw attention to the extent to which their world may be slightly disjointed, to the minutiae of everyday life, the details of every action or interaction, character or space, regardless of whether it seems significant or arbitrary. By suspending the perspective, that is, by exposing that depth is an artificial effect rather than a natural quality, a metaphorical illusion rather than a material reality, the programmes simultaneously point to the separation between foreground and background, that is, the geographical disjunction between one space and the next; and the indistinguishableness of foreground and background, the sense in which everything, action and interaction, character and place, broad outlines and detail, becomes equally visible – and perhaps, one could argue, equally important or irrelevant. I will discuss these effects, which appear to be the affects of audio-visual suburbia, in some detail, but let me first explain what I mean when I say ‘equality of forms’. Apparently unbeknownst to Wells or Leslie, Greenberg’s definition of modernism has been widely and consistently criticised since it was first published in 1939. Rancière’s consideration of the history of art, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, and contemplation of the nature of the image, The Future of the Image, too initially take the form of a critique of Greenberg’s definition(s). However, his criticism soon takes a more ambitious and intriguing direction: the discourse of (post) modernism as such. He suggests that what has long been called modernism is in fact part of a much broader regime in the arts which he terms the ‘aesthetic’.35 Rancière argues that we should not think of the modernist paintings of Picasso, Braque, Mondriaan and Matisse (solely) in terms of medium specificity, in terms of what they expose to be intrinsic to their methods or reveal to be innate to their materials, but rather in terms of what he calls an ‘equality’ of forms.36 Indeed, he asserts that what we now call modernism was in fact part of an ongoing process of democratisation of the forms hierarchically ordered from the Renaissance through to the

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late Greek antiquity, a period he links to what he calls the ‘representative’ regime (the regime, roughly, of Aristotelian poetics). According to Rancière, images are operations between what he terms the ‘sayable’ (dicible) and the ‘visible’ (visible).37 Simply put, the sayable is the representative – the representation by way of a narrative, plot, action and agent – and the visible the present – presence in its own sake. Rancière maintains that in the representative regime, the sayable dictates and directs the visible. That is to say, a narrative or plot or action or agent defines and delineates the extent to which the world, event or subject is, quite literally, exposed. In the aesthetic regime, however, Rancière suggests, the sayable is subsumed by the visible. Here, a narrative does no longer so much define and delineate the extent to which the world, the event or the subject is exposed, as that it is itself subsumed by the extent to which they are present in their own right. If the former images are informed and indeed formed by action, the latter are an expression of description. As he writes, ‘[c]ontrasting with the representative scene of the visibility of speech is an equality of the visible that invades discourse and paralyzes action. [. . .] It does not make visible; it imposes presence’.38 Such is, as I have argued elsewhere, the fundamental difference between a police show like, say, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000– present), in which there is a distinct plot that defines and delineates what is seen (the dead body) and what is not seen (the killer); and The Wire (HBO, 2002–8), in which the plot is subsumed by and into the sheer presence of the world, the situatedness and the subjects, and everything (from dead body to killer to countless other bodies and killers and everyone in between) becomes equally visible, equally important.39 Or such is the difference between a family sitcom like, say, Family Ties (NBC, 1982–9), in which a static camera emphasises the action, signifies the importance, of an interaction; and Arrested Development (FOX, 2003–6), in which a mobile camera, constantly moving from the interaction to random noninteraction, zooming in and out from two-shots of characters to close-ups of an arbitrary object or detail, undercuts the action, the significance of the interaction, indeed, makes everything, interaction and detail, equally significant or insignificant. Of course, The Simpsons and King of the Hill are still far from identical to Picasso’s ladies from Avignon, or any of Mondriaan’s compositions in blue, red and yellow – or, to stress that literature too is an image, a relation between the sayable and the visible, Flaubert’s extensive and intense descriptions of everyday life. In the latter works, the sayable is almost wholly subsumed by the sheer presence of the visible. Even in Flaubert’s novels, the sayable gives in, gives way to the visible, asserting

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itself in descriptions of the most trivial of interactions, the most arbitrary of objects, in the details of fabrics and textures, in the specs of dust and air. In, say, The Simpsons, the sayable is never entirely subsumed by the visible, and moreover will never entirely be completely subsumed by it, because of the conventions of the sitcom genre the show has to adhere to. Both The Simpsons and King of the Hill are produced as episodes, they are structured around circular plots and agents. Indeed, the moment the sayable gives way to the visible, the show would cease to be a sitcom and become something else altogether. However, Rancière’s reconceptualisation of modernism does solve the problematic question of self-reflection that appeared to divide The Simpsons from the ladies from Avignon. It effectively erases the fundamental division between having the intention to change a discourse and the intention to change a demographic. If one accepts Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic regime, the division between the contemporary animated sitcom and the modernist painting of the early twentieth century is reduced to a difference of mere scale. The Simpsons, almost as much as Picasso’s ladies from Avignon or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), cannot but draw attention to the sheer presence of its fictional world. However engaging the plot may be, however convincing the characters, the split-second interruptions of the texture and the momentary suspense of perspective, achieved by the simultaneous separation and identification of foreground and background, and the harsh, flat lines of characters and places, inevitably draw the spectator’s attention to the minutiae and most trivial details of everyday life. This, I would dare say, is one of the reasons why so much attention has been devoted by the show’s fans to complexities and inconsistencies of place, space, addresses, car registration plates, character appearances and so on.40 However, neither The Simpsons nor King of the Hill abounds in minutiae or details. In fact, their foreground and background, plot and place are not merely equally visible, they are also equally sober, simplistic and flat. Whether it is Rainy Street in Arlen or Moe’s Tavern in Springfield, the Hill residence or the Simpsons’ humble abode, there is very little to see. And that is precisely the point: these animated sitcoms present the suburb at once as democratic, in the sense that they render everything equally visible, and autocratic, in that each plane, each figure or shape is self-contained; they are at the same time completely full, in that everything is present, and utterly empty, for what actually is present is very little. Like Happiness, these sitcoms – albeit clearly in a different way and on the level of the mise-en-scène rather than the map – present the suburb as what Sloterdijk has called ‘Schaum’ – ‘foam’. For example, The Simpsons season 2 episode

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Figure 3.3  The Simpsons watching TV from their couch.

‘Homer vs Lisa and the 8th Commandment’ (2, 13), wilfully repeats one of the show’s most iconographic images: Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie and their pets watching television. The family taps off cable television illegally and makes the most of the opportunity by watching television continuously, day after day, and in some cases, night after night. The episode features eleven medium-long shots of identical composition and angle of the family in front of the television. In some, Homer and Marge sit on the couch while the children lie on the floor (Figure 3.3). In others, Homer shares the couch with one of his children while another child and/or the pets lie around on the floor. And in yet others, Homer occupies the room alone (Figure 3.4). Sometimes the characters look excited (Homer, Bart), sometimes they look disappointed (Lisa), but mostly they appear indifferent (Marge, Maggie). Sometimes they interact, sometimes they do not. At times they are awake, at other times they are asleep. And the content of the programmes they watch ranges from action flicks (Die Hard, Jaws) to Mexican wrestling to cock fights to dating shows, covering the unlikely variety of random topics, ironically, that only a show like The Simpsons itself (or perhaps its clone Family Guy) could act out. Indeed, the eleven medium-long shots of the family watching television become something of a microcosm of the episode, and perhaps, the entire show.

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Figure 3.4  Homer watching TV from the couch.

The shot has a surprising depth, and appears to include at least three planes: the top of the television marks the foreground, the children lying on the floor mark the middle ground, and Homer and one or more of his relatives sitting on the couch signify the background. In addition, there is the suggestion of another plane even further back, in the form of the kitchen. Although the planes seem open and transient at first sight, they are in fact clearly demarcated: the first plane is demarcated by the top of the television; the second plane is delineated by the contours of the carpet; and the third plane is delineated by the outlines of a wall. Furthermore, there is no suggestion that it is possible to move between planes within a single shot, as one is not once shown characters moving from one to the other; one only sees them after they have moved. Indeed, the space, ostensibly open and ordered, is in fact remarkably rigid and disjointed: the different planes are equal, but clearly separated (or at least as clearly as an image purporting to depict a world possibly can be). In addition, despite all the depth, and despite its compactness, the space appears flat and empty. Its flatness derives from the harsh black lines with which everything, whether foreground or background, character or place, is drawn, precluding depth and, by drawing attention to the mechanisms by which movement is achieved, precluding continuity: from

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the s ub urb a s t e x t u r e 99 the absence of continuity between planes; and from the lack of grades and shades of colour. Its emptiness, in turn, made all the more visible by the many returns to this set-up, is, paradoxically, the result of the equality of the visible. Everything is equally present, from the television in the foreground to the toaster in the background, from the passively shrinking Homer to the actively growing plant; but because everything is equally present, it soon becomes apparent what is absent: personality. The room contains, from front to back, a television set, an oval carpet, a couch, to the right side of which there are a potted plant and a standing lamp, and to the left of which there are a drawer with some books, a telephone and a table lamp; the wall moreover, is decorated with one painting of a sailboat. To say that the room seems sober and impersonal would seem like an understatement. In fact, I would argue that if one took more than one object out of this living room, it would probably cease to look like a living room. It is precisely because of the simplicity of the lines and the flatness of the surface that the space becomes fragmented and artificial. And it is precisely because of the long takes and the deep focus that the space becomes empty and anonymous. What this scene illustrates, is the extent to which space in The Simpsons is democratic, in that each plane, each field of colour, each figure, is equally important. But it also draws attention to the extent to which space is autocratic, in the sense that each space is uniform in colour and does not allow for chromal plurality. It draws attention to spatial interdependence, in that each space depends for its form and meaning on the others. Yet then it also connotes spatial autonomy, in that each plane is physically separate. It renders space as part of a larger whole, and discontinuous. It renders space permanent, by establishing hard, thick, impermeable lines, uniform colour fields, and self-enclosed planes between which no contact appears possible, that is, between which no influences can be exchanged. In correspondence with that, it suggests that space is finite, in the sense that spheres end, do not gradually transcend into other spheres. And the scene suggests, most obviously, that space is constrained: characters are confined to certain spaces and cannot, at least not within a single shot, escape to another space.

Some Brief Remarks on the Matter of Elasticity I finally want to say a few words about the shows’ problematisation of elasticity, animation’s ability to stretch out and contract, thicken and thin down, mutate and transform. In both The Simpsons and King of the Hill, setting is at once meticulously delineated and immeasurable, in the sense

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that it is always extending and contracting boundaries, shifting positions. Alison Crawford has ascribed this contrast to the contrast between the conventions of the domestic sitcom and animation. Animation, she suggests, has the potential to create an infinite amount of places, spaces and situations, whereas live-action domestic sitcoms are usually tied – at least financially – to a finite number of locations and/or sets: As an animated program, The Simpsons can create environments and develop situations that the average live-action sitcom cannot. The Simpson family is free to roam around the fictional town of Springfield, allowing for a wider range of situations and larger number of characters than are available to any live-action situation comedy without a massive budget.41

The Simpsons can envision Homer in the nuclear plant, Moe’s tavern, at home or the moon, depict Bart at school, at Milhouse’s, or Paris, join Lisa in jazz clubs and school buses, be with Marge in Japan and the supermarket. As Matt Groening, the series’ creator, puts it: The Simpsons is ‘a sitcom, but there’s no sit’.42 At the time of writing, The Simpsons is in its twenty-first season and has aired more than 450 episodes and counting; King of the Hill has run for thirteen seasons, with approximately 250 episodes. Both animated sitcoms appear to have visited and explored a virtually limitless number and range of places and space. The Simpsons, for example, has been set in, amongst others, Japan, France and Albania, and the towns of Springfield, Shelbyville, Ogdenville, North Haverbrook, Cypress Creek, Waverly Hills, and Humbleton. Within Springfield, it has been set in a plethora of districts, countless streets and numerous places, like the town hall, the courthouse, a prison, hospital, retirement home, library, elementary school, baseball stadium, nuclear power plant, and any number of shops, restaurants and bars such as the Springfield Mall, the Sprawl-Mart, Kwik-E-Markt, Moe’s tavern, Barney’s Bowl-A-Rama, King Toots and Lard Lad Donuts, and the homes of Mr Burns and the Simpsons and the Flanders families. King of the Hill, the show that appears to use least locations, has still been set in multiple cities: besides Arlen, in Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, New Orleans, and a nameless Mexican beach town. It has further been set in an airport, an army base, a hospital, Arlen community college, a beauty school, Tom Landry middle school, the office of Strickland Propane, the country club, a gun club, Shiney Pines trailer park, a football stadium, a mall, the Mega-Lo-Mart, a number of restaurants from the Arlen Barn and the Whataburger to the Get-in, Get-out and a New York diner, a number of local nature reserves, Rainy Street (the street where the characters tend to assemble

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for beer and conversation), and the homes and gardens of the main characters. Whatever else the list above may suggest, it shows that both shows are meticulous in their description of their environment. Each of the places the Simpsons or the Hills visit or inhabit is identified. Surprisingly few places remain anonymous. The lists also suggest that both Springfield and Arlen are open, sprawling and diverse places in much the same way Happiness’s New Jersey is. They are open in the sense that characters are free to leave for other towns and even countries. They are sprawling in the sense that although they are both narratively centred around one single place (the home), there is nonetheless no spatial hierarchy amongst them. Neither Springfield nor Arlen appears to have a town centre, for instance. And they are diverse in that they include places varying from power plants to supermarkets, working-class residential neighbourhoods to estates, trailer parks and beauty schools, baseball stadiums and diners. This sense of diversity is enhanced in that both shows people their world with characters from all socio-economic classes and backgrounds. In King of the Hill, for instance, the Hills live next door to the Souphanousinphones, a Laotian family, while The Simpsons repeatedly features Mr Burns, a wealthy industrialist. King of the Hill is particularly precise in its outlining of its setting, Arlen, Heimlich County, Texas. It presents Arlen as what Kolb would call a ‘thick’ place as opposed to a ‘thin’ place. Kolb describes thick places as ones characterised by a sense of locality and history in which social relationships are rich. Thin places, on the contrary – a description of place not dissimilar from either Henri Lefebvre’s definition of ‘abstract space’ or Edward Relph’s definition of ‘placelessness’, and it also has much in common with Mark Pimlott’s notion of ‘interiority’ which I will discuss in the next chapter, and Marc Augé’s idea of the non-place that is central to my discussion in Chapter 5 – are places that lack such locality and history and ‘demand only thin roles that abstract from most of the content of [people’s] lives’.43 In thin places, like airports or shopping malls, people are only allowed to perform one particular ‘slimmed down’ role, like the role of client or customer. In thick places, social relationships are enriched by local mores and shared histories. Here, people can still be customers, but customers who can dwell on shared experiences or acquaintances, or a long history of cooperation. To be sure, thick does not mean complex, nor does thin mean simplistic. As Kolb writes: Thickness refers to the quality of the contemporary roles in a place, whereas complexity refers to the multiplicity of those roles and the nature of their interaction

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with one another. A place can engage only in thin roles but still be complex because of the number and interaction of those roles.44

The show suggests on numerous occasions that Arlen is a suburb of Austin. In the season 2 episode ‘Hank’s dirty laundry’ (2, 16), for example, Hank’s mail is addressed to the zip code 78701, which is Austin’s zip code. And Arlen’s high school football team is repeatedly said to rival the Belton and Killeen school teams. Both Belton and Killeen are Austin suburbs. The show infers a sense of thickness, of locality and history, in numerous ways. First, a number of its inhabitants speak with a Texan accent: Peggy and her friend Nancy, for instance, speak with a slight, general Texan accent, while Hank’s friend Jeff Boomhauer speaks in a strong, almost impossible to understand local dialect. Second, most characters profess a rather stereotypically Texan (or at least Southern) predilection for Republicanism, propane gas, hunting, grilling and beer. In the season 3 episode ‘Good hill hunting’ (3, 8), Hank takes his clumsy, overweight son Bobby out hunting as an essential rite of passage towards becoming a man. Elsewhere, he calls propane gas ‘God’s gas’. In correspondence to this, the show repeatedly draws attention to the extent to which the identity of the characters is intertwined with their hometown. When the season 5 episode ‘Yankee hankie’ (5, 10) reveals that Hank was born in New York, for example, Hank immediately undergoes a crisis of identity. And thirdly, as Ethan Thompson has noted, ‘whether it is the places they vacation, the football teams they root for, or the fast food they eat, the Hills patronize actual Texas institutions’.45 Finally, what renders Arlen thickest is, perhaps, that it has – and repeatedly reflects upon – something akin to an internal memory. Although each episode is structured like a sitcom in that it establishes a certain situation that needs resolving and is eventually resolved, certain plotlines are played out across episodes or seasons. Hank’s father Cotton dies, for instance, and remains dead. The same goes for Luanne’s erstwhile boyfriend Buckley. Similarly, Cotton’s wife gets pregnant and eventually gives birth to a baby. Joseph and Connie hit puberty, and so on. The paradox of King of the Hill – and, as I will demonstrate shortly, The Simpsons – is that by outlining its environment so meticulously, it draws attention precisely to the extent to which it cannot be measured. If the show suggests on numerous occasions that Arlen is an Austin suburb, it equally often implies that it is located near Dallas. All the characters are Dallas Cowboys fans, for instance, and the Tom Landry middle school is named after a former Dallas Cowboy coach. The show’s creator, Mike Judge, further revealed in an interview that the town was based on

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Richardson, a suburb of Dallas.46 At other moments, however, it is suggested the town is close to the Mexican border (which would suggest it is even further south than Austin). In the episode ‘The final shinshult’ (2, 18), Arlen is the last American town to host an exhibition before it reaches Mexico. And in ‘Three days of the Kahndo’ (2, 15) it is implied that the Mexican beachfront is only a short ride away. Indeed, for all the precision with which it is drawn, the Arlen townscape shows little evidence of any geographical whereabouts. It appears to exist, rather, on a sort of elastic, multi-dimensional continuum between each of these places, sometimes moving closer to Austin, then to Dallas, then distancing itself from both to move towards the Mexican border, and so forth. In the season 2 episode ‘Two cars in every garage and three eyes on every fish’ (2, 4) The Simpsons purports to be set in not ‘just another state’. In the season 6 episode ‘Lemon of Troy’ (6, 24), the show tells the history of Springfield, including local legends and founding myths. However, again, these outlines and histories only draw attention to the inconsistency of the show’s landscape. In The Simpsons Movie, Ned Flanders remarks that Springfield is located somewhere in between the states of Ohio, Maine, Kentucky and Nevada, which means that it can be anywhere from the far west of the United States to the farthest east. Similarly, the town is sometimes isolated in the middle of nowhere (as it is in the film), at times neighboured by Shelbyville, and at other times shares a border with Ogdenville. Indeed, as Douglas Rushkoff has suggested, the only certainty the viewer has is that Springfield lies somewhere in Mediasprawl, USA.47 In The Simpsons, the sitcomic plot drives the camera over the harsh, black, thin lines making up the flat setting in an often hasty and inconsistent tempo. The camera moves up and down, from left to right and right to left, from foreground to background, whip panning and whip cutting, zooming in and zooming out, constantly complicating the relationship between the narrative space of the in-frame and the not yet but potentially narrative space of the out-of-frame. To be sure, this complication is a flat or geometrical complication, that is, a complication along the horizontal or vertical axes, but hardly ever a geographical complication, that is, a complication along the diagonal axis. However, paradoxically, in moving rather than cutting, the image suspends the fragmentation felt in favour of a rationally implied totality and unity. It thus creates a world that is at once flat and static, and wide and in flux, that feels at once unfinished and fragmented, and complete and unified. However, just as the equality of forms only exposes an indifference to forms, the equality of places reveals an indifference to (and indistinguishableness of) places. In The Simpsons, except for the opening credits, it is the

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sitcomic plot that drives the camera, and so every space on display is a narrative space rather than a space in its own right. Plot dictates and directs the visibility of space, defines and delineates it. Indeed, plot fully subordinates space to its own nature and structure. The sitcom plot usually suspends internal memory, and indeed, in The Simpsons, spaces closely aligned in one episode might very well be miles apart in another.48 Moe’s tavern provides the most obvious case in point. In some episodes it is located next to a warehouse, in others next to Barney’s Bowl-A-Rama, and in yet others (most of the time) it can be found next to King Toots musical instruments shop. In The Simpsons, the sayable dictates and defines the visible. But because it does so self-reflectively, stressing the unnatural hierarchy of that dictation and definition of the visible, it p ­ aradoxically precisely allows the visible to liberate itself. In Happiness, the democracy of places draws attention to the extent to which places cannot be connected; in The Simpsons, on the contrary, it draws attention to the extent which potentially every one place can be connected to another. I do not want to simply add theory onto analyses, but allow me to make one brief, final observation. As I have explained in the previous chapter, Happiness’s rendering of the suburb can be understood by Sloterdijk’s metaphor of foam. The Simpsons’ presentation of Springfield, I would be inclined to assert, can be understood by Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of what they alternately call the virtual, the diagram, the rhizomatic, or the map. The map, Deleuze and Guattari write, is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. [. . .] Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways. [. . .] A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same’.49

Of course, there is a complexity and nuance to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome and the map that goes far beyond what I can address here. I here merely want to draw attention to the different ways in which Happiness and these sitcoms render an ostensibly similar environment. In Happiness, places share a certain sense of place yet are fundamentally unrelated and disconnected. In The Simpsons too, places are unrelated; yet here they are at the same time always already connected. The Simpsons and King of the Hill thus try to map a spatiality that is unmappable, that changes form, substance, and, not unlike Pleasantville, logic – that is always already something else. They suggest, in other words, that the suburb is a nomenclature, or a concept, that wants to fixate something that is fundamentally open, wants to establish firm relationships between rhizomatic lines. As I have shown in the previous

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the s ub urb a s t e x t u r e 105 chapters, some suburban narratives perceive this tension between the closed and the open, the fixated and the flexible, as something inherently Historical; others perceive it as something psychoanalytical. In both King of the Hill and The Simpsons however, it is perceived as something that imbues place with a sense of place. In King of the Hill, it imbues Arlen with a certain complexity and thickness, in the sense that it constantly complicates and deepens the nature of Arlen, the relationships between Hank and his family and friends, and Hank’s character. For it is precisely because the figure and the character of Hank are so rigidly drawn, that the uncertainties with which he is faced produce such a compelling and, above all, complex character. In The Simpsons, the tension between the sobriety of the sitcom and the elasticity of animation infuses Springfield with a sense of liveliness and possibility, in that anything can happen at any one moment. Here, too, it is precisely because the borders are drawn so clearly, that it becomes apparent that this is a world of constant change.

Openings and Conclusions When critics describe the suburb as flat or one-dimensional, they tend to mean it is a simplistic, shallow and undifferentiated non-place. They assume that something that lacks dimensions cannot be complex. But as Edward Abbott already suggested so many years ago, one-dimensional worlds are not necessarily less complex than two- or even three-­ dimensional worlds; they simply go by other rules.50 In his book Sprawling Places, Kolb has explained that critics deem new places like suburbs, shopping malls and theme parks simplistic primarily because they judge them by the wrong standards: Many criticisms of places today take their orientation from classic examples: small communities (the primitive village, the medieval manor, the old New England town), or centralised cities (Renaissance piazzas, Roman processional streets, Parisian squares, Savannah’s street plan), or places of ritual (the Greek temple precinct, the medieval cathedral square), or pastoral places (the English countryside, the Nordic farm). But these are no longer adequate for understanding the new kinds of places being created since the middle of the twentieth century. Today’s economy is not the same; our images of past places are too idealized; today’s society is less restricted. Places today are different because out lives are different. We are more mobile, perhaps more self-conscious, certainly more fragmented yet abruptly linked together.51

According to Kolb, places like suburbs and shopping malls are not necessarily simplistic; they might just be complex in different ways. Suburbs,

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for instance, he suggests, may well be complex in terms of politics and economics, legal regulations, the environment, density, intensity, structures of movement, normative structures, and ‘processes of local interpretation and reproduction’ as in customs, community initiatives and the like.52 I think Kolb’s book is a necessary intervention. It is important to study these new places and their representations within their own terms: not as either city or small town, and as little in terms of Simmel’s culture of money as in the light of Baudelaire’s project of the flâneur.53 In this chapter, I have tried to make a beginning in finding such a language by looking at the textural structures of two particularly flat representations. I hope to have shown that flat though Springfield and Arlen may be, they are certainly not simple; that in fact, it is precisely because they are so flat, that they can be complex in completely different ways.

Notes   1. I. Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 95.   2. R. Silverstone, ‘Introduction’, in R. Silverstone (ed.), Visions of Suburbia (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1-25; L. Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 2–59.  3. P. Wells, Understanding Animation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 11. My emphasis.  4. Ibid.   5. J. H. Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 14.  6. L. Vaughan, S. Griffiths, M. Haklay, and C. E. Jones, ‘Do the Suburbs Exist? Discovering Complexity and Specificity in Suburban Built Form’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (2009), p. 480.  7. Compare P. Wells, Understanding Animation; P. Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 9; E. Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 290–1.   8. P. Wells, Understanding Animation, p. 23.   9. E. Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 290. 10. G. Sorborn, ‘The Classical Concept of Mimesis’, in P. Smith and C. Wilde (eds), A Companion to Art Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 19–29. 11. See M. Mullen, ‘The Simpsons and Hanna-Barbera’s Animation Legacy’, in J. Alberti (ed.), Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), pp. 63–84. 12. G. Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 135.

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13. E. Thompson, ‘ “I Am Not Down with That”: King of the Hill and Sitcom Satire’, Journal of Film and Video 61: 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 38–51. 14. See also J. Corner, ‘Presumption as Theory: “Realism” in Television Studies’, Screen 33: 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 97–102. 15. J. Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 188–94. 16. A. Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View (Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991), pp. 80–2. 17. I. Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 41–50. 18. Ibid. p. 42. 19. J. Mittell, Genre and Television, p. 191. 20. As an aside, it might be noted that this is a strategy that has been particularly common among postmodern domestic sitcoms from the 1980s and 1990s in general, and FOX sitcoms from those years in particular. 21. J. Mittell, Genre and Television, p. 190 22. But see, for a problematisation of the relationship between The Simpsons and the postmodern, J. Gray, Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody and Intertextuality (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), especially pp. 142–67. 23. R. Wlliams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 121–7. 24. Compare I. Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987); L. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988); and F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). 25. P. Wells, Animation and America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 24. 26. E. Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 23. 27. E. Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 291. See also J. P. Telotte, ‘Ub Iwerks’ (Multi)Plain Cinema’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1: 1 (2006), pp. 9–24. 28. P. Wells, Animation and America, pp. 19–20. 29. E. Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 297. 30. C. Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, in C. Greenberg (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 8–9. 31. C. Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in C. Greenberg (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 85. 32. Ibid. p. 87. 33. I will return to the programmes’ negotiation of these two sets of conventions in much detail in the next section.

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34. J. Rancière, The Future of the Image (London; New York: Verso, 2007), p. 121. 35. For an account of Rancière’s reconceptualisation and restructuration of art history, see J. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 20–9. 36. J. Rancière, The Future of the Image, p. 121. 37. Ibid. pp. 4–6. 38. J. Rancière, The Future of the Image, p. 121. My emphasis. 39. T. Vermeulen and G. C. Rustad, ‘Watching Television with Jacques Rancière: US Quality TV, Mad Men, and the Late Cut’, Screen 54: 3 (Autumn 2013), pp. 341–54 40. See, for example, the unofficial home of the Simpsons on the web, The Simpsons Archive: http://www.snpp.com. 41. A. Crawford, ‘ “Oh Yeah!”: Family Guy as Magical Realism?’, Journal of Film and Video, 61: 2 (Summer 2009), p. 54. 42. Groening cited in J. Mittell, Genre and Television, p. 182. 43. D. Kolb, Sprawling Places (Athens; London: Georgia University Press, 2008), p. 70. 44. Ibid. p. 72. 45. E. Thompson, ‘ “I Am Not Down with That”: King of the Hill and Sitcom Satire’, p. 44. My emphasis. 46. K. Shattuck, ‘It Was Good to Be “King”, but What Now?’, The New York Times (26 April 2009), p. AR22 47. D. Rushkoff, ‘Mediasprawl: Springfield, USA’, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (Fall 2003), http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/suburbia/rushkoff.htm. 48. A. Wood and A. M. Todd, ‘ “Are we there yet?” Searching for Springfield and The Simpsons’ rhetoric of Omnitopia’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 22: 3 (August 2005), p. 214. 49. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 12–16 50. E. Abbott, Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions (London: Penguin, 1998). 51. D. Kolb, Sprawling Places, p. 2. 52. Ibid. pp. 54–80. 53. G. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in D. Frisby and M.  Featherstone (eds), Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (London: SAGE, 2000), pp. 174–85; C. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1995).

C H A PT E R 4

Desperate Housewives: The Suburb as Social Space

This chapter offers an analysis of the cultural geography of the uppermiddle-class suburban cul-de-sac Wisteria Lane in the ABC dramedy Desperate Housewives against the background of postfeminist discourse, ideas about domesticity, and women’s film and television. The chapter is divided into two parts: in the first part I discuss how Wisteria Lane is produced as a social space. I am especially interested here in problematising issues of public and private, those discursive realms so often evoked in discussions of the cinematic and televisual suburb but so rarely considered at length. In the second section I study the spatial mobility of the various women that live on the street. Here my concern lies with complicating gender perceptions – as David Morley has noted, there tends to be ‘a collapsing of the image of the wife/mother into the image of the home itself [. . .] the woman and the home seem to become each other’s attributes.’1 My argument is that although Wisteria Lane and the various homes on it may seem open and democratic in comparison with earlier settings for women’s genres, this openness and democracy is precisely the cause for oppression, paranoia and restlessness. One note on the scope of my study. Social space is a concept that encompasses anything from class to race, power relations to historical genealogies, and intimacy to isolation. It is therefore impossible to discuss it in all its facets and dimensions. I here discuss only two aspects of the social production of Wisteria Lane – public/private and gender – and therefore by no means wish to claim that I have written anything like a definitive account. But I hope that my observations on these two aspects of the social space of Wisteria Lane will offer at least a partial insight into the ways in which suburban narratives might produce social space and its implications for the plot, as well as trigger further research into issues particular to Desperate Housewives, such as the spatialisation of ethnicity, class and age.

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Infinite Interiority Few televisual settings in history have received as much attention as Wisteria Lane. Television specials, magazines, blogs: the little tree-lined lane has been discussed far and wide. The attention can be explained to some extent, I think, by the setting’s narrative significance and visual presence. After all, in a medium that has traditionally been associated with the art of dialogue and static close-ups, Desperate Housewives features surprisingly many silences and mobile long shots, relocating attention from narrative reason to narrative rupture, from face to body, and, ultimately, from the situation of characters to the social situatedness of a subject. As the American Cinematographer writes: The centrepiece of the show, both physically and dramatically, is [production designer] Walsh’s rendering of the housewives’ suburban Wisteria Lane neighborhood, which over the course of three seasons has grown to encompass 36 standing sets on the Universal Studios lot. Many of the show’s interiors [. . .] are spread across six soundstages, but the bulk of the ground-floor sets are attached to the facades on the studio’s 1,500’-long Colonial Street [. . .] ‘Normally you just shoot the facades, then all the interiors are onstage,’ points out [DOP] Peterson, ‘but here we’re actually able to look out the window and see the neighbors. As such, the neighborhood of Wisteria Lane really has a personality. It’s like another character on the show.’2

Another explanation for the widespread attention Wisteria Lane has received might be that it offers something of a microcosm of Hollywood history. Indeed, multiple magazine discussions, newspaper articles, Internet blogs, Wikipedia pages and flickr accounts have been devoted specifically to the intertextual geography and genealogy of the row of houses occupying a studio lot commonly referred to as Colonial Street. The tabloid People Magazine, for example, published a map of the street detailing some of the previous uses of each of the houses. The map shows that Colonial Street previously featured prominently in, amongst others, the comedy The Burbs (Dante, 1989), the family thriller The Desperate Hours (Wyler, 1955) and the small-town family drama Providence (NBC, 1999–2002). It also shows that the house where Mary-Alice Young (Brenda Strong), the show’s narrator, kills herself in the pilot episode, was formerly home to the Cleavers. And finally, it draws attention to the fact that other, now vacant lots were once inhabited by the somewhat less than perfect Hardies (the teenage detectives solving petty crimes in the ­detective show The Hardy Boys (ABC, 1977–9) and the Munsters. What People Magazine forgets to mention is that Colonial Street also previously featured prominently in a number of Douglas Sirk’s films. It has hosted, among others, the melodramas All that Heaven Allows (1956)

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and All I Desire (1953) and the comedy Has Anyone Seen My Gal (1952). It also omits that Susan Mayer’s (Teri Hatcher) home is a conversion of Ron Kirby’s old mill. This intertextual genealogy is no mere coincidence. Indeed, Desperate Housewives’ cinematographer Lowell Peterson has described the show as ‘Douglas Sirk with a comic touch’.3 What is interesting is that Wisteria Lane is at once a re-appropriation of Colonial Street and of Ron’s old mill. After all, in All that Heaven Allows, the two locations are spatially, socially and psychologically separated from one another. For one, Colonial Street is located near the centre of town, while Ron’s mill is situated in the countryside. More importantly still, Colonial Street is associated with bourgeois order, etiquette and artificiality, whereas Ron’s mill connotes a Thoreauesque freedom of class, mores and manner. Where the former signifies restraint, frustration and alienation, the latter denotes liberty, jouissance and a sense of belonging. All That Heaven Allows ends with Cary moving in with Ron, at least temporarily. One might be tempted to say that Susan Mayer’s house on Wisteria Lane represents the homestead Cary and Ron have created for themselves (not in the least because Susan too is in love with a lowermiddle-class outcast, plumber Mike Delfino (James Denton), against the advice of her friends). As is the case in Ron’s mill, there are few walls or frames, and hallway, lounge, kitchen and office physically inhabit the same space. It also seems to be adaptable, with Susan working in the office space in some episodes, in the kitchen in others, while eating at the kitchen table as often as on the couch in front of the television. Susan’s home is further associated with a freedom of mind comparable to the liberty Ron’s place connotes, through, respectively, her creative work as a children’s books illustrator, her informal attire, and the confused, chaotic manner of her behaviour. Finally, Susan’s home seems to symbolise something of an emancipation of the female body: Susan frequently discusses her sexual desires with her friends, acquaintances and teenage daughter Julie (Andrea Bowen) and often negotiates space dressed in nothing but a robe or towel, or even naked. If I am to believe what most critics have thus far said about Desperate Housewives, it would seem that Desperate Housewives’ integration of Colonial Street and Ron’s old mill should be interpreted as a spatial metaphor for melodrama’s changing landscape. Janice Turner, for example, writes in The Sunday Times that ‘feminists should stop complaining. [. . .] This is The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s seminal exposé of middleclass female domestic ennui, for a postmodern generation. And this time with jokes.’4 Another critic comments that ‘Housewives is a modern-day tale that shows how much our society and the notion of a “housewife”

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has changed’.5 In similar vein, Ellen Goodman writes in The Washington Post that ‘if you’re looking [. . .] for signposts of a slowly changing society, DH is [. . .] the No. 1 show’.6 And Naomi Wolf suggests that Desperate Housewives is particularly progressive in its representation of female independence and female vices.7 What these authors suggest, in other words, is that Desperate Housewives no longer needs to come to terms with the issues its cinematic predecessors needed to address, such as equality and independence, because contemporary women have already successfully dealt with those issues. According to Turner, Goodman and Wolf, the programme can instead concern itself with other, less immediately, or at least less obviously, political issues, such as what choices to make, or how to negotiate sexual desires. A term many of these reviewers use is postfeminism. Goodman, for instance, describes Desperate Housewives as the ‘post-feminist mystique’, Oldenburg deems it characteristic of the postfeminist generation,8 and Lisa de Moraes appears to suggest that the show appeals to a postfeminist audience (since she begins her review of the show’s pilot episode with ‘Postfeminists turned out more than 21 million strong to witness the unveiling of ABC’s darkly comic drama, “Desperate Housewives,” Sunday night’).9 Now, postfeminism is a notoriously elusive concept. As Vivvi Coppock, Deena Haydon and Ingrid Richter put it, ‘despite its wide-ranging currency on dust-jackets, on late-night talk shows and in “serious” features articles, postfeminism has rarely been defined. It remains the product of assumption.’10 Stephanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon point out that it has been associated with about every other movement or trend involving or pertaining to women, from Third Wave feminism to antifeminism to girl power.11 Sarah Projanski, in a particularly insightful account, has distinguished five discourses of postfeminism: linear postfeminism, which posits itself at once as the continuation of and the conclusion to feminism; backlash postfeminism, which condemns feminist politics for its detrimental and destabilising consequences to family and gender relations; equality and choice postfeminism, which argues that the aims and ambitions of feminism – simply put, equality and freedom of choice – have been achieved and a new set of goals, for example, a celebration of difference and individual self-realisation, should be adopted; sex-positive postfeminism, structured around sexual desires and the sexualisation of the body; and male postfeminism, addressing alternately the wilful ­feminisation and the unwanted emasculinisation of the male.12 However disparate these strands of postfeminism may seem one from the other, they share a parting with old ideals and an affirmation of new objectives. They are each concerned not with the political, but with

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the SUBURB AS SOCIAL SP ACE 113 individuals; not with collective equality, but with personal choices. What the likes of Turner, Goodman and Wolf suggest is that Wisteria Lane is already a democratic place; the protagonists just cannot seem to find their place in it. As the show creator and runner Marc Cherry puts it in one often-cited interview: I call it a post-post-feminist take. [. . .] The women’s movement said, ‘Let’s get the gals out working.’ Next the women realized you can’t have it all. Most of the time you have to make a choice. What I’m doing is having women make the choice to live in the suburbs, but things aren’t going well at all.13

In defence of these critics, the openness and ostensible democracy of, among others, Susan’s home reflects recent trends to make contemporary suburban housing gender-equal. The sociologist Solly Dreman has argued that what she terms ‘positional’ family structures are increasingly being replaced by what she calls ‘person-oriented’ families.14 Dreman adopts her terminology from Basil Bernstein’s canon Class, Codes and Control (1973– 90). According to Bernstein, positional families are founded upon strict rules, predetermined, hierarchical social roles (related to age and gender), and respect for authority. Person-oriented families, on the other hand, are structured around more flexible rules, adaptable, democratic roles and equal respect for each other regardless of their age or gender. Simply put, in positional families, the father’s, or alternatively the mother’s, word is law; in person-oriented families, it is an opinion open to discussion.15 The cultural geographer David Sibley has translated Bernstein’s sociological concepts to space. In positional homes, he argues, space is partitioned into distinct social functions; the boundaries between spaces and functions are rigid and the internal organisation of spaces is strong. In person-oriented homes, on the contrary, space is only sporadically classified and the internal organisation of spaces is weak.16 As he explains, in positional families, we could assume that the use of domestic space would be controlled in that children would be denied access to ‘adult spaces’ either permanently or at certain times of day. The indifference of children to boundaries would, in these circumstances, be seen as transgression requiring admonishment. It would be a source of tension. Conversely, in the personalizing family, we would expect multiple use of space to be characteristic and the location and timing of the activities of different members of the household to be frequently renegotiated. Thus, boundaries will be either absent or weakly maintained and impermanent.17

Indeed, Dreman’s assertion that positional families are increasingly replaced by person-oriented families is reflected in contemporary architecture and design. As the cultural geographers Moira Munro, Ruth

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Madigan and Daphne Spain, among others, have demonstrated, suburban dwellings increasingly tend ‘towards multi-purpose open areas [. . .] so that new model homes now boast great rooms that replace traditional distinctions between living rooms and eating areas. The master bedroom now flows into a doorless bathroom, and recreation rooms open to outdoor decks and patios.’18 As Spain continues: The history of middle-class housing in America is a microcosm of the social changes accompanying industrialization. Strict internal ordering of rooms and the separation of adults from children and of men from women were eventually replaced by open floorplans that encouraged family togetherness. [. . .] Architects did not set out to create more egalitarian environments specifically for women, yet the twentieth century was characterized by a gradual reduction in sexual spatial segregation and in gender stratification.19

Susan’s home is not the only house that is person-oriented, that is, characterised by open and adaptable spaces. Numerous houses on Wisteria Lane seem to be person-oriented. Lynette (Felicity Huffman) and Tom Scavo’s (Doug Savant) home, for example, is almost without walls or doorframes, unmarked by static or heavy objects, and narratively unified by what is commonly referred to as ‘walk and talk’, the spatialisation of dialogue. Lynette and Tom frequently walk from, to and across bedroom and bathroom, living room and kitchen while talking about work, their marriage or their children. Their house is also an adaptable space, with the comfortable furniture, floors covered with magazines, toys and leftovers, and frequent images of children climbing on couches and crawling under tables all drawing attention to the extent to which there is no one specific function for any one space, no single use for any one object, as well as to the extent to which functions, spaces and objects can be moved around. Similarly, the house Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) and Carlos Solis (Ricardo Chavira) inhabit is characterised by large picture windows and bright, open spaces. It is in typical suburban fashion a ‘space designed for looking’.20 Separate spaces are united, close(te)d spaces opened up by the gaze: the large picture windows are always open, and the door is of glass, with characters often looking in from the outside. The camera also frequently looks over characters’ shoulders or cuts from a character immersed in a situation to a character observing the situation from a distance. Indeed, both Gabrielle and Carlos often use the verb ‘to see’, in phrases such as ‘Did you think I didn’t see you, Carlos?’ or ‘I saw you, Gabrielle’. Most poignantly, in season 2 Carlos loses his sight, and with it, control over space. All spaces moreover are used to multiple ends: work is continued in the bedroom, dinner is served in the lounge, and sex is enacted almost

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everywhere, from the bedroom and the bathroom to the dinner table and couch to the hallway and the garage. Perhaps only Bree (Marcia Cross) and Rex (Steven Kulp) Van de Kamp’s house is clearly positional. It is unmistakably compartmentalised, with each space separated from the other by way of walls, closed doors and doorframes. But I am inclined to say that the Van de Kamp house is so overly partitioned precisely because it is so obviously a camp re-appropriation of the houses associated with melodramas and sitcoms from the 1950s (it features, for example, many of the frames within frames and barred shots so characteristic of Sirk’s homes).21 It is not meant to represent a contemporary home; it is intended to connote a home from another era, a household run according to another set of rules, norms and values adapted from what Stephanie Coontz has described as ‘the way we never were’, the sitcomic 1950s.22 Indeed, most narratives played out in the Van de Kamp home emerge precisely from this socio-spatial incongruity: a struggle over boundary maintenance, a scuffle over one’s position. When Rex transgresses the boundaries by sleeping in the living room, for example, Bree physically punishes him for it by sabotaging his makeshift bed, favouring her socialised wellbeing over his personal health. Similarly, Bree often has to assert her authority over the household by asserting control over her children’s spatial awareness: she repeatedly forces entry into her son Andrew’s (Shawn Pyfrom) room; she grounds her daughter Danielle (Joy Lauren); and she threatens to refuse them access to the house by changing the locks. Wisteria Lane itself, with its wide, winding lane, its broad, walkable pavements, its central, well maintained park, its low white picket fences and its open front lawns too is an image of openness, flexible boundaries and adaptable spaces. Many episodes and scenes begin or end with long takes or panning shots of children playing on the asphalt (see, for example the episode ‘There won’t be trumpets’ (1, 17)), fathers and mothers with buggies occupying the pavements, social events in the park, and people talking to one another from their lawns. Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking that Dolores Hayden’s plea for a more gender-equal suburb is, in fact, a description of Wisteria Lane: To replace empty front lawns without sidewalks, neighbours can create blocks where single units are converted to multiple units; interior land is pooled to create a parklike setting at the centre of the block; front and side lawns are fenced to make private outdoor spaces; pedestrian paths and sidewalks are created to link all units with the central open space; and some private porches, garages, pool sheds, utility rooms, and family rooms are converted to community facilities such as children’s play areas, dial-a-ride garages, and laundries.23

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The extent to which Wisteria Lane and the houses that occupy it are presented as open and democratic is further enhanced by the spatial mobility of the camera. The first scene of the pilot episode is exemplary here. The scene opens with a high-angle long shot of Wisteria Lane, gradually panning down in circles until it reaches street level. It then cuts to introduce Lynette, circling around her from back to forth, right to left, moving upwards from her hands to her face along the way. It next, and ostensibly out of tune with the overall aesthetic of the programme, zigzags through space in accelerated speed towards Gabrielle, whom it too encircles, back to forth, left to right, unperturbed by whatever distance or physical hindrances there might be (Gabrielle passes from one sphere into another, one space into the next, crossing expensive cars, white picket fences and mailboxes, and passing by neighbours, along the way). It repeats similar circling movements with its introduction of Bree and Susan. Indeed, if one compares these shots to the static shots characteristic of, say, Happiness or American Beauty, it becomes clear just how mobile the camera in Desperate Housewives is, and how freely navigable space is. Regardless of whether it is the street characterised as theatrical (I will return to this later) space, Bree’s house associated with repression, Mary-Alice’s house associated with secrecy, Lynette’s house associated with stress, Susan’s home connoted with girlishness, or Gabrielle’s home linked to sex, the camera navigates its way through it without ever encountering a threshold of whatever kind. Desperate Housewives uses mise-en-scène, camera movement, architecture, design and, as I will show shortly, fashion, to create an idea of openness and democracy that implies a spatial equality for women and men ostensibly reflecting the increased equity experienced by women in reality. The show suggests, indeed, that its female protagonists are, or should be, able to negotiate space, that is, to navigate their way around town, neighbourhood and home, freely. In Desperate Housewives, Gabrielle appears uninhibited as she moves around town, while it is her husband Carlos who is repeatedly confined to the home – by blindness, by injuries, by juridicial house arrest. In the episode ‘Everyday a little death’ (1, 12), for example, Gabrielle makes a point of standing on the pavement to demonstrate that Carlos cannot move beyond the porch. As I already suggested above, Turner, Wolf, de Moraes, Goodman and Oldenburg imply that the issues the programme’s female characters deal with are therefore self-inflicted. To paraphrase Kant, they suggest that the women’s ‘tutelage’ is ‘self-incurred’. ‘Self-incurred is this tutelage’, Kant wrote, ‘when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.’24 According

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the SUBURB AS SOCIAL SP ACE 117 to Turner, Wolf, de Moraes, Goodman and Oldenburg, Susan, Lynette, Gabriella and Bree are liberated, but do not allow themselves to experience their freedom (are not, indeed, enlightened). However, to assume that the suburb is or ought to be experienced no longer so much as a prison but as a privilege, or to assume even that women have managed to take control of their prison cells but choose, as it were, to remain inhibited, as these critics have to some extent assumed, would be to miss the point. For Desperate Housewives may present an illusion of equality, but it also, simultaneously, deconstructs that illusion. Carlos’s inability to move beyond the confines of his home is turned into a story precisely because it is so uncommon, just as Gabrielle’s explorations of the outside, that is, the job market, are emphasised exactly because they appear so unnatural. In contrast, the programme never problematises the women’s inability to move beyond Wisteria Lane, nor does it ever make an issue of the men’s mobility. In what follows I look at some of the ways in which Desperate Housewives produces Wisteria Lane as a social space. I focus in particular on its delineation of public space and private space and the ways in which that affects the women’s lives. My argument is that Desperate Housewives problematises the distinctions and boundaries between the public sphere and the private realm textually – by means of inconsistent editing, mobile cameras, shallow focus and space-indifferent performances – as well as diegetically – by way of broad pavements, large picture windows, open floor plans, and flexible uses of spaces. I would argue that the show suggests (whether knowingly or unwittingly) that the very elements and properties that create a more open and democratic society simultaneously destroy the distinctions upon which that democracy is founded: the existence of a separate public sphere, where debates are enacted, and a private sphere, where people can retreat to without being confronted with that debate. I would suggest that Desperate Housewives precludes at once the possibility of public debate and the potential for private intimacy or introspection. I do not wish to suggest that there is no privacy at all in Wisteria Lane, but rather that every bit of privacy can potentially be made public. Throughout the first season of Desperate Housewives, the community comes to learn of, among others, the following supposedly private affairs: Bree and Rex’s marital problems, Rex’s sexual preferences, Gabrielle and Carlos’s legal problems, Gabrielle and Carlos’s financial problems, Gabrielle and Carlos’s marital problems, Gabrielle’s affair with John, Lynette’s Ritalin addiction, Susan’s part in the burning of Edie’s (Nicolette Sheridan) house, both Mary-Alice and Mike’s murderous past, and Maisy Gibbons’s job as a prostitute. In some episodes, the protagonists

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mistakenly feel private enough to inform the others themselves. Bree, for example, blurts out at a dinner party that Rex cries when he ejaculates; Gabrielle shouts abuse at Carlos at numerous parties and even a wake, while John brags to a friend about his affair with a housewife. In other scenes, they simply cannot keep their private affairs a secret. Gabrielle’s financial difficulties are exposed when she is seen taking a shower at the neighbours’; while Carlos’s problems are outed when he is spotted stealing a public toilet. In Wisteria Lane, private matters extend onto the public sphere not because they cannot be contained by the private space of the home, but because the private sphere itself has extended into the public space, indeed, has subsumed the ‘public’ sphere of the street, while at the same time the public sphere has imposed itself upon the private realm. If one agrees with Gaston Bachelard that a private space is a space of intimacy that is not just open to anybody,25 then Wisteria Lane has very few private spaces – for every place is open, to everyone. In the pilot episode, Susan enters Edie’s house without Edie’s knowledge. In later episodes, Susan enters Mike’s house without knocking; Lynette invites herself into Mrs McClusky’s home without consent; and Mrs Huber, Paul and Zack all at some point in the first season force their way into Susan’s home. In addition, a variety of grandparents surprise their children and grandchildren on the doorstep expecting to be housed. In similar vein, the show features numerous instances where characters exchange looks with one another from across what are supposed to be separate spheres or spaces. In the episode ‘Fear no more’ (1, 20), for example, Susan stands in her kitchen when her eyes meet Paul Young’s (Mark Moses) eyes, who is observing her from the porch in front of his house. Similarly, in the final episode of season five, Susan stands in the kitchen when her gaze meets that of Katherine, who is standing on her front lawn. In both instances, the exchange poses a direct threat to both Susan’s and the audience’s perception of her home as a private space. In the first example, Susan’s kitchen has just exploded, and the exchange of looks implies Paul knows more about it. In the second example, Susan has married Mike even though he was in a relationship with Katherine. The exchange of looks intimates, if not danger, then at least an anticipation of unpredictable hatred directed towards her that can reach her within her own home. These two scenes indicate that one can be seen, exhibited – that is to say, can be involuntarily pulled into the public sphere – even when one is within the privacy of one’s home. They draw attention to the extent to which the inhabitants of Wisteria Lane can never be sure of their position in any one place: should they behave as they would on the street even if they are in their own home because their exposure is the same?

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I am reminded here of the architectural theorist Mark Pimlott’s notion of interiority. As Jürgen Habermas famously noted, democracy is conditioned upon and structured by means of the idea of the public sphere, the structural ‘rationalization of power through the medium of public discussion among private individuals’.26 According to Pimlott, such public places are increasingly subsumed by private – or privatised – systems which he calls ‘public’ or ‘continuous interiors’. Pimlott intends the term ‘public interior’ as more than an evocative metaphor: it literally refers to the extent to which today the outside is replaced by the inside, the whole of reality displaced by its unified, pacified, controlled and especially commodified simulation. That is to say, the polis is replaced by congress halls, streets by shopping malls, the spontaneity and diversity of everyday life by the order of museums, nature by (indoor) parks, and so forth, until there is no exterior left, until each individual space has been systemised, interiorised. Evoking alternately Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, Marc Augé’s non-places, Henri Lefebvre’s representations of space and Michel Foucault’s panopticons (without, peculiarly, ever referring to any of them), he writes that ‘the elimination of exteriority and otherness’ is in fact central to ‘these contemporary, continuous interiors for public treaty, whose realms can be extended indefinitely and connected to everything’.27 He writes: Such spaces go to substantial efforts to achieve interiority in order to exclude the world and provide protection from its experiences. Instead, they immerse their occupants in representations, which replace reality and assume its status. If the outside world appears, it is as an image of itself framed by soundless picture windows. [. . .] The representations within, from materials to signs, evocations and images, are clearly simulations, falsehoods.28

These public interiors are at once open spaces and closed systems. Public interiors such as malls and museums are open in the sense that they establish continuity between various spaces and feature open floorplans. In a mall like the Mall of America, the USA’s largest shopping mall, one can see and move across hundreds of metres of indoor shopping space. It thus simulates an experience of spaciousness and mobility. Public interiors are closed, first, in the sense that they can choose to exclude, by means of boundary enforcement, the presence of unwanted entities; second, because they can choose to control everyone and everything within their confines, and expel whom and whatever they consider unwanted; and third, because they, subsequently, can be familiar with everyone and everything inside them – there are no ‘strange’ elements left. That is to say, in public interiors such as malls and museums, everyone and everything is internalised or

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indeed interiorised, that is, incorporated, simulated, excluded or expelled; there are no external or exterior elements. Whilst public spaces are, as the term public indicates, public – that is, open to all private individuals – and private spaces are private – that is, closed to the public crowd – public interiors are, despite their misleading nomen, neither. As Pimlott writes, ‘the captive occupant is discouraged from establishing relations with others’.29 Malls and museums encourage mobility, an effortless transition from one shop or exhibition room to the next rather than stasis, public or private contemplation in and of one particular sphere or space and one’s position in it. They invite fleeting interactions between corporate representatives and customers, oriented towards an interest, such as the sale of this product or the story of that painting, rather than prolonged engagements between private individuals that one could most appropriately term disinterested, that is, an engagement for the sake of the engagement itself (the foundation of the public sphere). In public interiors, people discuss the quality of a certain good because they want to sell or buy it for a certain price, not because they seek to determine the nature of the object. Public interiors are too closed to allow for public debates; but they are too open to offer intimacy. If Richard Sennet was right in asserting that the public man has fallen, then one could equally maintain that the private woman too has collapsed. By problematising the boundaries between the house and the street, the inside and the outside, Desperate Housewives presents its entire space as one huge interior, where it is difficult for characters to know how to behave. The programme reminds the audience that privacy is a rare privilege by constantly emphasising the extent to which characters are uncomfortable and restless. For example, it renders Gabrielle’s affair with the under-age gardener John (Jesse Metcalf) immoral and illegal not so much by making him look young – in fact, he does not look young at all – or even by his repeated uttering of the phrase ‘Mrs Solis’, but by the spatial unease that everywhere surrounds them and of which they are increasingly aware. Whether they are outside, in the more public realm of the garden, downstairs, in the ambiguous space of the salon, or upstairs, in the assumed privacy of the bedroom, they appear out-of-place. In the pilot episode, the programme presents Gabrielle and John together twice. In the first scene, about eighteen minutes in, they make love in the front room, on the dining table. The scene cuts between stationary shots and hand-held footage, between long shots, over the shoulder shots and closeups, shots that are detached and shots that are engaged, immersed in the act. The diversity of the shots and the mobility of the camera once more

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Figure 4.1  Desperate Housewives’ Gabrielle seduces her young gardener in her living room. The shot’s slightly off-centre composition draws attention to the extent to which they are visible to the people walking outside.

appear to suggest a sense of freedom. But in each of the shots, regardless of the type, the characters are set against large, open picture windows through which cars can be seen passing, neighbours spotted walking by (Figure 4.1). This scene is the first time the audience is shown Gabrielle and John’s affair, and it is telling that its attention is immediately drawn to the extent to which this affair, even if it is conducted in the privacy of the home, can be seen by others. However, one could still assume that they are out of place simply because they consummate their affair in the semi-public front room rather than the private bedroom. In the second scene, which takes place ten minutes later, they are in the bedroom. Traditionally, the master bedroom is a place of privacy.30 Here however, the assumed association between space and social function is complicated from the first shot onwards. The scene opens with a long shot of Wisteria Lane tracking back through the balcony doors (Figure 4.2) into the bedroom until it reaches Gabrielle and John lying together in bed naked (Figure 4.3). The shot at once creates continuity and contrast between the outside and the inside. On the one hand, it generates a contrast between outside and inside by means of the transformation of a bright blue, white and green colour palette into a dim, beige hue; and by way of the incongruence between the ordered, predictable lines of the houses, the street, and balcony, by the diagonal, unpredictable (although of course rather clichéd) lines of Gabrielle’s legs. On the other hand, it creates continuity, and, indeed, unity, through

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Figure 4.2  The camera tracks back from the balcony into the bedroom . . .

Figure 4.3  . . . revealing Gabrielle’s naked legs.

the panoramic quality of the image, transiting rather than cutting from public to the private sphere; and via the mobility of the camera, effortlessly trespassing the boundaries between spaces where one is seen (the street), spaces where one sees (the balcony), and spaces where one should be secreted (the bedroom). The shot thus simultaneously draws attention to the extent to which these spaces represent two separate spheres and the extent to which these spaces are unified. It problematises the boundaries between the exterior and the interior, complicates the ontological

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premise of each of them, and, here, instantly signifies Gabrielle and John’s ­activities as a spatial transgression. This single shot turns Wisteria Lane and the houses that occupy it into what one may best call, for lack of a more suitable word, a crystal palace. It signals, at the inception of the series, that every interaction, every utterance, every gesture is potentially exposed. If it creates a continual experience of being out-of-place, it also constantly reminds the characters that they should be cautious with their acts. For indeed, the privacy of the other women is also always under threat of being publicised. Earlier on in the episode, there is a scene at Mary-Alice’s funeral in which the housewives discuss the suspicious circumstances of her death. After a range of two-shots and close-ups, the programme suddenly cuts to a long shot that gradually moves to the right until it reaches Mary Alice’s husband, Paul Young, who is shown to be secretly listening in. Similarly, halfway into the episode ‘Fear no more’ (1, 20) Tom comes home to what appears to be an empty house. A sudden turn of the camera however reveals that Lynette is lurking in the bay window.31 In the episode ‘Move on’ (1, 11) an intimate scene between Susan and Mike is disturbed by the unexpected presence of the police; in ‘Every day a little death’ (1, 12) it is interrupted by the unanticipated appearance of Edie; while in yet another episode they are unpleasantly surprised by Zack’s intrusion into Susan’s bedroom. And Lynette’s romantic engagement with her husband Tom in the third episode is watched by their children. Desperate Housewives’ public interiority turns Wisteria Lane into that most clichéd of suburban metaphors: the panopticon, or rather still, perhaps, what Gilles Deleuze has called the control society, where surveillance is no longer bound to a specific site or contract, but is everywhere, hybridising space.32 Interiority and ­surveillance, as Pimlott asserts, are each other’s correlate. As an aside, it is surprising how commonplace this strategy is in contemporary suburban television. Even a programme like Weeds, which is often thought of as experimental and radical in its treatment of women, couples the open to the oppressive, the democratic to the hierarchical. The home that the programme’s protagonist Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) inhabits with her two sons Silas (Hunter Parrish) and Shane (Alexander Gould) is exemplary here. The space is virtually undivided by walls or doorframes, undifferentiated by colour, and unmarked by static objects or heavy furniture. The house is also not partitioned according to social functions. All areas are used for multiple purposes. In the season 1 episode ‘Good shit lollipop’ (1, 3), for example, Nancy uses the kitchen not to cook dinner for the children but to bake hash cookies and marijuana cakes for clients. At another point, the kitchen functions as the homework

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room, while the living room is used for dinners and breakfasts, smoking weed, sex, watching pornography and family interventions. Moreover all of these spaces are accessible to each character equally. People frequently enter the house without knocking; intruders rummage through cupboards; guests serve themselves to coffee. In the pilot episode, ‘You can’t miss the bear’, for example, Silas’s girlfriend Quinn enters the house without knocking, treats herself to an apple without asking, slouches on the couch, and interferes in a family discussion without anyone commenting on it. In a later episode (1, 4) Nancy’s brother-in-law breaks into the house at night and surprises the family with breakfast in the morning. However, here, too, it is precisely because of this democracy that characters become increasingly uncertain and paranoid as to how to behave. Disturbed when she is fabricating drugs, when she is sexually active, when she cries, Nancy’s control of her private space is undermined; her understanding of space is problematised. The architectural theorist Anthony Vidler has described how architectural history has been a history of opening up, of democratising: ‘the rational grids and hermetic enclosures of institutions from hospitals to prisons; the surgical opening up of cities to circulation, light and air; the therapeutic design of dwellings and settlements’.33 These interventions, Vidler writes, were initiated to ‘eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny, and above all the irrational’.34 But what these interventions also eradicated in the process, as Wisteria Lane illustrates, was the division between the public sphere and private space, and with that, the public sphere and private space themselves (which were, to be sure, themselves inventions of the Victorian era rather than natural givens).35 In Wisteria Lane there no longer is any public debate nor is there any, or at least very little, intimacy. Instead of openness and democracy, the modern interventions have brought about paranoia, since each and every space is always already intruded, and perpetual performativity, since one always has to be on her guard. If the suburb was once perceived, as Roger Panetta has documented,36 as a therapeutic environment, a retreat from the city where families could rekindle their relationships, relax and regain their health, Desperate Housewives portrays it as something of a mental institution.

Time and Again In this section I discuss how the social spatiality of Wisteria Lane might inform the behaviour and state of mind of its female inhabitants, in the light of ideas about gender, place and temporality, and women’s television. My

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the SUBURB AS SOCIAL SP ACE 125 focus lies almost exclusively on one instance in particular, a scene in the season 1 episode ‘Anything you can do’ (1, 7). I will suggest, however, that the scene is indicative of a recurring strategy within Desperate Housewives in particular and, to an extent, women’s television and film in general. The scene I want to discuss takes place midway through the show’s first season. It features three characters – Edie, Mike, and Susan – between which a lot has happened at this point. It has been revealed to the audience that Mike is a private detective pretending to be a plumber who has recently moved to Wisteria Lane to look for the killer of his ex-wife. This revelation has problematised Mike’s relationships with his neighbours, since he does not know who to trust, and has complicated his relationship with the two women who fancy him, Susan and Edie, as he is still unsure of what to feel. Susan and Edie, meanwhile, have tried in ways intended to be comedic (Susan falling in the bushes naked) and dramatic (Susan accidentally burning down Edie’s house), assertive (but often nonetheless demeaning, like Edie washing her car in a soaked white T-shirt and hot pants) and discreet (Susan asking her daughter to arrange her a date) to seduce Mike. Their shared feelings for Mike have caused numerous rifts between the two of them. So the scene involves three people the audience knows have a history together. The scene opens with Susan crossing the road from her house to Mike’s house. Mike has invited her out on a date earlier in the episode, and she is now on her way to his house to go for dinner. The first shot is a frontal mid shot which draws attention to Susan’s appearance. Susan is dressed elegantly compared to her usual casual wear. She is wearing extravagantly large, gleaming golden earrings, make-up and glossy lipstick, a glamorous but slightly tacky, glittering gold and orange cocktail dress, and high heels (Figure 4.4). She is smiling, beaming even. Her walk is rhythmic, and has a confidence and swagger it does not normally display. As Susan walks from her lawn onto Wisteria Lane, the programme cuts from the frontal mid shot of Susan to a medium close-up of Edie, who is putting up a ‘For sale’ sign by a house she is trying to sell on the other side of the road. The composition of the close-up is off centre, with the sign to the far left, and Edie’s face centre left. Soon enough indeed, Susan strolls into the right half of the frame, drawing the shot’s focus with her, drawing attention to Edie’s defeat and her victory. At this point, Susan would have been able to walk across the street unnoticed, since Edie has her back to her and is busy putting up the ‘For sale’ sign. Excited by the prospect of her date with Mike, however, she decides to gloat in her victory by showing Edie what she is missing out on:

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Figure 4.4  Medium shot of Susan. Her body language expresses power: her shoulders are pushed back, chest forward, she smiles, and confidently looks Edie straight in the eyes. Susan: Hey, Edie! Edie: Wow! Get a load of you! You look so pretty. I hardly recognize you. Susan: Oh this? Well, I have a date. Right now. [beat] With Mike. [beat] We kissed. FYI.

There are three implications here. The first is that Susan understands that Wisteria Lane is a theatrical space and puts up a performance (‘Oh this?’). The second is that Susan assumes that she is in control of this public interior and will be able to win her war of words with Edie. And the third implication is that Edie, too, understands that Susan controls space at this moment and assumes the vernacular of the oppressed – sarcasm (‘You look so pretty. I hardly recognize you’). However, when Susan arrives at Mike’s place, he informs her that he cannot go out on a date since he has an ‘unexpected visitor’. That visitor, it turns out, is a beautiful young woman. As Susan walks back across the street, her interaction with Edie is of a rather different nature: Edie: Hey, how was your big date? 
 Susan: [in soft, apologetic voice] Mike had to reschedule. Edie: Oh. Because of the hot girl? With the suitcase? Over there? Gosh, how devastating for you. [beat] FYI.

This interaction makes three different, even contrasting implications. It implies first of all that Susan realises she should not have entered the

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Figure 4.5  A few minutes later, Susan’s body speaks another language. Here her shoulders are down, her arms limp besides her body, her bag clutched to her side, and there is no eye contact.

stage. Second, it implies that Susan realises that she should not have assumed control over space nor over Edie. And finally, the scene implies that Edie realises that the power relations have turned. Indeed, she is now the one who initiates the interaction. Susan’s sense of dejection, disappointment and embarrassment is illustrated by her body language (Figure 4.5). Her confident swagger has been replaced by an inhibited walk. For half of the walk, she hides her face behind her handbag, unwilling and unable to confront the theatre’s audience. Her head is down, her face contorted, her shoulders are down and her arms hang limp besides her body. Within mere minutes, Wisteria Lane has turned from a walk of fame into a walk of shame. I would argue that when Susan crosses the street to meet Mike, she spatially enacts the understanding that space is democratic (believing it is open for everyone), while she temporally enacts the notion that time signifies possibility (believing, after all, that she is finally going on that long awaited date with Mike). When she returns, she is reminded that space is neither democratic (since she has been put in place for asserting her femininity in public), nor does time signify possibility (since her beliefs have been proven false). She is reminded that the spatial body should enact a caution related to exposure and that the temporal body should enact a carefulness related to disappointment. Indeed, she now performs another identity, rooted in an understanding that space is hierarchic and a notion that time signifies lack. The show thus trains Susan – and the viewer – into

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performing caution, alerts her to the fact that, next time, she should tread more carefully on these grounds. Far from a postfeminist narrative, this appears to me to have more in common with Victorian morality tales. I wish to very briefly turn from matters of space to time here. One should not assume, because Susan’s expectations are disappointed, because she – as well as the female viewer – is taught that she will never achieve what she is after, that time is not linear but circular. It is a common misconception in film and television studies that linear time is necessarily Hegelian time, that is, History that eventually comes to an end. Most scholars have correspondingly theorised the temporality of the soap opera, the genre where women’s expectations are continually disappointed, in terms of what they appear to perceive as the only alternative to linear time – circular time. Dennis Porter, for instance, has dismissively called the temporality of the soap opera ‘an indefinitely expandable middle’.37 As Ien Ang puts it, soap operas represent process without progression and as such do not offer the prospect of a conclusion of final denouement, in which all problems are solved. Thus, soap operas are fundamentally anti-utopian: an ending, happy or unhappy, is unimaginable.38

Or, to cite Lynne Joyrich: [w]ith no agreed transcendental value to be achieved, melodrama can offer no final closure, and thus its narratives – in both continuing serials and episodic series – are circular, repetitive and unresolvable. [. . .] [S]oap operas ultimately reject the notion of progress, the belief in a visible difference between past and future. In a genre whose form has been described as ‘an indefinitely expandable middle’ lacking beginning or end, the viewers as well as the characters are trapped in an eternally conflictual present.39

Now, I agree that Desperate Housewives is structured by multiple, mostly female, incomplete and often competing points of view. I do not agree, however, that it necessarily suggests Desperate Housewives adheres to a non-linear, non-developmental temporality. What I think Joyrich especially overlooks, or sees but disavows, is that although few soap operas generate a ‘visible difference between past and present’, they are nevertheless premised on the possibility they might generate such a difference. Simply equating what does not happen to what did not happen misrepresents the point of much women’s television. For indeed, the scene I described above is not so much about what does or did not happen, as it is about the tension between what the show pretends might happen, and makes clear cannot happen. Contrary to what Joyrich appears to suggest, this scene is in fact structured around and towards a telos: a date

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the SUBURB AS SOCIAL SP ACE 129 with Mike, to make love to Mike, a relationship with Mike, children with Mike, a life with Mike, and so on. This telos might never be achieved, but that does not mean that Susan’s point of view and understanding is not structured by it. I would argue that Desperate Housewives’ viewers and characters are not so much ‘trapped in an eternally conflictual present’, as tricked into a future that will never materialise – and that is a significant distinction. Desperate Housewives in general, and the above discussed scene in particular, are conditioned upon and structured around desires of which it is doubtful it will ever be able to fulfil them. (In fact, as Naomi Wolf has remarked, their pretence is all the more charged since the female protagonists are now no longer merely attempting to fulfil their desires for their own sake, but also under pressure from a society that expects women to fulfil their desires, but, at the same time, will not allow them to fulfil these desires.)40 Desperate Housewives is concerned, for the most part, with balancing personal desires and social demands that cannot be balanced. As Mary-Alice Young, the programme’s omniscient, dead narrator, says in the season 1 finale: Each in their own way so brave, so determined . . . and so very desperate: [Lynette] desperate to venture out, but afraid of what she’ll miss when she goes; [Gabrielle] desperate to get everything she wants, even if she’s not exactly sure of what that is; [Bree] desperate for life to be perfect again, although she realises it never really was; [Susan] desperate for a better future, if she can find a way to escape her past. [. . .] I hope so much that they’ll find what they’re looking for. But I know that not all of them will.

The street’s spatial transiency at once promises and prohibits a fulfilment of desire in the present, the here and now. Its temporal transcendentalism simultaneously promises and precludes the possibility of a fulfilment of desire in the future, the there and then. Like Susan, the housewives are constantly pushed and pulled forwards and backwards between a present they would like to be empowered in or escape from, and a future that might very well deny them that empowerment and escape. Space and time thus each impose their own dual subjectivity, and indeed performativity. Spatial identity is constituted by the oscillation between the hope that space is equal and the fear that space is unequal. Temporal identity is constituted by the repetition of the fluctuation between what might be (the fulfilment of desire) and what will very likely never be (doubt). Of course, there is tragedy here. However, in a sense, albeit admittedly a very small sense, this double-bind also offers hope. For it renders the suburb in terms of possibility rather than stasis.

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I wish to make two final observations here with respect to Wisteria Lane and performativity. The first observation, one that I hinted at before, is that whereas men are free to roam around town and outside of town, the women are constantly reminded that they cannot leave Wisteria Lane. The few times Bree leaves Wisteria Lane it results initially in her accidentally poisoning her husband Rex, and eventually her friend George purposefully murdering him. When Lynette leaves Wisteria Lane, she jeopardises her marriage with Tom, causes Tom problems at work, and is nearly arrested by the police. Similarly, Susan causes an accident on each of her car trips out of the street. Other women that leave town heading for disaster are Mrs Huber in the first season, and her sister Felicia in the seventh season. Both are killed. The second observation is that the only woman who is unrestricted in her spatial behaviour is a woman referred to in the first episode as a ‘slut’: Edie Britt. Desperate Housewives, in a gesture that renders every comparison to feminism not only ridiculous but also offensive, here places itself in a long tradition of conflating space and gender, of misogyny and agoraphobia that can be most appropriately summarised by the sociohistorical positions of the flâneur and the flâneuse. Janet Wolff has argued that whereas men have always been free to ‘botanize on the asphalt’, women have long been less free to roam around.41 Throughout much of modernity, Wolff writes, they were denied access to public spaces like streets and squares, theatres, cinemas, societies and bars, merely because they were women. They were withheld from such spaces by means of threats of immoral conduct, disrespectability and physical assaults. The women dwelling in these spaces were then, indeed, often socially abused or even physically harassed. Other than men, women dwelling in public spaces could not control them with their gaze, but were rather looked at; they are not subjects in space, but objects of space. As Susan Buck-Morss has explained, ‘the flâneur was simply the name of a man who loitered; but all women who loitered risked being seen as whores, as the term ‘streetwalker’, or ‘tramp’, applied to women makes clear’.42 The typical flâneuse, in other words, was/is the prostitute: the streetwalker, the public woman, la femme publique. (Again, the contrast of the term ‘public woman’, the woman who belongs to everyone, with that of ‘public man’, the man who is invested in the public cause, is telling). Edie Britt is the only woman who is not just free to move around Wisteria Lane but also venture out of it. As an estate agent, she has a key to most of the houses. In addition she is frequently pictured driving her car, ready to leave the confines of the street. It is interesting to note, then, how the programme characterises Edie. In the pilot episode, she is introduced

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the SUBURB AS SOCIAL SP ACE 131 by Mary-Alice as ‘a slut’, after which the programme cuts to snapshots of Edie seducing, respectively, a tennis teacher, a handy man, and a priest. In subsequent episodes, the other women discuss her in dismissive terms, or glance in her direction coldly. On numerous occasions do the women make remarks about Edie’s aggressive attitude towards men and her loose morals. She is further signified as someone of overt sexuality and dubious morality through repeated shots of her in tight or wet clothing, tacky colours and high heels, and her often somewhat colloquial vernacular. One could say that Desperate Housewives portrays Edie as a public woman. Edie is a public woman in the most denotative sense of the term in that she inhabits (since her house has burned down halfway through season 1), and is able to navigate her way around, the public sphere. But she is also a public woman in a connotative sense. She is conceived of as a loose woman, a ‘slut’. In fact, it appears legitimate to suggest that it is precisely because Edie inhabits – and controls – the public realm that she is ­presented as a slut. Desperate Housewives thus does not only deny women a place in the private sphere, but also explicitly condemns the one woman who inhabits the public sphere. The programme turns the suburb, that place supposedly ‘essentially feminine’, into a decidedly anti-feminist environment; it turns the suburb into a detention camp, a disciplining programme, where women – both the women of Wisteria Lane and the women watching – are trained into being a particular kind of ‘woman’: the woman who is always on her guard, never at rest, never comfortable with herself; a woman who is housebound yet never at home.

Conclusion I have argued in this chapter that Desperate Housewives is at once structured around the dissolution of the realms of public and private, and premised on the disparity between desire and destiny. Both the interiorisation – that is, the transiency – of the fictional space and the transcendentalism of the fictional time induce a performativity that oscillates between clarity of position and a contemporaneous sense of ambiguity, limitations and possibility. The show renders the suburb at once democratic and hierarchic and neither of them, public and private and neither of them, a space of dreams as much as a place where those dreams will never materialise. Indeed, if it draws attention to anything, it is, first, that like Pleasantville, the New Jersey of Happiness, Arlen and Springfield, Wisteria Lane is unstable, characterised by contradictions and oscillation; and second, that concepts like public and private, democracy and hierarchy, might not necessarily

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be the most appropriate discourses by which to think about representations of the suburb. Indeed, it suggests that another vernacular is needed in order to understand the nature of mediated suburbia. In Chapter 5, I show how three teen films – Brick, Alpha Dog and Chumscrubber – seek to reconceptualise the terms by which suburban space can be represented.

Notes  1. D. Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 65.   2. T. Longwell, ‘Desperate Housewives’, American Cinematographer (August 2007), p. 19.   3. Cited in J. Oppenheimer, ‘Desperate Housewives’, American Cinematographer 89: 3 (March 2008), pp. 50–1.   4. J. Turner, ‘A Wife Less Ordinary’, The Times (1 January 2005), Features p. 4.   5. A. Oldenburg, ‘From Domestic to Desperate’, USA Today (1 October 2004), Life p. 1.   6. E. Goodman, ‘The Truth of “Desperate Housewives”, The Washington Post (20 November 2004), p. A19.   7. N. Wolf, ‘Hell is a Perfect Little Life in the Suburbs’, The Sunday Times (28 November 2004), Features p. 3.   8. A. Oldenburg, ‘From Domestic to Desperate’, Life p. 1.   9. L. de Moraes, ‘ABC’s “Housewives” Leaves Competition in the Dustbuster’, The Washington Post (5 October 2004), Arts and Living p. C01. 10. V. Coppock, D. Haydon and I. Richter, The Illusions of Post-Feminism: New Women, Old Myths (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995), pp. 3–4. 11. S. Genz and B. A. Brabon, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 1. 12. S. Projanski, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 66–89. 13. Cherry, cited in B. Weinraub, ‘How Desperate Women Saved Desperate Writer’, The New York Times (23 October 2004), B7, B12. 14. S. Dreman, The Family on the Threshold of the 21st Century: Trends and Implications (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), pp. 174–5. 15. Ibid. 16. D. Sibley and G. Lowe, ‘Domestic Space, Modes of Control and Problem Behaviour’, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 74: 3 (1992), pp. 189–98; D. Sibley, ‘The Purification of Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6 (1988), pp. 409–21. 17. D. Sibley, ‘The Purification of Space’, pp. 415–16. 18. D. Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 130; see also M. Munro and R. Madigan, ‘Negotiating Space in the

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Family Home’, in I. Cieraad, At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 110. 19. D. Spain, Gendered Spaces, p. 134. 20. L. Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 2. In some ways, it might seem unlikely that the Solis’s house resembles the stereotypical suburban dwelling. Their home, after all, is consistently shown through a rather orientalist, perhaps even racist, lens: as numerous scholars have noted, and as the actors themselves have complained, each scene with Gabrielle and Carlos is accompanied by a Latin-American jingle (predominantly in the first season), the colours of the home are exotic, the objects are neoclassical kitsch, and Gabrielle is presented, through lighting, clothing, performance and narrative, as the clichéd ‘spicy Latina’. See D. Merskin, ‘Three Faces of Eva: Perpetuation of the Hot Latina Stereotype in Desperate Housewives’, Howard Journal of Communication 18: 2 (April 2007), pp. 133–51. 21. I have neither the space nor the intention to discuss the Van de Kamps’ campness in detail, but see N. Richardson, ‘As Kamp as Bree: Post-feminist Camp in Desperate Housewives’, in J. E. McCabe and K. Akass (eds), Reading Desperate Housewives: Beyond the White Picket Fence (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 86–94. 22. S. Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 23. D. Hayden, ‘What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work’, Signs 5: 3 (Spring 1980), p. S183. 24. Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment’, in L. W. Beck (ed.), Kant On History (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2001), p. 3. 25. G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 78. 26. J. Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article’, New German Critique 3 (Autumn 1974), p. 55. 27. M. Pimlott, Without and Within: Essays on Territory and the Interior (Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2007), p. 12. 28. Ibid. p. 298. 29. Ibid. 30. It is interesting to note here that many suburban fictions complicate the privacy of this most private of sanctuaries, the bedroom. In both The Truman Show and Alone With Her (Nicholas, 2006) it is secretly filled with cameras. In The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007), there is the constant fear of microphones. In The Ice Storm (Lee, 1997), the room is made of glass. And in multiple texts, televisual, cinematic, or literary, including Lynette’s home in Desperate Housewives and Nancy Botwin’s home in Weeds, parental solitude is disturbed by children barging in unannounced. 31. There is an argument here to be made about the function of the threshold and the niche in Wisteria Lane as a space that is of utmost significance to the

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construction of Wisteria Lane as an open space, yet paradoxically also seems to be the one space that offers the inhabitants temporary respite from public view. 32. G. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3–7. 33. A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 168. 34. Ibid. 35. R. Sennet, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 47–121. 36. R. Panetta, ‘The Rise of the Therapeutic Suburb: Child Care in Westchester County, New York, 1880–1920’, in D. Rubey (ed.), Redefining Suburban Studies: Searching for New Paradigms (Hempstead: Hofstra University Press, 2009), pp. 63–77; see also R. Panetta, ‘Westchester: the American Suburb: A New Narrative’, in R. Panetta (ed.), Westchester: The American Suburb (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 54–8. 37. D. Porter, ‘Soap Time: Thoughts on a Commodity Art Form, College English 38: 8 (April 1977), p. 783. 38. I. Ang, ‘Melodramatic Identifications: Television Fiction and Women’s Fantasy’, in M. E. Brown (ed.), Television and Women’s Culture: The Politics of the Popular (London: SAGE, 2004), p. 80. 39. L. Joyrich, ‘All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture’, in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 6: 1 16 (January 1988), p. 140. 40. N. Wolf, ‘Hell is a Perfect Little Life in the Suburbs’, p. 3. 41. J. Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture & Society 2: 3 (1985), pp. 37–46. See also E. Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, New Left Review 191 (January/February 1992), pp. 90–110. 42. S. Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering’, New German Critique 39 (Autumn 1986), p. 119.

C H A PT E R 5

Teen Noir: The Suburb as Lived Space

There are few genres that know their way around the suburb as well as the teen film. From the ‘youthpix’ of the 1950s and 1960s to John Hughes’s oeuvre, from Larry Clark’s films to the American Pie cycle, the teen film navigates its way around the whole spectrum of suburban locales: by car or by bike, skateboard or trainers, from highway to gas station, shopping mall to parking lot, high school to front lawn, picture window to cellar. In this chapter I examine the ways in which three teen films – Alpha Dog (2007), Chumscrubber (2006) and Brick (2005) – present the suburb. The chapter is divided into three overlapping and accumulative parts. In the first part, I discuss the ways in which these films use style to distinguish the adult experience of everyday life (the experience central, also, to the previous four chapters) from the teenage experience of the quotidian, looking in particular at how adults are made to look like children while teenagers are rendered as adults. In the second part, I discuss the ways in which the films employ editing and mise-en-scène to distinguish the adult experience of space from that of the teenagers; and in the third, concluding part, I suggest that the films turn the so-called non-place of the suburb into a lived space. Indeed, if I am issuing a discreet defence of the suburban narrative somewhere in this book it is here. Part of this chapter’s aim is to take issue with the idea that suburbia is by definition a non-place. I wish to say a few words here about my choice of films. As the film scholar Timothy Shary has noted, the teen film is an increasingly diverse, ‘complex, dynamic, and revealing’ genre.1 Since the 1980s, he writes, a number of distinct subgenres and character types within the genre of ‘youth/ teen/young adult’ films have emerged and have offered richly provocative images that question the changing concepts of youth in America. The specific number of these categories is arguable, and surely too large to detail in one volume, so I offer

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here an analysis of five subgenres – containing 18 of the most significant youth film styles and movie roles – to demonstrate the changing nature of teen representation in American media during the past generation.2

Among the subgenres and film styles Shary discerns are the supernatural horror film, the slasher film, the juvenile delinquency film, the science film, the romantic melodrama, the sex comedy, the dance movie, the athletics film, and the school picture. To those genres and styles others have added the musical, the biopic, the apocalypse film,3 and what Skye Sherwin calls the ‘mental illness’ film.4 The teen film set in suburbia is no exception, ranging from suspense thrillers such as Disturbia (Caruso, 2007) and Crime and Punishment in Suburbia (Schmidt, 2000) to coming-of-age dramas like Ghostworld (Zwigoff, 2001) or SubUrbia, to any number of Hollywood and indie college and high school (romantic) comedies. If it is, as Shary thinks, impossible to discuss all of these generic variations – and more – in detail in one volume dedicated to teen cinema, then it is certainly not feasible to do so in one chapter. I therefore concern myself here exclusively with one particular strand of cinema that has been rather popular of late:5 what has been called the ‘teen noir’ or ‘suburban noir’.6 What interests me especially about this subgenre is that it transposes to the suburbs a generic form – film noir, but more broadly the gangster film – often associated with the city. I focus especially on three films concerned with the drug trade, an activity that has of late increasingly come to be associated with the suburbs in popular culture, the press and scholarly discourse alike: Alpha Dog, in which an unpaid drug payment leads three teenagers to kidnap and kill a young boy; the very similar Chumscrubber, in which an undelivered drug package turns three teenagers into kidnappers; and Brick (2005), in which a hard-boiled teenage detective infiltrates a drug cartel in order to try and find the murderer of his ex-girlfriend.

Driving around Suburbia with Karl Mannheim At one point in his canonical study The City in History, the urban historian Lewis Mumford describes the suburb as a children’s playground. One unfamiliar with Mumford’s work might assume that he is simply describing the extent to which the suburb has traditionally been a child-friendly and child-centred environment. After all, many of the postwar American suburbs especially were initially conceived of as a safe, healthy and, above all, spacious place to raise children. Today, the suburbs house more children than the city and the countryside taken together.7 Yet Mumford’s

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t he s ub urb a s l ive d s p a c e 137 metaphor refers not to the suburb’s conceived child-centredness, but to its perceived childishness: In the suburb one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of its evil fell over a column in the newspaper. Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion. Here domesticity could flourish, forgetful of the exploitation on which so much of it was based. Here individuality could prosper oblivious of the pervasive regimentation beyond. This was not merely a child-centered environment; it was based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle. [. . .] In the suburb [. . .] a single phase of life, that of childhood, became the pattern for all the seven ages of man. As leisure generally increased, play became the serious business of life; and the golf course, the country club, the swimming pool and cocktail party became the frivolous counterfeits of a more varied and significant life.8

Mumford has hardly been the only critic to describe suburbia as childminded. Many will be familiar, for instance, with Richard Yates’s damning indictment of the suburban estate Revolutionary Road as a ‘toyland’. ‘It’s as if everybody made this tacit agreement’, he wrote about the suburbanites, ‘to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality!’9 Only recently, Tom Perotta entitled his fictional contemplation on adulthood and adultery in the suburbs Little Children (2004). Cinematic chronicler of the suburb du jour, Todd Solondz, called his first feature film Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). And in television programmes as diverse as Swingtown (CBS, 2008), Mad Men (AMC, 2007–present), Desperate Housewives and Arrested Development, suburbanites are portrayed as irresponsible, naïve children quarrelling for attention. In Swingtown, adult couples irresponsibly experiment with drugs while their under-age children are asleep across the hall. In Mad Men, Desperate Housewives, and Arrested Development, some adults never seem to have matured at all. Mad Men’s Betty Draper (January Jones), for instance, seeks help from a children’s psychologist; Desperate Housewives’ Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher) and Arrested Development’s Lindsay Fuenke (Portia de Rossi) frequently rely on their daughters for advice; Arrested Development’s Buster (Tony Hale) still lives with his mother, while his brother Gobe still believes in magic. Teen films in general, and teen films set in suburbia in particular, appear to be especially prone to portray adults as immature. From Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, 1955) to The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) to Back to the Future, they each present the adult authorities, whether they are local police officers, school boards or parents, as either irresponsible or ignorant of their children’s struggles. Arie Posin’s 2005 film Chumscrubber might be considered exemplary in this respect. In Chumscrubber, the adults are

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wholly unaware of the violent power struggles, kidnapping and drug abuse that form the reality of their children’s lives. They attend to soirées and cocktail parties, discuss interior decoration and muse about casseroles, while their children are struggling to cope with the pressures of parental and peer expectation. The Parker family, Mr Peck (Tim DeKay), and Jerri Falls (Cary-Ann Moss), for instance, are unaware that their children have kidnapped another child. Terri (Rita Wilson) and Lou Bratley (John Heard) in turn are unaware that their son has been kidnapped. Bill (William Fichtner) and Allie Stiffle (Allison Janney) never notice that their son has a serious drug problem. And Mrs Johnson (Glenn Close) long remains oblivious about her son’s suicide. Chumscrubber is as much a film about generational divide as it is a film about teenage delinquency; it is as much about parents who do not want to see what is happening before their eyes, as it is about children who assume their parents are blind. In a particularly telling scene, the film’s teenage protagonist Dean Stiffle (Jamie Bell) tries to discreetly inform Terri Bratley that her son has been kidnapped. He twice tries to tell her. The first time he asks Mrs Bratley whether her son is in, trying to make her look for him. The second time he asks her whether she can say goodbye to Charlie for him, again suggesting she has a look. The first time she simply refrains from answering (as if she is aware that Charlie is not in but does not want to admit it); the second time she answers but absently, as if her mind is already elsewhere. When he subsequently tries to tell her partner, the Mayor Michael Ebbs (Ralph Fiennes), the latter’s thoughts too soon drift off elsewhere. Dean tries to open the adults’ eyes to reality, but they are either not willing or not able to sacrifice the pleasure principle: Terri is not willing to sacrifice the wedding she has been planning for months; Michael is not able to sacrifice his feelings of peace and tranquillity. Interestingly, many teen films juxtapose this childish behaviour by the adults with remarkably adult conduct by the actual children. Of course, one can only distinguish one from the other if one takes into account questions of performativity. For what defines ‘adult’ behaviour, and what identifies ‘childlike’ behaviour? Both categories are discursive, and change depending on culture, genre, time and space. But for argument’s sake I will suggest, for now, that adult behaviour is characterised by thoughtfulness, carefulness, responsibility and what one might call an understanding of the ways of the world; whereas childlike conduct tends to be characterised, on the contrary, by instinctiveness, carelessness, a lack of responsibility and a certain naivety when it comes to the ways the world works.10 The teenagers in Chumbscrubber, Brick and Alpha Dog are surprisingly mature in this regard. Brick’s The Pin (Lukas Haas) and Alpha

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t he s ub urb a s l ive d s p a c e 139 Dog’s Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) run cohesive criminal empires, organise corporate takeovers and order hits. In Chumscrubber, Billy (Justin Chaplin), Crystal (Camilla Belle) and Lee (Lou Taylor Pucci) kidnap another child. Importantly, most of these teenagers engage in criminal activities to pursue or protect their political or economic interests, not out of some childish cruelty. Each of the teenagers in these films moreover understands and accepts the consequences and implications of his or her actions. Both Brick’s Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Chumscrubber’s Dean take their physical hardship with a remarkable stoicism: they knew it was coming, and they accept it for what it is. And each of the teenagers is able and willing to manipulate structures, phenomena and people to his or her advantage at the cost of others. The Pin and Johnny Truelove are willing to sacrifice their musclemen, Brick’s femme fatale Laura (Nora Zehetner) is willing to sacrifice her love interest, and Brendan realises he might have to sacrifice his own life. The films make particular use of the cinematic apparatus to articulate the reversed relationship between parents and children. In Chumscrubber, the parents are consistently shot from high angles, while the teenagers tend to be shot from low angles. If the former strategy makes the parents look less commanding, the latter manoeuvre makes the children appear more imposing. The above-discussed scene in which Dean tries to inform the Bratleys that their son has been kidnapped is once again exemplary. In the scene’s final shots, Terri is on her hands and knees to clean up the red wine Michael clumsily spilled (Figure 5.1). Her hair is messy, her face red, and her breathing irregular. Dean, on the contrary, stands up straight. He looks relaxed. His facial expression is subtly balanced between confusion and contempt (Figure 5.2). Although Terri’s stern tone of voice may indicate parental authority, that authority is undercut

Figure 5.1  Chumscrubber. Terri looks up to Dean, her face tense, her body language submissive . . .

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Figure 5.2  . . . while Dean, at ease, bemusedly looks down at Terri.

each time she raises up her head to look up at Dean – or, conversely, when Dean lowers his to look down at her. The shots intimate that the parents play house and the children play along, but in reality have already outgrown the game. The film even explicitly plays with this reversal when Dean later talks to his mother (Allison Janney) about responsibility: Mrs Stiffle: I wonder what that would be like. If we could just switch roles and you could be the parent and I could be the child and you could tell me what to do and I would listen to you and I would trust you. Dean: Are you OK, mom? Mrs. Stiffle: I’m supposed to be making a casserole right now for Troy’s memorial. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I guess my energy levels are just really low right now . . . [laughs hysterically]

Mrs Stiffle wonders what it would be like if she and Dean could switch roles. But both the plot and the mise-en-scène at this point suggest that this switch has already taken place. Dean’s problems far outweigh his mother’s issues at this point in time. He has to prevent a boy from getting murdered whilst coming to terms with his best friend’s suicide, while the only thing she has to do is to bring a casserole to that best friend’s funeral.11 Yet he is the one consoling her. And throughout the scene Dean is filmed from below, looking down at his mother, while his mother is filmed from above, looking up to her son. One might further suggest, but perhaps this would be stretching the point, that Dean is associated with culture and the material reality, while his mother resembles a sort of state of innocence or ignorance. Dean is wearing a cream shirt and anthracite grey tee-shirt, matching the creams, dark greys and dark browns of the houses he is standing in front of. Mrs Stiffle, on the other hand, is wearing

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a light green dress corresponding with the greens of the bushes behind her. In Brick, the most obvious signifier of the teenagers’ early adulthood is their use of language. It is something of a truism that teenagers on the silver screen tend to speak far above their age. As Tai (Brittany Murphy) remarks to Cher (Alicia Silverstone) and Dionne (Stacey Dash) in Clueless (Heckerling, 1995): ‘Wow, you guys talk like grown-ups!’ Yet in Brick, they also speak beyond their era (I will explain shortly what precisely I mean by this). The following conversation, which takes place towards the end of the film, is exemplary: The Pin: I want full assurance that any heat from Emily and Dode is on just you. I don’t even want my name put into this shindig. Second, you owe me six C’s. No rush, but I want your shake that they’ll be home in not too much time. Brandon: That’s square. You did ’em after all. Lay low [and] it’ll blow over. Stick on this [and] one of you will dish it to bury the other [and] you both get the rap. As for the six, did you borrow it? Tugger: Yeah. Brandon: Then you owe it. You shouldn’t need to shake on that. Tugger: Alright to both. Brandon: Good. Let’s seal it up and blow for keeps.

In this scene, the film’s protagonist Brandon tries to patch things up between the teenage drug lord The Pin and his muscle boy Tugger (Noah Fleiss). Over the past few weeks, The Pin’s empire has been endangered by a number of killings and a badly cut brick of heroine. He suspects Tugger. Tugger, on the other hand, feels vengeful for being left out of a deal. Brandon’s attempt to reconcile the two is not merely an attempt to prevent an innocent brawl from getting out of hand; it is an attempt to avoid a gang war becoming a massacre. I will return to their particular use of hard-boiled language shortly, but let me first briefly describe the scene further in terms of its visual style. The scene is set in a dark, enclosed cellar, enacted by characters wearing suits, canes and guns, and involves tense negotiations about thousands of dollars, kilos of drugs and numerous murders. In many senses, it has less in common with a teen film than with a gangster film. Indeed, as has been well documented,12 Rian Johnson’s film fuses the high-school drama with film noir. On the one hand, Brick is set in the low-rise residential neighbourhood, the high school and the front yard, and invites the viewer into the house parties that have become such a commonplace in many teen films. Yet on the other hand, its colours are as subdued, its hues as predominantly grey, its spaces as dimly lit, narrow and empty, and its

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characters as cold, calculated, tormented and unpredictably violent as in many a film noir. And if it includes the vice principal, the football squad and the cheerleaders, the geeks and the freaks, it also features a young Philip Marlowe, an adolescent mobster, a teenage version of the muscleman and an equally young variation on the femme fatale. Brick prints film noir onto high-school drama celluloid without exhausting either of them. Its outlines are still the outlines of the high-school movie, but they are coloured in with noir ink. A McMansion is at once recognisable as McMansion, and as all-night bar; the vice principal is still the vice principal, but he is also a political police commissioner; the most popular girl in class is also the femme fatale; and the loner turns into Sam Spade without forfeiting his status as high-school outcast. I will here focus primarily on the film’s appropriation of the verbal language associated with noir’s generic a­ ffiliate: hard-boiled fiction. Words like ‘shindig’ and ‘square’, and phrases like ‘stick on this’, ‘get the rap’, and ‘blow for keeps’ are, as far as I am aware, not, or no longer, part of the everyday vernacular. Neither are words like ‘bull’ (police), ‘pill’ (oddball), ‘sap’ (fool), ‘kid’, ‘powder’ (leave) or phrases like ‘keep your specs peeled’ (stay on the look out), ‘knives in my eyes’ (ill), ‘I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night so that puts me six up on the lot of you’, ‘if you are behind me I’d have to tie one eye up watching both of your hands’ and ‘you’ve been sniffing me up before then . . . Sniffing like a vampire bat from a horse with a nick on its ear that he can suck on.’ One might assume that these words and phrases are part of a particular slang. By slang I mean the informal, often social critical re-appropriation of speech and semiotics by a specific group of people, a re-appropriation that makes up the identity of that group of people and that is not necessarily comprehensible by other people.13 Much has been written about the particular vernacular adopted by the teenagers living in the Parisian banlieues,14 but many American adolescents too employ an idiom that differs from that of their parents, and/or from that of other adolescents.15 The linguist Teresa Labov has studied the use of slang among American teenagers. Some words, like ‘dude’, ‘chill out’, ‘cool’ and ‘bummer’, will be known to all English-speaking teenagers alike. Other words might be familiar only to teenagers from a certain state, province, neighbourhood, class, ethnicity or gender. Labov points out, for instance, that suburban teenagers are much more likely to know words like ‘jock’, ‘pothead’, and ‘za’ (pizza) than adolescents living in cities (or, perhaps, small towns); and that teenagers enrolled at private schools will be more familiar with the words ‘dweeb’ and ‘hammered’ than those studying at public schools. She also indicates that words like ‘schlep’, ‘burnout’ and ‘homie’ are highly

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racialised, with the first two primarily used by Anglo-Saxon Americans, and the last by African Americans; while other words like ‘clutch’ and ‘squid’ tend to be gendered.16 Slang functions as an identifier. But it identifies by differentiating; by including those who speak it and excluding those whose ears are not adapted to it. In Brick, slang functions as an identifier too. It functions as an identifier on two levels: what one may call a ‘diegetic’ level and what I will call the ‘intertextual’ level. On the diegetic level, slang informs the plot, that is to say, it has a function within the diegesis. The Pin’s gang uses its own language which is incomprehensible to outsiders. It is a language in which ‘The Pin’ means criminal mastermind, Tugger is the name of the muscle boy, specific drawings refer to specific meeting places, and brick equals heroin. At the beginning of the film, the meaning of these words is unclear to Brendan (as it will be to the audience). He mistakenly thinks that tug is a drink (‘like milk and vodka, or something’), and believes that a brick is a stone. Brendan needs to acquire The Pin’s language, and learn that Tug is the name of a person and not a drink, in order to solve the crime (and for the audience to make sense of the plot). On a diegetic level, slang informs the plot, which in turn influences one’s understanding of the plotted world. On an intertextual level, on the contrary, slang influences one’s understanding of the fictional world, and, subsequently, informs one’s understanding of the narrative that stems from that world. In the former, slang is what one may call ‘particular’; in the latter it is ‘universal’. That is to say, the former slang is a language the viewer might not yet understand but whose function is clear. The latter slang one already comprehends (provided one has read or heard of hard-boiled novels) but is unclear about its function. What is interesting, however, is that neither the ‘universal’ slang nor the ‘particular’ slang corresponds to the vernacular used in other teen films. To my knowledge, few recent teen films use words like shindig and sap, let alone phrases like ‘You’ve been sniffing me up before then . . . Sniffing like a vampire bat from a horse with a nick on its ear that he can suck on.’ On the other hand, Brick notably underuses words often employed in many other teen films, such as ‘dude’, ‘cool’ and ‘chill out’. Indeed, Brick’s slang is not based on either an actual West Coast or San Clemente (where the film was both shot and set) teenage slang, nor on any particular teen film vernacular. It is based instead on the writing style of Dashiell Hammett. Far from being an author of teen fiction, Hammett is known primarily for his works of hard-boiled fiction. His writing, which includes The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1933), is replete with words like sap, dame and kid, with wisecracks and sharp-tongued

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phrases such as ‘The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter’17 and ‘I’m a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it’s not the natural thing.’18 Like Brick’s slang, his style is at once rational, distant and clear, and fraught with raw, barely suppressed emotion; simultaneously observant and immersive. To my mind, Brick’s imitation of Hammett’s style has at least four implications. First, Hammett’s slang pertains to adults. It is intended to be spoken by adults. A character like the Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade is about forty years old, while The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora are middle-aged. By imitating Hammett’s style thus, Brick makes the teenage characters seem older than they are. Second, Hammett’s slang evokes what some might call a more ‘mature’ understanding of the world. Sam Spade believes that the world is both immoral and indifferent. Yet this belief stems from years of experience. As the hard-boiled novelist Raymond Chandler put it in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Hammett’s detective ‘talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness’.19 By imitating Hammett’s style, the film thus also makes its teenage characters seem more mature than they are. Third, Hammett’s slang evokes a quick-paced, unbalanced, unpredictable and, above all, urban world. His hangouts are the all-night bar, the illegal gambling joint and the back alley. Here, Brick implies that the suburban high school is as rife with danger as the urban, hardboiled universe. And fourth, Hammett’s slang invokes a past era. Most of Hammett’s novels and short stories were written and set in the 1920s and 1930s. Brick thus puts words in the mouths of contemporary teenagers that are ancient to them. Here, finally, the film sets its story in a present of the past. In each of these ways, Brick bestows upon its characters a wisdom, relational understanding and experience that makes them seem mature far beyond their age. In contrast, the few adults that play a part in the film seem significantly less mature. The one parent that the film features seems especially childish. She speaks in a language that betrays no particular day or age, and no awareness of the nature of the world around her. At one point in the film Brendan, The Pin and Tugger have breakfast at The Pin’s home. Brendan looks scruffy and physically drained. He has not slept for days and has been severely beaten up by Tugger the night before. The Pin’s mother (Reedy Gibbs) makes them breakfast. Pin’s mother: I thought we had orange juice Brendan, I’m sorry. What about tang? No, that’s more like soda isn’t it.

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the s ub urb a s l ive d s pa c e 145 Brendan: Water’s fine Ma-am, thanks. Pin’s mother: Oh . . . [pitches her voice as if speaking to a little child] wait a minute. We have apple juice here, if you like that. Or we have milk. But you’re having that on your cornflakes . . . Apple juice sounds terrific. Brendan: Pin’s mother: It’s country style. That’s perfect. Brendan: Pin’s mother: And I’ll even give it to you in a little country glass. How about that?

The Pin’s mother uses simple, straightforward, even silly language. In addition, she employs that language for trivialities only. She speaks about milk and cookies, cereals and orange juice, but never once refers to the bloodstains on Brendan’s clothes or the scratches on his face. Brendan instantly simplifies and universalises his speech accordingly: ‘Water’s fine ma-am’, ‘Apple juice sounds terrific’. The film’s exclusive slang is exchanged here for the kind of open, all-inclusive vernacular one might associate with 1950s in-show advertisements (indeed, it reminds me as much of June Beaver or Margaret Anderson’s easy solutions for their families’ woes, as of Laura Linney’s desperate attempt to calm Jim Carrey down with product placements in The Truman Show). Reality is suspended for disavowal. In both Brick and Chumscrubber, the adults are portrayed as children, while the children are imbued with a wisdom and perceptiveness far beyond their age.

From the Grid to the Grit Brick and Chumscrubber each present the suburb primarily in terms of what Karl Mannheim might have called a generational divide,20 in terms of a seemingly irresolvable tension between adults with one particular outlook on life and their adolescent children with another. Alpha Dog, as I will go on to show shortly, too, explicitly plays out the generational divide. The films present this divide as the division between disavowal and knowingness, between an inability to cope and the ability to care. Crucially, in each of the films, this distinction is both illustrated by and rooted in a spatial divide: between a sense of placelessness on the one hand, and a being-in-the-world on the other. In Brick and Alpha Dog, for instance, adults are consistently portrayed within spaces. That is to say, they are never portrayed in between spaces, journeying from one space to the other. The two adults depicted in Brick are respectively bound to an open kitchen, and a cold and narrow, vice principal’s office. In Alpha Dog, the adults are tied, respectively, to a restaurant, a baseball pitch, an office and their various homes. To be sure,

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I do not wish to suggest that adults do not move. But crucially, the viewer does not see them move. Interestingly, the films often insinuate that the adults do not inhabit these places voluntarily, but are trapped within them. Alpha Dog repeatedly depicts the adults behind bars for instance. Early on in the film, Johnny Truelove meets his father Sonny (Bruce Willis) at the baseball pitch. As Johnny makes his way towards the field, the film cuts to shotreverse-shot close-ups of Johnny and Sonny in which they are separated by a fence. As the film cuts from one close-up to the next, the characters’ faces are each obscured by the fence. Johnny, however, is set against an open background, in which his car is clearly visible. It implies he can leave whenever he wants. His father, on the other hand, is set against a closed background, in which yet another fence can be seen. He is enclosed by the fence on all sides. Indeed, the scene ends with a shot of Johnny leaving while his father watches him leave from behind the fence. This sense of entrapment is enhanced moreover by Willis’s iconographic posturing (he is known for his action flicks but might also be remembered as the imprisoned thief Hudson Hawk). He hangs against the fence, hands clenched around it, whispering, evoking conventional prison shots. Later on in the film, the Mazurskys are portrayed as entrapped. The film splits the screen between a long shot and a medium close-up of the Mazursky house. Both shots centre around the picture window. In each, the focus lies with the bars by which the window is vertically and horizontally framed and partitioned. In each, Butch (David Thornton) and Olivia Mazursky (Sharon Stone) can be seen absent-mindedly, formally, embracing one another. In the long shot they are seen from afar, in the medium close-up from up close. Butch and Olivia look worried. Olivia tearfully stares into the distance. She drinks a whisky. When Butch tries to console her, she pulls away. On the soundtrack, David Bowie’s version of the Nina Simone song ‘Wild is the wind’ plays. It echoes the lines: ‘Let me fly away with you – for my love is like the wind – and wild is the wind’. At this point in the film, their son Zack (Anton Yelchin) has been reported missing, but has not yet been found dead. His brother Jake (Ben Foster) is going around town looking for him. Remarkably, however, his parents remain inside. The soundtrack suggests that they would like nothing more than to go out as well, ‘fly away’, like ‘the wind’. Yet the bars imply that they cannot. The long shot emphasises that passive inability, the stillness of the house, the bars and them. The close-up registers the repressed anger and helplessness (the inability to connect, the stare, the tears, the whiskey) that stem from it. They are entrapped in their house against their will. In contrast, most of the teenagers are portrayed across the whole spatial

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t he s ub urb a s l ive d s p a c e 147 spectrum: in spaces, between spaces, and so on. Johnny Truelove is as often depicted in his house as in his car, driving from meet-up to trade-off. Indeed, the teenagers’ mobility is an essential part of their lifestyle. Johnny and his friends kidnap Zack Mazursky while driving around aimlessly in their van, and they hide him from the police by moving him around from one house to the next. Ultimately, Johnny escapes the police by leaving for Paraguay. In Chumscrubber too, the kidnappers move Charlie around between houses. (Of course, the mere detail that none of the parents seems to realise, or realises but not want to admit, that their children have kidnapped a young boy and are hiding him in their house is yet another indicator of the adults’ childlike ignorance or disavowal.) The characters in Brick are particularly mobile. Brendan, for instance, moves across all social and spatial strata: he moves from the affluent districts to the run-down neighbourhoods, from sandy shores to concrete high ways, across strip mall and parking lot, diner and coffee shop, football pitch and library, McMansion and bungalow, bedroom and kitchen, cellar and sewer. He inhabits at least five different houses, drives around in four different cars (once driving himself, once seated in front, once seated in the back, and once lying in the trunk), and uses phone booths, home phones and mobile phones to place calls. One might be tempted to compare Brick’s geographical wealth with the topographical riches of Happiness which I discussed in Chapter 2. Or one might be tempted to compare it with the ferocious spatial exchange I argued, in Chapter 3, to be characteristic of The Simpsons. Each of these texts, after all, utilises a great variety of locations. Yet whereas Brick posits ties between the various sites, Happiness and The Simpsons problematise the links between places. Happiness never shows the journey from one place to the other, and the few times it does, it renders it desolate and destructive. In The Simpsons, buildings change place so often that even if the show would show the journey between places, it would be of little to no significance to one’s understanding of Springfield’s spatial relations. The difference between Brick, Happiness and The Simpsons can partly be explained by the texts’ various narrative structures. Brick’s plot is enacted by a single character and is guided by a well-defined purpose. Happiness and The Simpsons are ensemble pieces that, for the most part, lack such a clearly delineated principle. Brendan, for instance, simply wants to find Emily’s killer. The characters in Happiness and The Simpsons, on the other hand, are looking for the much less tangible idea of happiness. Similarly, Brendan navigates space with a clear idea of where he wants to go. The Maplewoods, the Jordans and the Simpsons do not even know where to begin (and, indeed, should better not begin at all).

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Brick often depicts its characters in between places. Sometimes they are on the way from one place to another, making a journey, connecting the various places. Other times they simply ‘hang around’. Among the non-places (I will discuss this in more detail shortly) frequented by Brendan, Dode and the other teenagers are a number of cars, a phone booth next to a highway, two parking lots, and the schoolyard, patio and corridors. None of those spaces is intended for prolonged use, yet each of them is used extensively. (In contrast, the one place intended for lengthy stays, Brendan’s bedroom, is only visited briefly. Interestingly, Brendan is restless that whole time, looking at his alarm, his watch, absent-mindedly playing a game on his Gameboy.) Brendan variously encounters the jock Brad Bramish (Brian White), the muscle boy Tugger, and ‘hash head’ Dode at parking lots. He also repeatedly meets up with his sidekick Brain (Matt O’Leary) at the school corridors. Indeed, some characters, like Dode and Brain, appear to inhabit these spaces permanently. I will return to Brick’s re-appropriation of these spaces in more detail later on in this chapter. For now it suffices that Brick stresses the significance of these sites for both plot and the social and spatial fabric of the fictional world. In contrast, the few times Happiness is set on the road, the background is either darkened or blurred; and the trip disintegrates the suburb’s social and spatial fabric. I would speculate that the difference between Brick’s plotted trace and Happiness’ plotless map should be understood within a much broader socio-cultural context. As a great number of sociologists and historians have noted, the suburb is where the parents want their children to live.21 It is not necessarily where the children themselves want to live. Presumably, Brendan has not chosen to live in suburbia. It is likelier that his parents have. One may suspect that the Maplewoods, the Jordans and Allen on the other hand have chosen to live in suburbia. Perhaps they have chosen to live in the suburbs because they have always lived there. Perhaps they have chosen to live there because the streets are safe, or because the schools are top-notch, the rents cheap, or the houses grand. The recent ABC show Suburgatory (2011–present) is premised on a father moving his family to the suburbs because he found a condom in his daughter’s drawer. But inevitably these families will have also considered the suburbs because of the cultural discourses surrounding suburbia in general and New Jersey in particular. Critics may ‘love to hate’ it, but for millions of Americans, it is home – not a house, but home.22 The Maplewoods might have associated the suburb with traditional norms and values. Kristina might have associated it with community. Helen Jordan will have liked the idea of hedonism. And Allen will have appreciated the idea of privacy.

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Either way, each of them will have made the conscious decision to move to the suburbs on the basis of the particular image they had of it. Whether one calls this image utopia, the end of History, the American Dream, or simply happiness is beside the point. What is important is that, as I have explained in Chapter 1, it implies one no longer needs to seek any further. It implies that one imagines oneself to have arrived at one’s destination. Where Brendan moves around because he is in search of a truth, the Maplewoods stay put precisely because they are under the mistaken impression that they have already found it. As Vlad’s T-shirt reads: I love NJ. New York may be the city of dreams. But New Jersey is where those dreams supposedly come true. For Brendan, the suburb is what Bachelard called ‘home’: ‘our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word’.23 Brendan’s experience of suburbia is what Relph might call authentic.24 He experiences it as it appears to him. It is, to cite Relph, ‘a direct and genuine experience of the entire complex of the identity of places – not mediated and distorted through a series of quite arbitrary social and intellectual fashions about how that experience should be, nor following stereotyped conventions.’25 Brendan experiences the suburb as a lived space like any other where some neighbourhoods are wealthier than others, where some streets are less safe than others, some squares are more lively than others, and particular corners, shops and rooms in his home evoke particular dreams or memories. The Maplewoods et al., however, experience the suburb inauthentically. They experience it as they believe it should appear to them. They experience the suburb as an imagined space where neighbourhoods, streets and squares all equally symbolise a preconceived image. Indeed, in Happiness, much of the suburbanites’ discontent stems from the discrepancy between what they believe they should experience, and what they are experiencing. I am reminded here of Michel de Certeau’s oft-cited discussion of the urban experience. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau distinguishes between two familiar figures of contemporary city life: the voyeur and the walker. The voyeur, de Certeau asserts, experiences the city as if from an aeroplane, a skyscraper, or as a map, a plan, a panorama or a series of photos. He experiences the city as a totality, as a unified, continuous and coherent whole. He sees it in its entirety, but is not a part of it. The voyeur looks at the city from a detached and disembodied point of view. The walker, on the other hand, de Certeau suggests, experiences the city as he or she drives, rides, walks or traces through it. His experience, indeed, is immersive, embodied and fragmented. He is part of the city, but only experiences it one place at a time.26

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One should be careful, however, not to understand de Certeau’s distinction between the voyeur and the walker simply as a distinction between what one may call total vision and fragmented experience. The voyeur’s view, too, is incomplete, while the experience of the walker betrays surprisingly much coherence and continuity.27 No map represents the whole city. Similarly, as Kevin Lynch has pointed out, people experience the city in terms of relationships rather than individual elements.28 De Certeau intends the figures of the voyeur and the walker not so much as illustrations of distinct scales of vision but as embodiments of distinct epistemological and phenomenological registers. The voyeur perceives the city as place. The walker experiences it as space. The debate about the relationship between place and space is one of the longest running and most intriguing in the history of cultural geography, and deserves (and requires) much more attention than I can possibly offer here.29 For argument’s sake, I will stick with de Certeau’s interpretation of the two concepts for now. De Certeau defines place as ‘an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability’.30 Space, on the other hand, ‘exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables [. . .] space is composed of intersections of mobile elements’.31 For de Certeau, thus, place is stable, while space is movement. In relation to place, he writes, ‘space is like the word when it is spoken’: In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e. a place constituted by a system of signs.32

The voyeur experiences the city as a map of locations, nodes and roads. For the walker, it is a field of past, present and potential experiences, or rather, as I will explain shortly, appropriations: journeys, meetings, memories, dreams. I have found the architectural historian Davide Deriu’s work particularly insightful for concretising the abstract aspects of de Certeau’s book. Although Deriu’s work does not reference de Certeau’s work (just as de Certeau’s work never references the writings of Henri Lefebvre to which he is so obviously indebted), it bears some remarkable resemblances to it. Deriu writes about the historical figure of the planeur, the twentiethcentury aerial photographer, where de Certeau writes about the  theoretical concept of the voyeur. And where de Certeau writes about the practitioner, Deriu speaks of the flâneur, the nineteenth-century scribent of the lowest common ground. Deriu continues:

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t he s ub urb a s l ive d s p a c e 151 The detached and lofty perspective of the planeur marked a significant departure, however, from the experience of the flâneur, who had to be embedded in the city’s texture in order to decipher its traces. The archeological practice of collecting urban data and details was lost to the aerial observer, whose macroscopic gaze was based on a ‘structural’ process of visual recognition. [. . .] With the aid of its technological apparatuses, the aerial gaze performed a progressive reduction of city space into cityscape, whereby the multiple layers of urban physiognomy were reduced to a visual pattern comprehensible at a glance.33

For Deriu, thus, the planeur experienced the city first of all as a representation, a cityscape rather than a lived reality; second, as a structure rather than a diversity of stimuli and sensations and details; third, as a place rather than a space, a prolonged moment instead of a movement; and finally, from a detached, disembodied point of view instead of an immersed, embodied point of departure. Brick and Alpha Dog identify the adult and adolescent experience of the suburb primarily in terms of place and space respectively. The adults do not, or cannot, move. The teenagers, on the contrary, move around freely. Chumscrubber explicitly distinguishes the adult voyeurs and the teenage practitioners from one another in terms of representation and ‘reality’, structure and detail, detachment and immersion, and disembodiment and embodiment, as well. As I have discussed before, Chumscrubber tends to look at adults from high angles, while it observes teenagers from lower angles. In addition, the film also looks at adults through a rather stable, static and detached lens, while it portrays the teenagers through a far more mobile, fluid and immersed lens. The aforementioned scene in which Dean tries to inform Terri Bratley that her son has been kidnapped, and Mayor Ebbs that his stepson is missing, once again proves particularly illustrative here. Earlier on, the film observes Terri as she comes home from work. It carefully watches her as she – in what is clearly a routine – puts down her keys, hangs up her bag, calls out Charlie’s name, straightens some papers, calls out for Charlie again, opens a bottle of wine, calls out for Charlie a third time, takes a glass from the cupboard, and checks on Charlie one final time. Throughout the scene, Terri does not leave the space, and the camera remains in place. It never once moves. It merely zooms out. Later on, however, when Dean comes in to look for Charlie, he moves from space to space. The camera follows him around as he makes his way around the house. It tracks and cuts from mobile pans to over-the-shoulder shots, and from close-ups to point of view shots. The camera only, and instantly, settles again once Dean meets another adult, Michael. One might suggest that Chumscrubber pulls away from Terri merely to

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draw attention to the picture-perfect but impersonal feel of her house. Or one might suggest that the film zooms out simply to indicate that Terri is home alone (that is, Charlie is not there). Or one might suggest that the film zooms out to emphasise Terri’s isolation, estrangement or entrapment. Yet the mere detail that the film consistently – or at least for the first half of the movie, it turns somewhat inconsistent after that – depicts adults through a stable, static, detached and disembodied lens, while it portrays teenagers through a mobile, embodied lens, implies that these choices in mise-en-scène refer less to a momentary situation or sentiment and more to a permanent epistemological disposition. Chumscrubber’s sudden shifts in mise-en-scène (between the adult experience and the teenage experience) carry at least three overlapping implications. They imply, first, that the adults experience the suburb as a totality, but a totality that is, paradoxically, ruptured. By zooming out to the point that all walls except for the fourth wall are in the frame, the film creates the illusion that it shows space in its totality. Yet at the same time it suggests that this totality is ruptured. The camera never turns to expose the other side of the space. It also never once follows Terri as she moves through it. Indeed, at one point it momentarily loses sight of Terri when she leaves the frame. Yet most tellingly, perhaps, is that Terri herself never links the space to another space by moving across or between them. For instance, although she is looking for Charlie, she only looks for him in this space. She at no point looks elsewhere. She does not go upstairs to look for him, nor does she check in the garden. She remains in the one space. At the same time, the ostensibly fragmentary experience of the teenage practitioners turns out to be surprisingly continuous. When Dean comes in, he moves from the hallway to the stairway to the corridor, from bedroom to kitchen to living room. Each of these places differs, if not in look, then at least in layout, social contract and function. The living room, for instance, is an open space, while Charlie’s bedroom is closed; the living room has high ceilings, Charlie’s room has lower ceilings; the living room is wide, the bedroom narrow; the living room is tidy, the bedroom messy; and so on. Similarly, if the living room is a place of daytime, the bedroom belongs to the evening. And if the living room institutionalises the community, the bedroom is intended as a place of privacy. Yet merely by moving from one to the other, by spatialising, that is, by turning the ‘dead’ place of the adults into lived space, Dean nonetheless creates a sense of continuity and coherence between them. Second, the shifts in mise-en-scène imply that the adult world is two-dimensional whereas the teenage experience of the suburb is three-­ dimensional. I intend two-dimensional here in the sense of the voyeur.

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The camera can perceive place, but it cannot practise it, that is to say, it cannot become a part of it. Correspondingly, under three-dimensionality I here understand the spatialisation of the practitioner. In the scene with Terri, the space is made to look two-dimensional in at least three ways. First, the camera is static. It may zoom out but the zoom is steady, and its composition and angle remain the same. Second, the camera is fixed in one position. Although it zooms out, it never changes place. And third, the camera is positioned behind the fourth wall, that is to say, beyond the limits of the set. It may look at the fictional world, but is not a part of it. The scene with Dean produces the contrary effect. Here the mobile camera, the unsteady medium close-ups of Dean’s face, the over-the shoulder shots and the point of view shots all work towards signifying the world as threedimensional. The mobile camera, moving from room to room, creates a sense of spatial depth. The somewhat unsteady medium close-ups create a sense of immediacy and intimacy. The over-the-shoulder shots here create a sense of embodiedness, a sense of being-in-the-world. And the point-of-view shots force the viewer to identify and experience the world from an embodied, tangible perspective. In the images of Terri, the world is a closed, two-dimensional representation; in the shots of Dean, on the contrary, it is an open, three-dimensional, corporeality. And third, closely related to the second, the shifts imply that the adults perceive the suburb from a detached, disembodied point of view, while the teenagers are immersed in the suburb. In the scene with Terri, the camera looks at the world from a distance, from a disembodied position. Terri lives in suburbia but never becomes a part of it. She experiences it, it is implied, as a series of still images between which there is no connection, or, to return to the vernacular I used earlier to describe Happiness, a series indeed of disjointed places of which the relationship remains not only intangible but also unimaginable. In the scene with Dean, the camera is immersed in the world. He is in every sense a part of this environment. He senses, he feels, the different sensibility that characterises each place, and he is able to relate all the sentiment to one another. I think that it is safe to say that in Brick, Chumscrubber and Alpha Dog, the representation of the adult experience of suburbia resonates with that portrayed in many other films and television series set in suburbia. The Truman Show, Pleasantville and, in a different sense, The Simpsons and King of the Hill, play with the concept of the hermetically closed, twodimensional world. Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane is at once signified as a spectacle and a panopticon. In Far From Heaven, Revolutionary Road and Mad Men, the characters are entrapped within their homes. And in Happiness, Storytelling and American Beauty, the characters are

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disaffected and disembodied, they have trouble emotionally connecting to the spaces they inhabit. Each of these representations moreover is tied up to a greater or lesser extent with the notion of the end of History. Each is caught, both on the level of the text and the level of the diegesis, between chromos and kainos, between time as plot (structured and finite) and time as place (unordered and infinite). Brick, Chumscrubber and Alpha Dog, however, portray the teenage experience of the suburb as three-dimensional, affected and embodied. I would argue, precipitately, that the same can be said for a substantial number of teen films, from a sex comedy like American Pie to dramas like SubUrbia and Ghostworld. The teenagers may not like the suburb, but they still experience some sort of innate physical bond and natural understanding with it. What I hope this section has achieved is to show that, contrary to what most critics seem to believe, the suburb is not necessarily an anonymous, uninhabitable place, but can in fact be turned into a space. I will seek to develop this thought further in the next section, concentrating on the distinct ways in which Brick in particular transforms non-place into lived space.

Traces of Vitality Whatever traces of vitality remained would have a wasteland as their only refuge. Henri Lefebvre34

I would suggest that teen films, or at least the teen films under discussion here, explore possibilities for rendering the suburb a lived place. Now, I do not wish to suggest that some of the films and television programmes I have discussed before did not also present the suburb, or parts of the suburb, or moments in the suburb, as lived spaces, but Brick and Chumscrubber especially are actively seeking to make the suburb as a whole a place that is complex, thick and affective. It is my argument that these films transform the suburb into a lived space by re-appropriating precisely those kinds of spaces that were intended to be simple, thin, and impersonal: wastelands, derelict houses, phone booths, and in other films strip malls and gas stations. In other words: non-places. I should say a few words here about my decision to introduce Marc Augé’s concept of non-place only now, at the closing pages, the final argument indeed, of this book. I imagine that my deferral of such an account might have caused surprise or even dismay. After all, in most studies of both fictional and actual suburbia, the concept of the non-place appears to be the first tool at hand to describe the particular, or, rather, the not so

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t he s ub urb a s l ive d s p a c e 155 particular spatiality at work. Beuka, for instance, immediately introduces non-place in the first pages of the introduction to his book-length study of suburban fiction and film, as one of the structuring principles of the suburban experience.35 The reason that I have not introduced this concept earlier is as simple as it is telling: I have thus far felt that other concepts have been more useful to explain the films and television programmes’ aesthetic and poetic tendencies. I do certainly not want to suggest that the non-place cannot be a useful concept in accounting for certain moments in Happiness or The Simpsons, but I have found other related but distinctly different concepts such as foam, abstract space, placelessness and interiority more helpful in my overall consideration of suburban narratives. For de Certeau, as I have explained above, place is above all a geographical and geometrical position. It is a street, or a corner, or a shop, or a house. His erstwhile student Augé, on the other hand, asserts that place is, first and foremost, anthropological, that is, ‘formed by individual identities, through complicities of language, local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how’.36 In his discourse, place is a street, corner, and so on in which a complex constellation of past, present and potential ­identities, interactions and histories is always already included. Interestingly, Augé and de Certeau both contrast place to what is translated respectively as non-place and nowhere, but in French both read as non-lieu. De Certeau conceptualises the nowhere above all in terms of representation. He defines non-place as a place that can no longer be spatialised for and in itself but only through its representation: through a powerful myth, story or metaphor, an expressive description, an evocative label, or a suggestive street name. If one visits New York, for example, one will look for an predetermined and therefore exhaustive experience (the ‘energy’, the ‘creativity’, the ‘fashion’, the ‘hotdog’, and so on) that is specific to representations of New York rather than New York itself, instead of experiencing the place as and how one is experiencing it. Indeed, a nonplace is a place that is, to adopt de Certeau’s Barthesian descriptions for it, ‘emptied-out’ and ‘worn away’ by representation.37 Augé, on the other hand, understands non-places – and this is as pivotal to an understanding of the concept as it is often overlooked – exclusively in terms of simulation. For Augé, a non-place is a place that was never meant to be practised for or in its variety of relational, local and historical meanings, but was always intended to be experienced through its simulation. As he explains: ‘Clearly the word “non-place” designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces.’38 The first reality Augé refers to here is that non-places are

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conceived of with a number of particular purposes in mind. An airport, for instance, is built as a transit, a lounge, a waiting room and, increasingly, a shopping centre. The second reality Augé points to is that these nonplaces produce a non-experience. Non-places such as airports, shopping malls, hotel rooms, and gas stations both lack a genius loci and prohibit their users from imbuing them with one. Instead, they provide fleeting, shared identities: the moment one enters an airport, one is a client, when one comes in to a shopping mall, one is a customer, hotel room, a guest, and so on. As Augé puts it: ‘[i]f a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.’39 A common strategy across ‘adult’ films and television programmes set in suburbia is to present the kinds of places often thought of as spaces as non-places. In films as varied as SAFE, Happiness and American Beauty, houses are depicted as nondescript, distant places, stripped of all personality or history. Interestingly, in the process, they frequently, consciously or unconsciously, absent the kinds of places that tend to be thought of as non-places, whether they are Augé’s simulations (gas stations, shopping malls), nomadic spaces, liminal spaces and/or marginal spaces (such as barren plots of land, street corners, alleys, corridors and desolate or deserted homes). In these films, thus, the non-place is paradoxically at once metaphorically everywhere yet literally nowhere. The subversive tactic employed by many teen films, in particular the teen films I have discussed, is to present – and problematise – these nonplaces. Teen films from American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973) to American Pie (Weitz, 1999), from SubUrbia (Linklater, 1996) to Over the Edge (Kaplan, 1979), and from Clerks (Smith, 1994) to the films under discussion here, play out most of their most crucial scenes on barren plots of land, motorways, in gas stations, shopping malls and high-school corridors. In what follows, I argue that whereas ‘adult’ films and series present places as nonplaces, teen films instead open up the possibility for presenting non-places as places. It is something of a popular cliché that teenagers hang around in nonplaces – yet one vindicated by most sociological and anthropological studies. Teenagers loiter in shopping malls. They linger at gas stations. They ‘slack’ around at bus stops. They stand around on street corners. They lounge around in parks. The Dutch language even has a word for it, hangjongeren, ‘hang youth’. Some geographers, sociologists and anthropologists argue that teenagers hang around in these non-places reluctantly. Jens Qvortrup et al. assert, for example, that teenagers loiter at gas stations and parks simply because they not allowed to congregate elsewhere.40 But

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many argue that teenagers linger around these places of their own accord. Most contend that they linger there primarily because these places tend to lack strict societal order, parental control and predetermined behavioural rules. The sociologist Herb Childress, for instance, asserts that teenagers slack around in these non-places simply because they elude adult interference.41 In similar vein, Hugh Matthews et al. point out that roadsides and street corners are the only places free from the gaze of the parents.42 Either way, the teenagers’ re-appropriation of these sites should be read as an act of resistance, an act of resistance, moreover, that is always in danger of being policed. As, again, Matthews et al. put it, [w]e use the term ‘the street’ as a metaphor for all public outdoor places where children are found, such as roads, cul-de-sacs, alleyways, walkways, shopping areas, car parks, vacant plots and derelict sites. [. . .] To young people the street constitutes an important cultural setting, a lived space, where they can affirm their own identity and celebrate their feelings of belonging. In essence, these places are ‘won out’ from the fabric of adult society, but are always in constant threat of being reclaimed.43

The teen film meanders between the two points of view. In films like The Outsiders (Coppola, 1983) and Over the Edge (Kaplan, 1979), the teenagers are more or less banished to the barren, underdeveloped sites on the edge of town. In The Outsiders, Johnny (Ralph Macchio) and Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell) are on the run from the authorities. They hide in a derelict church on the edge of town. In Over the Edge, a group of teenagers are forced out of the youth centre by suburban redevelopment. They find solace in an abandoned prefab (both instances are direct references, of course, to the empty house in Rebel Without a Cause). In films like SubUrbia, Ghostworld, Spike Jonze’s recent short film Scenes from the Suburbs (2011) and most of the films under discussion here, on the other hand, the teenagers seem to seek out the non-places themselves. In SubUrbia, for instance, the teenagers choose to hang out at the parking lot next to the 7-Eleven each evening (perhaps because they feel free to use drugs there). Similarly, in Ghostworld, Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) choose to spend their holidays at street corners, bus stops and garage sales. And in Brick, as far as we know, Brendan, Brain and Dode choose to botanise on the asphalt and concrete around their school. The teenagers’ use of these non-places is not always uncontested. After all, as Kevin Hetherington has showed, alternative geographies are not anarchic; they are just guided by different rules.44 In some films, like SubUrbia or Over the Edge, the teens’ use of a parking lot and a plot of barren land respectively lead ultimately to tragedy. In SubUrbia, for

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instance, the claim of a number of teenagers to the parking lot of the Circle A convenience story is disputed by the owner of the store (Ajai Nadu). Indeed, much of the film deals with the increasingly intimidating and unpredictable arguments between the teenagers and the storeowner. Ultimately, they are each so eager for use of or control over the nonplace that one of the teenagers, Tim (Nicky Katt), and the storeowner both resort to violence. In Over the Edge, the argument over the right to space escalates to the point of the death of both the teenager Richie (Matt Dillon) and the police officer Sergeant Doberman (Harry Northup). In the films where the use of non-places is, to a larger or lesser extent, uncontested, this is simply because the teenagers use spaces that the parents, in line with the argument of Matthews et al., cannot see. The adult authorities in Pleasantville cannot see beyond the centre of town, the Mazurskys in Alpha Dog cannot see past their porch, and in Brick The Pin’s mother cannot even seem to see the cellar in her own house. What is interesting is that in neither SubUrbia nor Over the Edge is the teenagers’ claim to place a claim to ownership or full control. They merely want to use it. The teenagers in SubUrbia, for instance, do not want to live on the parking lot behind the Circle A convenience store, they just want to spend some time there. The reason that they cannot use it is because the adult authorities do think in terms of ownership. The shopkeeper in SubUrbia understandably feels entitled to decide who can and cannot enter his property. Similarly, the town magistrates in Over the Edge are legally in the right to assert their power over the land that is theirs. The conflict between the teenagers and the adults here is not merely a conflict about space, but, again, about two different ways of experiencing non-place. It is a conflict between the embodied practice of place and the disembodied vision of it. Childress interestingly compares the spatial experience of teenagers to the territorial behaviour of hunters and gatherers described by the ethnologist Tim Ingold in his canonical work The Appropriation of Nature. In contrast, he compares the adult ‘platial’ experience to the tenure of farmers. Hunters and gatherers roam around space in search of food. Farmers settle down in one place in order to find it. He cites Ingold: territorial behavior is basically a mode of communication, serving to convey information about the location of individuals dispersed in space. By contrast . . . [sic] tenure is a mode of appropriation, by which persons exert claims over resources dispersed in space.45

Childress suggests that teenagers stray around town in search of a party, a fight, sex or solitude. Adults, on the contrary, tend to stay in their homes

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in order to find these vices and virtues. One might cautiously say that the former derive their identity from their spatial practice, whereas the latter derive their self-image from their property rights. If I thus speak about the ways in which teenagers re-appropriate nonplaces, I do not necessarily mean to say that teenagers own or completely control that non-place. Indeed, few of the teenagers in film ever own a place. At the most they ‘poach’ it.46 In Brick, for instance, Brendan spends his nights at the house of Tugger’s parents or The Pin’s mother. Similarly, in any number of films, from The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 1999) to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Hughes, 1986), the teenagers borrow the car of one of their (friends’) parents. When I talk about the ways in which teenagers re-appropriate non-places, I rather intend to say that teenagers make the non-place their own. One might think here of the re-appropriation of physical attributes, such as graffiti or (creative) vandalism. As Childress puts it: ‘Markings of public space such as graffiti are in part a marking of the kids’ interior environment [. . .] The outside wall of an abandoned store or second-floor parapet is the inside of some kid’s lived space’.47 But one should also think of less tangible signs of sense of place, such as displays of intimacy or the sharing of secrets. Brick spends most of its time in non-places. To name a few: the parking lot behind the Coffee and Pie, Oh My! diner, the public phone booth at the corner of Sarmentoso and Camino del Rio, a number of cars, the school corridors, the cellar in the house of The Pin’s mother, and the sewer pipe. It creates a genius loci in each of these non-places. Yet it creates that sense of place differently in each individual space. It turns the cellar into a space by means of power relations, the re-appropriation of physical attributes and music. It turns the parking lot into a space through the establishment of community. The sewer pipe turns into a space primarily through its uncanniness. And the phone booth is turned into a space via narrative. I will discuss a number of these strategies in some detail, for each draws attention to another method of spatial re-appropriation. At first sight, the phone booth looks like a caricature of the non-place. It is located at the edge of a deserted highway, it lacks any marker of locality or history (although one might say it is a reminder of the pre-cellular era), it lacks any sign of personality, it is made entirely from glass, ostensibly precluding the possibility of intimacy, let alone secrecy, and it is intended for fleeting conversations with absent others. Yet the film turns it into something akin to a place through a number of narrative choices. It turns the phone booth into a place first and foremost by imbuing it with what one might call a narrative presence. The film features a phone booth exactly five times: once at the very beginning, three times halfway

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through, and once towards the end. In addition, it twice features other public pay phones. The mere detail that public phones are featured so frequently already indicates that they serve as a central place. They are a point on the map, a point of reference for both the film and the teenagers (indeed, the teenagers have meetings there) as opposed to a positionless position. Indeed, one may suggest that Brick’s narrative is structured around the locale of the phone booth. The first time it features the booth is the moment it initiates the plot’s mystery or enigma. In this scene, Emily tells Brendan she is in trouble. It is also the moment the audience is first introduced to code words such as ‘Pin’, ‘Tug’, ‘Frisco’ and ‘brick’. The second and the fourth times the film features the phone booth, it establishes the plot’s treacherousness. In these scenes, Brendan and Brain try to unpick, to varying degrees of success, the web of suspects, motives and methods. The third scene in which the phone booth features indicates that the mystery might never be solved. At this point in the film, Dode accuses Brendan of the murder. On the one hand, Dode’s accusation puts Brendan’s own criminal investigation under some strain. On the other hand, it also opens up the possibility for the audience that Brendan is himself the murderer. And the fifth and final time the film is set in the phone booth carries the implication that the mystery is solved. Here Brendan asks Brain to call the police. So the development of the plot is intrinsically linked to the presence of the phone booth. Second, the scenes in the phone booth all establish a surprising degree of interconnectedness, intimacy and/or secrecy. The first scene, the scene that sparks off the film’s plot, establishes at once the perils of the present and the problems of the past. On one level, it determines Emily’s fear for Tugger (an exasperated ‘I think Tug – oh no!’) and demonstrates Brendan’s concern about her (‘Em, why don’t we meet up?’). On another, less explicit but no less palpable level, it suggests Emily’s grief about her split-up with Brendan (a slight and tearful ‘It’s good to see you, Brendan’), while hinting at Brendan’s reservoir of anger and pain (his terse, purposefully distant tone of voice). The second, fourth and fifth scenes establish a high degree of intimacy and trust between Brendan and Brain as Brendan lets the Brain in on his thoughts, and Brain in turn expresses his concern for Brendan’s wellbeing. And the third scene finally establishes a certain amount of secrecy by explicitly voicing the extent to which the phone booth houses a secret: Dode: I know what you did. I was in the tunnel. I saw you hide her. Brendan: Dode . . .

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t he s ub urb a s l ive d s p a c e 161 Dode:  Anyone I’d tell it would ruin you some way. And I’m gonna tell someone. [. . .] I just gotta squawk.

The film’s respective choices in mise-en-scène support this sense of intimacy. Although most of the scenes open with a long shot of the phone booth against the desolate backdrop of the highway, many subsequently pan, zoom or cut to (medium) close-ups of Brendan’s face. In the first scene, for instance, the camera gradually cuts from a long shot of the phone booth to a medium close-up of Brendan’s upper body seen through the glass to an unobscured close-up of his face. In the second scene, the camera gradually zooms in on Brendan’s upper body and face, framing out everything else in the process. The third scene is particularly illustrative here. In this scene, too, the camera slowly zooms in on Brendan’s face. Interestingly, the moment the camera begins to zoom in, Brendan begins to shift around nervously, anxiously looking around him, his eyes twitching, his breathing increasingly heavy. The film thus captures his response to Dode’s accusation not only by portraying in detail his facial expressions, but more vividly still, by literally and overtly framing him, and by having him react to that framing, by making visible his increased feelings of entrapment. In the final two scenes, the film does not pan or zoom, but instead turns the non-place of the phone booth into a place simply by turning it into the only point of visual or aural recognition within the frame. Everything is dark, except for the phone booth, which is lit by a solitary street lamp. In addition, in the fifth scene the viewer’s view of Brendan is problematised by the sudden opening of the trunk of a car. The car is Tugger’s and the trunk has been opening throughout the film. It is significant here, however, because the trunk is loaded with Emily’s dead body. Its inclusion in the shot (front left, taking up a quarter of the frame) and soundtrack (a squeaking sound) thus enhances one’s understanding of this place as secretive: this is the kind of place one would hide a body out in the open without being afraid to be caught. In similar vein, the non-places of the school corridors, back lots and the parking lot behind the Coffee and Pie, Oh My!, too, are turned into places primarily by presenting them as destinations rather than roads to destinations. When Brendan wants to find Dode, he looks for him at the parking lot behind the Coffee and Pie, Oh My! – as opposed to parking his car at the parking lot on his way to school or the house of Dode’s parents. Indeed, the one time he cannot find Dode there, the moment the nonplace of the parking lot is not utilised as place but is simply a non-place, is the moment Brendan begins to worry about Dode’s wellbeing. Similarly,

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Figure 5.3  The parking lot in Brick resembling a living room: a couch to the left, a couch in the middle, with teenagers slouched backwards and relaxed.

Brendan repeatedly meets, and consciously arranges meetings with, Brain and Kyra in school corridors. And Brendan himself, as an apparent act of resistance as well as contemplation, eats his lunches alone in an alley behind the school. Each of these non-places is presented moreover as a site of community, intimacy and at times secrecy. The parking lot behind the Coffee and Pie, Oh My! is a case in point. The scene opens with a low-angle medium long shot envisaging four teenagers slouched against the diner’s walls and trashcans (Figure 5.3). The low wide angle in combination with the teenagers’ relaxed attitude conjures up images of a living room. The scene then cuts to a medium close-up of Dode entering the ‘living room’ from an anterior ‘room’. The living room and the anterior room are separated from one another by two large blue bins, indicating if not a hierarchy, then at least a differentiation in terms of access and function – a compartmentalisation which in itself already intimates personal investment, since it mentally resignifies and reconfigures an otherwise open, uniform non-place. Indeed, if Dode’s ensuing remark ‘Hey Brendan, maybe you shouldn’t be here’ suggests a claim of spatial authority, his subsequent retreat into the anterior room (something of a teenage equivalent of the den) implies a demarcation of a more private sphere as well as an invitation for Brendan to come into that sphere. In addition, although the parking lot itself bears few explicit markers of physical re-appropriation (there is no graffiti, for instance), Dode sits on a stolen groceries cart by way of a chair, and lights up what appears to be a joint almost in the manner Jim

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Anderson might light a pipe. Here the teenagers’ re-appropriation of the back lot thus at once subverts its pre-conceived identity, or non-identity, and with it the logic of the suburb, yet at the same time inscribes it into the dominant discourse of the nuclear family. (Again, the reference to the teens’ re-appropriation of the empty house in Rebel Without a Cause is striking.) The non-places of the school corridors and back lots are less obviously turned into domestic spoofs, yet they too come to be signified as places of community, intimacy and secrecy. Brendan and Brain play detectives there, and it is in a back alley behind the school theatre that Kyra unwittingly ‘spills her beans’ about Dode. Most of the shots taken at these places, moreover, are medium long shots situating the characters within the larger world, intercut with medium close-up en-profil shots allowing the face as much space as the background. On the one hand, these shots draw attention to the ‘publicness’ of the interactions; on the other, by showing that the public space is uninhabited, deserted, desolate, they emphasise their ‘privateness’. Indeed, the shots render the paradox of public privacy so intrinsic to these interactions that if they were to include another character it would feel like intrusion – and doubtlessly trigger a reaction from one of the characters along the lines of ‘What do you want?’ or simply the momentary suspension of an exchange. I wish to finish this concluding discussion by devoting some words to the chronotope of the sewer pipe. In Brick, the sewer pipe appropriately functions as something of an outlet for narrative excess: it is in the sewer pipe that the generic, narrative and spatial transgressions find their logical conclusion in the form of the inevitable murders of Emily and Dode.48 Yet interestingly, the sewer pipe also acquires a less tangible, rather spiritual identity. It takes up the role of the haunted space: it accommodates the film’s narratively incomprehensible, mysteriously soundtracked opening sequence (the plotted lack, the enigma, with which the plot will try to come to terms in the remainder of the film), it appears as an apparition in Brendan’s dreams, and it comes to be associated solely with murder (each scene set in the sewer pipe features a dead body) and, quite literally, dark undercurrents (the repeated emphasis on the darkness of the tunnel as well as the numerous close-ups of the water trickling towards it). A place can only be haunted, as de Certeau points out, once one is able to have some sort of emotional, often historical relationship to it.49 Freud describes the uncanny (das unheimliche), after all, as the familiar turned unfamiliar.50 Indeed, in contrast, whatever horrors the white picket-fenced colonials in Happiness and American Beauty may house, they cannot be haunted simply because their prefabricated homogeneity

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pre-empts any possibility of emotional investment (what Jurca, indeed, terms sentimental dispossession). Brick’s rendering of both the cellar in the house of The Pin’s mother and the sewage pipes near school, finally, illustrate one other elementary aspect of the teenagers’ re-appropriation of non-places, namely that it remains invisible to the adults. The moment Brendan threatens to inform the adults about The Pin’s use of the cellar, Tugger nearly kills him. For it is financially, legally and socially of the utmost importance that the cellar remains a secret. Similarly, The Pin and his crew are so keen to keep their use of the sewage pipes clandestine that they only refer to it by way of a code language: a capital A. The teenagers understand that they can only re-appropriate the non-places by whose disavowal the adult suburb exists if the adults remain blind to it. For the moment the adults find out about these non-places’ potential, the suburban fabric will disintegrate. I should briefly say something, finally, about the film’s geography. As one local critic has noted,51 the film is replete with explicit references to recognisable San Clemente locations and street names: the San Clemente High School, the Pier, T-Street, Bush Street and Vista Blanca. The film opens, for instance, with a close-up of a handwritten note that says ‘12:30: Sarmentoso and Del Rio’, after which it cuts to a close-up of the street sign. The film repeats this strategy a number of times later on. Similarly, a reference to T-street is paired with a scene set on the respective beach, while mere mention of the word library infers an image of the actual library. In the previous chapters, I argued that most suburban films and series can be characterised first by their refusal to relate places to one another, and second, through their lack of a spatial and social centre. Interestingly, Brick both explicitly relates its various locations to one another, and measures each of their relative positions by their respective distance to the high school, which functions as something of a spatial and social centre. The nearness of the high school to the phone booth at Sarmentosa and del Rio,52 for instance, is established when the camera films Brendan while he is running from one to the other. And both the spatial and (imaginary) social distance between the high school and The Pin’s home on Vista Blanca are determined by the relatively long journey and the glimpses of the increasingly rundown houses. Where Happiness presents its viewers with a number of reasonably localisable sites but deprives them of the spatial or social relationships between them, Brick clearly defines their relative positions. Happiness presents the suburb from the experience of the voyeur but with the oversight of the walker: as objective, endless, directionless, i.e. meaningless sprawl. One might argue that Brick, on the

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t he s ub urb a s l ive d s p a c e 165 contrary, endows both its audience and its characters with the tentative or bodily experience of the walker and the oversight of the voyeur. The point is that Brick’s respective re-appropriation of individual non-places as places, and, subsequently, of all places as spaces, is closely connected, is indeed at once constitutive of and consequential to, both the audience and the characters’ sense of the suburb as place, of the suburb as a local, historical, potentially lived space.

Some Concluding Remarks What I have aimed to draw attention to and demonstrate in this chapter are the ways in which three suburban noirs – Brick, Alpha Dog and Chumscrubber – do two things: first, they differentiate the adult experience of the suburb from the teenage experience of the suburb; and second, they turn non-places into lived spaces. With respect to the first, I have argued that the films, to varying degrees and in different ways, use montage (cuts between places), cinematography (static shots), mise-en-scène (still and entrapping frames), plot (lack of understanding) and sound (childish language) to render the adult experience of the suburb disavowing or naive, disembodied, two-dimensional, and seemingly totalising but in fact fragmented, while they present (by means of mobile camera, tracking shots, over-the shoulder shots and point of view shots and hard-boiled language) the teenage experience of the suburb as its opposite: knowing about the ways of the world, responsible, embodied and affective, threedimensional, and seemingly fragmented but in fact surprisingly complete. With respect to the second, the transformation of non-places into lived spaces, I would maintain that these films turn non-places into places by including both non-places and places in their diegesis; by making nonplaces the narrative centre; by showing the relationships between places; by presenting the journey as destination rather than a journey to a destination; by imbuing non-places with a sense of locality, history or mythology; and finally, by having teenagers re-appropriate non-places in that they create communities and intimate spheres there. I think that these strategies are pivotal both in producing the suburb as such as a lived space and in problematising Augé’s notion of the nonplace. Brick, Chumscrubber and Alpha Dog rephrase the audio-visual language of the suburb so as to make sense of the incoherence exposed by films like Happiness and Pleasantville and television programmes such as The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives. I do not think that the strategies these films employ are necessarily either exclusive to the contemporary teen film, or to the genre of the teen film per se. As I have already hinted

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throughout the chapter, older films such as Rebel Without a Cause, The Outsiders and Over the Edge and a television programme like The Wonder Years use similar techniques. Similarly, although I think these strategies are particularly pronounced in the genre of the teen film, I have no reason to believe that they cannot be or are not already employed in other genres as well. I can imagine, for instance, that detailed textual analysis will reveal that, among others, Terrence Malick’s recent Tree of Life (2011), Greenberg (Noah Baumbach, 2010) and a number of melodramas too create an embodied, affective and three-dimensional experience of the suburbs. But that is for another study, and perhaps, another researcher, to find out. What I do think, however, is that the teen film in general, and the three films I have discussed here especially, are particular well attuned to the nuances and possibilities of the suburban vernacular. Teen films are concerned with subjects that are still, whether they like it or not, developing, that are still discovering things about themselves and the world they live in – indeed, that are, like the suburb, ‘in between’ phases. Even in films as postmodernly nihilistic or sarcastic as Crime and Punishment in Suburbia (Schmidt, 2000) or Less than Zero (Kanievska, 1987), the teenage experience is portrayed as a stage rather than a state. For the teenagers, as well as for the viewer, the suburb is a place where the present is always already imbued with the future rather than a past future reduced to a pure present. It is precisely because the suburb is without distinct form – that is, because it lacks a centre, because it lacks differentiation, and because it lacks a distinction between public and private – that the teenagers are able to find a form of their own.

Notes  1. T. Shary, Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 264.   2. T. Shary, Generation Multiplex, p. 3.   3. R. Benjamin, ‘The Sense of an Ending: Youth Apocalypse Films’, Journal of Film and Video 56: 4 (Winter 2004), pp. 34–49.   4. S. Sherwin, ‘Sex. Violence. Whatever’, The Guardian (21 April 2006), Film and Music Section, p. 6.   5. Interestingly, Timothy Shary remarks in Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen, that the 1990s saw a decrease in teen crime movies, perhaps due to the reality of high-school shootings. Teen crime films returned again in the 2000s, however, led by films like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) and Larry Clark’s Bully (2001). See T. Shary, Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 89–90.

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  6. S. Hughes, ‘Humphrey Bogart’s Back – But This Time Round He’s at High School’, The Guardian (26 March 2006), Review, p. 6.   7. F. Hobbs and N. Stoops, Census 2000 Special Reports Demographic Trends in the 20th Century (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, 2002), pp. 32–44.   8. L. Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Progress (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 563. My emphasis.   9. R. Yates, Revolutionary Road (London: Methuen, 2001 [1961]), pp. 65–6. 10. K. Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1994); and S. Honeyman, Elusive Childhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 11. Unfortunately I do not have the space to dwell on this here, but it would be interesting to make a comparison with Jurca’s notion of a white diaspora, that is, the extent to which fictional suburbanites feel like victims dispersed over the country. See C. Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the TwentiethCentury American Novel (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). 12. See, for example, S. Sherwin, ‘Sex. Violence. Whatever’, p. 6; and S. Hughes, ‘Humphrey Bogart’s Back’. See also: T. Vermeulen, ‘Brick’, in J. Berra (ed.), World Cinema Directory: American Independent (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), pp. 280–1. 13. T. Labov, ‘Social and Language Barriers among Adolescents’, American Speech 67: 4 (Winter 1992), pp. 339–40. 14. T. Pooley, ‘Analyzing Urban Youth Vernaculars in French Cities: Lexicographical, Variationist and Ethnographic approaches’, in D. Ayoun (ed.), Studies in French Applied Linguistics (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008), pp. 317–44. 15. T. Labov, ‘Social and Language Barriers among Adolescents’, p. 343. 16. Ibid. pp. 350–6. 17. D. Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 120. 18. Ibid. p. 214. 19. R. Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Atlantic Monthly (1944), p. 59. 20. K. Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, in K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: RKP, 1952), pp. 282–300. 21. R. Panetta, ‘The Rise of the Therapeutic Suburb: Child Care in Westchester County, New York, 1880–1920’, in D. Rubey (ed.), Redefining Suburban Studies: Searching for New Paradigms (Hempstead: Hofstra University Press, 2009), pp. 63–77. 22. C. Jurca, White Diaspora, p. 161. See also K. Knapp, ‘Life in the ’Hood: Postwar Suburban Literature and Films’, Literature Compass 6: 4 (July 2009), p. 819. 23. G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 4. 24. E. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1996), pp. 72–8. 25. Ibid. p. 76.

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26. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Every Day Life (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 92–3. 27. Ibid. pp. 97–9. 28. K. Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974 [1960]). 29. Illustrative of how complex and confusing the debate about space and place is at times, is that there is little to no consensus about what place and space mean to begin with. De Certeau suggests, for example, that space is a practised place. Yet human geographers as diverse as David Harvey, Andrew Merrifield and Yi-Fu Tuan assume on the contrary that ‘place can be taken as a practiced space’. Similarly, for de Certeau, place itself is, simplistically put, disembodied (for the moment it is practised, it becomes a space). Yet for a phenomenologist like Edward Casey, the body is always already in place, indeed, cannot but be in-place. See D. Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 291–326; A. Merrifield, ‘Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 18: 4 (1993), pp. 516–31; Y.-F. Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Arnold, 1977), p. 6; E. S. Casey, ‘How To Get From Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena’, in S. Feld and K. H. Basso, Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), pp. 13–52. 30. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Every Day Life, p. 117. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. D. Deriu, ‘The Ascent of the Modern planeur: Aerial Images and Urban Imaginary in the 1920s’, in C. Emden, C. Keen and D. Midgley (eds), Imagining the City, vol. 1: The Art of Urban Living (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 210. 34. H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 52. 35. R. Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 36. M. Auge, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London and New York: Verso, 2008), p. 81. 37. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Every Day Life, pp. 104–5. 38. M. Auge, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, p. 76. 39. Ibid. p. 63 40. J. Qvortrup, ‘Childhood Matters: An Introduction’, in J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta, and H. Wintersberger (eds), Childhood Matters: Theory, Practice and Politics (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994), pp. 1–24. 41. H. Childress, ‘Teenagers, Territory and the Appropriation of Space’, Childhood 11: 2 (2004), p. 196. 42. H. Matthews, M. Taylor, B. Percy-Smith and M. Limb, ‘The Unacceptable Flâneur: The Shopping Mall as a Teenage Hangout’, Childhood 7: 3 (2000), p. 281.

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t he s ub urb a s l ive d s p a c e 169 43. H. Matthews et al., ‘The Unacceptable Flâneur’, p. 281. My emphasis. 44. K. Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 39–41. 45. Ingold, cited in H. Childress, ‘Teenagers, Territory and the Appropriation of Space’, p. 195. 46. A. Fielder, ‘Poaching on Public Space: Urban Autonomous Zones in French Banlieue Films’, in M. Shiels and T. Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 270–81; N. Archer, ‘Virtual Poaching and Altered Space: Reading Parkour in French Visual Culture’, Modern & Contemporary France 18: 1 (2010), pp. 93–107. 47. H. Childress, ‘Teenagers, Territory and the Appropriation of Space’, p. 200. 48. By transgressions, I here mean film noir spilling over the laws of teenage drama, tonal sincerity breaking with the postmodern rules of ironic verisimilitude, the behaviour associated with deprived urban environments disrupting the commonplace of the suburb, adult language reterritorialising the teenage bodies, etc. 49. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Every Day Life, p. 108. 50. S. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in J. Strachey and A. Dickson (eds), The Penguin Freud Library vol. 14: Art and Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), especially pp. 365, 372. 51. C. Scannapiego, ‘The O.C. turned upside down’, San Clemente Times 1: 3 (6–11 April 2006), http://sanclementetimes.com/view/full_story/6694144/ article-The-O-C--Turned-Upside-Down? (accessed 3 August 2011). 52. To illustrate the film’s spatial awareness: in the novella, the phone booth is located at the intersection between Pico and Alexander, which is even nearer to the high school, but since that intersection was too busy and it would be too expensive to produce fake street signs, director Rian Johnson decided to relocate it both in reality and diegetically to Sarmentosa and del Rio, which is about five minutes’ walk north. See T. Vermeulen, Email correspondence with Rian Johnson (2 February 2011).

Conclusion: ‘Upward, Yet Not Northward’

I began this book by citing a number of authors on the nature of the suburban narrative and its ill-defined protagonist, fictional suburbia. Most of the authors I cited argue that both the narrative and its protagonist have two sides. As Clapson put it, the suburban story ‘has tended to view suburbia as either a heaven or a hell, within a fairly limited range of conventions’.1 Beuka writes that suburbia ‘will call to mind for most Americans [. . .] a set of loaded signifiers that connote both the American Dream [. . .] and that dream’s inverse.’2 According to these writers, the suburban narrative by definition lacks ‘thickness’, consists, as Calvino once wrote, ‘only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on each side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other’.3 Other authors have taken issue with this description. Beuka himself, for instance, points out that there are also other kinds of suburban narratives that are more complex.4 Huston has noted that there are texts that are concerned with other types of suburbs, like post-suburbia, edge cities and exurbs.5 In similar vein, scholars such as Eric Avila and Wiggins draw attention to mixed, LatinAmerican and Afro-American suburbs. 6 One should take note, however, that these authors do not in fact contest or problematise the idea of the two-dimensional, dualist suburb. They merely juxtapose it with various other, allegedly more layered or complex representations of suburbia. In this book I have tried to, first, problematise the notion of the dualist suburban narrative per se; and second, develop another language by which to speak about both suburban narratives and the narrative suburb. Most studies of suburban films and television programmes to date concentrate exclusively on the plot. When scholars such as Knapp, Muzzio and Halper, or even Beuka discuss suburban film, they mostly simply summarise the main themes, tropes or plot. But a story consists of more than a plot, that is, the sequencing of actions. It operates, amongst others, through style, tempo, tone, mood, space and ideas about epistemic access and distance. In attempting to come to terms with the above two issues,

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con clu s io n: ‘upwar d, ye t no t n o r t h w a r d’ 171 I have contextualised and nuanced the inferences that can be drawn from the plot by looking at (the interaction between) a variety of elements at work in the production of a film or television programme and the creation of a cinematic or televisual place. In Chapter 1, for instance, I put the representative authority of the central thematic in perspective by looking at Pleasantville’s representation of its eponymous suburb through the lens of fictional world theory. When one looks exclusively at the film’s central thematic, it may seem as if the nature of Pleasantville conforms to Clapson and Beuka’s description of the suburb as dualist entity. After all, the film gradually turns the bright, safe sitcom suburb (the first dimension, so to speak) into the dark, dangerous world of film noir (the so-called second dimension). However, when one situates the thematic within the film’s larger modus operandi, it becomes apparent that it is only one moment within a forever ongoing power struggle between numerous generic contracts, natural laws and the ‘free’ will of agents: the generic contracts of the 1950s domestic sitcom struggle with the natural laws of the world of 1940s film noir, the temporal logic of film noir struggles with the spatial ontology of the 1960s family melodrama, the desires from the coming-of-age drama with the longings of the nouvelle vague, and so forth. The film’s point is not that Pleasantville is dualistic, split between one and its opposite. Rather, the point is that Pleasantville is ontologically unstable. Pleasantville is forever in between no longer being one thing and always already becoming something else, anything else. It may be sitcomic and always already malevolent and open and always already the End of History and melodramatic and closed and vague. It may be all of those at once; it may be some at one place, others elsewhere. Far from being a two-dimensional, dualist world, Pleasantville is a fixed world of which it is impossible to measure the number of ­dimensions it may have because it is also inherently unstable. Similarly, in the second and the fourth chapters, I looked beyond the obvious dualism that thematises Happiness and Desperate Housewives – utopia versus dystopia – by concentrating my discussion on visual style and the production of social space, respectively. In my discussion of Happiness, I argued that the film’s visual style renders suburbia, first, as an itinerary for a journey that is forever postponed; and, second, as a community that can never come together. While the film’s decentred compositions, for instance, suggest a process of becoming, the long takes and tableau shots, however, imply that the process of becoming has come to an end. Similarly, the narrative coherence and visual resonance between shots imply a sense of connection and togetherness, but the geographical disjunction evokes a sense of isolation. These constructions are not

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dualisms. The suburb in Happiness is not one or the other. It is much rather a multi-dimensional process, that has, whether momentarily or permanently, been interrupted. To recall Sloterdijk’s metaphor of foam, Happiness is like an emptied soap dispenser; the suburb is a globulating foam of co-isolated cells that are slowly but surely bursting. Indeed, it is telling that the restaurant has two-and-a-half stars: it is almost as if the Michelin critics stopped eating halfway through. This sense of interruption, of in-betweenness is what so often renders the suburb a timeless purgatory, but it is also what suggests that time may still be ongoing. In Chapter 4, I demonstrated how Desperate Housewives produces the suburb as a social space that restricts women in their assertion of space. Wisteria Lane’s distinct enclosed geography, open architecture and unobstructed interiors problematise the functions and nature of spaces, inhibit women and infuse paranoia, but they also – albeit in a cynical way – allow for suspense, for possibility. In the third chapter, I showed how The Simpsons and King of the Hill use harsh lines, interruption and flatness to draw attention to the static and fragmented nature of their worlds, but also, paradoxically, to suggest the complexity and multiplicitousness of the worlds. Their flatness, for instance, deconstructs the hierarchy of representation and opens up the possibility of a more democratic approach to meaning. It is important to note how different the styles and techniques are that each of these texts uses in order to present the suburb. Pleasantville produces the suburb by problematising the film world’s ontology. In Happiness, the suburb is produced in an interplay between stylistic register and diegesis. The Simpsons and King of the Hill play with notions of medium specificity so as to render their environment suburban, while the suburb of Desperate Housewives is characterised first and foremost through its architecture. Among the stylistic devices used to produce the suburb are match-cutting, jump-cutting, bright colours, pale colours, grey tones, green hues, plays with form, plays with depth, enclosed frames, open spaces, picture windows, walk-and-talk, phone calls, tropes of spatial immobility, car trips and highways, and so forth. The list is endless. However, what Pleasantville’s ontology, Happiness’s visual style, The Simpsons and King of the Hill’s texture, and Desperate Housewives’ discursivity have in common is a sensibility that evokes at once fixity and radical instability, of being one thing but always already any number of other things. After spending several chapters demonstrating how complex each individual representation of the suburb is, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the suburb can be reduced to this sensibility. But I do believe that this sensibility is the invisible thread that runs through them.

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con clu s io n: ‘upwar d, ye t no t n o r t h w a r d’ 173 What Brick, Alpha Dog and Chumscrubber suggest is that teenagers have least trouble adapting to the suburb’s in-betweenness. This can hardly be called surprising, since teenagers themselves occupy a positionless position of in-betweenness – moving from childhood to adulthood. Brendan, Dean and the others affirm the suburb’s in-betweenness by re-­appropriating precisely those places that are between places, that are on the way from somewhere to elsewhere: highways and parking lots, phone booths and school corridors. In contrast to Happiness and The Simpsons, where places are unidentifiable, sites unlocatable, Brick, Chumscrubber and Alpha Dog present an affective network, a psychogeography of lived spaces. What Desperate Housewives, Happiness, King of the Hill, Pleasantville and The Simpsons draw attention to is that the theoretical discourse used to discuss cinematic and televisual suburbia is not sufficient. My discussion of Alpha Dog, Chumscrubber and Brick has demonstrated that one no longer need think about space in terms of utopia and dystopia, of public and private, street and house and home. These films understand that the suburb is another kind of spatiality, or rather, spatial sensibility, for which another vernacular may be in place. The teenagers in SubUrbia, Dode in Brick, the boys in Over the Edge or The Outsiders, they inhabit the inbetween without owning it or feeling the need to own it. Similarly, when John in SubUrbia and The Pin in Brick do not feel at home where they are, they simply set up house elsewhere: John lives in a tent in his parents’ garage, while The Pin appears to live in the cellar. I think it is such a language, a language that is not structured around places but around relationships between places, a language that is not fixed but flexible, that allows for contradiction and ambiguity, a language that understands space not as striated (into public and private, house and street) but as smooth or hybrid, that might begin to allow one to understand the cinematic and televisual suburb in all its complexity and possibilities. To my knowledge, this is the first book-length study of suburban film and television. Unsurprisingly then, there are, as I have indicated on several occasions throughout the book, numerous genres, cycles and formats of suburban film or television that are beyond the scope of this book, as there are various kinds of narratives concerned with (relationships between) particular socio-economic classes, ethnic minorities or sexualities that I have not had the space to reflect upon. Considering how complex the five related traditions I have discussed here already render the suburb, there is undoubtedly much that these semiotic spheres can tell us about the nature of cinematic and televisual suburbia. Another avenue of enquiry that this book has not had the space to venture into is transnational comparison. It would be very interesting to see how the nature and form of US suburbs

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relate to that of suburbs in Australia, the UK, Germany and Singapore. All of these fictional suburbs remain uncharted territory. It is up to further research, perhaps another researcher, to map out these lands. What I have wanted to do here is redirect the reader’s gaze, allow her or him to think beyond two-dimensional dualisms into other directions. ‘Upward, yet not northward’, the three-dimensional sphere tells the two-dimensional square in Edward Abbott’s novel Flatland. Upward, yet not northward; that is also where the new suburban research needs to go.

Notes 1. M. Clapson, Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the USA (New York: Berg, 2003), p. 11. 2. R. Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 4. 3. I. Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 95. 4. R. Beuka, SuburbiaNation, p. 15. 5. S. Huston, ‘Filming Postbourgeois Suburbia: Office Space and the New American Suburb’, The Journal of Popular Culture 42: 3 (2009), pp. 497–514. 6. E. Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2004); B. Wiggins, ‘Re-placing Black Suburbia: Culture Industry Geographies of South Central Los Angeles’, unpublished conference paper (2009).

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Filmography

All I Desire, directed by Douglas Sirk. USA, Universal International Pictures, 1953. All that Heaven Allows, directed by Douglas Sirk. USA, Universal International Pictures, 1955. Alone With Her, directed by Eric Nicholar. USA, Pinhole Productions, 2006. Alpha Dog, directed by Nick Cassavetes. USA, Universal Pictures, 2006. American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes. USA, DreamWorks SKG, 1999. American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas. USA, Universal Pictures, 1973. American Pie, directed by Paul Weitz. USA, Universal Pictures, 1999. American Pie 2, directed by J. B Rogers. USA, Universal Pictures, 2001. American Pie: The Wedding, directed by Jesse Dylan. USA and Germany, Universal Pictures, 2003. Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis. USA, Universal Pictures, 1985. Badlands, directed by Terrence Malick. USA, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1973. Bewitched, directed by Nora Ephron. USA, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 2005. Bigger than Life, directed by Nicholas Ray. USA, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1956. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, directed by Stephen Herek. USA, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1989. Blast from the Past, directed by Hugh Wilson. USA, New Line Cinema, 1999. Blow-Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. UK, Italy and USA, Bridge Films, 1966. Boyz ’n the Hood, directed by John Singleton. USA, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1991. Brick, directed by Rian Johnson. USA, Focus Features, 2005. Bullet Boy, directed by Saul Dibb. UK, BBC Films, 2004. Burbs, The, directed by Joe Dante. USA, Universal Pictures, 1989. Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The, directed by Robert Wiene. Germany, Decla-Bioscop AG, 1920. Cheat, The, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. USA, Jessy L. Lasky Feature Play Company, 1915. Chumscrubber, The, directed by Arie Posin. USA and Germany, El Camino Pictures, 2005. Clerks, directed by Kevin Smith. USA, Miramax Films, 1994.

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Clueless, directed by Amy Heckerling. USA, Paramount Pictures, 1995. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, directed by Rob Schmidt. USA, G2 Films, 2000. Dark Victory, directed by Edmund Goulding. USA, First National Pictures, 1939. Desperate Hours, The, directed by William Wyler. USA, Paramount Pictures, 1955. Disturbia, directed by D. J. Caruso. USA, DreamWorks SKG, 2007. Edward Scissorhands, directed by Tim Burton. USA, Twentieth Century Fox, 1990. Election, directed by Alexander Payne. USA, Paramount Pictures, 1999. Far From Heaven, directed by Todd Haynes. USA, Focus Features, 2002. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, directed by John Hughes. USA, Paramount Pictures, 1986. Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold. UK and the Netherlands, BBC Films, 2009. Ghost World, directed by Terry Zwigoff. USA, UK and Germany, United Artists, 2001. Graduate, The, directed by Mike Nichols. USA, Embassy Pictures Corporation, 1967. Greenberg, directed by Noah Baumbach. USA, Focus Features, 2010. Guess Who? directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan. USA, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 2005. Hannah and her Sisters, directed by Woody Allen. USA, Orion Pictures Corporation, 1986. Happiness, directed by Todd Solondz. USA, Good Machine/Killer Films, 1998. Has Anyone Seen my Gal, directed by Douglas Sirk. USA, Universal International Pictures, 1952. Ice Storm, The, directed by Ang Lee. USA, Fox Searchlight Productions, 1997. It Happened One Night, directed by Frank Capra. USA, Colombia Pictures Corporation, 1934. It’s a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra. USA, RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Juno, directed by Jason Reitman. USA, Fox Searchlight Productions, 2007. Lakeview Terrace, directed by Neil Labute. USA, Screen Gems, 2008. Last Seduction, The, directed by John Dahl. UK and USA, Incorporated Television Company/October Films, 1994. Le Plaisir, directed by Max Ophuls. France, Compagnie Commerciale Française Cinématographique, 1952. Little Children, directed by Todd Field. USA, New Line Cinema, 2006. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The, directed by Peter Jackson. New Zealand and USA, New Line Cinema, 2001. Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, The, directed by Nunnaly Johnson. USA, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1956.

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Nothing Like the Holidays, directed by Alfredo De Villa. USA, Overture Films, 2006. Notting Hill, directed by Roger Michell. UK and USA, Working Title Films, 1999. Outsiders, The, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA, Zoetrope Studios, 1983. Over the Edge, directed by Jonathan Kaplan. USA, Orion Pictures Corporation, 1979. Passion of Joan of Arc, The, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. France, Gaumont, 1928. Pleasantville, directed by Gary Ross. USA, New Line Cinema, 1998. Poltergeist, directed by Tobe Hooper. USA, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 1982. Quinceañera, directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. USA, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006. Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray. USA, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1955. Revolutionary Road, directed by Sam Mendes. USA and UK, DreamWorks SKG, 2008. Safety of Objects, The, directed by Rose Troche. UK and USA, IFC Films, 2001. Scenes from the Suburbs, directed by Spike Jonze. USA, MJZ Productions, 2011. Sense and Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee. USA and UK, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1995. Shadow of a Doubt, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA, Universal Pictures, 1946. Simpsons Movie, The, directed by David Silverman. USA, Twentieth Century Fox, 2007. Skinner’s Dress Suit, directed by William A. Seiter. USA, Universal Pictures, 1926. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, directed by William Cottrell. USA, Walt Disney Productions, 1937. Stepford Wives, The, directed by Frank Oz. USA, Paramount Pictures, 2004. SubUrbia, directed by Richard Linklater. USA, Castle Rock Entertainment, 1996. Tree of Life, The, directed by Terrence Malick. USA, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Germany, UFA, 1953. Truman Show, The, directed by Peter Weir. USA, Paramount Pictures, 1998. Trust, directed by Hal Hartley. UK and USA, Channel Four Films, 1990. Virgin Suicides, The, directed by Sofia Coppola. USA, American Zoetrope, 1999. Welcome to the Dollhouse, directed by Todd Solondz. USA, Suburban Pictures, 1995.

Teleography

Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The. Stage Five Productions/Volcano Productions. USA, ABC, 1952–66. Arrested Development. Imagine Entertainment/Hurwitz Company. USA, Fox Network, 2003–6. Cleveland Show, The. Persons Unknown Productions/Happy Jack Productions. USA, Fox Network, 2009–present. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. AA Communications/Arc Productions/CBS Productions/CBS Paramount Television/Jerry Bruckheimer Television. USA, CBS, 2000–present. Desperate Housewives. Touchstone Television/ABC Studios. ABC, 2004–12. ‘Pilot’ (1, 1), ABC, 3 October 2004. ‘Anything you can do’ (1, 7), ABC, 21 November 2004. ‘Move on’ (1, 11), ABC, 9 January 2005. ‘Everyday a little death’ (1, 12), ABC, 16 January 2005. ‘There won’t be trumpets’ (1, 17), ABC, 3 April 2005 ‘Fear no more’ (1, 20), ABC, 1 May 2005. ‘One wonderful day’ (1, 23), ABC, 22 May 2005. ‘If it’s only in your head’, ABC, 17 May 2009. Everybody Loves Raymond. CBS. USA, CBS, 1996–2005. Family Guy. Twentieth Century Fox. USA, Fox Network, 1999–present. Family Ties. Paramount Television. USA, NBC, 1982–9. Father Knows Best. Rodney Young Productions. USA, CBS, 1954–5, 1958–60/ NBC, 1955–8. ‘Betty, girl engineer’ (2, 30), NBC, 11 April 1956. Gossip Girl. CBS Paramount Television/CBS Television Studios. USA, CW, 2007–12. Growing Pains. Warner Bros. Television. USA, ABC, 1985–92. Honey I’m Home. RiPe Productions/Nick @ Nite. USA, ABC/ Nick @ Nite, 1991–2. King of the Hill. Film Roman/3 Arts Entertainment/20th Century Fox. USA, Fox Network, 1997–10. ‘Hank’s dirty laundry’ (2, 16), Fox Network, 1 March 1998. ‘Three days of the Kahndo’ (2, 15), Fox Network, 15 February 1998. ‘The final shinshult’ (2, 18), Fox Network, 15 March 1998.

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‘Good Hill Hunting’ (3, 8), Fox Network, 1 December 1998. ‘Yankee Hankie’ (5, 10), Fox Network, 4 February 2001. Leave It to Beaver. Gomalco Productions/Kayre Vue Productions. USA, CBS, 1957–8/ABC, 1958–63. Mad Men. Lionsgate Television/Weiner Bros. USA, AMC, 2007–present. Malcolm in the Middle. Satin City Productions/Regency Television/20th Century Fox. USA, Fox Network, 2000–6), Married with Children. Embassy Television/ELP Communications/Columbia Pictures Television. USA, Fox Network, 1987–97. Modern Family. Lloyd-Levitan Productions/20th Century Fox. USA, ABC, 2009–present. Providence. John Masius Productions/NBC Studios. USA, NBC, 1999–2002. Roseanne. Wild Dancer Productions/Casey-Werner Company/Paramount Television. USA, ABC, 1988–97. Simpsons, The. Gracie Films/20th Century Fox Television. USA, Fox Network, 1989–present. ‘Homer’s Odyssey’ (1, 3), Fox Network, 21 January 1990. ‘Some enchanted evening’ (1, 13), Fox Network, 13 May 1990. ‘Two cars in every garage and three eyes on every fish’ (2, 4), Fox Network, 1 November 1990. ‘Homer vs Lisa and the 8th Commandment’ (2, 13), Fox Network, 7 February, 1991. ‘Lemon of Troy’ (6, 24), Fox Network, 14 May 1995. Sopranos, The. HBO/Park Entertainment. USA, HBO, 1999–2007. Swingtown. CBS Paramount Network Television. USA, CBS, 2008. The Goode Family. Film Roman/3 Arts Entertainment. USA, ABC, 2009. Weeds. Lionsgate Television/Tilted Productions. USA, Showtime Networks, 2005–12. ‘Good shit lollypop’ (1, 3), Showtime, 22 August 2005. ‘Dead in the nethers’ (1, 6), Showtime, 12 September 2005. Wire, The. Blown Deadline Productions/HBO. USA, HBO, 2002–8.

Index

Abbott, E., 105, 174 adolescents see teenagers aesthetic regime, the, 94–6 aesthetics, 3, 6–7 affect, 153–4, 165–6, 173; see also immersion, intimacy, lived space Agamben, G., 31, 34 alienation, 5–6, 65–7, 78–9 Alpha Dog (Cassavetes), 4, 12, 16, 135–6, 138–9, 145–7, 151, 153–4, 158, 165, 173 American Beauty (Mendes), 1, 12, 116, 153, 156, 163 American Dream, 2, 6, 28, 149, 170 anaesthetic, 2–3 animated sitcom, 16, 81–106 animation, 81–5, 88–91, 93, 99–100, 105 Archer, J., 5, 28 architecture, 5, 16, 62, 67, 83, 114, 124 Arrested Development, 1, 95, 137 Augé, M., 101, 119, 154–6 Avila, E., 170 Babbitt (Lewis), 5–6 Bachelard, G., 118, 149 Back to the Future (Zemeckis), 12, 21, 31, 137 Bakhtin, M., 23 banlieue, 142 Barber, S., 67 Batchelor, D., 35 Baudrillard, J., 29, 119 belonging see immersion, intimacy, lived space Bernstein, B., 113 Beuka, R., 2, 4, 155, 170–1

Bildungsroman, 31–2 black-and-white see monochrome Bordwell, D., 10–11, 51, 67 boredom, 6, 36 Brabon, B., 112 Braudy, L., 70–1 Brick (Johnson), 1, 4, 12, 14, 16, 132, 135, 136, 138, 141–8, 151–9, 162, 163, 164, 165, 173 Bruno, G., 55 Brunsdon, C., 7 Buck-Morss, S., 130 Buckland, W., 40, 67 Calvino, I., 81, 170 camera techniques movement, 33, 42, 55, 57–60, 70–1, 74, 85, 87–8, 90, 95, 103–4, 114, 116–17, 120, 122–3, 151–3, 161, 164–5 types of shots, 10, 11, 24, 37, 41–2, 47, 57, 60–1, 64, 68–74, 77, 85–7, 95, 97, 110, 116, 120, 123, 125, 126, 139, 146, 151, 153, 161–3, 165, 171 Chandler, R., 144 Cheat, The (DeMille), 6 Cherry, M., 113 childishness, 93, 137–9, 165 children see parents, teenagers Childress, H., 157–9 Chumscrubber (Posin), 4, 12, 16, 135–9, 145, 147, 151–4, 165, 173 cities, representations of, 7, 14, 26, 57–8, 67, 124, 136, 149 city film, 51 Clapson, M., 5, 170–71

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inde x 195 class, 2, 6, 13, 23, 29, 39–40, 48, 83, 101, 109, 111, 114, 173 cognitive mapping, 61–3, 66–7 Colonial Street, 110–11; see also fictional settings colour, 6, 24, 30, 33, 35, 36–9, 48, 53n36, 57–8, 60–1, 65, 77, 85–8, 99, 121, 123, 131, 133n20, 141, 172; see also monochrome coming-of-age narrative, 21, 23–4, 30–6, 39–40, 49–50, 136, 171 community, 162–3, 171; see also immersion, intimacy, lived space commuting see transport composition, 36, 50, 55, 68–75, 77, 97, 121, 125, 140–1, 153, 161, 163, 171 Conley, T., 55–6, 65 connection, 57, 63–4, 67, 78, 119, 160, 165, 171; see also isolation consumption, 14, 26, 29, 91; see also late capitalism Coontz, S., 28, 115 Cooper, G., 11 Coppock, V., 112 Dark Victory, 6 Davis, M., 29 De Certeau, M., 9, 11, 16, 149–50, 155, 163, 168n29 Deleuze, G., 3, 82, 104, 123 Deriu, D., 150–1 Desperate Housewives, 4, 14, 16, 109–31, 137, 153, 165, 171–3 disavowal, 72, 138–41, 144–5, 147, 164 disconnection, 55, 57, 61, 63, 65–6, 71–2, 77–8, 104; see also alienation, connection, isolation disillusion, 72, 76 disruption, 39, 58, 61, 70, 73, 84, 94, 96, 169, 172 diversity see heterogeneity Dolce, P., 39–40, 47–8, 58, 77 Doležel, L., 45, 49 Dreman, S., 113 dualisms, 2–3, 50–1, 170–3 dystopia, 12, 171, 173; see also utopia

edge cities, 2, 12 editing coherence, 55, 57–61, 63–5, 72–3, 77, 114, 117, 120–3, 151–2, 164–5 rhythm, 33, 47–8, 55, 67–8, 77 elasticity, 81, 93 Election (Payne), 12 Elsaesser, T., 40 end of History, 28–31, 49, 83, 149, 154, 171; see also History entrapment, 60, 128–9, 146, 152–3, 161, 165 estrangement see alienation ethnicity, 2, 5, 13, 48, 133n20, 142–3, 173 everyday, the, 3, 9, 66–7, 71, 73, 94, 95, 119, 149 families, 16–17, 37, 48, 58, 66, 77, 90, 97–9, 105, 113–15, 123–4, 136–41, 148, 162–3 Family Guy, 88, 97 Far From Heaven (Haynes), 1, 12, 77, 153 Father Knows Best 23, 25–8, 33, 39, 43, 44, 75 femininity, 16, 26–7, 109–32 fictional settings Arlen (King of the Hill), 96, 100–3, 105–6, 131 Pleasantville (Pleasantville), 15, 21–51, 104, 131, 171 Springfield (Father Knows Best), 23, 43–4 Springfield (The Simpsons), 88, 96, 100–1, 103–6, 131, 147 Wisteria Lane (Desperate Housewives), 109–11, 113–18, 121, 123–7, 130–1, 133n31, 153, 172 fictional worlds, 4, 8, 10, 15, 21–51, 70–1, 85, 88, 91–8, 101, 103–5, 143–4, 148, 153, 171–2 film noir, 5, 21, 31, 33–9, 44, 49–50, 77, 136, 141–2, 169n48; see also suburban noir flâneuse, 130–1; see also public woman

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flatness, 2, 12, 16, 68–9, 71, 81–8, 90–4, 96, 98, 99, 103–6, 152–4, 165, 170–2 foam (Schaume), 15, 68, 78–9, 155, 171–2 Foucault, M., 8, 119 fragmentation, 55–6, 72, 78, 83, 103, 105, 149–50, 152, 165, 172 Freud, S., 2, 65, 163 Friedan, B., 111 Fukuyama, F., 28–9 gardens, 120–1 gated communities, 28 gays, 13 gender, 5, 9, 16, 26, 109–32; see also femininity, masculinity genre of exception, 31, 24–35, 36, 39, 50; see also state of exception Genz, S., 112 Ghostworld (Zwigoff), 136, 154, 157 Gibbs, J., 11, 55 Grainge, P., 36 Greenberg, C., 92–4 Grote, D., 26 Guattari, F., 3, 82, 104 Halper, T., 1, 5, 170 Hammett, D., 143–4 hard-boiled novel, 141–4 Harvey, D., 7, 29, 168n29 Hayden, D., 115 Heidegger, M., 46 heterogeneity, 2, 13, 29, 36, 48, 58, 101, 120 History, 28–31, 49, 66, 83, 128; see also end of History, temporality Holbein, H., 3 home, 37, 101–2, 109–18, 121, 123, 131, 148–9, 153, 156, 158, 173 homelessness, 5; see also uncanny, the homeliness see immersion, intimacy, lived space homogeneity, 2, 5, 16, 83, 163 Honey I’m Home, 12, 37

housing projects, 13, 20 Huston, S., 2, 170 iconography, 17, 23–4, 76 identitity see performativity immersion, 138–66; see also lived space inbetweenness, 81–2, 171–3 instability, 15, 38–9, 46–9, 172 interiority, 101, 110, 119–23, 131 intertextuality, 25, 78, 110–11, 143 intimacy, 64–5, 74, 117–18, 123–4, 153, 159–5 isolation, 14 32, 40, 60, 63, 65, 152, 171 It Happened One Night (Capra), 6 It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra), 139 Jameson, F., 29, 34 Joyrich, L., 128 Judge, M., 81, 84, 102 Jurca, C., 1, 4–6, 65, 164, 167n11 King of the Hill (Judge), 4, 7, 12, 14, 16, 81–105, 153, 172, 173 Keats, J., 5 kidnapping, 136, 138–9, 147, 151 Kolb, D., 16, 81, 101, 105–6 Kruse, K., 1 Kunstler, J., 83 Labov, T., 142 Lakeview Terrace (Labute), 1, 13 late capitalism, 26, 28, 91 Leave it to Beaver, 25, 27–8, 43–4 Leibman, N., 26 Lefebvre, H., 7–9, 11, 19n37, 67–8, 101, 119, 150, 154 Lefebvre, M., 7, 9–11 Leslie, E., 84, 91–2, 94 Little Children (Perotta), 117 lived space, 16, 135–65, 173 locality, 34, 60–1, 66, 101–3, 155–6, 159–65 loneliness see isolation looking ‘awry’, 3, 32, 46, 75

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inde x 197 Lynch, K., 61–2, 66, 150 Lyotard, J. F., 91 MacKinnon, K., 58, 77 Mad Men, 137, 153 malls, 29, 57–8, 76, 100–1, 105, 119–20, 147, 154, 156; see also thin place; non-place Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The (Johnson), 5–6 Mannheim, K., 145 maps, 22, 55–8, 65–6, 104, 110, 148, 149–50, 160 Marcus, D., 25, 27–8 Marcuse, H., 2 masculinity, 5 Massey, D., 7, 9 Matthews, H., 157–8 McGinley, P., 6 McLaren, N., 82 McMansions, 63, 142, 147 melodrama, 6, 14, 21, 27, 31, 33–5, 38–9, 44, 52n13, 53n36, 53n40, 57, 77, 110–11, 115, 128, 171 Mildred Pierce (Cain), 6 ‘mise-en-abime’ film, 12, 31 mise-en-scène see camera techniques, colour, composition, editing Mittell, J., 89 mobility, 16, 109, 117, 119, 125–8, 130–1, 147, 148–53 modern, 74–5, 91, 12 modernism, 39, 90–4, 96 modernity, 91, 130 monochrome, 22–5, 29, 33, 35–9, 53n36, 73; see also colour Moretti, F., 2 Morley, D., 109 Mumford, L., 5, 28–9, 136–7 Muzzio, D., 1, 5, 170 neoliberalism see late capitalism New Jersey, 56–8, 61–3, 66, 101, 138, 141, 149 New Suburban History, 1, 13 new urbanism, 28

Nietzsche, F., 26, 28–30 non-place, 16, 83, 101, 105, 119, 135, 148, 154–66; see also place, placelessness, sense of place nostalgia, 22, 27–8, 32, 73, 75, 105 open-plan interiors, 33, 109, 113–19, 123–4, 145, 152, 172 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 5 Ortega y Gasset, J., 69–70 oscillation, 50, 129, 131 O’Sheary, M. B., 32 Over the Edge (Kaplan), 156–8, 166, 173 paedophilia, 63–5 paranoia, 109, 124, 172 parents and children 27, 63–5, 137–49 parking lots, 56, 58–61, 135, 147–8, 157–62, 173; see also non-place, transport parody, 21–34, 42, 89–91 Pavel, T., 44 Perez, G., 7, 69–70, 87 performativity, 124–31, 138 Perkins, V. F., 7, 11, 45, 47 Picasso, P., 92–6 picture windows, 2, 44, 76, 114, 117, 119, 121, 135, 146, 172 Pimlott, M., 101, 119, 120, 123 place, 17, 41, 46, 56–8, 60–72, 75, 78, 100, 101–6, 111, 113, 118–19, 131, 146–7, 149–66 sense of, 9–10, 39–40, 47, 61, 104–5, 159 and space see space see also non-place, space placelessness, 15, 60–3, 101, 145; see also place, non-place, sense of place plasticity see elasticity Pleasantville (Ross), 21–51, 94, 153, 158, 165, 171–3 Pleasantville see fictional settings plot, relation to narrative, 10–11

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postfeminism, 16, 109, 112–13, 128 postmodern, 90–1, 111 postmodernism, 12, 34, 74–5, 90–1, 107n20, 166 post-suburbia, 2, 3, 170 privacy see private space private space, 14, 39, 109, 115, 117–24, 131, 133n30, 162–3, 166, 173 Projanski, S., 112 public space, 14, 39, 60, 109, 117–24, 126–8, 130–1, 157, 159–60, 163, 166, 173 public woman, 130–1; see also flâneuse Pye, D., 41 Qvortrup, J., 156 race see ethnicity Rancière, J., 94–6 realism, 44–5, 70, 83–4, 8–9 re-appropriation, 156–65; see also immersion, lived space Rebel Without a Cause (Ray), 137, 157, 163, 166 Relph, E., 60, 101, 149 Revolutionary Road (Yates), 137 rhizome, 56, 104–5 Riesman, D., 5 romantic comedy, 73–5 Ronen, R., 44–5 Ross, G., 4, 21, 30–1 Rubey, D., 11 Saegert, S., 16 Schwartz, B., 16 Sconce, J., 74 Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock), 39 Shary, T., 135–6 Shonfield, K., 11 Sibley, D., 9, 113 Simpsons, The, 4, 12, 16, 81, 84–91, 93–105 simulation, 28, 119–20, 155–6; see also interiority, non-place, thin place Silverstone, R., 82

sitcom, 4, 12, 16, 21–31, 33–9, 43–4, 49–51, 65–6, 75–7, 81–2, 89–90, 93, 100, 102–5, 171; see also animated sitcoms Skinner’s Dress Suit (Seiter), 6 slang, 141–5 Sloterdijk, P., 15, 78, 96, 104, 172 small town, representations of, 26, 39, 44, 76–7, 106 small-town film, 21, 55, 75–8 ‘smart’ film, 12, 74–5 Snow White (Cottrell), 83–5 soap opera, 18n13, 89, 128 social space, 109–66 Soja, E., 7–8 Solomon, S. J., 5, 58 Solondz, T., 4, 15, 55, 137 space see lived space, private space, public space, social space and place 149–51 Spain, D., 114 spatial turn, 7 Spigel, L., 7, 82 sprawl, 12, 48, 55, 58, 62, 65, 76, 101, 164 state of exception, 31, 34; see also genre of exception Stepford Wives, The (Oz), 77 structure of feeling, 14, 17, 55, 76–8, 173 suburbs as fictional world see fictional world as lived space see lived space definitions, 16–17, 170–3 histories/and history, 1–4, 26, 136 stereotypes and criticisms of, 1–5, 11–12, 28–9, 82, 136–7, 154–5, 170–1 suburban fiction history, 5–6 scholarship, 1–7, 39–40, 154–5, 170 suburban studies, 1, 11–13 Suburbia (Linklater), 77, 154, 157, 166 Suburgatory, 148 Sugrue, T. J., 1 surveillance, 123–8; see also interiority, open-plan interiors

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inde x 199 teen film, 13, 16, 21, 33, 135–66, 169n48 teenagers, 13, 21, 23, 30–1, 34–5, 135–66, 173; see also parents temporality, 8, 23–30, 124–31; see also History Thomas, D., 7, 37, 39 Thompson, E., 102 Thompson, K., 10 three-dimensionality, 152–4, 165–6; see also immersion, lived space time see temporality Tom and Jerry, 82, 93 tone, 10, 15–16, 25, 27, 32, 41–2, 55, 61, 74–6, 170 tragedy, 27, 65, 75, 129 transparency see interiority, open-plan interiors, picture windows transport cars, 57, 59–63, 65, 67, 116, 121, 125, 130, 135, 146–8, 159–61, 172 railways, 56, 77 see also parking lots travelogue, 12, 31 Truman Show, The (Weir), 12, 133, 153

Trust (Hartley), 12, 77 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 56, 168n29 two-dimensionality see flatness uncanny, the, 37, 77, 159, 163 utopia, 27, 29, 31, 75, 128, 149, 171, 173; see also American Dream, dystopia, nostalgia Walton, K., 43, 45 Weeds, 12, 123–4, 133n30 Welcome to the Dollhouse (Solondz), 137 Wells, P., 82–4, 91–2, 94 Whyte, W. H., 5 Wiese, A., 13 Wiggins, B., 2, 170 Williams, R., 55, 77–8, 90–1 Wilson, S., 5 Wolff, J., 130 Yates, R., 5, 137 youth see teenagers Žižek, S., 3, 75