The Suburbs 9781501336461, 9781501336492, 9781501336485

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THE SUBURBS Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly The Modern Lovers by Sean Maloney Homogenic by Emily Mackay Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Rubin Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Peepshow by Samantha Bennett In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony Transformer by Ezra Furman Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson The Holy Bible by David Evans Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin and many more. . .

The Suburbs

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The Suburbs

Eric Eidelstein

Bloomsbury Academic An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Eric Eidelstein, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-3646-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3648-5 ePub: 978-1-5013-3647-8 1

Series: 33 –3 Cover design: 333sound.com Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Contents

Acknowledgment Track listing

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Introduction 1 Who is Arcade Fire? 7 What are the suburbs? 17 Where do you kids live? 27 What’s up dog? 45 Why do I have these headaches? 59 Why are there people like Frank? 71 Why are you so profoundly sad? 85 Surely expulsion is not the answer? 101 Should I move past the feeling? 113 Filmography Also available

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Acknowledgments

The bulk of this project is about influences, about the way Arcade Fire’s monumental 2010 record—along with several works of film and TV—have helped me deal with difficult emotions, have helped me feel less alone in a world where I’ve often felt like I don’t belong. Naturally, there are the people in my life—friends, family, and colleagues—who I want to thank, who have made this book easy (or at least easier) to write. I’ve had a tremendous amount of support throughout this process—writing my first book—and it’s essential for me to name names. Hopefully this doesn’t sound as contrived as my Bar Mitzvah candlelighting ceremony. First and foremost, thank you Amanda Petrusich. Thank you for bringing this project to my attention. Thank you for guiding me through it, making it all a little bit more digestible. Thank you for being a loyal editor and friend and someone I’ve seen as a mentor since I took my first class with you at NYU. Also, Bloomsbury and Leah Babb-Rosenfield. I don’t have a lot of experience working with publishers, with navigating this complex world of book writing, but it’s been as close to

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a breeze as I can imagine. It’s nice writing something when you feel like the people who will ultimately put it out into the world are on your side. Given that this book is—at least in part—a tribute to some of my favorite films and TV shows, I need to also give credit to my inspirations, to the artists who, through their work, have provided me with the drive to create. These past couple of months I’ve committed myself to watching a movie a night and while this may sound like procrastination, there’s nothing that makes me want to write more than watching someone make something beautiful. Ultimately I want to move people with anything I do, and I thank Todd Haynes, Spike Jonze, Leslie Jamison, Matthew Weiner, and all the other figures I mention throughout this 33 1/3. And my friends! I’m the kind of writer—for better or worse—who needs to constantly be throwing around ideas, talking through my plans, reaching out for reassurance when the whole thing feels incredibly overwhelming. My friends have not only been supportive in theory, but have been there emotionally, to read over graphs I felt strange about, to offer their own ideas about a record that’s also important to them. So, thank you friends: Graham Bohling, Jake Byrne, Adrian Russell Carter, Lara Casselman, Hazel Cills, Kam Collins, Nolan Flaherty, Katie Goldman, Ken Greller, Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, Sophie Lilla, Izaak Lustgarten, James McMeans, Vanessa Mendal, Jane Morgan, Madeleine Pomilla, Maggie Rose, Rex Santus, Austin Sedaghatpour, Taylor Silver, Jordyn Taylor, Russell Taylor, Yamila Waissmann, and Alexandra Wuest. My most challenging “thank you” goes out to my large and close-knit Jewish family. A third cousin twice removed is ix

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probably as important to this endeavor as one of my parents. But, for the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that I couldn’t have done this without my dad, mom, and Lili; my siblings Victor, Alec, Daniel, and Julia; my grandparents and aunts and uncles; and anyone else who has been kind enough to guide me (or at least not cause more anxiety than I inevitably felt) while I wrote this book on Arcade Fire. And, Arcade Fire. Thanks for being weird and open and uncomfortable and unrestrained and a piece of my life.

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Track listing

  1. The Suburbs   2. Ready to Start   3. Modern Man  4. Rococo   5. Empty Room   6. City with No Children   7. Half Light I   8. Half Light II (No Celebration)   9. Suburban War 10. Month of May 11. Wasted Hours 12. Deep Blue 13. We Used to Wait 14. Sprawl I (Flatland) 15. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) 16. The Suburbs (Continued)

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Introduction

Every so often I think about words in other languages, words that cannot be translated into English. Komorebi. It’s a Japanese word. It’s the image of light filtering through trees, touching up against the leaves. There’s nothing I wanted more than to leave my suburban upbringing. Now that I have, a part of me wishes I could dip my toes back into the bubble. It has left me restless and endlessly frustrated, thinking about this, about a place that isn’t necessarily just a place but is also a state of mind. Sometimes the suburbs manifests as less of a spot on a map and more of a feeling, perhaps a metaphor for that weird interval between childhood and adulthood. Suburbia is innocence and ignorance. Suburbia is freedom and constraint. Suburbia is lightness and darkness. I want this book to be the word—a word I couldn’t find— that describes a sensation. I want this book to capture a feeling that could only be experienced in retrospect, with a bird’s-eye view of yourself, at 15 or 16 years old. I want you to play over all the times in your life, in your young life, that you’ve felt alone, different, weird, but also powerful,

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understood, and in love. I want you to think of the suburbs, whatever that may mean for you. Arcade Fire is a Montreal-based indie rock collective who, as of 2017, are composed of Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, William Butler, Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbury, and Jeremy Gara. Their name allegedly comes from a story Win was once told, about a fire inside a local arcade. The story stuck with him and under this name the band released their highly acclaimed first record, Funeral, in 2004 and have— like clockwork—released subsequent records in three-year increments (Neon Bible in 2007, The Suburbs in 2010, and Reflektor in 2013). The Suburbs came out 8 months after I turned 16. But I didn’t find the magic and warmth and sadness and danger in the record, however, until I graduated from high school, after I left my Florida suburb—nestled between Fort Lauderdale and Miami—for the Big Apple. My suburb was not traditional by any means, and when one conjures an image of American suburbia, I assume they’re not envisioning my town. My suburb with its palm trees and high rises and beachside resorts—but a suburb nonetheless. My suburb with its several hotels and condos that bare the Trump name. My suburbs immune to the four seasons and, instead, built with a consideration for extreme heat, heavy rains and wind, more heat. I moved to New York to write about movies and to maybe, one day in my life, write them. This became a natural way to delve into The Suburbs, a record I have always experienced in scenes, perceived in visuals, seen as an accompaniment to many works of visual art—particularly film and television. There’s Douglas Sirk’s melodramas and David Lynch’s sinister 2

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Blue Velvet and The Iron Giant and The Americans and My So-Called Life and the delicious bits of Mad Men removed from the claustrophobic Madison Ave. Our suburbs are never exactly the same. The Applebee’s that was your after-school hangout was my Chipotle. The lovely but also sinister cul-de-sac you passed on your way to school was the four-way stop where I rear-ended my first car. The waxed gym floors that may have been your second hearth, a home away from home, was the embodiment of my greatest fears about never quite fitting in. Of course, this brushes the surface. It goes deeper and darker. But The Suburbs is not interested in what sets us apart. Instead it functions as a concept album eager to articulate an Americana ideal ingrained in the minds of those of us who grew up on the outskirts of Miami, Houston, Montreal, Chicago, and New York. Or, if not that, at least, it’s interested in all of us who have felt like we exist on a fringe. It functions as a direct attack on the amygdala, triggering all sorts of memory receptors. It begs you to feel something, to remember, to reflect. I think of “Month of May,” perhaps the most jarring track on the record, and am suddenly excitable; I’m transported to a punk show, replete with indie head bobbing, sweat that has accumulated on backs and underarms. It smells like cigarettes and sweat. I think the person next to me ashed her American Spirit on my elbow. It doesn’t hurt much. How can it? Win Butler, one of Arcade Fire’s coleads, presented a scene, his own recollection, to describe The Suburbs. “I got a letter from an old friend and it had a picture of him and his daughter at the mall near where my brother and 3

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I grew up. It was unforeseeably moving and it brought back a lot of memories,” Win told Clash Magazine in an interview soon after the album was released.1 “This combination of someone that I hadn’t seen for a long time and his daughter who I’d never met and a totally generic but familiar place. It was this conflicted but very deep feeling.” It’s sweet, tinged with sadness, and haunts. It is like the photograph of the narrator in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover.2 It is more than a photograph. It is a memory that breathes its own life. “It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards . . . it takes us to a place where we ache to go again,” Don Draper intones in a pitch to Kodak.3 But did it ever exist in the first place? When I first sat down to write this book I asked myself, “How the hell are you going to do this, Eric?” I asked, “What’s your way in?” I love movies and TV and have written extensively about both. This is my background, the critic, the dude who tweets about movies and television several times a day. It’s my roots and that became a place for me to go with this project. I think about things, all things, in this respect, in terms of intertext, how one scene or episode I adore informs something else, something different, or something grander. I also know I love 1 “Suburban Hymns—Arcade Fire Interview.” Clash Magazine. N.p., August 11, 2010. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.clashmusic.com/features/ suburban-hymns-arcade-fire-interview. 2 Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. London: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print. 3 Weiner, Matthew. “The Wheel.” Mad Men. AMC. October 10, 2007. Television.

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The Suburbs. I know I love anything that stirs something in my tummy, the way a photo of an old friend with his young daughter stirred something in Win. That feels like enough. I have a sentimental attachment to The Suburbs and to my suburb. I love where I grew up but I also hate it. I am aware that many would argue against this sentimentality, would be the first to say the record’s schmaltziness—and schmaltziness in general—makes for lesser art, and simply provides its audience and fans with unearned, uncomplicated emotion. I disagree. In her essay, “In Defense of Saccharin(e),” Leslie Jamison states4, “I want to make a case for the value of that moment when we feel sentimentality punctured—when we feel its flatness revealed, that sense of vista splitting open or opening out. Something useful happens in that moment of breakage. After the sugar high, always, dwells a sharpened sense of everything not sweet.” This is the second component and perhaps my more challenging undertaking when considering The Suburbs. Why are intense feelings my immediate go to when listening to the record? What about the record which invites these feelings? Is a suburban existence, particularly a teenage one, conducive to feeling something wholeheartedly and perhaps hyperbolically despite being oblivious to the larger mechanisms of the world? If so, why do we see this as bad or wrong? And, through it all, I want to understand what the

4 Jamison, Leslie. “In Defense of Saccharin(e).” The Empathy Exams. N.p.: Audible Studios on Brilliance, 2015. N. pag. Print.

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record’s sentimental nature actually reveal about the suburbs, what does sentimentality reveal about them? Throughout this book I hope to explain—as the poet Mary Ruefle5 grapples with in her lecture “On Sentimentality”— why it’s important to interrogate our “causeless emotions,” why it’s reductive and simplistic to reduce Arcade Fire’s sentimentality to “cheesy” or “bad” or “too much.” Ruefle cites William Wordsworth, who advocates for a kind of sentimentality that must be accompanied by consideration. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.” Likewise, The Suburbs invites us to feel deeply but to interrogate why we do too, what we are feeling deeply. Also, I wish to do this by blending a mixture of serious analysis and intimate anecdote, hopefully never relying too heavily on one or the other. Anyway, “Ready to Start,” the second track on The Suburbs, the song the band chose to perform at the 2011 Grammys, has a hook—repeated throughout the song—that operates similarly to a pastor’s sermon meant to rev up a crowd. “If I was scared, I would / And if I was bored, you know I would / And if I was yours, but I’m not.” It’s building to something, a payoff, but the climax is delayed. We don’t hear it until the outro. “Now I’m ready to start.” Ruefle, Mary. Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures. Seattle: Wave, 2012. Print. 5

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Who is Arcade Fire?

It was February in 2011 when Barbra Streisand took to the Grammys stage to present the award for album of the year. When she opened the envelope and announced Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs she stumbled over the word “suburbs,” as if, backstage, she had been prepped to declare other nominees Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, or Eminem as winners and was suddenly and inexplicably betrayed by the Recording Academy. Arcade Fire were shocked too. Régine Chassagne, one of the Montreal-based sextet’s founding members, covered her mouth in awe while her husband Win Butler gave a quick, garbled speech. At 6 feet 4 inches tall, Butler towered over the microphone as he thanked the Quebec city for housing him and his bandmates, his family, and concluded with an awkward but endearing, “We’re going to go play another song because we like music.” Chassagne shouted her own brief thanks, but in French, and the band proceeded to close the ceremony with a stirring albeit ironic (again, they were closing the evening) performance of “Ready to Start.” Grammy viewers were confused. Despite having two very different critically acclaimed records under their belt—Funeral

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and Neon Bible—and a loyal indie fan base, the public at large (and most likely Grammy viewers) didn’t know much about Arcade Fire, or at least didn’t expect them to beat out Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Eminem, or even Lady Antebellum for the coveted award. They could not have imagined that it would go to some indie band with too many members to count. Naturally, what ensued is what always ensues when a horde of people are confronted with a pop culture phenomenon: an internet meme was born. Out of the frenzy came a Tumblr account called “Who is Arcade Fire?”—a viral site that poked fun at those confounded by this relatively unknown indie band’s rise to mainstream fame. The site, still up even though it hasn’t been updated since 2012, features intentionally poorly photoshopped JPEGs, digs at the losing nominees, and, most spectacularly, a gem of a tweet from Rosie O’Donnell.1 “album of the year ? ummm never heard of them ever” While it became popular enough to pick up attention from Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, like all memes “Who is Arcade Fire” died rapidly, without an afterthought. Sure, it was succeeded by “Who is Bonnie Bear?” which similarly explored an indie band’s transition to mainstream popularity after Bon Iver won the best new album award at the Grammys the following year, but the bit probably became hard to keep

1 O’Donnell, Rosie (Rosie). “album of the year ? ummm never heard of them ever.” February 13, 2011, 8:25 P.M. Tweet. https://twitter.com/rosie/status/ 37004373498269696?lang=en

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up when—two weeks after the Grammy win—The Suburbs leaped from No. 52 to No. 12 on the Billboard 200 list2. Overall, the meme’s legacy may not be that significant (what meme’s legacy is?), but the implications of Arcade Fire’s win—especially considering they were by no means an overnight band but a group already respected for their small oeuvre—inevitably distinguishes The Suburbs from the band’s earlier efforts. One would think the Grammys propelled Arcade Fire into the public eye, but from the moment The Suburbs was released in August 2010, Arcade Fire were met with exceptional record debut numbers. The Suburbs debuted at the No. 1 spot3 on the Billboard album charts, making it the second album of the year to come from an indie band to debut at the top spot. Vampire Weekend’s Contra was the first. In its first week The Suburbs sold over 156,000 copies— about 30,000 more than Contra. Eminem, who would later join Arcade Fire with his album of the year nomination, debuted in the number two spot of the year with 152,000 copies sold. It may not be feasible to enter the minds or the souls who crowded the Target and the Amazon sites to purchase the record, but something about The Suburbs must 2 “Week Ending Feb 20, 2011: Albums: An Early Birthday Present.” Chart Watch. Yahoo! February 23, 2011. Retrieved August 19, 2011. 3 Montgomery, James. “Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs Debuts At #1 On Billboard.” MTV News. N.p., August 11, 2010. Web. June 12, 2017. http:// www.mtv.com/news/1645528/arcade-fires-the-suburbs-debuts-at-1-onbillboard/.

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have resonated on a grand level—grander than either Funeral or Neon Bible, whose numbers, although not as impressive as The Suburbs, are still nothing to scoff at. They’re not the first band to write about suburban anxiety, being young, but it’s the way they do it, the way they are so raw with what they feel— this is what feels unique. Arcade Fire arrived to the music scene with their 2004 debut record Funeral. As its title implies, the record is a meditation on death, grief, and how one is able to grow in the wake of tragedy. Funeral was inspired by several major losses: Chassagne’s grandmother, Win and his brother Will’s grandfather, and Richard Perry, another Arcade Fire bandmate, lost his aunt. Arcade Fire received raves for their highly personal and raw debut. Pitchfork’s David Moore writes4, “So long as we're unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance.” Sincerity. From the get-go Arcade Fire is distinguished by their contagious earnestness—even when they’re at their bleakest—and their bold approach to diving into difficult, powerful, and extreme emotions headfirst. While the album received the warmest of reviews, including an A- from Robert Christgau, the rawness of the record was off-putting to some.

4 Moore, David. “Arcade Fire: Funeral.” Pitchfork. Conde Nast, September 12, 2004. Web. June 12, 2017. http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/452funeral/.

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Even Christgau5 says, “And that’s how the album goes—too fond of drama, but aware of its small place in the big world, and usually beautiful.” It seems like an apt descriptor for all of Arcade Fire’s endeavors. They may take on weighty subjects, but they’re unafraid to go in headfirst, to let themselves explore and feel it all. There’s a truth to Christgau’s “too fond of drama” caveat, particularly when lyrics like “If the children don’t grow up / Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up / We’re just a million little god’s causin’ rain storms / turnin’ every good thing to rust” exist. The band’s greatest fans would call lyrics like these visceral, central to Arcade Fire’s schtick: bringing hard-learned truths about weighty themes like life and death to the surface. On “Wake Up,” Will Butler’s vocals appear strained, almost as if he’s summoning forth a teenage version of himself—a boy with greasy hair who sings emo tunes about love and loss in his parents’ garage—even though he’s actually a grown-up. The song also features a choir of supporting vocals, transforming the rather melancholic tune into an uplifting one, enough so that it caught the attention of Spike Jonze, who used the tune for the trailer of his film Where the Wild Things Are, a goose bumps–inducing adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book. Arcade Fire’s biggest critics would probably highlight how fantastical, in a roll-your-eyes kind of way the band can be,

5 Christgau, Robert. “Funeral.” Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics. N.p., 2004. Web. June 12, 2017. https://www.robertchristgau.com/ get_album.php?id=12704.

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how they lack any sort of subtlety or restraint, are all about the so-called drama. They’re intense—their first album has a no-nonsense title like Funeral, after all—and not everybody is about that life. A still mostly positive A.V. Club review from Noel Murray6 reads, “Funeral's layering of sound and wide-eyed posing can be overly dense, and though the band utilizes nice melodies and lively arrangements, the nostalgiasteeped-indie-rock-orchestra pool was pretty much drained before The Arcade Fire dove in.” Yet, the power of their first record clearly resonated, and three years later they brought the world their sophomore record Neon Bible, which debuted in the No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and sold over 92,000 records in its first week7. Unlike Funeral, Neon Bible isn’t as internal or even bombastic, and instead the band offers up pretty straightforward—without sacrificing the angst—commentary on everything from television to religion to the government (there’s a song on it called “Black Mirror”, and it’s title is the basis for the eerie TV series). Released near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neon Bible is heavily critical of the US government, and in an

6 Murray, Noel. “The Arcade Fire: Funeral.” The A.V. Club. N.p., September 20, 2004. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.avclub.com/review/the-arcadefire-emfuneralem-11275. 7 Kreps, Daniel. “How Arcade Fire Conquered the Charts.” Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone, August 11, 2010. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.rollingstone. com/music/news/how-arcade-fire-conquered-the-charts-20100811.

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interview with The Guardian Butler states8, “You don't have to have an entire plan of how to withdraw from Iraq in order to say something about it. I’m not a fucking political planner, I don’t know how to bail Bush out of this shit, but it doesn't make it any less evil.” Neon Bible is as political as Funeral is personal. The record also feels more distinctly American, often Springsteen-esque, and not only because it consists of songs like “Keep the Car Running,” which Springsteen happened to cover when he played with the band at a 2007 concert in Ottawa, and “No Cars Go.” It’s as preoccupied as Lana Del Rey is with cars and the open road—images that return in The Suburbs—but the record is also blatantly political, in a distinctly American way. It’s a late 2000s staple, a record completely aware of the realities most Americans are facing: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a continuing post–9/11 distrust of the government’s role in our lives, and an anxiety about the increasing role technology plays day to day. Writing about the album in honor of its 10th anniversary, Kenneth Patridge at Billboard drew his own parallels to The Boss9. “Springsteen himself wrote about senseless warfare (“Last to Die,” “Gypsy Biker”), distorted reality (“Magic”), and the dehumanizing effects of mass media (“Radio

Morley, Paul. “Interview: Arcade Fire.” The Observer. Guardian News and Media, March 18, 2007. Web. June 12, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2007/mar/18/popandrock.features11. 9 Patridge, Kenneth. “Arcade Fire’s ‘Neon Bible’ Turns 10: How Springsteen & Dubya Influenced Their Second Album.” Billboard. N.p., March 3, 2017. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/ rock/7708960/arcade-fire-neon-bible-album. 8

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Nowhere”) on his 2007 album Magic, the last truly great thing he’s done. Although Bruce ultimately paints a sunnier picture than Arcade Fire on Neon Bible, both albums capture life in the waning days of Dubya.” Neon Bible certainly marks a departure from the severe and intimate nature of Funeral—something that the band would pick up again with The Suburbs—but its existence asserts that they’re not just one note, in terms of both the themes they wish to explore and the sounds they want to adopt. It also serves as a well-executed interruption to what many fans and non-fans alike probably expected from the band’s second effort, a continuation of the charged scene that Funeral brought forward. Take “The Well and the Lighthouse,” by no means a standout from Neon Bible, but a fun track nonetheless. It provides a simple narrative about a criminal at his darkest hour who is redeemed after given the opportunity to look after a lighthouse, to make sure ships don’t wreck as they come to shore. It’s a mundane story about a twisted redemption and— in addition to having a fable-like quality to it in the vein of Springsteen’s writing—the track also almost feels like it was taken from a John Steinbeck story, even from Elia Kazan’s adaptation of East of Eden, about a troubled young man who causes a lot of mischief and ends up working the land to gain his father’s approval. It’s an American tale, a parable for the American Dream perhaps, even though—ironically enough—the record was released shortly before the housing crisis. The contradiction in this—and Arcade Fire seems so fond of them—is that it is just a fable and the idea of everyone having a purpose in this country, of working hard to achieve 14

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financial success and happiness, is just a fantasy. The song offers up a sweet fantasy amid a record more preoccupied with the many wrongs committed by the Western world. Like any halfway decent band, Arcade Fire builds on itself, and the band’s newer projects are always a culmination of their older works. We see ideas and images and sounds from before, but there’s also a freshness to each endeavor. That’s not to say their growth is linear, that each new record is objectively better than the previous, but that there’s a clear interest in going just a little bit deeper each time. Before we move into The Suburbs, it feels important to have iterated what came before, how Funeral introduced a band’s bold relationship with the bleakest of emotions, articulated them in 80s sounds reminiscent of The Talking Heads and The Pixies. Neon Bible widened their scope, had them looking outward at ponderous topics like technology, surveillance, and ultimately what it means to be American. The Suburbs unites these feelings and themes, and perhaps that is why it exploded. With it Arcade Fire may have— intentionally or not—delivered their most relatable work.

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What are the suburbs?

The Suburbs works alongside several pieces of media that all attempt to illustrate what our suburbs look and feel like, what the implications of suburbia are, and why so many of us share a collective unconscious, of sorts, when it comes to articulating the makeup of that special region that exists between the core and periphery. But talking about the suburbs, defining them, understanding their history, feels like an important first step in understanding what Arcade Fire is up to. Suburbia is not universal. And while I’m certain Arcade Fire wants as many people as possible to feel something when listening to their album, it is essential to understand that a popular conception of suburbia is heavily colored by a Western ideology, and that this ideology was formed by and for a privileged population (white and wealthy), particularly in the earliest appearances of what we now know as the American suburbs. As romantic as the suburbs can be, as safe and warm and nostalgic as they can be, they are also inherently sinister, by no means a “universal” haven for all. In his book Screened Out cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard critiques this universal,

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and states1, “Every culture worthy of the name comes to grief in the universal. Every culture which universalizes itself loses its singularity and dies away.” The suburbs affirms universality through uniformity. Whether intentional or not, it demands a sameness among its inhabitants. It is in this demand for sameness that it is most dangerous, most also most alluring. Arcade Fire may be capturing a specific suburban mood, one that may be familiar to many, but The Suburbs also offers critique. As the band would undoubtedly argue, The Suburbs is not a defense of urban sprawl, does not glamorize a certain privileged and exclusive youthful experience. There’s romance in their record, which may only be possible coming from a place of privilege, from an experience where there is a certain safety one may feel growing up in the suburbs, but there’s also something distinctly apocalyptic about the record too. It’s never just one thing. Spike Jonze’s “Scenes from the Suburbs,” a short film2 that accompanies the record, presents us with the expected: kids riding bikes, kids talking about sex, kids at house parties, etc. Then, there are the disruptions: a young man who suffers from PTSD after returning from a war, military figures populating the town, violence, fear, and heartbreak. Jonze shows that beneath the utopic exterior that makes up an understanding of the suburbs are several cracks. Perhaps it is the point where, as Leslie Jamison argues, “we feel sentimentality punctured. . . . If the saccharine offers some

Baudrillard, Jean. Screened out. London: Verso, 2014. Print. Scenes from the Suburbs. Dir. Spike Jonze. 2011. Online.

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undiluted spell of feeling—oversimplified and unabashedly fictive—then perhaps its value lies in the process of emerging from its thrall: that sense of unmasking, that sense of guilt.” A bubble can only exist if people are left out, and that does not feel like the purpose of The Suburbs. As we delve into the images and sentiments that have come to be common symbols and signifiers of suburban living in American society, it’s important to always keep in mind that this cannot be true for everybody, that the ideas expressed in the record are personal and not meant to be prescriptive or revealing of some absolute truth about a suburban experience. It’s also important to understand an unintentional but still significant contradiction present in the album. There’s an inherent privilege in the sentimental, in being able to look back with any sort of longing—even in being able to wrestle with an image of suburbia as a “love-hate” sort of environment. That’s not to say that The Suburbs is a record about privilege, only that there’s a certain privilege that must be acknowledged in looking at the album—and suburbia—with a longing for it. “Suburbia symbolizes the fullest, most unadulterated embodiment of contemporary culture; it is a manifestation of such fundamental characteristics of American society as conspicuous consumption, a reliance upon the nuclear units, the widening division between work and leisure, and a tendency toward racial and economic exclusiveness,” writes Kenneth T. Jackson in his book Crabgrass Frontier3, which

3 Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. N.p.: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

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systematically breaks down suburbia in America before the term was even used. Jackson—who wrote Crabgrass Frontier in the 80s, as the suburban dream began to fall on its head—is quick to establish this phenomenon as uniquely American, highlighting how suburbs around the world aren’t necessarily planned the same way. While many of us see our American suburbs as semi-urban areas with a strong middle- and upper-middle-class backbone where you move to for the good public schools, a product of the American Dream away from the city’s debauchery, the same can’t be said everywhere, particularly abroad. “In Buenos Aires, Santiago, Mexico City, and Lima, the most degrading poverty exists on the outskirts, where flush toilets sewers, running water, and fire and police protection are virtually unknown.” For some of these cities, and even some more Western ones like Paris, the city center houses the wealth. We can’t generalize. Then there’s “the racial and economic exclusiveness” factor inherent to the suburb’s inception. One person’s sanctuary, their somewhat more romantic association with the suburbs, can be another’s nightmare. In Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror film Get Out, as a contemporary example, a black man visits the suburban home of his white girlfriend’s parents. What he sees and how he feels amid an environment so white, so intended to other, is anything but safe. Even his drive to the suburbs, a drive that could have been serene—the trees, the open, and quiet road—is anything but ideal. A deer leaps out from the woods and slams into his car, all before he arrives to his girlfriend’s parents’ home—which looks like right out of a Pottery Barn catalog. 20

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This is all important to keep in mind, given that Arcade Fire’s depiction of the suburbs are, while often steeped in a sweet nostalgia, not immune to delving into the more corrupting, violent, and straight up fucked up mentalities that are tied to a makeup of our suburbs. After all, their second record Neon Bible is essentially a giant critique of neoliberalism during the Bush years—there’s no way The Suburbs could be apolitical. Also, without it being entirely explicit, the band by no means shy away from the complications that accompany urban sprawl (although they do have two songs on the record named “Sprawl”): segregation, its environmental consequences, the menacing homogenized population that ends up regulating our culture. As most of us know—perhaps because our parents or grandparents are of the baby boomer generation—the end of the Second World War brought on a massive urban sprawl, which happened to be directly encouraged and funded by the federal government. “In the decade after the war Congress regularly approved billions of dollars worth of additional mortgage insurance for the Federal Housing Administration. Even more important was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which created a Veterans Administration mortgage program similar to that of FHA. This law gave official endorsement and support to the view that the 16 million GI’s of World War II should return to civilian life with a home of their own,” Jackson writes. While many families lived grouped together in homes in the years before and after the war, single-family homes rose exponentially between 1944 and 1950. In 1944 there were 114,000 single-family homes in the United States. Two years later—and a year after soldiers 21

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had returned home—there were 937,000 in 1946. By 1948 there were 1,883,000 and 1,692,000 in 1950. Although this government support and grand migration to the suburbs seems all fine and well, the system— naturally—thrived on exclusion. “The post-1945 developments took place against a background of the decline of factory-dominated cities. What was unusual in the new circumstances was not the presence of discrimination—Jews and Catholics as well as blacks had been excluded from certain neighborhoods for generations—but the thoroughness of the physical separation which it entailed. The Levitt organization, which was no more culpable in this regard than any other urban or suburban firm, publically and officially refused to sell to blacks for two decades after the war. Nor did resellers deal with minorities.” As William Levitt explained, “We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine two.” Our modern conception of the suburbs, moreover, feel synonymous with a construction of whiteness. But it’s more complicated than that. There’s no way to be aware of all of this as a kid. All you know is what’s in front of you, the drama or lack thereof present in everyday life. In a Clash interview one of Arcade Fire’s coleads Régine Chassagne says,4 “I grew up in Quebec, [Win] grew up in

4 “Suburban Hymns—Arcade Fire Interview.” Clash Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.clashmusic.com/features/suburban-hymnsarcade-fire-interview.

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Houston. What was interesting to me is that even though the places we grew up in were very different there were feelings and emotions attached to our surroundings that transcended the culture. We could both relate to the same sentiments even though we were in different countries.” She adds, “I think it was interesting to describe all those feelings. For example, the feeling when you’re very young that suburbs are kind of nice because there’s a little park to go to and it’s safe, but then you grow up and as a teenager it seems kind of dead and you feel like you want to get out of there. The image of the suburbs is not very glamorous and it’s not something people are very passionate about, but there are still dramatic stories that happen there.” Some of the deadness, a sense of dread that seeps in with age, may be—at least at a subconscious level—an understanding that there’s more. “[The suburbs] obfuscates things that weren’t true. There’s the sense that we love this utopian ideal and the suburbs were intended to be that way,” Rebecca Amato, a historian and urban studies professor at NYU explains. There’s working class people who are not living in the suburbs, white and black. The working class wasn’t able to live in the suburbs either but there was a lot of stuff happening in the 50s and 60s around working class— unionization and protecting union rights. Then there’s the civil rights movement, which is revved up after World  War  II. All of these things are hidden by this utopian vision of the suburbs. Régine almost expresses herself as if she were describing stages of human growth. There’s the warmth and innocence 23

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and obliviousness of a child, a child who treasures slides and swings and the mulch that gets stuck between toes. The child amused by fireflies trapped in mason jars, who never grows tired riding their blinged out scooter on the same bike path day after day. Then that child grows up, tries pot for the first time in the backseat of a friend’s Jeep in a Checkers parking lot, and soon longs for a busier existence away from curfews, malls, and the same goddamn people you run into everywhere. This is superficial, of course. There’s also an awareness, for many of us, of a lack of difference, of how exclusive and small our world can be. We see those left out and ostracized or we are those left out and ostracized. The suburbs become claustrophobic, malicious, the root of all that is wrong and unfair and dull. However, she skips a last phase, which comes perhaps a decade or two after the teenage years. Will Butler, Win’s younger brother who plays synthesizer, bass, guitar, and percussion for Arcade Fire told Pitchfork, “I have definitely developed an appreciation for aspects of it now that I’m at the point where I’m considering having kids. It’s like, ‘Oh shit, it would be nice to go to a place where there’s no crime and great schools.’ I don’t want to move back to the suburbs any time soon, but you see why people move there.”5 The Suburbs doesn’t shy away from these truths, from dissecting the layers that make up a certain suburban

5 Dombal, Ryan. “Arcade Fire Talk Scenes From the Suburbs.” Pitchfork. N.p., April 5, 2011. Web. June 15, 2017. http://pitchfork.com/news/42108-arcadefire-talk-scenes-from-the-suburbs/.

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existence, one that many of us (but not all of us) share. Again, the ability to feel these contradictions, to feel conflicted, leads back to an inevitable position of privilege, but the band seems aware of their position, almost as if they know that their nostalgia may be a little fucked up. But they have to work through it somehow. Again, it’s complicated.

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It was divine inspiration. It came to us through a dream. Osmosis. Loaded responses to a loaded question: What inspired you to make this work? There’s nothing satisfying about “it just came to us,” about having to make something concrete out of an abstract vaguity, but The Suburbs—like the rest of Arcade Fire’s oeuvre—rests so heavily on the feels it would be difficult to imagine the band attributing the record’s birth to the mundane. It boils down to that photograph, an unremarkable image of an old friend of Win Butler’s standing with his young daughter in front of a Houston mall. There is nothing prescriptive-sounding about the image and there’s nothing about The Suburbs that feels intent on defining it. It’s like what Susan Sontag says in On Photography,1 “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” The Suburbs carries this authenticity with it, and is unpretentious in its ability to inspire sentiment

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 2010. Print.

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without enforcing a specific vision as the status quo. Their suburbs are complicated, indefinite, paradoxical, dangerous, lived in, desolate, and probably whatever you want them be. In Mick Middles’ Arcade Fire: Behind the Black Mirror,2 the closest thing we have to a comprehensive Arcade Fire biography, the author got a gem of a quote from Win, a few sentences that are essential to understanding Arcade Fire’s intentions and their tastes. “The idea of using what is technically pop music to convey a heavy emotion always appealed to me. It was through people like The Cure that immense possibilities seemed to open up. It astonished me that it was still possible, despite the tendency for radio playlists to remain completely safe, dull and unthreatening . . . that it was still possible for people to break through that and express things that would be beyond the understanding of radio playlists and yet [be] easily absorbed by the fans on the other side.” The Suburbs—composed of 16 tracks and running at over an hour—was mostly recorded in Montreal, and is—to boil it down to Win’s concise thesis statement—“neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs—it’s a letter from the suburbs.” The Suburbs does not invest in a pro/antibinary, and, as you’ll hopefully discover in a track-by-track breakdown below, it’s simply fascinated by images, scenes, some pretty and some not so pretty, that make up a reality of the burbs and of ourselves as grown-ups who were once not

2 Middles, Mick. Arcade Fire: Behind the Black Mirror. London: Omnibus, 2012. Print.

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grown-ups. It does all that Will stated above. The images they conjure are familiar and sentimental, and each song on the album serves to create a distinct mood and idea we may feel about suburbia. It may seem pedantic to focus on each track but the way they operate alone and together reveal a steadfast but also a restless energy that highlights the several and often conflicting ideas that make up the album. “The Suburbs” The album opens with the titular track, which functions as more of a prologue than as an actual opener. It’s straightforward and, in a way, works to say, “this is more or less what the record is going to be about; this is more or less how you’re going to feel listening to it.” It’s an invitation, one that poses a central paradox that comes up again and again throughout the record. “In the suburbs I / I learned to drive,” Win sentimentally begins before transitioning into the bleak “And you told me we’d never survive / Grab your mother’s keys we’re leavin.” It’s a gentle rock track, a mood setter that seamlessly leads into “Ready to Start,” perhaps—as implied by its title—the record’s real opener. It also introduces the idea that there are layers, more than one thing we feel when considering the suburbs. There’s that sense of longing and nostalgia, that saccharine image of learning to drive a car, almost John Hughesian in its expression of fondness for a sheltered youth, but we can also understand that there’s more to this too—a desire to get the fuck out. 29

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“Ready to Start” “Ready to Start” begins with drums and the sound of a bass reverbing, creating a sense of anticipation, the kind one may feel as a plane suddenly speeds up on the runway, about to take off. Maybe you were falling asleep, about to go off into dreamland, but suddenly you’re wide awake, reminded of the journey ahead of you. Maybe you’re going home. Maybe you’re going to your old home. How do you feel about it all? The opening lyrics are cheeky. We get a “fuck capitalism” comment, but not in some heavy or overwrought way. “Businessmen drink my blood / Like the kids in art school said they would.” There’s a self-awareness of the pretensions and privilege the band is accused of here, all the more apt when you consider that this is the record where they’ll truly begin to balance that fine line between the indie and the mainstream. Win told NME that the record, in part, was inspired by love letters he used to write in high school,3 and the track contains a levity that feels both micro and macro. Young Win is scared of rejection, that the girl who sits on the other side of chemistry lab will hit him with the “but we can still be friends.” Arcade Fire, however, has more to lose, which brings us to the hook, perhaps one of the band’s greatest. “If I was scared, I would / And if I was bored, you know I would / And

3 Fullerton, Jamie. “Arcade Fire’s Win Butler Reveals Love Letters Inspired ‘The Suburbs’—Video.” NME. N.p., July 29, 2010. Web. June 15, 2017. http:// www.nme.com/news/music/arcade-fire-292-1296114.

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if I was yours, but I'm not.” It suddenly cuts off into the next verse, a tease, and we’re left to wonder, “If I’m not yours, then what am I?”—a rhetorical question for the existential youth. “Modern Man” In terms of placing us in a certain time frame, the early tracks in The Suburbs feel more reflective, of grown-ups looking back, trying to understand why they are the way they are. “Modern Man” feels like an extension of “Ready to Start.” It’s up tempo and maintains the same sense of anxiety about identity, the same looking inward, and asks what it means to be a so-called modern man. It’s existential, something you’d expect Don Draper to consider as we are presented with flashbacks of his traumatic childhood. As Ian Cohen states in his Pitchfork review of the record, “The bulk of The Suburbs focuses on this quiet desperation borne of compounding the pain of wasting your time as an adult by romanticizing the wasted time of your youth.” This is best exemplified in “Modern Man,” which repeats the line “makes me feel like,” without us ever learning what the song’s narrator actually feels like. Arcade Fire are masters of expression, at letting us know what’s on their mind, but sometimes—without realizing it—we find ourselves more capable of explaining how we feel intellectually rather than emotionally. Sometimes it feels impossible to fill in the blank with something simple. “Makes me feel like—”. Before Arcade Fire takes a blast to the past, romanticizes a certain youth and a suburban existence, they open their 31

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record with the now, with a narrator who is trapped in thought loops, is preoccupied with what was and what could have been. This isn’t exactly expressed as a tragedy—“Modern Man” is more of a conventional rock song, blending both acoustic and electric guitar—but there’s a manic energy that feels like an important set up for track number four, which is, without a doubt, the record’s most jarring. This manic energy also feels referential, tied to something we’d expect to hear from New Order. “Rococo” “Rococo” is The Suburbs most difficult track—immediately apparent in its aggravating title. But with several listens it becomes one of the record’s most significant entries, a song that’s less superfluous than its pretentious name—taken from the French eighteenth-century art movement—implies. “Rococo,” with its orchestral strings and droning guitar, is supposed to feel irritatingly repetitive, the way a parent— constantly disappointed in their child—becomes. There’s a not-so-veiled criticism present in its lyrics: “They seem wild but they are so tame” as we see—for the first time on the record—a confident opinion on the negatives of a suburban upbringing. The kids the band sings of in “Rococo” are complacent; they use “great big words that they don’t understand,” are Rococo in their commitment to presentation, to their image. They’re conformists who believe they are radicals, me at 16 thinking that my Urban Outfitters tee distinguished me from the masses. A dictionary definition

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describes Rococo as such: “The style of architecture and decoration, originating in France about 1720, evolved from Baroque types and distinguished by its elegant refinement in using different materials for a delicate overall effect and by its ornament of shellwork, foliage, etc.” Nevertheless, while “Rococo” offers a warning, an observation about uniformity and its comforts, the band is wise not to reproach. They’re playful, aware that their nagging, their preoccupation with lecturing the youth, is exhaustive too. They don’t take themselves too seriously. But, as an important note, Win did bring to attention something incredibly subtle, but fucked up about the Rococo period when speaking to Middles. This very modern idea using the same language. Also, though it’s not really in the song and I don’t think anyone would ever pick it up, that same period was the most opulent time in French history, and the darkest shit was going on in Haiti at the same time. There are these images of French aristocrats with big collars and big hair in the jungle in Haiti trying to do their tea parties with flies buzzing around. That was a little bit of the feeling behind it, too. “Empty Room” The violins! They’re aggressive, the song is too, and present us with Régine’s velvety vocals. “Empty Room” is a huge divergence from what they’ve given us so far, not only

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sonically, but emotionally. The darkness of “Empty Room” is deceptive, and if anything serves to counter the warning of “Rococo” with a song about individuality. “When I'm by myself / I can be myself / When my life is calm / But I don't know when.” Régine sings this ecstatically, and one envisions a child—perhaps in a new home, walking into the room that will soon become their bedroom. It’s still not their space, however, is lacking the artifacts that breed comfort and warmth and familiarity. But, while their parents are elsewhere, perhaps inspecting a faulty living room sconce, the child bounces around the space, wall to wall, making it their own. “City With No Children” Like “Modern Man” and “Rococo,” there’s a restless energy that’s evident in “City With No Children,” a simple, stripped down song. We hear Win’s vocals over a guitar and what sounds like clapping. The hands, if they are in fact hands, serve to shine a spotlight on Win’s narrative, which takes him back to this youth in a suburban Houston. The track opens with a sweet memory, “The summer that I broke my arm / I waited for your letter.” However, “City With No Children” quickly grows dark, as a world war—whichever war—stripped the narrator of his innocence before he had the opportunity to love. Now, as a grown-up, living in a “city with no children in it,” we sense an internal conflict, a figure who looks to his youth—which only exists in memory— with some fondness. 34

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It all feels very tragic, and one senses that the world war that has raged, the chatter about apocalypse and desecration, are both literal and internal. The child in you dies and “City With No Children” is an ode to that. “Half Light I” A rhythm has started to develop, a conflict becomes clearer and clearer. Arcade Fire has the utmost reverence for youth, for being young, and The Suburbs becomes a record that is simultaneously nostalgic and ominous. There’s a sweetness in reflection, but there’s also an understanding that our reminiscing is fragmented and the place we long for, the feeling we long for, may not be some sort of Eden. “Half Light I” is Régine’s shining moment, and it’s only similarity to “City With No Children” is its insularity, as Régine reflects—over lovely, light string—about her own youth. She sings of the night, which, like the empty room, is a safe space, where we can run, where we’re loose, where we’re free. The track offers no defenses or criticism of suburbia, but instead focuses on a fixed moment, an image, a moment in time where its narrator can take a breather. Wherever we are—in large, overwhelming cityscapes or oppressive, manicured suburbs—we can find a freedom in ourselves, at night. Régine sings of “the ocean in a shell,” which feels like a metaphor for the way we can safeguard our individuality and our innocence. There’s no ambiguity in this. It’s certain. 35

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“Half Light II (No Celebration)” It’s with “Half Light II (No Celebration)” that Arcade Fire turns to a more electronic sound; using synths to complement a narrative that’s presented like an American fable. “Half Light II” gives us a story about a man, who lost all of his money in a financial crash, and now must leave San Francisco for his hometown. His story extols the virtues of suburbia. It’s a place one thinks to return to after hardship, and whether Arcade Fire believes this is true or not, the song concludes with a devastating understanding that the place cannot exist in anything but the man’s memory. Win sings, “In this town where I was born / I now see through a dead man’s eyes.” It’s not because the town is different, but because it never was what he thought it to be in his youth. “Suburban War” As with “Half Light II,” Arcade Fire is pretty despondent in “Suburban War,” and Win reminisces about the past, taking lyrics from the album’s title track “In the suburbs I / I learned to drive / and you told me that we would never survive” and imbuing them with a different, even less innocuous meaning. There are two figures we’re introduced to, friends, who are driven apart by different attitudes about suburbia. Win—and through him, the band—are more nostalgic, and by no means as cynical as the friends. The song opens with a sweetness: “Let’s go for a drive and see 36

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the town tonight / There’s nothing to do but I don’t mind when I’m with you.” It’s haunting, dreamlike almost, and the band invites us to imagine this reminiscing, this particular and ultimately familiar scene. Naturally, as they age, as time goes by, as ideologies are formed and changed, this friendship begins to deteriorate. “Suburban War” concludes explosively but also anticlimactically. There’s a stirring repetition of “All my old friends they don’t know me now,” and then we are given an abrupt, severe ending. “All my old friends, wait.” “Month of May” To shake us out of this melancholic stupor Arcade Fire offers up “Month of May,” The Suburbs most bombastic track. We’re over the midway point, have established an understanding of the certain scenes—mostly bittersweet— and “Month of May” disrupts this all. It begins with a countdown, but the cheesiness of this decision, to give us an amateurish opening that feels more fitting for a high school rehearsing for a local gig, is without a doubt deliberate. Then “Month of May” explodes, becomes a loud, noisy, punk-y rock ballad. There’s an insane bass line, and the track—like “Rococo” talks about the complacent youth, who keep on “standing with their arms folded tight.” They’re not doing much, are all talk, and “Month of May” acts like a call to action, emphasized through the track’s most aggressive lyrics. “Well, I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light,” Win sings about the 37

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world, the problems of the world that only the youth carry. “But how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight.” They’re provocative, and sometimes that’s a little annoying, as is the song. It’s the “wake up” moment in another-wise more reflective record. It’s not passive or concerned with the past. Instead it’s charged, a welcome albeit discomfiting interruption that appears a little more than halfway through The Suburbs. It’s also, more simply, a head-bobbing anthem, something you’d expect more from Blink-182 than Arcade Fire. “Wasted Hours (A Life That We Can Live)” “Wasted Hours” is gentler, again reflective. It also, by this point, brings to attention an obsession of Arcade Fire’s: driving and driving and driving. There’s nothing else to do, but Arcade Fire doesn’t necessarily mean that hours passed driving around carry no meaning. Instead, the term feels more like something you’d expect to hear from a parent after they learn you’ve spent a day wandering around, not being productive. Perhaps they’re reprimanding you, but it’s done lightly, with a fondness and understanding that there’s something nice about this time and age where you can get away with doing nothing, thinking about nothing. The sad irony of this is, as teens, we hate this, and long to get out. “At first they built the road then they built the town / That’s why we're still driving around and around / And all we see are kids in the buses longing to be free.” Then the child becomes the parent, life has grown complicated, and the wasted hours feel more precious than anything. 38

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“Deep Blue” It’s tied to Boyhood now, Richard Linklater’s revolutionary film that takes place over twelve years, following a young boy as he grows into a young man. As with Win and Will, Linklater grew up in Texas, and throughout the film his characters move around the state, from city to city, or the outskirts of cities. “Deep Blue” plays over the credits of his deeply personal film about youth and time gone by, but the song’s title actually takes its name from the first robot— named Deep Blue—to beat a human at chess. This occurred in 1996, at the turn of the century, and the track—replete with piano and strings and the expected acoustic guitar— looks at the implications of the upcoming new millennium. It’s a little bit of 2001: A Space Odyssey anxiety. There’s that fear, one so many of us hold, that machines will take over, beat us at living.    Like many songs on The Suburbs, “Deep Blue” has an apocalyptic feel to it, which makes sense considering that many people thought the world would end in 2000. It’s obsession with concern over technology—“You could never predict it / That it could see through you / Kasparov Deep Blue 1996” and “Hey! Put the cellphone down for a while”— allude to the themes explored in Neon Bible. The world is changing and we have less power. But what does this have to do with suburbia? Technology affects us all, even those of us who aren’t in the center of it all. Why would you need to be getting frostbite at Times Square when the famous ball drops when you can watch “. . . the end of the century / Compressed on a tiny screen.” 39

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“We Used to Wait” As skeptical as Arcade Fire are about technology, they are still pioneers in the ways they allow their fans to interact with their music. It would be foolish to ignore their The Wilderness Downtown project, an interactive, multimedia effort that accompanied the release of “We Used to Wait,” the second single off of The Suburbs after “Ready to Start.” The band collaborated with Google and music video director Chris Milk to create the site thewildernessdowntown.com. Taken from a “We Used to Wait” lyric the site asks you to type in your hometown and proceeds to play the track over a couple of interactive videos. One features a kid in a hoodie running, another uses satellites to zoom in on images from the town or city you typed in when first arriving to the page, etc. Given that The Suburbs is explicitly tied to images, to scenes, the site is transportative, a perfect experiment for the band. It takes you to your past, while you’re in your present, and has you thinking about the future. The song itself is also aggressive and opens with the repetitive playing of a piano key. Win opens singing “I used to write,” and “We Used to Wait”—like “Deep Blue”—is a tune about communication and interaction in the face of a technological revolution. We don’t wait for anything anymore. We receive everything instantaneously. While it may seem naggy, and old fashioned, releasing this alongside the interactive video complicates things. They’re not necessarily stuck in the past here, regretful of the way things were. But knowing that “now our lives are changing fast” inevitably brings up the “hope that something pure 40

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can last.” Whether or not their video project was intended as some sort of solution or compromise is ambiguous, but at least—with its interactive function—there’s less of a distance between us and technology. We retain some power. “Sprawl I (Flatland)” “Sprawl I (Flatland)” once again slows things down, takes away the drums, and functions as a sort of eulogy for a place that no longer exists. Win sings melancholically and longingly, and “Sprawl I” takes listeners to a present-day and rather desolate suburb. Whether the place is actually in ruins or just void of an energy the narrator expected is up for debate, but regardless “Sprawl I” is the saddest song on The Suburbs, a sleepy meditation on growing old and finding the place where they were raised is empty and devoid of meaning. The narrator once again takes an existential drive through the burbs, looking at the house where he used to live, “the places that we used to play.” Tragically, however, the obsession he has with the past must die and we sense an internal struggle to let go. Letting go seems to be the most difficult thing for Arcade Fire, as they stay stuck in the past, find it challenging—as they express in “The Suburbs”—to “move past the feeling.” This feels like an apt descriptor for the record, this struggle to move past the feeling, to grow up, to not let a sentimental reverence for home swallow them up. It’s perhaps why there’s such a schizoid arrangement to the whole thing. They jump from upbeat to downcast and while there’s undoubtedly an effort being made to move on, that’s all easier said than done. 41

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“Sprawl II (mountains beyond mountains)” It’s not the tragic part two you’d expect, but instead the polar opposite to “Sprawl I.” Easily the most spirited track on The Suburbs, “Sprawl II” is a dancey tune that sounds like it’s coming right off Blondie’s Parallel Lines. It has a synthy sound that comes right out of the 80s and there are moments when Chassagne’s vocals are indistinguishable from Debbie Harry’s. On a sonic level, “Sprawl II” is immediately nostalgic, paying homage to the music the members of Arcade Fire must have listened to growing up. It’s also incredibly powerful and evocative lyrically, with Chassagne directly addressing critics of the band’s sentimentality. Amid the dullness of suburbia, of urban sprawl, the hyperbolic “mountains beyond mountains of shopping malls,” she finds the feeling, her bubble within the bubble. In the opening lyrics we hear her say, “These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose / But late at night the feelings swim to the surface.” The night offers a sort of comfort, a danger and excitement that is incredibly cinematic. The uniformity, the boringness is all apparent at night, but everything truly remarkable—bad or good—makes its way to the surface at night. During the day time “the man,” the people intent on controlling things, rule. “They heard me singing and they told me to stop / Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.” We’re all part of this capitalistic machine, Arcade Fire seems to be saying, punching in and out of our mundane jobs. It’s a shame, particularly as Chassagne notes that she feels we can never escape it. But in the records most sentimental statement, we 42

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are told that we have the darkness, a period where no one can see us, where we can be the closest thing there is to ourselves. “The Suburbs (continued)” We’re ushered out with only the string section of the titular track. Then we hear vocals from both Win and Régine. They repeat the lyric, “Sometimes I can’t believe it / I’m moving past the feeling again.” The ending song is simple and doesn’t offer anything new, but that’s intentional. It’s like the closing track that appears in the end credits of a moving film. It reminds you of everything you just heard and leaves you with a thought or feeling that’s supposed to stick with you for some time.

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I think, as you’re growing up, your emotions are just as deep as they are when you’re an adult. You’re ability to feel lonely, longing, confused or angry are just as deep.1 —Spike Jonze There’s something that occurs when you listen to The Suburbs that feels deliberate. You can’t help but conjure up images. They may be memories of past experiences—pleasant, unpleasant, or a mix of both—or they may be associations to other works, artifacts that similarly strike some sort of chord within you. Arcade Fire knows this, are also concerned by the relationship that exists between their music and visuals. This is evidenced in the multimedia project they took on to accompany “We Used to Wait,” but even more so with Scenes from the Suburbs, a short film directed by Spike Jonze that blends music from The Suburbs with, well, scenes from them. 1 Weintraub, Steve Frosty. “Spike Jonze and Max Records Interview WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.” Collider. N.p., October 11, 2009. Web. June 15, 2017. http://collider.com/spike-jonze-and-max-records-interview-wherethe-wild-things-are/.

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It began with Jonze’s film, Where the Wild Things Are, his third feature after collaborating with Charlie Kaufman on his first two films—Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Working alongside writer Dave Eggers, Jonze decided to take on Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, releasing his film adaptation in 2009. Although the source material was only ten sentences long, from it, Jonze crafted a moody, heartfelt feature about the perils of childhood, and used actual costumes and puppets to create the magical world young Max escapes to (from the suburbs) after upsetting his single mother. But what does Arcade Fire have to do with the film? They inspired it. Given the popularity of the book and the acclaim Jonze had garnered for his previous efforts, the film was highly anticipated, and when its trailer first dropped, fans of Arcade Fire were probably surprised, but definitely not disappointed, to hear “Wake Up” playing in the background. Jonze’s visuals— the monsters he so delicately crafted, the sense of isolation Max feels as he gazes curiously out a classroom window, jealously at his mother and her new boyfriend—work like bread and butter with Win’s aching vocals and the sense of both ecstatic wonder and deep melancholia that oozes from the song. While “Wake Up” didn’t make it into the film’s actual soundtrack, Jonze revealed that the song and Funeral in general were the inspiration behind the film.2 It makes sense 2 Hughes, Josiah. “Spike Jonze Cites Arcade Fire As Central Influence on Where the Wild Things Are.” Exclaim! Music. N.p., October 15, 2009. Web. June 12, 2017. http://exclaim.ca/music/article/spike_jonze_cites_arcade_ fire_as_central_influence_on_where_wild_things_are.

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given how solemn it is, how suffocatingly heartbreaking Max’s loneliness is. “Before we shot the movie, I cut together this mood piece; I used footage from E.T., Ratcatcher, and The Black Stallion, and cut together this mood piece to the song,” Jonze explained. I showed it to the crew to give them a sense of the tone and the feeling of the film before we shot. It was a way to get everyone to the same place. I wrote the whole script to Arcade Fire’s Funeral, and I listened to that song a lot. That record is thematically very connected to the film. Funeral is a record about loss, about the ways we perform grief and ties together so neatly with Jonze’s film, which, in a way is also about a type of loss. Max is threatened by his mom’s boyfriend and, in a larger sense, by inevitable change. Although he escapes to a fantasy world of monsters, he soon finds their world to be as complicated and volatile as his own. It’s no safe haven. He returns home, where he’ll eventually face reality, and ultimately grow up. There’s a tragic element to this interpretation, and the more negative reviews focused on how the film may not be as suitable for young children. David Denby at the New Yorker writes,3 Kids like danger, followed by a release from danger and a return to safety, yet the only danger posed by these creatures is that they will turn Max into someone as 3 Denby, David. “Naughty Boys.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, June 05, 2017. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2009/10/19/naughty-boys.

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messed-up as they are. . . . I have a vision of eight-yearolds leaving the movie in bewilderment. Why are the creatures so unhappy? That question doesn’t return a child to safety or anywhere else. Moreover, they have to grow up, and that’s the saddest of realities. The collaboration between Jonze and Arcade Fire may now seem inevitable, particularly when one considers how the director’s work is so similar—at least in tone—with Arcade Fire’s. Both are moved by the sentimental, and are often uncomfortably open in their works. Jonze won a deserved Academy Award for his screenplay for Her, a sci-fi romance not so concerned with the obvious obstacles that accompany falling in love with an operating system, but of falling in love in general—particularly in an age where technology gets in the way of “IRL” relationships. Despite its absurd-sounding premise, Jonze’s film is as sincere as they come, a meditation on an unexpected yet—by the end of it—entirely plausible romantic relationship between a human man and the computer system he purchases to help manage his life. Its anxiety over technology feels similar to what we hear on Neon Bible, especially in its openness. An Indiewire review of the film calls it4 “a vulnerable, earnest

4 Perez, Rodrigo. “NYFF Review: Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams & Rooney Mara.” IndieWire. N.p., October 12, 2013. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.indiewire.com/2013/10/ nyff-review-spike-jonzes-her-starring-joaquin-phoenix-scarlettjohansson-amy-adams-rooney-mara-92702/.

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movie that strikes no false notes, never feels manipulative, and earns the sadness and reflection it evokes in its audience.” Its earnestness may also earn eyerolls—understandable given that Jonze’s film5 isn’t a satire about the perils of a digital age but a genuine albeit unconventional romantic drama—but Jonze is nonetheless determined to proffer up an unflinching look at how we, as humans, operate. Early on there’s a scene, a brief but standout sequence, where Theodore Twombly—played by Joaquin Phoenix, who looks like a puppy dog if puppy dogs had creepy, porny mustaches— goes on a blind date with a young, beautiful woman played by Olivia Wilde. As their date comes to a close and they’re making out on a futuristic Los Angeles sidewalk, about to have sex, she takes a step back. “Wait, you’re not just going to fuck me and not call me like the other guys, right?” When he hesitates she tells him, “You know what? At this age I feel like I can’t just let you waste my time, you know, if you don’t have the ability to be serious.6” It’s a devastating little episode, raw and vulnerable and uncomfortable and almost hyperreal. It’s something so many of us have wanted to say, have feared we would hear, will probably never say, and will probably never hear. It’s a scene that stings to the core. Although “Wake Up” didn’t make it into the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack, the collaboration between Jonze and Arcade Fire was inspired, enough so that Jonze decided 5 Her. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. Warner Bros, 2013. Film. 6 Her. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. Warner Bros, 2013.

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to help the band out with Scenes from the Suburbs, a halfhour-long short film that serves as an accompaniment to the band’s third record and the mood they’re attempting to evoke with the record. “The original dream was to make a 20-minute trailer for a movie like Red Dawn where you feel some emotional points and parts of it are really confusing and parts of it are really cool looking,” Will Butler explains to Pitchfork. “We didn't have the ability to do a feature-length, but since we always make feature-length things in the musical world, we wanted to try to give it the feel of a feature, but also have it be a little more disparate structurally.”7 It’s not only a confirmation of the visual elements that make up The Suburbs, that it is not unnatural to perceive the album in such a way, but the younger Butler sibling also offers Red Dawn, the 1980s film starring 1980s film stars like Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, and Jennifer Grey, as a point of reference to a feeling that both Jonze’s short and the record try to channel. Scenes from the Suburbs is a pretty simple and straightforward film, which blends music from The Suburbs with visuals and a story crafted by Jonze and the band. Like Red Dawn, which imagines what the United States would look like in the 80s after a Soviet invasion, Suburbs opens on an apocalyptic note. Win Butler provides an opening

7 Dombal, Ryan. “Arcade Fire Talk Scenes From the Suburbs.” Pitchfork. N.p., April 05, 2011. Web. June 15, 2017. http://pitchfork.com/news/42108arcade-fire-talk-scenes-from-the-suburbs/.

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voice-over, and we witness kids looking out a wired fence, at rising smoke. We are brought into a claustrophobic, unsafe world, a universe where the suburbs are at war with one another. It’s a fictional word, sure, but it would be difficult not to think about our own world in 2010—with American soldiers still in Iraq and Afghanistan, many arriving back home traumatized, way less innocent and idealistic from when they had left. This is a reflection, we surmise, and Butler’s voice-over brings us to the perspective of a young, carefree, but sensitive kid named Kyle whose innocence is ruptured after he begins to see his best friend Winter start to change for the worse. Butler asks, “Why do I only remember the moments that I do? What happened to the other moments?” Scenes opens with the closing track from the record, an instrumental reprisal of “The Suburbs.” It’s romantic, slightly sleepy, the perfect mood setter to escort us back to this time, when things were a certain way. It almost feels like the opening to Lana Del Rey’s “Ride” music video, which also features the singer—one of our most prominent voices keen on capturing a type of America—moodily reminiscing over a relationship, monologued over a somber melody. Ultimately, the tune morphs into the titular “The Suburbs,” and as we hear the more buoyant track, Jonze presents us with a montage of tenderer, archetypal images of suburban youth. There are kids riding bikes—lunging them forward the way stupid kids do—shooting BB guns at unassuming grown-ups, talking about pop cultural happenings (Winter discusses his fondness for the rom-com Hitch), etc. Even if they’re not our specific images we feel their purity and 51

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familiarity. These are bored but overall content teenagers, and it’s fitting to hear Butler sing, “If I could have it back / All the time that we wasted / I’d only waste it again.” The opening lyrics to “The Suburbs” both allude to this safe place fixed in time, but they also foreshadow an inevitable and creeping darkness. This is already present in the song, which is probably why it’s the album’s opener—instead of “Ready to Start.” In this way The Suburbs feels inherently cinematic, starting off with a sweetness, with a vision of a world where everything is ok. But we know we are supposed to feel on edge, that it won’t last. This is the suburbia Arcade Fire is shoving our way, a place and time and feeling you look back upon with a mixture of fondness and disgust, with a longing for all that was good before it suddenly isn’t. As Ruefle states in her lecture, “They give pleasure—or put a lump in our throats—and then they make us think.”8 After the track fades we get an overhead shot—the only way we can properly look at ourselves as teens in suburbia is with distance—of three kids sitting around in a desolate garage. Even though Scenes was filmed outside of Austin, the colorless town Jonze films feels like it belongs in the Rust Belt. Everything is sparse and decaying. The teens are having a pretty mundane conversation, the kind only kids have, about sex. But you can also sense how they feel about their own musings, as if every syllable they utter is revealing

8 Ruefle, Mary. Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures. Seattle: Wave, 2012. Print.

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of some sort of great truth. They’re self-important, or at least it looks that way for us onlookers. But they don’t know this. The scene, although insignificant in the scope of Jonze’s short, captures something essential about youth: a simultaneous awareness of the self and a lack thereof. They think they know everything about themselves, about each other, but they know nothing. Is this how we all were? Although the song doesn’t appear in the short, the scene feels tied to “Rococo,” Arcade Fire’s catchy, seemingly superficial track that is loaded with subtle significance. The title alludes to an ornate style of art from the eighteenth century and in the way it is repeated throughout the track—like a mantra—it takes on a sort of intentional meaninglessness. “The sound of ‘rococo’ is itself rococo. It is redundant, turned in on itself, a spiralling swirl of a word. A word that is going nowhere, describing an art lost in lace, a world frozen in joy,” Jonathan Jones explains in an essay about the song for The Guardian.9 Again and again—even in works outside of Jonze’s film for the band—“Rococo” manages to be one of the more unexpectedly poignant songs on the record, enough so that even though it doesn’t play in the short, it plays in our minds. It produces these associations, of pretentious youth, and informs Jonze’s film and considers just about any film or show where you see a bunch of kids talking nonsense. 9 Jones, Jonathan. “Arcade Fire’s Rococo Lampoons a Frivolous Age through Art | Jonathan Jones.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, December 02, 2010. Web. June 12, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ jonathanjonesblog/2010/dec/02/arcade-fire-rococo-art.

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Win sings, “Let’s go downtown and talk to the modern kids / They will eat right out of your hand / Using great big words that they don’t understand.” He sounds judgmental but one gets the sense that he’s being a little less self-serious, playfully poking fun, giving a gentle reminder at  how insular we can be as kids, preoccupied with ourselves, with fads and the superficial, forgetting to rise above our complacency and take actual action against everything we say we’re against. The irony in it all, of course, is that Arcade Fire’s statement, like the repetition of “rococo,” is redundant. We’ve all heard grown-ups nagging at us. What’s new? Suddenly, we get a tonal shift. Innocence is punctured. Lights flicker, we hear emergency sirens, “Half Light I” plays. It’s a sleepy, dreamy track that opens with Régine’s fragile vocals. At first it sounds uplifting. “Lock us up safe / And hide the key / But the night tears us loose / And in the half light / We’re free.” This freedom, to feel and think for ourselves is nice, but what are its consequences? The kids are bundled up in a car and are shocked to suddenly see that Winter’s older brother has returned home. So far the album is somewhat playful, only hinting at a danger, but “Half Light” marks a shift. It’s not the climax, but it’s getting us there. Soon after his brother has returned from an unnamed war, Winter announces he’s moving towns and—predictably— “Wasted Hours” plays over this revelation. The song is deeply nostalgic, the tune you expect to hear as two best friends are about to be separated by distance. But, the drama of it all is intensified in Scenes, where it’s very difficult to leave one’s town in the midst of war. When Winter leaves, the stakes 54

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are real. Ultimately, the impending move and the return of his damaged brother who suffers from PTSD, changes Winter. He grows quiet, troubled, and loses patience with his friends’ playfulness. As Duras says in her autobiographical book, “Very early in my life it was too late.”10 Although the song is soft and reflective, there’s a heaviness to it, a doomed quality that’s Arcade Fire at their most dramatic (“Wishing you were anywhere but here / You watched the life you're living disappear / And now I see, we're still kids in the buses longing to be free”). Winter’s change in mood also accompanies the escalating violence in the town, and “Sprawl I (Flatland),” an obvious warning about the consequences of urban sprawl, comes on. The song brings about a sense of fear as its narrator looks upon suburbia with a mixture of nostalgia, particularly for his own youth, and a more mature understanding that there’s nothing to return to here. The good moments—biking around, waving to a friendly town cop (played by Win Butler) who probably knows you by your name and cracks jokes with you (“Nothing, just a little up dog,” “What’s up dog,” “Nothing much, you?”)—are only memories and have little do with reality, with what the suburbs actually are. “Took a drive into the sprawl / To find the places we used to play / It was the loneliest day of my life / You’re talking at me, but I’m still far away.” Win sings the song like it’s a bittersweet eulogy, and it’s not the first time the band muses

Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. London: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print.

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about the thorny relationship between nostalgia for a place that only exists in memory. NPR’s review of The Suburbs11 reminds us, “The members of Arcade Fire have always been fascinated by the subtle ways geography informs our lives. With its series of ‘Neighborhood’ songs on the band's 2004 full-length debut, Funeral, the group unpacked the emotional and psychological baggage of seemingly bucolic landscapes, and the sometimes haunted lives of the people who live there.” As “Sprawl I (Flatlands) plays,” soldiers interrogate the kids and we see the town being ravaged. Here, “Suburban War” gently plays, in the background. Jonze’s scene is pure fiction, but the militarization of suburbia isn’t necessarily an improbable nightmare. “There’s a way in which the military preparedness and suburbanization go together in that way,” Amato suggests during our conversation. “The highways are there so that you can get tanks into the city if the city gets bombed.” The tense mood in the town is juxtaposed to an inevitable house party scene, where Kyle witnesses a tense conversation between Winter and his girlfriend. “Month of May,” which sounds like a messy punk song you’d expect to hear from a local high school band at any house party, is heard as we shift from the rowdy gathering to the climax of the film: where Winter is beating up Kyle at a fast food joint. Kyle looks up at

11 Hilton, Robin. “First Listen: Arcade Fire, ‘The Suburbs’. ” NPR. NPR, August 01, 2010. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=128878239.

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his friend in fear. It’s obvious in his eyes. He’s long gone, and the ideal of suburbia has gone with him. “Month of May” acts like a pastiche of a rebellion anthem, something you’d expect from Green Day. But it turns a conception of youthful rebellion on its head, and warns against the cynicism that may come when we are suddenly striped of innocence. “So young, so young / So much pain for someone so young / Well, I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light / But how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?” On a sonic level it’s a necessary jolt, a hype tune needed on an album that is ultimately fascinated with youth. Like with “Rococo,” Arcade Fire reminds youth culture that it takes more than folding your arms in dissent to make a statement. It also explains their complicated feelings about suburbia in general, one that transitions from a place of safety and warmth to a hellmouth. Scenes ends as it began, with Win Butler’s voice-over. He explains how the friendship between Winter and Kyle came to a close. With it “Sprawl I (Flatland)” comes on once again, which expands upon the film’s tragedy, not as micro or simple as it appears. Sure, there’s an end of a close friendship, but the twisted virtues of suburbia are also gone, and all we are left to are our memories, with a dull ache one feels after experiencing so much, feeling so much. The film and collaboration with Jonze further delves into the ambivalence Arcade Fire holds with suburbia. Scenes from the Suburbs is its own distinct product, crafted from the mood of the record, but it also owes much to a visual history of suburbia in film, particularly from 80s films like Red Dawn. 57

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In the following chapters I will look at the films and TV shows I think of when listening to The Suburbs or watch Jonze’s film, and dive into how a sentimental view of growing up in the suburbs is ruptured by a less apocalyptic but still obviously nefarious growing up process.

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“I love how ‘melodrama’ is a denigrated term— a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that’s what life is, man.” —Todd Haynes1 Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is an affluent woman residing in a New England suburb in the 1950s. Although her husband is dead and she lives alone, she’s fairly popular and well liked, and occupies her time caring for her kids—both in college— attending events and gatherings with her snooty friends, and rejecting the advances of the men—some married—who believe they can take advantage of the widow. Yet, her life is pretty uncontroversial, and Cary—at least on a cosmetic level—appears to embody a post–Second World War suburban ideal. She has the sizable home with a manicured front lawn, two attractive and intelligent children (a boy and a girl), and a circle of intimates who enjoy her company. 1 MacKenzie, Malcolm. “Todd Haynes’s Kitchen Confidential.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, June 20, 2011. Web. June 12, 2017. https://www. theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/20/todd-haynes-mildred-pierce.

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Then she meets Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), a hunky gardener who’s several years younger than her, and her headaches begin. Upon its release Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955)2 was deemed—like most of his films—a “woman’s picture.” The derogatory and highly misogynistic classification stemmed from the fact that Sirk’s films were vibrant melodramas, sentimental pictures about love, deceit, and wealth—filmed in an oversaturated Technicolor. It was assumed that his movies would only appeal to women, the way salacious novels were assumed to solely pique the interest of bored and/or dissatisfied housewives. In addition to All That Heaven Allows his two most popular films—Written on the Wind (1956) and his final film Imitation of Life (1959)—were also melodramas about middle-aged women, and it took some time for critics and audiences alike to embrace his films. It took some time for the world to see Sirk as a bona fide auteur. Alongside the films of Vincente Minnelli and Nicholas Ray, Sirk’s endeavors have come to be labeled “sophisticated family melodramas.”3 “This label defined the potential of some melodramas to surpass the genre’s cathartic aims and reactionary tendencies to achieve aesthetic complexity and social commentary. Thus, the sophisticated family melodrama realized the genre’s historical capability to act as a revolutionary form during times of cultural struggle,” 2 All That Heaven Allows. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Universal Pictures Co., Inc., 1955. 3 Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.

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Barbara Klinger writes in her book Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk. Melodrama is a proper entryway into Arcade Fire and The Suburbs, an almost Sirkian record with its commitment to veiling its larger implications behind the sentimental. That’s not to say that The Suburbs ever toys with artifice in the way All That Heaven Allows may, but that both works have complex perspectives on American suburbia—from different ages, of course—that feel inextricably tied to the saccharine, which, in turn, becomes a tool to critique. The highly crafted nature of All That Heaven Allows and how that vision is carried over into The Suburbs supports the idea that there’s an inevitable link between the construction of our stereotypical conception of suburbia and the sentimental. The Suburbs may not be as interested in artifice as a means of making their point, but the record and the band in general have always leaned into melodrama, have used the genre to make their statements. It’s difficult to say whether this privilege, the ability to be so out there with their intentions—criticizing an institution that’s distinctly American—would even be possible without people like Sirk and films like All That Heaven Allows. Moreover, the connection between the film and record is evident in the critical reception for All That Heaven Allows. A year after it was released, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times said4 in his review of the film, “Solid and sensible drama

4 Crowther, Bosley. “Screen: Doleful Domestic Drama; Mayfair Offering ‘All That Heaven Allows’ Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson Teamed Again.”

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plainly had to give way to outright emotional bulldozing and a paving of easy clichés. What could a conscientious actress do when Director Douglas Sirk bathed her in lush autumnal colors and pulled all stops on the piano and violins?” Crowther’s scathing review—a sentiment echoed by several critics of Sirk’s works at the time—notes the film’s superficiality, the way it manipulates its audience with its artifice. The piano and violins play at the most heart-wrenching moments. The colors are overwhelming, and the central romance between Cary and Ron is plagued by a series of over-the-top interferences, particularly from Cary’s children and friends. Her son throws a tantrum and her daughter, seemingly openminded (after all, she’s learned about Freud in college), cries and begs for her mother to end her affair with Ron. Given its over-the-top nature, how cheap it all appears, how unrealistic it all appears, Crowther’s analysis doesn’t appear far-fetched. He is unable to see Sirk’s film as anything but a sentimental, overwrought cliché, a film that doesn’t earn its feels. He’s both right and wrong. Ultimately Crowther’s review is easy to dismiss these days considering that Sirk’s filmography has been reclaimed by critics who have found richer meaning in films like All That Heaven Allows. However, that’s not to say that the director wasn’t interested in pulling at the heartstrings, something Arcade Fire also knows how to do pretty well, to make a point.

The New York Times, February 29, 1956. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www. nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9506E5DB153CE03BBC4151DFB466838 D649EDE&partner=Rotten%2520Tomatoes.

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In his Rolling Stone review of The Suburbs, Rob Sheffield states,5 “The strange thing about Arcade Fire is how they instinctively scale their most intimate confessions to arenarock levels, rolling out big drums and glossy keyboards.” This feels like the most apt place to draw a comparison, given that, like Sirk, the band likes to present audacious ideas about something as blasé, as mundane as suburbia. After all, on “Sprawl II,” one of the records most explosive tracks, Régine sings, “These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose.” It’s exaggerated, certainly melodramatic, almost laughably so in its raw straightforwardness. All That Heaven evokes similar emotional responses. In a reevaluation of the film, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes, Melodrama decks out the ordinary in the grand trappings of tragedy, except when it roots tragedy in the risible trivia of daily life. As such, it risks, even invites, laughter at the moments of greatest passion; those moments when laughter threatens are the triumph of the genre, because they’re proof that the regular folk in the story take their emotional lives deeply seriously—and that their director does the same.6 Sheffield, Rob. “The Suburbs.” Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone, July 21, 2010. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/thesuburbs-20100721. 6 Brody, Richard. “DVD of the Week: All That Heaven Allows.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, April 4, 2011. Web. June 15, 2017. http://www. newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/dvd-of-the-week-all-that-heavenallows. 5

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Arcade Fire takes everything seriously, even when they’re playful. Even their reproaching on a song like “Rococo” is gentle, with enough awareness to realize that they’ve become exactly what they once hated as youth, the nagging adults. There are moments that are laughable, but laughable in the most humanistic and natural way possible. It’s like a young, nervous child laughing at a funeral or in the face of something incredibly uncomfortable. It’s unfiltered and uncensored and visceral—human. Arcade Fire is sincere, respectful of feeling, of all the conflicting and powerful ways we express ourselves. Arcade Fire has never cited the film as an explicit influence on their record, but All That Heaven Allows is a pivotal work in the way that it pushed open the doors for criticism on suburbia, all the more impressive given that it was made just after a boom in the housing market. It’s a point to jump in, to investigate how the record utilizes certain tools that All That Heaven Allows uses to deconstruct a utopian idea about suburbia. All That Heaven Allows—like some of our most famous romances—falls into the “love at first sight” cliché (or maybe, given its age, it’s an early pioneer of it?). There’s a meet-cute between Cary and Ron in the first few minutes of the film, where she locks eyes with him outside of her home. They begin spending time together, he introduces her to his friends and way of life, and soon they are engaged to be married. Even removed from the 50s, when the film was released, Sirk makes sure we immediately understand how scandalous their union is, all the more so considering the rigid social codes that tend to exist in homogenous (and rich) small towns. Their different statures in life—particularly her age and background— become an obstacle, particularly as Cary’s kids and friends 64

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attempt to interfere in her happiness. Her children vehemently object to the marriage, threatening to cease speaking to their mother, and her so-called friends are quick to turn on her the moment she decides to go against their grain. Ron, on the other hand, is unfazed, committed to living a life of simplicity, away from the rigid bounds of society. He’s positioned as a sexy Henry David Thoreau—Sirk shows us a copy of Walden that Ron lent to a friend—and we sense, from Sirk, an admiration of this way of life, his indifference to capitalism and the expectations of high living in the postwar era. He doesn’t have the same aspirations as Cary or her friends. He just wants to live simply in a house he built with this woman he loves. It’s a sentimental dream. This earnest romanticism is familiar, present in The Suburbs, and like All That Heaven Allows, the album is preoccupied with fantasies, like the ones posed in “City with No Children.” The song begins with Win talking about a youthful version of himself, waiting for a letter from a girl he had a crush on after breaking his arm. All That Heaven Allows doesn’t toy with this kind of nostalgia mostly because it invents it, a utopia of suburbia. We know it’s not real, Sirk knows it’s not real, Arcade Fire knows it’s not real, but the feelings that surround this vision are tender. Cary is seduced by Ron’s lifestyle, his rejection of status, but committing to Ron is not that simple for Cary. Although she tries, she can’t just pretend that she’s above the scrutiny, immune to her children’s anger and her friends’ gossip. As her life grows increasingly complicated with Ron— particularly as she tries to ignore their troubles—she begins to get these headaches. It’s what happens when life as you 65

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know it crumbles around you, when you understand that the perfect world you think you live in is not that perfect. Near the end of the film Cary decides to visit Dr. Hennessey. She’s concerned that there’s something very wrong with her but the good doctor—in a scene as improbable as most in the film—reassures Cary, manages to see right into her soul. “There’s nothing organically wrong with you, Cary,” he says. “Forget for a moment that I’m your doctor and let me give you some advice as a friend. Marry him.” Name a doctor you’ve visited with such bedside manner.7 Let’s ignore the irony of the circumstance for a bit— after all, the so-called radical leap Cary is asked to make is not so radical if it’ll culminate in your average, traditional, heterosexual marriage (As an aside, it would be foolish not to acknowledge that Hudson came out as gay in the 80s— shortly before dying of AIDS-related complications—which adds another subversive, albeit unintentional, layer to the film). In her mind, and perhaps in the minds of the initial viewers of Sirk’s film, Cary is at a serious crossroad, one that for its time is indeed a big deal. She’s asked to choose between an isolated life away from all the values she would hold dear and the comforts of her cushiony suburban bubble. Although we know that she’ll choose the man and get a happily ever after, Sirk’s film—lighthearted and lovely— reveals a veiled criticism of the lifestyle he presents in his melodrama. It may be obvious and discussed to death by fans and critics of Sirk’s oeuvre today, but to use the film

All That Heaven Allows. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Universal Pictures Co., Inc., 1955.

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to dismantle the fiction that is the American Dream while in the Golden Age of that ideology, is a mid-century work that’s ahead of its time in its subtle deconstruction of the consequences of urban sprawl and post–Second World War values. The genre makes way for something like The Suburbs, something more blatantly critical of a troubling institution. As Roger Ebert succinctly states in the opening of his rave review for Written on the Wind8, a film also about familial relations, class, and an unlikely romance, Opinion on the melodramas of Douglas Sirk has flipflopped since his key films were released in the 1950s. At the time, critics ridiculed them and the public lapped them up. Today most viewers dismiss them as pop trash, but in serious film circles Sirk is considered a great filmmaker—a German who fled Hitler to become the sly subverter of American postwar materialism. Sirk may have wanted to force a mirror in front of his contemporary society, but it’s his methodology and his toying with genre that remains the most fascinating part of his filmography. It’s also what often makes The Suburbs so fascinating. “Favorites today with formalist film critics and cultural studies professors alike, [Sirk’s] movies were once held in nearly complete contempt by the gatekeepers of good taste, who resented their overtly sentimental appeal and

8 Ebert, Roger. “Written on the Wind Movie Review (1956) | Roger Ebert.” RogerEbert.com. N.p., January 18, 1998. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-written-on-the-wind-1956.

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dismissed them as soap operas,”9 Dave Kehr says of Sirk in the New York Times, echoing Ebert’s sentiments. And while his films may have received their fair share of unfavorable reviews, especially in their time, Sirk appears to have always known what he was doing with his melodramas. “So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures,” the director said about the genre. “They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.” Sirk treasures this artlessness, more likely what we’d refer to as trashy, and the potential the form holds in giving his audiences pictures that are simultaneously fluffy and insubstantial and subtextually rich, heavy, and straight up frightening. While we may be operating in a different era with The Suburbs, released ten years after the new millennium, the record works in a similar vein as the melodramatic picture, or at least the kind of melodrama Klinger perceives in Sirk’s films. In All That Heaven Allows, the New England suburb we are exposed to is depicted as an almost utopian vision of post– Second World War life. The violence has ceased, fathers and sons have returned home, have found jobs, and the economy is more stable than it’s been in some time. Moreover, open lands with fertile grounds are in demand—it’s no coincidence

9 Kehr, Dave. “Douglas Sirk Without Tears.” The New York Times, October 16, 2010. Web. June 15, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/movies/ homevideo/17kehr.html.

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that the meet-cute between Cary and Ron takes place outside of her home, where she first sees him tending to her garden. A utopia, a suburban utopia fashioned in the 50s, may be a fiction, but it’s a highly sentimental one, particularly for Sirk. Likewise, Arcade Fire initially puts forth a similar vision, evidenced visually in Scenes From the Suburbs. Kids are riding their bikes, talking nonsense—all is as good as it’s ever been. Until it’s not, until we see that just under this sentimental veneer there’s corruption and a loss of individualism. This darkness, tied with the illusion of happiness and stability that we’ve come to believe emanates from the suburbs, becomes difficult to reconcile. Cary sees this—even if it’s just for a brief moment—toward the end of All That Heaven Allows. At the insistence of her children, she’s broken up with Ron, and her son Ned, perhaps out of a desire to lessen his guilt, presents his mother with a gift. In the film’s most infamous shot we see Ned give Cary a television set, what’s supposed to be a surrogate for Ron. Sirk gives us a shot of Cary gazing at her own reflection through the TV screen. As he closes in we see what looks to be Cary going through a second mirror stage. She truly sees herself, what her life is about in this claustrophobic suburb, how she has essentially just sacrificed her chance of happiness for the sake of her peers’ approval, for a TV set. The moment is Sirk’s clear-cut critique of materialism and capitalist values, but on a more intimate level, it’s a moment where he breaks a wall and has Cary see what he and the rest of us are seeing: her sheltered world is a farce. It’s the moment, as Klinger describes, where catharsis is being surpassed, where we are forced to take a hard look at the 69

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ills of this society. Without even addressing the similarities between the TV scene and Arcade Fire’s long-standing anxiety about technology, there are similarities in what the moment accomplishes. The Suburbs gives us catharsis and is a pensive work that investigates the enduring power of memory and nostalgia when we think about the suburbs. But, to invoke Leslie Jamison, it has purposes—perhaps not immediately apparent—that move past the feelings—where we see an entire portrait. It’s the sweetness of learning to drive in the suburbs, the lyrics that usher us into the record, combined with the more vicious afterthought, the realization that there’s more under the cliché. This place is dangerous and we will never survive. Given that The Suburbs is so rich with its imagery, the following chapter will take a more romantic look at the films and television—many most likely influenced by Sirk—that more blatantly expose an irony or confusion or darkness in our suburbs. Like The Suburbs, these contemporary works are more outwardly critical and are not as subtle in the messages they’re delivering.

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There are few things I can recall in my life that have been as disorienting as returning home to the suburbs after deciding to leave for good. It’s like a grogginess, the uncomfortable “where am I” sensation you get for a good ten minutes after taking a long nap. Only it lasts longer, for the entire duration of your visit. Even if it’s not entirely conscious, there’s some part of you wondering how to now exist in a place where a younger version of you—most definitely a less defined and secure version—once existed. Now imagine how it feels to first arrive home, to be taking an aimless stroll through the place that still safeguards all of your childhood memories, to discover a severed ear resting in a patch of mostly dead grass. There’s little that is sacred in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a fantastical suburban noir that begins with a close-up of relaxed roses towering in front of a white picket fence, moves to the discovery of the abovementioned ear, and soon morphs into a full-blown horror picture, a tense, claustrophobic drama involving a lounge singer and a sociopath who is holding her husband and son captive. The sociopath is Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper. Frank is a sadist,

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an absolute monster, a villain Lynch wisely conceives as beyond redemption. There’s not an ounce of pity, sympathy, or understanding we are supposed to have for Frank, who we discover functions as more of a symbol, an embodiment of all the evil in the world. Blue Velvet—expressed through Lynch’s usual, surreal imagery—ultimately becomes a film about loss of innocence and a kind of depravity that Sirk wouldn’t dare broach in his realization of suburbia. Gone are the yellows, oranges, and light browns (malicious in their own right)—replaced by a melancholic palette of dark reds, blues, and greens. The Suburbs also shows how violence and decay are not simply city things, that a small town where nothing seems to ever be happening can hold some of the darkest stories and people. In Arcade Fire: Beyond the Black Mirror, Middles notes that both the Butler siblings shared a love of the writer J. G. Ballard. “Both Arcade Fire and Ballard seem fond of lyrical references to vast emptiness, suffocating boredom and a mysterious evil undertone to everyday activity,”1 Middles writes. This vast emptiness, the boredom, and evil are perfect descriptors for Lynch’s film as well. Blue Velvet shouldn’t work for me. It’s not the type of film I usually lean into, but there’s a surprising and omnipresent warmth in the story about an earnest college-aged guy who returns home after his father suffers from a stroke. He stumbles upon pure, adulterated evil—and Lynch’s film is

1 Middles, Mick. Arcade Fire: Behind the Black Mirror. London: Omnibus, 2012. Print.

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certainly as disquieting as they get—but there’s still some light, perhaps what Arcade Fire would call a “half light,” which manages to seep through it all (“Strange how the half light / Can make a place new / You can’t recognize me / And I can’t recognize you”). In Blue Velvet we discover a space that exists between youthful innocence and a more honest, but still dramatized and stylized, depiction of a harsh grown-up world. It’s the perfect summation of The Suburbs. Although it’s never as dour as Lynch’s film, the record seems to advocate for a sentimental “we can create our own home” idea. We can make our own light just about anywhere. This makes me think of “Empty Room,” a song I visualize as more threatening than the band intended. The repetition of “Searching in, in an empty room” sounds manic to me, and I can’t help but envision a young person, a teenager, locked up in some sort of sterile, padded room away from the rest of the world. There’s a droning in the track that sounds vaguely like an ambulance, which probably contributes to this image, but “Empty Room” still carries an air of hope to it. Win sings, “When I’m by myself / I can be myself / When my life is calm / But I don’t know when.” It’s bittersweet, having to find this warmth on your own amid an unideal circumstance, but it’s also the ultimate act of self-care. In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont is played by the nevernot-earnest Kyle MacLachlan (pre Twin Peaks fame). He finds himself falling for Sandy, the detective’s daughter who is beautiful, smart, curious, and more than just a passive, twodimensional love interest. Adjacent to all the violence in the film, to a horrific world where a man like Frank terrorizes, is 73

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this simple romance, between two simple and good-hearted individuals. It offers a reprieve from the looming darkness. Darkness, nevertheless, makes up the bulk of Blue Velvet. It’s often nighttime in the logging town that Jeffrey returns to, where the slimy underbelly of small-town life is front and center. But amid the gore, are a few delicate moments that sting more than the grotesque, surreal, and flat-out repugnant sequences. There are moments that feel like a sudden blow to the gut—shocking, at first, but then, only when you’re able to catch your breath, can you process what you’ve just endured. Sandy, played by the reliably expressive Laura Dern, and Jeffrey are sitting in a parked car outside her home one evening. They’re entirely immersed in the underworld of their town, particularly Jeffrey, who can’t resist wanting to be the hero and play out his rescuing the damsel in distress fantasy. They’re so absorbed that when Lynch gives Sandy the opportunity to deliver a lucid, grounding monologue, it becomes difficult to not recall the power of Régine’s biting vocals in “Sprawl II” as she sings about how “late at night the feeling swim to the surface.” It’s quiet, dark, Sandy and Jeffrey are in this contained space together, and Lynch gives her the opportunity to bare it all. “I had a dream,” Sandy begins to tell Jeffrey.2 She’s serious, perhaps in the absurd sort of way a teenager is just before they’re about to say something they believe is astute or true about the world. Of course, the stakes in Blue Velvet are not

2 Blue Velvet. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986. Film.

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superficial, are actually life or death, and her confession is all the more stirring. In fact, it was the night I met you. In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren’t any robins, and the robins represented love. And for the longest time, there was just this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free, and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did. So I guess it means there’s trouble ’til the robins come.3 Sandy’s monologue is supposed to be ridiculous. She’s speaking the kind of nonsense that only a teenager speaks. Her musing is a bit of a run on, pretentious in a youthful, inoffensive, “Rococo” sense. It has the same laughable quality as many of the more emotional scenes in All That Heaven Allows. It’s incredibly (and uncomfortably) earnest for Sandy, a sentimental realization that her world is a dangerous place. And it’s late at night, away from the hustle and bustle of the everyday, when Sandy is able to be vulnerable, shed some light on the terror she feels, but also the ultimate hope and light she believes will eventually come through. We fall in love with her, I fell in love with her, and this scene is fixed in memory. Blue Velvet is a horror film about growing up in suburbia and the strange barbarity that is present in small-town

Ibid.

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life—also seen in Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Wild At Heart. His suburbs are just like his cities, strange and violent spaces with a mixture of strange and violent faces. There’s no illusion of protection, of sheltered life, and if anything Blue Velvet is even more claustrophobic than Lynch’s noirs that take place around a cityscape because we know they are bound by tighter borders. As with Arcade Fire, Lynch also holds a fondness for wholesome values, for a privileged and nostalgic vision of youthful innocence—the easy romance between Sandy and Jeffrey. Arcade Fire often shares this sentiment, a conflicted longing for the white picket fence, the robins, for an ideal suburbia that—they acknowledge—is nothing more than a pleasant reverie. As I’ve argued before, it’s challenging not to conclude that a sweet feeling about suburbia or at least a desire for a version of it, is tied to a certain privilege. The suburbs, at least as they were envisioned in the post–Second World War era, are homogeneous, a place where difference of any kind is frowned upon, where wealth is concentrated, where some of the worst kind of hate and judgment comfortably resides. If there’s any room for sentiment, it’s safe to say that these feelings stem from a more positive experience. Sirk has a subtle stroke and grappling with his visions of suburbia is not necessarily easy or even that radical when one considers a film like All That Heaven Allows, which is extraordinarily white and insular and tied to its time. But, given that it is the rare critique of an institution that truly was the establishment, it made its mark, particularly on the more overt and angrier Far From Heaven, a 2002

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melodrama from Todd Haynes—a pioneer of the New Queer Cinema movement of the 90s—that takes Sirk’s themes and forces them to the surface. As Rob Sheffield explained when writing about the bombastic quality of Arcade Fire’s music, Haynes also lays it on thick. He does not want you to miss a thing. I love Todd Haynes, find myself referencing his films in most things I do, and this project feels no different. Throughout his career Haynes has only made bold choices. Whether he’s exploring shamed and repressed desire in the short Dottie Gets Spanked, a lesbian romance set in Eisenhower-era Manhattan in Carol, or the gender-fluid figures of the glam movement in Velvet Goldmine, he’s been unabashed in his choices, never concerned with offering too much spectacle, never concerned with offering too much of anything, especially on the emotional front. Too much is awesome, he seems to say. I doubt Arcade Fire would disagree. Cathy Whitaker could be Cary Scott’s next-door neighbor, and Haynes’s film, shot with Sirk’s saturated palette in mind by Edward Lachman, is a clear homage and pastiche of All That Heaven Allows. But, like all great tributes, it expands upon Sirk’s masterpiece, exaggerates the nightmare that was the 50s suburb, all while maintaining a sober sincerity that unsurprisingly rubbed its critics the wrong way. In a rather misogynistic review from The Washington Post, critic Stephen Hunter states, “Three or four hankies will get its preferred viewers through the raptures of torment, unless you're a guy dragged by your better half down to the Bijou,

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where you’d probably fall asleep and have a nice dream about the neighbor gal in a French maid’s outfit.”4 Hunter not only addresses the sentimental nature of the film (implying that sentiment in film is something that only brings women to theaters), but ironically ends up articulating exactly what Haynes set out to make: an unapologetic, inyour-face film, powerful in the way that it simultaneously alludes to Sirk’s melodrama and points a spotlight at all the faces we never saw in cinema back in the 50s and still see very minimally today. All That Heaven Allows shows us a suburb that’s not unlike William Levitt’s Levittown, exclusive, planned developments created after the war where only white people—not including Catholics or Jews—could live. This is what many of our suburbs still look like, and if Far From Heaven is over the top, which it often is with Elmer Bernstein’s rousing score and Julianne Moore’s extravagant lead performance, it’s supposed to be. In a comprehensive evaluation of Far From Heaven, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum states of the film, “And I’m touched not so much by the unlikely proximity of kitsch and truth, as by the truth that’s found within the kitsch, at the end of a long train of thought and emotion that began with falsity.”5

4 Hunter, Stephen. “He Likes Ike, And She Loves Raymond.” The Washington Post. WP Company, November 15, 2002. Web. June 15, 2017. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2002/11/15/ AR2005033116900.html. 5 Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Magnificent Repression.” Chicago Reader. Chicago Reader, June 12, 2017. Web. June 12, 2017. https://www.chicagoreader.com/ chicago/magnificent-repression/Content?oid=910451.

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Rosenblum’s understanding of what is birthed from kitschiness isn’t too different from Leslie Jamison’s understanding of sentimentality, and Far From Heaven, even more so than All That Heaven Allows, feels more in the vain of The Suburbs, which offers various, unambiguous but still nuanced ideas about contemporary suburbia. Like The Suburbs, Far From Heaven—mostly because it’s a film about the 50s made in the 2000s—is a reflection on the past, on a time many have understood as simpler and more wholesome. All That Heaven Allows may have been a pioneer in plainly offering some sort of critique of suburbia, but the levels in which it can subvert are naturally limited to its time. Far From Heaven, on the other hand, adopts the form but has no interest in fond reminisces of any kind. It’s more immediately isolating and suffocating. It wants a contemporary audience to know what’s going on, to be moved and disturbed, by the past and by what lingers in our present. The Suburbs often feels claustrophobic, and many of its songs deal with a conflict that can only be resolved by getting out. In “Suburban War,” Win concludes by repeating, over booming drums and a somber melody, “All my old friends they don’t know me now.” It’s a mixed feeling about what’s happened when you leave your bubble, but having left the suburbs opens the narrator of the song to a world away from a repressive structure that only privileges those who want to or are easily able to conform. Then there’s the trapped outsider in “Half Light II (No Celebration),” a man who returned to the suburbs after living in a city only to realize that it was never this romantic place he thought it to 79

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be. The song concludes tragically, “In this old town where I was born / I see through a dead man’s eyes.” This sense of the suburbs as a dead place is also present in Far From Heaven. As with Arcade Fire, individuality is important to Haynes, who takes a leap from Sirk’s works and offers narratives—unhappy ones—about race, homosexuality, and gender roles in the 50s. Who are you if you don’t fit in with the norms, Haynes asks in all of his films, and that is at the center of the tragedy we see in Far From Heaven, which doesn’t have the neat bow tie ending that All That Heaven has, but opts for something more ambiguous, more affecting. Cathy Whittaker’s husband, Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid) is gay, and her life is shattered by this revelation. She finds herself falling for her gardener, not a Rock Hudson– type, but Dennis Haysbert, a black man whose father used to work for the Whitakers. This is what the suburbs looks like if you don’t fit in the mold, Haynes suggests in his film. It makes Far From Heaven less of a period piece interested in recreating a specific era, but a film that broaches the past with a consideration of the present. As a result, Todd Haynes’s film, like The Suburbs, offers a kitschy—while feels synonymous to sentimental in certain instances—reflection of a pivotal time in history. It’s tied to memory, but, as Rosenbaum points out, the more moving aspects have to do with Haynes’ transgressions, the moments that seem far-fetched. Perhaps it’s similar to the lyrics from “We Used to Wait,” lyrics that I always find myself wondering if they’re too unsubtle, even for Arcade Fire.

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On a verse before the hook, Win sings, “I’m gonna write a letter to my true love / I’m going to sign my name / Like a patient on a table / I wanna walk again / Gonna move through the pain.” Isolated, they’re sort of insane, particularly the simile comparing signing a letter to one’s true love to the feeling of being a patient on a table who, understandably, wants to walk again. Rosenbaum points out a scene in Far From Heaven, perhaps one of the most striking and unlikely, that feels like the best to compare to such lyrics. Frank’s seeing a shrink hoping to cure his gayness, and after his first session in conversion therapy, he bitterly tells his wife, “Look, I just want to get the whole fucking thing over with!” Rosenbaum intelligently notes that this isn’t something we’d be unlikely to hear in a 50s movie out of the mouth of a 50s star. In this out of placeness, in this moment that’s incredibly overwrought, something moving emerges. “And so the collision of two exhausted movie clichés, a phony 50s acting style and a standard and utterly banal expression from over a decade later, produces a truth that we can all believe in— much as multiplying two negatives yields a positive.” With Arcade Fire the uncomfortable simile, and clichés in general, feel important considering they’re characterizing an institution built out of clichés. What happens when they use them, when they toy with our feelings, I’ve found, is that we get real feeling. By the time we get to “Now our lives are changing fast / Hope that something pure can last,” we get an image that’s incredibly tragic. Can the purity and magic of this fictional suburbia exist again, if it did ever exist when

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we were youths? Arcade Fire doesn’t offer a direct answer, but they do—over and over again—remind us that once we leave home, and shed an image of our ideal youth, we can’t ever return. We can only trap ourselves in a romantic fantasy. Far From Heaven ends ambiguously too. It’s critique may be blatant, but unlike Sirk’s film, which ultimately resists the conventions of the time only to have Cary and Ron end up together, Haynes leaves us with a devastating “Now what?” This is where Arcade Fire is at. After a few schoolchildren assault Raymond’s young daughter, he decides to leave the Connecticut suburb, understanding that he can’t force himself in a place that’s trying to throw him out. So we are left with Cathy, who is both in and out of society, waving goodbye to Raymond as his train departs. He is her chance for real happiness that could never materialize, and as the train pulls away we are forced to consider that Cathy is trapped and fixed in this space and time. What traps us, Arcade Fire argues, is reconciling an image or memory of safety and comfort that emanates from the suburbs with the reality that it never has been this. It’s another kind of stuckness. I could have chosen several films here, ones that work on their own and are not so clearly adapted, but the lack of subtlety, the commitment to challenging a sentimental view of suburbia by making a sentimental film about it, is also central to Arcade Fire’s schtick. Mostly, I thought of the film after reading Ian Cohen’s Pitchfork review of The Suburbs. “But what makes The Suburbs a more humane and empathetic record [than Neon Bible] is that Butler and Régine Chassagne have come to terms with how the pain of our day-to-day lives 82

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more often results from the lies we tell ourselves,”6 he states. This is Far From Heaven, a film all about what happens when the lies don’t work, where the fantasy of a perfect suburban existence is proved to be nothing more than illusory. The band grapples with an understanding of how so many of us view suburbia, even subscribe to it at points, but they never hide behind the vague, and are overt in their layered presentation of the institution. Their openness is one we take for granted, and Far From Heaven serves as an example of what can be achieved through straightforward, unironic, openness.

6 Cohen, Ian. “Arcade Fire: The Suburbs.” Album Review | Pitchfork. N.p., August 02, 2010. Web. June 15, 2017. http://pitchfork.com/reviews/ albums/14516-the-suburbs/.

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In “(Antichrist Television Blues),” a track off of Neon Bible, Win manically sings a cynical tune about the state of the world. The anxiety here is more focused on cities, of a fear of big buildings and the planes that may crash into them, and of a certain type of influence TV may be having on the world. It was rumored that the song was initially called “Joe Simpson,” a reference to the father of Jessica Simpson, who was accused of exploiting his daughter, for being a “stage dad.” It makes sense considering that on the track Win jests, “Dear God, would you send me a child? / Oh God, would you send me a child? / Cause I wanna put it up on the screen.” Although The Suburbs is exploring a different kind of anxiety, and doesn’t ever explicitly reference television, the implications of technology and TV is felt—particularly when one considers the role television holds in American suburbia. As best seen in All That Heaven Allows, the TV set is one of the greatest markers of American capitalism (and corruption), a staple of suburban life that fills Cary with existential dread the moment she lays her eyes upon it. Moreover, like the manicured front lawn, like the perfect two kids, like a newly waxed car, every middle-class family aspires to own a TV set.

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Rather than talk about the tube itself, I prefer to shift my focus to the way suburbia looks on television, and how certain TV series interact with the suburbs and The Suburbs. I could take various routes—looking at the sitcom, at the way we consume TV, at soaps, the news—but I decided that I wanted my focus to be on two of my favorite dramas from the late 2000s and early 2010s, the age of The Suburbs. Both of the series I discuss in this chapter, however, are period pieces (an argument can be made that The Suburbs, with its obsession over memory and nostalgia, is also a period piece), and both show—at least in part—how suburbia has evolved in the United States. The first of the two is Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men. It may initially seem like an unlikely choice to include here given that the series, which ran from 2007 to 2015 on AMC, is a drama about the men and women who worked in the advertising world on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Weiner expands the series beyond the streets of New York City, and offers us a taste of 60s New York suburbia—just as a utopian vision of postwar suburbia began to crumble. Weiner’s envisioning of suburbia, of the suburb of Ossining, New York, pays tribute to the author John Cheever, who wrote extensively about the suburbs in his fiction.1 Cheever spent many years of his life, up until his death, in Ossining, and wrote several shorts that romanticized suburbia, all 1 Chellas, Semi. “Matthew Weiner, The Art of Screenwriting No. 4.” The Paris Review. N.p., Spring 2014. Web. June 15, 2017. https://www.theparisreview. org/interviews/6293/matthew-weiner-the-art-of-screenwriting-no-4matthew-weiner.

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while illuminating the troubled and unhappy individuals who resided there. In addition to the gloom surrounding The Suburbs—and Arcade Fire offers tunes that explore a more apocalyptic and cynical feeling about suburbia—the band complicates the record by imbuing some of these songs with romance, a nostalgia and longing to be young again, riding bikes, etc. They capture an essential conundrum that many of us feel about our suburbs, a bittersweetness. Mad Men isn’t necessarily so mixed about its feelings on suburbia— it doesn’t seem to be fond of any part of the repressive atmosphere—but, like Arcade Fire, it uses romance as a tool, sometimes even toying with sentimentality to unveil its darker underpinnings. At the start of the series we meet Don Draper (Jon Hamm), Weiner’s existential anti-hero who is the creative director of a huge advertising firm on Madison Avenue. Mad Men opens in the early 60s, and throughout the episode we watch Don schmooze with clients, his coworkers and bosses, and his bohemian mistress. Only at the end of the episode, as he leaves New York City, do we learn that he’s also a family man. He pulls up to his suburban home and we hear an upbeat jazz tune, heightening the drama of the moment. Here’s this man we presumed good, or at the very least not married, leaving the Big Apple and arriving some place unexpected. The music stops and we get a glimpse of his perfect blonde wife—a Grace Kelly doppelganger named Elizabeth “Betty” Draper (January Jones)—and his two sleeping children. The episode concludes on a lovely, romantic note. We get a final shot of Don kissing his children while Betty, in a billowy pink 87

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nightgown, stands by the doorway watching. Vic Damone’s cover of “On the Street Where You Live,” originally from the musical My Fair Lady, plays in the background. It would make for a beautiful painting (it looks like the inverse of Edward Hopper’s doom and gloom) or for a billboard that looms over the first highway exit out of the city. “This is what you can go home to,” it seems to say. It flaunts the allure of suburban life, but we can sense it’s anything but that. Especially for Betty Draper. The relationship between Arcade Fire and Mad Men, particularly the character of Betty, is—on the surface—hard to draw. For one, Betty’s cold demeanor doesn’t resemble anything the band’s interested in doing. In one episode, a man who is fond of Betty tells her, “You’re so profoundly sad.” She responds, “I’m not. It’s just that my people are Nordic.” Arcade Fire are expressive, often uncomfortably visceral and honest. Betty, on the other hand, is deeply unhappy but can’t pinpoint why. She has money, two healthy and goodlooking children, close friends to gossip with, and Don freaking Draper as her husband. But, almost like Cary and her headaches, Betty finds herself suddenly losing control of her hands. They slip off the wheel of her car. They are too shaky for her to apply lipstick. Something’s up. I’ve watched all seven seasons of Mad Men, beginning to end, at least four times now. On my first viewing I wasn’t a fan of Betty. I thought she was childish, selfish, so removed from reality that I perceived her inaccessible for viewers. But every time I watch I like her more. She has become my favorite character on Mad Men. Sometimes I wonder if this is the case for Weiner, who shoots her with the utmost respect, with a 88

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sincere love for this woman who never had a chance. Of all the rich characters of the Mad Men universe, her arc has the most in common with a Greek tragedy. She’s doomed from the start, and there’s nothing more sentimental than that. So, what do The Suburbs and this fictional character have to do with one another? Mad Men is poetic, layered, and as moving as any TV drama I’ve ever seen, but other than a few surreal and absurd moments, it aims for poetic realism and doesn’t delve into what we perceive of when we think of sentimentality. But like The Suburbs, the series is inextricably tied to memory, often nostalgia, and there’s nothing more sentimental than that. Don is constantly daydreaming about his traumatic youth and Peggy is running away from her simple, Catholic upbringing. Weiner’s series is a complicated ode to the 60s but perhaps his mixed feelings about the period are best seen through Betty, not Don or Peggy or any of the other major characters. Although I’d argue that Mad Men is a sentimental show, I’d also stand by believing that Betty is the only sentimental character on the series. Don has his moments—particularly when he’s pitching (and manipulating) clients—but Betty’s constant fantasizing, her need to cling on to the past, feels like a coping mechanism in the way that Arcade Fire’s sweet nostalgia often does in The Suburbs. Although I’m more interested in Betty and what she represents, I do think it is important to briefly address the scene I mentioned in my introduction, as it does, strategically, tie back to a fondness of suburbia. Don, whether he knows it or not, subscribes to a sort of American Dream fantasy and as we look at the images 89

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of his kids playing in their home, at his family and friends, we see him melt. Betty, on the other hand, is living Don’s fantasy and it’s nowhere near as romantic. Throughout the series we mostly see Betty at home, in the suburbs, where she occupies her time taking care for her two young children—Bobby and Sally. When she’s not reprimanding them or avoiding being affectionate by insisting that they go watch TV (“Sally, go watch TV!” remains one of Mad Men’s2 most cited bits) she’s reminiscing about the past—about her dead mother, about the Jewish boy she once kissed, about her days modeling in Italy—as if she were Blanche Dubois, one of the most sentimental characters in modern fiction I can think of. It’s often here, in Mad Men’s suburban scenes, that we can make a connection with The Suburbs. Even though Betty is often reserved, unemotive, and distant, she’s a fully developed character, a woman whose greatest misfortune, perhaps, is bad luck. She was born a little too early, in circumstances that demanded she became exactly what she isn’t: a mother, a wife, a perfect housewife. But Betty’s arc also works as a metaphor for Arcade Fire’s vision of suburbia in general. There’s the complicated and contradictory love/hate she holds for her circumstances and, at its core, a feeling of not belonging, of—perhaps ironically given that she’s a beautiful, affluent white woman—being on the margins. It’s like the opening verse of “City with No Children.” Win begins with a tender image. “The summer that I broke my

Weiner, Matthew. “Mad Men.” Mad Men. AMC. 2007. Television.

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arm / I waited for your letter.” Then there’s a shift. “I have no feeling for you now / Now that i know you better.” There’s the flirtation with youth, with a warm memory of a past love and then a sad understanding that it has been torn away from him forever. There are lyrics like this throughout the record, which grapples with nostalgia and a more disturbing present. If it’s not always a place, like the outskirts of Houston or Ossining, suburbia seems to manifest as a feeling of not belonging. In “Shoot,” the ninth episode of the first season of Mad Men, we get the first episode in the series that is entirely devoted to unpacking Betty’s psyche. The head of McCann, a rival agency to Don’s firm, Sterling Cooper, is trying to poach him. Part of this executive’s negotiating tactic is seducing not only Don—with the promise of more money and bigger clients—but Betty too. He tells her that she should model again and has her audition for a Coca Cola advertisement. The prospect of leaving her home and once again joining the workforce means everything to Betty, and we sense— perhaps for the first time all season—pure joy radiating from her. This pleasure reinforces how oppressive her home life is, how bored and unsatisfied she is, and how the suburbs can truly be a trap. But the vision of suburban utopia is still going strong in the 60s, and it’s no surprise that the world works against her (“But in my dreams we’re still screamin’ and runnin’ through the yard / And all of the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall”). Don doesn’t want her working again and even her friends are skeptical about the idea. 91

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Ultimately Don decides to stay with Sterling Cooper, and his decision unfortunately impacts Betty. The McCann executive rescinds his offer to have her model for Coca Cola, and Betty is left dejected, forced to rationalize her circumstances. The episode concludes—in one of Mad Men’s most iconic moments—with Betty taking out a shotgun and shooting a neighbor’s birds. While Betty was in the city, the Draper’s dog had tried eating one of the birds, and their neighbor ended up yelling and traumatizing her children. The final shot of the episode sees Betty, cigarette planted firmly between her lips, attempt to shoot down bird after bird, finding some sort of acceptance in her inability to escape from her own misfortune. There are many elements of this scene that make me think of Arcade Fire. It’s one of Mad Men’s more outrageous moments, and although it’s all pretty sad, it’s also definitely supposed to be funny, empowering, and sexy. But, more significantly, it’s the moment where we see The Suburbs message plain and clear. If suburbia not only functions as a place but as a metaphor for feeling trapped, different, like you don’t belong, then—if you can’t get out—you have to find some sort of freedom within yourself. In Todd VanDerWerff ’s review of the episode he writes3, “It’s interested in the idea that Betty has never had an opportunity to define herself and is, therefore, stuck in a kind

3 VanDerWerff, Todd. “Mad Men,” The A.V. Club. N.p., February 12, 2014. Web. June 12, 2017. http://www.avclub.com/review/mad-menshoot-201129.

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of pleasant stasis that is slowly ossifying underneath her.” Throughout the series she is presented with few opportunities and does what anyone of us would do in her circumstances: dream and create a space where she can be ok. “And in the Half Light we are free.” Probably hitting closer to home, at least for Arcade Fire, is the suburbs we’re presented with in The Americans. Another period drama, The Americans brings viewers to Falls Church, Virginia—an upper middle-class D.C suburb, in the early 80s. Ronald Reagan is already president and there’s a repressive air that hovers over the FX series, which grows all the more merciless after we meet and later understand Philip and Elizabeth Jennings. So far I’ve discussed how Arcade Fire conceives of suburbia in The Suburbs and how that vision carries over into some of the films and TV shows I like, but with The Americans what’s most interesting is the era in which it takes place, and more specifically the way nostalgia is ushered in by the music we hear throughout the series. Of course in the world of the show this isn’t nostalgia, it’s just their present, but for us viewers it becomes its own sort of joy to take note of certain period details in the show: Elizabeth’s shoulder pads, the closing song of a particularly tense episode, watching the youngest Jennings child play ancient video games, etc. At the time I’m writing this 80s nostalgia is omnipresent. On TV there’s Stranger Things and a Heathers reboot, a John Hughesian sensibility can be seen in movies like The Edge of Seventeen, and some of our greatest contemporary horror movies make use of colors and sounds that feel tied to the 93

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age: It Follows, The Guest, The Neon Demon. Even our music seems so defined by artists like Fleetwood Mac, Depeche Mode, and Blondie—to name some of the bigger, more obvious groups. Régine and Win and presumably most of Arcade Fire’s members grew up in the 80s, have been influenced and have collaborated with so many 80s icons, so the nostalgia we get in The Suburbs is specifically tied to a certain environment— one that is perfectly recreated in The Americans. Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are your average white, attractive, upper middle-class American family. They work as travel agents, have two children—Paige and Henry— and from a bird’s-eye view, or at least from new neighbor Stan Beeman’s view, they’re pretty ordinary and therefore innocuous. As we’ve come to see, this is essential to a successful suburban life: the more you blend in, the better off you’ll be. We discover, however, that they’re only performing the role of the perfect suburban family. The two are actually Soviet sleeper agents sent to the United States under the guise of a married couple, with elaborate covers, to do some covert work for Mother Russia. So the suburban fantasy they’re asked to perform is actually a nightmare for the Jennings— it represents everything they’re taught to hate. Greed. Mass consumption. Complacency. While their performance of suburban living is itself subversive, enough to fill a chapter, I’m more fascinated by some of the exterior elements of the series, how The Americans recreates a certain mood that seems central to the 80s and Arcade Fire’s conception of youth. For one, it’s reflected in the wardrobe, and The Americans’ costume designer Katie Irish 94

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broke down for me some of the subtler elements that define the characters on the show and the period at large. The thing that keeps striking me as I go back and look at school yearbooks and do research is how adult a large portion of the kids look. That’s not to say that you didn’t see hoodies or sweatshirts on people, but they were much more worn when you went out to play basketball. You didn’t go to school in a hoodie. There was more of a formality and wanting to be dressed like an adult. I think that’s because of the Reagan-era conservatism, for men especially. There was a put together buttoned up look that was very appealing. This is just an example, and Irish also cited the colors that were popular at the time. “You have this off-blood color that leather goods were made of. You have rich dark saturated colors. You’ve got navy and greens and that kind of thing.” We see this in the wardrobe, yes, but also do in the furniture, the way it’s filmed. There’s a severity to the environment, as if they’re inhabiting a world that’s perpetually overcast. It’s the clothing and the palette I envision when I think about The Suburbs, when I try to visualize the images that Win and company create on the record. But beyond the clothing, one of the most notable ways The Americans creates this mood is through the music. There’s a tense, droning score present throughout the series, but The Americans also makes use of the music of the time. It’s the music that influenced Arcade Fire, it’s the music that captures a certain ennui and dissatisfaction and desperation. There’s a way in which deciding to use 80s hits could feel overwrought, but The Americans avoids this trap, knows how 95

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to either create tension or romance or a nostalgic feeling with its selections. Arcade Fire does this. Their music could easily fit into the Jennings’ world. In a way, to add another layer to The Suburbs, Arcade Fire seems to not only have made a record about nostalgia, but they’ve done this by making a record that sounds like it’s from the past. Throughout its run, The Americans’ soundtrack has been populated by bands such as Yaz, Roxy Music, and The Cure and artists such as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and Phil Collins. Arcade Fire collaborated with Bowie on their 2013 record Reflektor, which features the legend’s vocals on the album’s title track. The band also covered Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers,” which plays at the very end of season one of The Americans. The links are there, but what The Americans ends up doing with their selections is what matters. The pilot episode of the series opens with Fleetwood Mac’s monumental “Tusk.” We hear the booming drums and feel a sense of sexy danger as we meet Elizabeth, sporting a cheap blonde wig, in the midst of a mission. She’s at a bar trying to seduce an official in the Reagan administration when we hear the Fleetwood Mac single. “Tusk” is an interesting, bold opener. For fans of Fleetwood Mac it’s immediately recognizable, by no means something that fades into the background of the scene. It’s also the perfect time-setter. You know the world you’re getting into off the bat. It’s ominous, a little flirtatious, but ultimately—at least sonically—a pretty good song to use to build tension. I was sucked in. I’ve often wondered why I respond so viscerally to new wave, to the angsty, synth-dependent sound that seemed to

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dominate in the 80s. Arcade Fire and The Americans have found a way to articulate this. “We Used to Wait,” as an example, has a new wave sensibility to it. The track is not a rock song, but it probably wouldn’t be entirely accurate to call it pop either. It has more pop elements, definitely, some disco-y moments, some electric bits—it’s its own thing. The hook, where Win sings, “Now our lives are changing fast / Hope that something good can last” stands out to me. It’s pretty simple, but Win sings these lyrics over a mounting keyboard that is simultaneously  evocative of Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” and something you’d expect to hear off a Eurythmics record. There’s something contagious about it, dangerously exciting, perhaps the kind of think you want to drown yourself in alone in your bedroom on a Friday night. It’s what Tusk does in the pilot of the series. The Americans conveys mood, complements its visuals with musical cues that serve to enhance our emotional relationship to the show and its characters. When Elizabeth is tense and in danger on her mission, we should hear it. Near the end of the episode when we see a more intimate but still taut moment between the married couple, Phil Collins’ mesmerizing “In the Air Tonight” plays. It’s deeply sexy, functions to show the closeness between these two characters, but also maintains this air of mystery that keeps us on edge. Being on edge, on high alert, and having an overall sense that you can’t ever be too comfortable in your circumstances doesn’t only feel applicable to Russian spies, but to any individual that feels like they don’t quite fit in. If the music 97

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on the show lends itself to that, helps prove this to be true, then it had a similar effect on The Suburbs as well. “A mix of the Depeche Mode and Neil Young,” is what Win said of the album’s sounds before The Suburbs was released. The Neil Young reference explains The Suburbs rockier influence, but it’s with Depeche Mode where we hear that dark and manic energy that like Blue Velvet feels perfect for moody teenage youth. For Win and Régine and Will. My favorite musical moment in The Americans, however, also happens to be one of the show’s most sentimental (there’s that word again!) scenes. In season three episode “Dimebag,” one of Philip’s more controversial assignments is to gain the trust—through seduction, if necessary—of a teenage girl with a powerful father. He’s pretending to be a cool older guy who smokes a lot of weed and can hook the girl, Kimmie, and her friends up. But Philip can’t help but feel like it’s all too much—to betray the naive Kimmie, who’s about the same age as Philip’s daughter Paige. It’s nighttime—as it usually is—and Philip is sitting outside alone with Kimmie. She had previously introduced him to a band she likes, Yaz, and Philip in turn tries to bond with Paige using the band too. Philip’s arms are around Kimmie and it’s all very creepy and upsetting and then Yaz’s “Only You” plays. I mean, there are lyrics like, “All I needed was the love you gave / All I needed for another day / And all I ever knew / Only you.” Creepy. But effective too. The romantic tune, a staple of the 80s, works wonders in this definitely unromantic situation. It’s warm and very sweet and it’s used in a scene that could be all of this, if Philip was an appropriate age, if he wasn’t a spy trying to manipulate 98

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and corrupt this young woman. It does what Arcade Fire does best. It’s sugary against the not so sweet. It’s like the title track of the record, warm and somewhat romantic in theory. Then you break it down and you feel the ache. “If I could have it back / All the time that we wasted / I’d only waste it again.”

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There are so many works that bring me back to The Suburbs and vice versa. Perhaps that’s one of its greater strengths, its ability to remind, to make you think of all the things that have similarly affected you. In my case, it’s not only a few films and TV series, but a collection of projects that bring me back home, to my memories, to the lyrics and mood I feel to this day when listening to the record. I’m not a fan of the sitcom and its constraints often feel tedious and uninteresting to me—especially when a good ole laugh track is thrown in. Nevertheless one of the best comedies on TV happens to not only fit into the genre, but subvert it at every corner. It also doesn’t need to manipulate audiences into laughter. It does it on its own. Black-ish has a lot of the wholesomeness of any beloved sitcom. It mostly reminds me of All in the Family except, maybe, Black-ish is more representative of actual, modernday American families living in suburbia. The comedy is about the Johnsons, an upper middle-class black family. Anthony Anderson, the patriarch, plays Andre, a successful advertising executive raising four kids alongside his biracial anesthesiologist wife, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross). The

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children are always the focus and Black-ish ultimately is a series about child-rearing, about the values—societal and familial—the do and do not carry over. The series is also about black identity, about the anxieties Andre and Rainbow have raising their kids in an environment that has proved to reject difference, particularly when it comes to one’s racial identity. It’s often about complex intergenerational relationships, boiling down to a question about how to be black wealthy American suburbs when these American suburbs were built for white people (“And all the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall”). I often think of “Hope,” one of the show’s more remarkable episodes from its second season. “Hope” begins with the TV, with the family gathered around the TV. It’s a suburban image we’ve seen time and time again in our suburban sitcoms, but the air around this particularly episode of Black-ish is tense. The Johnsons are watching the news. Another unarmed black man has been killed by the police, and the entire family— including the Johnson grandparents—are watching to see whether or not a grand jury will indict the police officer who committed the murder. There’s an anxiety about living in an information age that ties back to both Neon Bible and The Suburbs (“Hey! Put the cellphone down for a while / In the night there is something wild / Can you hear it breathing?”), but more than that one gets the sense that even in this isolated bubble—both the sitcom and the living room cushioning the Johnsons—safety is never a guarantee. Andre’s mother thinks back to riots and in a more humorous but still very poignant moment in the episode, 102

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prepares the entire family for war (“I wish that I could have loved you then / Before our age was through / And before a world war does with us / Whatever it will do”). Like in Scenes from the Suburbs and the hints the band drops throughout the album, the episode has an apocalyptic edge to it. Here the main focus is on the adults as they decide whether or not to fill their kids in on the reality of the world. Rainbow doesn’t want her young twins to watch the news quite yet, to see how the people they’ve come to believe will protect them are against them. “I want to help them hold onto their innocence and be kids a little longer,” she says1 (“Now our lives are changing fast / Hope that something pure can last”). It’s at the core of the tragedy of The Suburbs. We can never fully go back to a time or place or feeling that was this innocent. The episode concludes with the entire Johnson family deciding to leave their nest and head out to the streets to rally against the results of the case: the officer was not indicted. They leave the confines of the suburbs, of their bubble, for the real world. There’s little that is as scary or as moving. I want to stay in the comedy realm for a bit longer, mostly because my last few sections have taken an incredibly bleak approach to exploring our suburbs. Sometimes, however, there’s a lot to say with a lighter approach, the kind of approach we see in John Waters’ ridiculous Polyester, a loose adaptation of All That Heaven Allows that decides to explore the life of a suburban woman through camp.

Barris, Kenya. “Hope.” Black-ish. ABC. February 24, 2016. Television.

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Polyester is a satire, and the housewife we meet in its opening is not a beautiful lost woman like Betty Draper or Cary Scott. Francine Fishpaw is an overweight woman played by frequent Waters collaborator Divine, a famous drag celebrity. Besides gender roles being challenged, we see all sorts of discord in Waters’ messy comedy: Francine’s husband’s affair, her children’s rebelliousness (her son, who has a dangerous foot fetish, is expelled from school), her alcoholism—issues that we’ve come to see as stereotypically suburban. Polyester satirizes these values, exposes their absurdity, and is a kind of rebellion (“Well, I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light / But how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?”) against conformity and a bland normalcy. In “Rococo” especially, Arcade Fire lets us know they’re not amused by the complacent youth, by a generation of people not willing to take action. Polyester, on the other hand, is full of fight. There’s not a moment where the film is comfortable. There’s divorce, adultery, foot fetishes—a long list of ungodly sins that makes the film not only an object of pleasure but of catharsis. Waters frees us from all constraints, gives us a place where oddities are embraced and more traditional ideologies are thrown out the door (‘Cause on the suburbs the city lights shine / They’re calling at me, “come and find your kind.’”). If The Suburbs is an album that asks you to embrace your inner weird, then Polyester is that weirdness materialized, a film that takes our preconceived notions of a bland suburban existence and turns it on its head. I often wondered what happens to superheroes when the world discards them. Bruce Wayne has his money, Clark Kent is an alien, but what about the rest of them? For Mr. Incredible 104

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this means becoming your average suburban dad. After years of serving the world, Mr. Incredible is forced into retirement, has to take an office job, and uses the bland name Bob Parr. He’s married to another former superhero, Elastigirl, and the two are now your average, depressed couple. They have two kids, lived tucked away from any sort of action, and in Brad Bird’s remarkable animated film The Incredibles we get a true sense of how boring this kind of lifestyle can be (“We were already bored / We were already, already bored”), all the more so if you’re used to flying around and stopping the bad guys. Eventually they get back into the swing of things, bring their kids into their world too, and The Incredibles morphs into a layered film about the role of the family. I love The Incredibles because it advocates for magic, indulges all of our fantasies about being heroes, having powers, escaping our lives for a less mundane one. It’s romantic, in a sense, how the family comes together, finds joy and purpose, in saving the world. Not everyone is cut out for a domestic, slow-paced environment, and even though most of us aren’t destined to be heroes, to fight criminals and villains with super strength or super speed, doesn’t mean we have to resign ourselves to boredom. We can take action (“We are not asleep / We are in the streets”), we can have more. The pleasure in the film, and the reason I’m reminded of The Suburbs, is because both works give their audience permission to “live a little.” Régine calls for the youth to take the street, muses about what we can find in the darkness, and that contagious excitement is present in this Pixar masterpiece as well. I was born six months before the short-lived drama series My So-Called Life premiered on ABC. I caught the 105

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90s staple years later, in college, and haven’t found a series that so intelligently depicts the suburban teenage experience. My So-Called Life doesn’t condescend, acknowledges that just because teenage problems seem small or superficial in hindsight or from the perspective of someone older, doesn’t mean that what’s happening at the time isn’t the most important thing in the world. Arcade Fire, similarly, respects its youth—even when it pokes at them or tries to provide a gentle warning. If anything, they hold a reverence for being young, wish they could themselves return to a time where the world doesn’t feel as heavy as it does when you’re a grown-up. Still, it sensitively narrows in on this world while always keeping its audience aware that everything taking place is contained to a mostly safe, privileged bubble (“They seem wild but they are so tame.”) Our narrator and protagonist is 15-year-old Angela Chase (Claire Danes), and most episodes open with a voice-over an intimate entry into her interior. The pilot introduces us to Angela and what will be the major conflict throughout the series, which only lasted one season. She feels lost in her high school, doesn’t know who her friends are anymore, and for those of us who have felt like this, like we didn’t belong but also didn’t know where we could belong (“Wasted hours before we knew / Where to go and what to do / Wasted hours that make you new / And turn into a life that we can live”), we have an extraordinary amount of empathy for Angela. It’s rare to find a high school drama that doesn’t feel like it was written by people who are no longer in high school. There’s a lot of empathy in the series, for Angela and her friends, that make my So-Called Life such a memorable TV 106

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moment. Perhaps its insularity, its ability to get inside of the mind of a lost teenager, is why it was canceled. But, at the end of the day, what makes it so wonderful is that we know these issues are fixed in time. She’ll bounce out of that adolescent rut, maybe leave her town, and the rest will be a memory (When I’m by myself / I can be myself / When my life is calm / But I don’t know when”). Released the same year My So-Called Life wrapped up, Welcome to the Dollhouse is Todd Solondz dark suburban comedy that ends up feeling like more of a tragedy about seventh grader Dawn Weiner. Dawn is strange, mistreated or ignored by her parents, bullied by her siblings, and is unable to catch a break. But—despite all of her efforts to stand out and to fit in—Solondz film isn’t a happy one, isn’t one where things get better. Dawn’s circumstances don’t change throughout the film and instead we are presented with just about one of the loneliest American films I’ve ever seen (“Now that you have left me here / I will never raise my voice / All the diamonds you have here / In this home which has no life”). Whether or not Solondz’s film is intended to be an aggressive statement on suburbia, what happens to the people who just don’t fit in, it feels true to feeling like an outsider. However, the comfort we get in this film has to do with the alternate reality Dawn creates for herself. The crush she has, the way she talks and responds to the people around her. She may be on her own planet, not many people may speak her language, but that’s alluring about her little world within a little world (“Strange how the half light / Can make a place new / You can’t recognize me / And I can’t recognize you.” 107

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Not to be reductive or make The Suburbs a “message album,” but if there’s something the band is trying to advocate for its kind of what Solondz does in a film way more cynical than anything Arcade Fire would create: create a place for yourself where you’re comfortable, where you feel confident and ok. Even darker that Welcome to the Dollhouse and My SoCalled Life is an HBO science fiction series that ultimately becomes a gorgeous meditation on grief and trauma. The Leftovers takes us all over the world and explores themes that are as close to universal as we can imagine, but—interestingly enough—opens up in a New York suburb. Mapleton, New York, is the initial focus of the series, which follows a group of individuals after an unexplained tragedy strikes the planet. Two percent of the world’s population have disappeared, suddenly, randomly, and with no explanation. Those who remain are struck by the unexplained loss, cope by looking toward religion, substance abuse, denial, or by joining a doomsday cult notable for their all-white outfits, chain smoking, and silence. The Leftovers is a surreal series, but the Sudden Departure, as the freak catastrophe comes to be called, gives “how the neighborhood has changed” a whole new meaning (“Let’s take a drive through the sprawl / Through these towns that they built to change / Then you said the emotions are dead / It’s no wonder that you feel estranged”). It’s an exaggeration and interpretation of Spike Jonze’s and Arcade Fire’s vision of a world coming to an end, of innocence being destroyed. It feels like an interesting choice to set the series in suburbia instead of some large city—but ultimately it’s the wisest approach. The disruptions and pain are all the more 108

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clear as everyone attempts to adjust to their new normal. We first meet the cast of characters Mapleton before moving on to the town of Jarden, Texas. These figures are trapped in their memories, always thinking about loved ones, about their lives before something changed (“I wish that I could have loved you then / Before our age was through / And before a world war does with us / whatever it will do”). For some reason, I don’t think about the people in the cities when I think about The Leftovers or about being forced to grow up in a cruel, unfair world. Like in the suburbs, in The Suburbs, I think about the people with smaller and less controversial lives, the everyday folk who feel change more powerfully than anybody else. These choices have been a little all over the place and most of them, it seems, represent my taste for the nontraditional, for representations that are exciting in the way they don’t fit in the mold of what we expect or have come to see from suburbia. Still, one of the most moving films about suburbia happens to be one of the more traditional ones. Robert Redford’s Ordinary People had a profound effect on me, is also about the way we compartmentalize, the way we do or don’t grieve, and most dangerously, the masks what we put on for others in order to fit in. We so desperately care about fitting in. In Ordinary People, the Jarretts are a family trying to move past the death of a son and brother. Conrad, the surviving son has tried to kill himself and has returned to his Chicago suburb from an institution. He was with his brother when he died, while the two were sailing during a storm, and blames himself for his brother’s death. Meanwhile Calvin (Donald Sutherland), 109

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the father, is trying to bridge the tense relationship between Conrad and his wife, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore). Mary cares about maintaining appearances, about securing an illusion of the Jarretts being ordinary people. But it’s not possible. Their son is dead. They can’t escape that reality and have to deal with their actual circumstances (“Wishing you were anywhere but here / You watched the life you’re living disappear”). The desire to hold on, to let go of a vision of perfection, is also central to The Suburbs, which mixes its more upsetting views about suburbia with nostalgia, a craving for a time and place and mindset that, once shattered, can’t spring up again. From these movies I often get the impression that grief and tragedy strikes harder in towns away from the city. While this isn’t true there’s something about the interruption tragedy holds in a small, quiet, close-knit town that does feel more severe. Everything is a little bit rawer, a little bit more public, and that rings true for the Jarretts, who are not only concerned with themselves but how the rest of the world will view them now (“All the kids have always known / That the emperor wears no clothes / But to bow to down to them anyway / Is better than being alone”). There are more, way more that I can’t go into detail about because there just isn’t enough space or time. But in case you’re interested, in case you want to see the movies and TV shows that have moved me, that have, like The Suburbs, influenced my way of thinking in some sort way, here’s a short list. Bigger Than Life (1956)—Directed by Nicholas Ray; The Burbs (1989)—Joe Dante; Carrie (1976)—Directed by Brian De Palma; Donnie Darko (2001)—Directed by Richard Kelly; 110

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Fresh off the Boat (TV Series)—Created by Nahnatchka Khan; Happiness (1998)—Directed by Todd Solondz; The Ice Storm (1997)—Directed by Ang Lee; Little Children (2006)—Directed by Todd Field; Rebel Without a Cause 1955)—Directed by Nicholas Ray; Safe (1995)—Directed by Todd Haynes; The Simpsons (TV Series)—Created by Matt Groening; SubUrbia (1996)—Directed by Richard Linklater; The Virgin Suicides (1999)—Directed by Sofia Coppola.

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Should I move past the feeling?

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”1 —Leslie Jamison I was in the fifth grade when my school was put under a serious lockdown. This was not a routine drill and my teacher—our surrogate parent from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.— couldn’t maintain her composure, a collected calm we, or at least the anxious 11-year-old me, expected under such duress. She locked the door, turned down the lights, and demanded we get under our desks. We were instructed to be silent, and except for a select few who were stupid enough to be fearless or nervous enough to

1 Jamison, Leslie. “In Defense of Saccharin(e).” The Empathy Exams. N.p.: Audible Studios on Brilliance, 2015. N. pag. Print.

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let out a reflexive giggle, we mostly were. We stayed like this for 20 or so minutes. I believe it was my dad who once told me a story about his lockdowns. When he was younger, growing up in the 70s and 80s, there was something sick and twisted and just outright sad about the drills at his school. He also had to hide under his desk, but his drills weren’t about your everyday crime. It was Russia, the looming nuclear threat that hung over the country. He and his friends and his teacher all hid under their desks. But did any of them know or at least pause to question that if a nuclear bomb hit their Miami school, they would all die—desk or no desk? There’s a practical purpose to these drills, of course. A secure lockdown could actually save lives. Hiding under a desk, retreating from windows and doors—there’s a point. You could avoid gun violence, protect yourself against breakins. And there’s a point to the kind of hiding my dad did too, a point that feels incredibly obvious to me now. We find comfort in what we can control, in mobilizing ourselves. We feel like we’re taking action and despite the reality of the situation, sometimes a calm sets in when you are able to convince yourself that you’re doing something. Even if this something is illusory. Also, hiding under a desk, which I tried doing the other night, is rather pleasant. It’s probably biological, wanting to feel sheltered and all. You have a makeshift roof over your head. If you were outside, in a forest, just you and your desk, and you were hiding under it, you may find refuge from the merciless sun or a relentless rain. It’s just nice.

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I’m not sure if I remember the details from this particular lockdown or if my memories from these lockdowns, almost all just drills, have melded into a single memory. But at some point, after we were settled under our desk, after the laughs had died down, I was able to hear my stomach, my anxious stomach and the noises it would make. This is one of the ways my body responds to fear. All the little people inside me, who work tirelessly to keep me okay, lose their shit. They’re the ones who are afraid. It’s their feet, slipping against the surface of my organs, that causes the grumbling. I was afraid of a lot growing up. I was afraid of elevators, ironic considering I lived in what feels like the only suburb in America—a small suburb of Miami called Aventura, Florida—where there are an abundance of high rises. My dad lived on the 27th floor of a building, and I would dread going over, having to ride up alone, or worse, with my younger, carefree brother who did not understand why I closed my eyes or shouted when he would move around too much. I was afraid of being away from my parents. I was afraid of being alone in a car, even for just a few minutes, while my parents ran an errand, I was afraid of hearing nothing at night. I  needed to know, from my bed, that the world was continuing to move. Even though I was about to take a break from it. I had to hear my mom showering, her tiptoeing footsteps, and her whispers. I loved hearing the kettle go off. After the lockdown finished we resumed our activities. There’s nothing a teacher hates more than a disruption to her lesson, even if the disruption is actually serious. This is true of all teachers, I’m sure of it, and because of that, even

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with things going back to normal something remains off. The lesson is rushed. Everyone’s attention is on something else. It’s just how things go. I’m not sure how long after, but some administrator came to our classroom and asked if he could speak to our teacher outside for a moment. This was great. We all loved this, a few seconds or minutes of chatter. The class clown debates if they’ll have enough time to go up to the whiteboard and draw something silly. The overachiever stays still and poised, what’s the teacher to see that even in her absence, they’re being respectful to the classroom. Our teacher returned and happened to be one of those teachers who shared things with her students. This I know for sure because there was no other way I could have found out what happened, why were under lockdown. There was a bank next door to our school and it had been robbed. It has been robbed and the robbers ran away in their car and there had been a huge car chase. Every little bit of crime in Aventura—where there is so little crime—grows into a big deal. If there’s a car accident, five police cars will arrive at the scene. If there’s noise coming from a house, six officers will knock on the door to break it up. This is what I assume it’s like in most small, affluent suburbs. So when there’s something real, something like a bank robbery, well, you can imagine the attention those robbers get. Our school was locked down out of precaution, because we were in the area. This is something a principal can pride themselves of, can have their secretary mention in the weekly newsletters sent to parents. “Our number one priority is to keep your children safe.” The optics of it, especially in a 116

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place where everyone notices these things, where the local paper will probably be interested in covering the events surrounding the robbery, look good. A journalist will write, “After John Doe and other John Doe robbed so and so bank, the Aventura City of Excellence School operated in the most organized fashion.” Etc. I only mention these elements because they feel important, lend some insight into how a place like Aventura operates when something out of its norm comes along. Our teacher relayed this story sensitively, I’d like to think, reminding us that there’s nothing to be worried about. No one was killed. The robbers were caught. We only have 15  minutes left of class, but that’s enough time to finish talking about whatever she was talking about. I don’t remember how long it took to get home that day. There was traffic though. Roads were blocked off. I heard police sirens, saw the flashing red and blue lights dancing against the bank’s walls. This was from the window of my bus. I really wanted to get home. Something was boiling within me. The little people had resumed their activities. My stomach had settled and all that was left was this sense of urgency in me, an energy that I didn’t know how or where to direct. But I wanted to get home. When I did, to the apartment, my mom was leasing at the time, a small two-bedroom on the second floor, thank god, of an older building, I rushed to my room. My mom wasn’t home and I was let in by our nanny, a sweet woman who stayed until my mom got home from work. I greeted her and shut the door and threw myself onto my bed. I got a 117

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pillow and I sobbed into it. I don’t know why I was sobbing or what exactly I was sobbing about. I was scared, I guess. I was terrified, actually. Something snapped, something I could not articulate. My world was like every other place, safe until proven unsafe. Bad people did exist, not in some conceptual way but in my day-to-day life. People steal. People hurt other people. People kill other people. I could be killed, or worse. My mom and dad could be killed. I went through it all, what feels like a less-developed version of Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief model. I mourned by suburbs that day, which feels like an incredibly dramatic thing to say, but holds true. In a few hours I would move past it, this intense moment of total controlessness. But it sticks with me, is something I vividly recall, a memory of an ideology I didn’t even know existed but was subscribed to, proved to be phony. Danger is everywhere. There’s no perfect place. After that I probably did some homework. I waited for my mom to get home. We ate dinner and I took a shower. I watched TV or read a book for a little bit. At bedtime my mom would come into the bedroom I shared with my brother, ask us to repeat the Shema Yisrael prayer with her. I would stay awake for a bit, get lost in the sounds of our tiny apartment. I’d hope my mom was taking a shower that night. Then, after maybe 45 minutes, I would fall asleep—through the night—and wake up in the morning, ten minutes before I needed to.   I was a weird fucking kid, and not only because I was gay. I didn’t know I was gay but that certainly played into it. I didn’t 118

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do any team sports, PE was my second least favorite subject in school after math. I liked to read books. I liked to watch movies. In high school I never went to clubs, which is what most people of my age started to do after they got their hands on a fake ID. I didn’t drink until my last semester of senior year. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom, wanting to get out, wanting to move to a big city where I’d be meeting a lot of people like me. I would write one of my college essays for NYU—the undergraduate school I ended up attending—on Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. I said, in a very dramatic and self-assured way, that I wanted to make something like that, something completely my own. There’s something I need to mention about Aventura, a suburb that is very difficult to comprehend if you’re not from it. Most of its residents, or at least a huge chunk of the ones I grew up around, are conservative Jews. Of these Jews very few I knew were American-born. Most, including my own mother, had moved from South America. There was—and in some countries still is—a sizable population of Jews in South America. But after their countries fell victim to corruption, often committed by these same Jews who avoided taxes and manipulated the fragile institutions that existed in their home cities, they came to Miami. They came to Miami and lived the way they lived back in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Mexico. They lived in Aventura, a shtetl of sorts, that grows at a very glacial pace. Difference of any kind is looked down upon and if not that, then at least you become a source of gossip. I grew to hate this way of life, which centered around the synagogue, displays of wealth, gossip, and very little awareness of the outside world. 119

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Most of the adults I grew up around are apolitical, but also uninterested in movies, music, or anything remotely cultural. If this feels like an exaggeration, maybe it is. But this is the way I felt. I felt isolated and sure, maybe a lot of this isolation was self-imposed—because sometimes, as people, we thrive off of victimizing ourselves, of making ourselves martyrs— but I really felt misunderstood and alone, a lot. I was 16 when The Suburbs came out. I don’t think I listened to it then. I hate to admit I was unaware of Arcade Fire until later in high school, but that probably was the case. But I think my fondness and eventual love for Arcade Fire, for The Suburbs—the first album of theirs I connected with on a profound level—stems from something I share with the record’s intention. The Suburbs is trapped in memory, some lovely and romantic, about youth and learning to drive and running around at night feeling free. The other memories or associations are not as kind and the suburbs becomes a place where we feel left out, where we can’t return to, a breeding ground for conformity and complacency. But the record also argues for a freedom within ourselves, a place or feeling we can escape to when we feel stuck.

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Filmography

All That Heaven Allows. USA: Universal Pictures. Sirk, Douglas, dir. 1955. Americans, The. USA: 20th Television. Weisberg, Joe, creator. 2013–18. Black-ish. USA: Disney-ABC Domestic Television. Barris, Kenya, creator. 2014– Blue Velvet. USA: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Lynch, David, dir. 1986. Far From Heaven. USA: Focus Features. Haynes, Todd, dir. 2002. Her. USA: Warner Bros. Jonze, Spike, dir. 2013. Incredibles, The. USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Bird, Brad, dir. 2004. Leftovers, The. USA: Warner Bros. Television Distribution. Lindelof, Damon & Perrotta, Tom, creators. 2014–17. Mad Men. USA: Lionsgate Television. Weiner, Matthew, creator. 2007–15. My So-Called Life. USA: ABC. Holzman, Winnie, creator. 1994–5.

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Ordinary People. USA: Paramount Pictures. Redford, Robert, dir. 1980. Polyester. USA: New Line Cinema. Waters, John, dir. 1981. Red Dawn. USA: MGM/UA Entertainment Company. Milius, John, dir. 1984. Scenes from the Suburbs. USA: MJZ. Jonze, Spike, dir. 2011. Welcome to the Dollhouse. USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Solondz, Todd, dir. 1995. Where the Wild Things Are. USA: Warner Bros. Jonze, Spike, dir. 2009.

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Also available 6-12

 1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes  2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans  3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis  4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller  5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice  6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh  7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli  8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry  9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo

13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing ... by Eliot Wilder 25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken

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27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 124

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62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond. . . by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer

80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by R. J. Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. Andrew W. K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J. H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 125

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 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves  98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild  99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole

113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton

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