Saturday night my wife and I went to see the movie “Revolutionary Road” starring the Titanic team of Leonardo and Kate. It’s sharp, intelligent and deeply depressing fare by the same director of that gem “American Beauty” but without much of the satiric humor.
The film brought to mind the concept of suburbs and just how intellectuals despise them, often for good reason. This is true at Bacons Rebellion (at least the original one) where such keen-eyed observers as EMR and Jim Bacon and Larry Gross take apart the problems of the car-centric suburbs that have overwhelmed Virginia since about the 1930s when the New Deal brought lots of new federal workers to Washington and many flocked to the cheap housing in Arlington.
I, too, have done my dissing of suburbs, although I lived in some as a child and some of my earliest memories are not of cities, but of station wagons on Rockville Pike north of Bethesda and Congressional Shopping Center, a converted civil airport, where I used to buy my plastic models. Later, I lived in true small towns and in the country. During my adult life, I tended towards residing near the centers of cities, including Norfolk, Richmond, Washington, Chicago, Moscow and New York.
Like Frank and April in the movie, marriage and two children brought me to the suburbs which are where I am now. But I start to wonder, why does everyone hate the suburbs so much? Is it really fair, since suburbs have been a huge part of the American experience since at least the 1950s? Are we really the worse for it as the EMRs and Baconators would have us believe? I mean, Ed and Jim, are we all really so worthless?
There is a certain pretension in ‘burb-bashing. Consider this excerpt from the New York Times which was riffing off the upcoming release of “Revolutionary Road:
“In the last couple of decades, the antisuburban film has become as much a staple of Hollywood as the Serious Crime Drama With an Incomprehensible Plot. A few prominent examples: Todd Haynes’s “Safe” (which has suburban people inexplicably bleeding from every pore of their bodies); the 2004 remake of “The Stepford Wives” (where Viking range + Sub-Zero refrigerator = robotic wife, death of feminism and extinction of human rights); “The Ice Storm” (just in case you ignored the urgent alarm sounded by the antisuburban novel by Rick Moody on which the film is based and moved to Larchmont); the British Sam Mendes’s very own “American Beauty” (of which “Revolutionary Road” is simply a reiteration — take a sprinkler, add a dollop of anomie, and presto! you’re an authentic American filmmaker).”
So, let me see if I am getting this right. The “autonomobile” + “dysfunctional settlement patterns” + boredom = hopelessness + self-abortion (see the movie). But I think that is terribly harsh and negates such much of what has been good about U.S. culture at least when I have been alive (I turned 56 last week).
The fact is that for years hardly anyone has lived in the extremely-densely packed neighborhoods where I resided in Brooklyn for four years when I worked at a magazine in Manhattan. I spent fascinating weekends inspecting brownstones and redbricks, studying the sub-society on tenement roofs and on fire escapes and marveling at the incredible ethnic diversity of the place. My Soviet-born wife loved New York with a passion and was disappointed when we ended up in a nice suburb. She ought to know — she teaches the children of suburban families and knows their issues very well.
Suburbs are alien worlds to her so her viewing of “Revolutionary Road” was a bit clinical. As a child, she lived for a while in a city in a “kommunalka” or apartment where as many as a dozen families lived on one floor and shared one kitchen and bathroom. Talk about properly dense housing patterns! Think of it as Risse’s ideal world on steroids with a vodka chaser!
It wasn’t that her family was poor – everyone was. Her mother worked at a partly-underground factory that made, among other things, surface-to-air missiles of the type used against U.S. aircraft in Vietnam. Back then in the Urals, such housing wasn’t so much a factor of far-sighted urban planning, Rather, it was because the nation was still getting over the effects of World War II which killed millions of Russians.
Anyway, back to the movie. Leonardo and Kate do a fine job of playing out their enormous frustrations at being alive in the 1950s suburbs and they really seem to want to get on to Paris and make like Kerouac or Ginsberg. I liked the movie but really admired “American Beauty,” another gutting of suburbia, but more of a satire thanks to Kevin Spacey’s wry and brilliant humor.
I guess I subscribe to the intellectual pretension of ‘burb-bashing because I am so much a product of it.
Peter Galuszka