American Suburbia: the Everyday Matrix
By Caterina Erlinger (she/her)
What do Lester Burnham and Angela White have in common?
A cookie-cutter American suburban existence that covers up the bleakness of their dysfunctional families, work days that become indistinguishable from one another, and general hopelessness.
If you’re uncultured, you might have no idea who these Americans are. Well, they’re not real people.
Lester Burnham, who exists in a suburban New England town in a beautiful home with a white picket fence and roses cared for by his wife, is the main character of the film American Beauty. Angela White, the perfect housewife and mother, inhabitant of a picket-fenced, tree-lined street is a character and narrator of the show Desperate Housewives.
They are the Joneses, by design. However, the stories that play out in these idyllic suburban backdrops are dark, bleak, and unsettling.
Lester Burnham is a disappointing father, emasculated husband and ‘expendable’ employee of a big corporation- he ends up dead at the end of the movie. Angela White is hiding a decade-old secret, and she kills herself in the pilot episode.
In both cases, suburbia is being used to represent the fake facade of a darker existence. Picket fences hide broken marriages, new cars hide disillusionment with the rat race, picture frames that put on a show, and curated lawns that keep up appearances while everything silently rots behind closed doors.
The pattern of suburbia hiding a darker underbelly is seen again and again in American cinema and TV: The Truman Show, American Beauty, Mad Men, Virgin Suicides, Desperate Housewives, Don’t Worry Darling, and even Marvel’s Wanda Vision.
Desperate Housewives is an apparent example of this trope. In the show, suburbia is overemphasized and directly contrasted with the heavy and dramatic nature of the storylines which routinely involve murders, messy lawsuits, affairs, divorces, kidnappings, and dysfunctional family dynamics. It’s not even left to subtext. It’s brought into the dialogue and narration.
In its own distinguishable trope, suburbia isn’t just the backdrop of the story, it’s a key element that shapes the story.
The point can be made that in any story, in any film, the setting is essential to the story, and a replacement would concoct an altered message. Little House on the Prairie does not have to be on a prairie, but it does have to be in a faraway, remote, unexplored territory; it could very well be set in the middle of Montana instead of Minnesota and the story would still work, but transplant it to Manhattan and it falls apart. That is all to say that the setting is very important; it communicates its own meaning, its own message, and has its own tropes, just like characters do.
Tropes are patterns of storytelling. They are usually patterns found in characters or storylines, like the ‘cool girl’ or the ‘makeover’, but they can also be patterns in setting. Tropes give us insights into the collective imagination of a population, because they are recreated and repackaged, again and again. If they weren’t paid attention to, they would fall off, and no one would be talking about them. But if they are paid attention to, they get remolded, they become inspiration, they’re played with and reimagined. This happens subconsciously, but through their resurfacing in film and TV we can pick out patterns, which is a conscious act. Analyzing the stories of a population is like analyzing the dreams of an individual.
So, what does the trope of a perfect suburbia hiding dark storylines mean? The purposefully idyllic, cookie-cutter setting is paired with stories characterized by psychological turmoil, dysfunction, and bleakness that is kept secret from the rest of the world. The surface-level appearance disguises that which isn’t supposed to be spoken of, that which puts the whole existence of the facade at stake. It mismatches the setting and the events that unfold, which instantly becomes interesting, because it sticks out, it’s a contradiction. The idyllic suburban setting is characterized by green lawns, white picket fences, curated gardens, and homes that look like one another, while the characters that inhabit them are plagued by toxic families, psychological disorders, and deep unhappiness.
The suburban sprawl of post-war America was a revolution: after decades of income disparity between the classes, financial disasters and wars, American prosperity was democratized thanks to a thriving economy and increased education facilitated by the GI Bill. The American dream was radically transformed - and became radically attainable. More men than ever before became college educated, creating the white collar workforce. With increased income, families moved out of the cities into the newly built suburbs, designed as perfect havens for family life with spacious homes and yards.
Thus, a new way of life was born: suburbia. The media of the time portrays both men’s and women’s roles in the suburban world as separate and idyllic. Men were the breadwinners, working a white collar job in the city, coming home each evening to their families, involved fathers and strong role models. Women worked in the home, preparing meals, tending to their children, dressing in the latest fashions, hosting parties and social events in their free time. This lifestyle became accessible to the majority of Americans. This was an era where the dream of peace, freedom and prosperity became an everyday reality. The Joneses had it all. They were materially prosperous, safe, and free. Despite this triumph of essentially equalized prosperity, suburbia has been used to represent a facade.
There’s no doubt that it remains an iconic era in the American psyche, frozen in time, repeatedly referenced in pop culture.
However, in recent depictions, suburban material prosperity is completely overlooked and irrelevant, almost taken for granted. It’s not a blessing, it’s not an achievement, it’s a cage that needs to be broken out of, it's ‘the Matrix’. In American Beauty, Lester’s wife, Carolyn carefully obsesses over her beautiful red roses in the front yard while inside, she leaves an unattended weeded mess of an unhappy marriage, an affair, and a neglected daughter. Carolyn cares very much about the material appearance of her life; she tends to the garden, her home is well furnished, and her table is set perfectly. Arguably, she is an accessory of suburbia, a character as much as she is part of the background. Lester, on the other hand, is breaking out of this ‘cage’, he has awoken from being ‘sedated’, as he says. Through a series of unhinged decisions Lester actively fights against the life of sedated normality he’s led so far.
As Lester’s life begins to unravel, his tree-lined street looks exactly the same. The setting is increasingly at odds with the story we are being told. It’s odd when you compare to other films- Snow White runs through a haunted forest, not an apple orchard, as she embarks on her journey, and ‘Blondie’ has a deathly stand-off with Tuco in a deserted cemetery in the middle of the desert. These are cases where the setting reflects the story that is told, where the rough landscape reflects the roughness of the characters.
That’s where this trope is recognizable. The peaceful, affluent setting sets itself directly against the mood of the story. Angela White and Lester Burnham are shot in their picture perfect living rooms. This facade, this fakeness, hides a more complex and murky truth. It hides what the characters are truly grappling with, and it hides their journey of freeing themselves from the mediocre tormented lives they led. Peace and comfort was not enough. Comfort became a cage and peace became sedation.
With the fruits of modern government, economy and society, Americans were given access to a lifestyle that could only be a dream for most post-World War II countries, and instead of cherishing it and holding it up as a worthy ideal, we became suspicious of it. In true American fashion we began weaving stories of comfort conspiring against the soul, of normality stifling the spirit. Peace, freedom and prosperity wasn’t enough for us. We need to grapple with something: with the dark truth of our lives, with the system, with the next frontier. We are a restless nation. We cannot appreciate the enormous wealth and opportunity we have created. We must demolish it and build something new and better over it.
