What’s so terrible about suburban life? Am I the only guy in America who feels grateful to live in a comfortable house with a three-car garage, a minivan, a pretty wife and three decent kids?
The Noisy Parade of Suburb-Bashers
As a matter of fact, statistics show that I've got a lot of happy company — which raises a question about current trends in Hollywood. Given the overwhelmingly middle-class, mostly suburban existence of the American public, why does the movie industry persist in portraying this lifestyle as an unending torment and depicting even our most privileged suburbs as hell on earth?
Two new films join the noisy parade of suburb-bashers: The Safety of Objects and Bringing Down the House. Both drive home the hackneyed idea that the American dream has become the American nightmare and emphasize the decadent, despairing situation of American kids.
In The Safety of Objects, one teenager (portrayed by actor Joshua Jackson) lies in a coma after a beer-soaked accident while his pre-teen neighbor engages in an obsessive (and highly sexual) relationship with his sister's Barbie doll.
In Bringing Down the House, Steve Martin's 15-year-old daughter defies her divorced dad by engaging in wild partying with the drug ecstasy.
Scarcely Connecting with Reality
Although Bringing Down the House tries for uproarious comedy (by injecting the irrepressible Queen Latifah into an uptight California suburb) and The Safety of Objects deploys a fine ensemble cast (Glenn Close, Dermot Mulroney, Patricia Clarkson, Moira Kelly) in a searing, multifamily melodrama, the movies offer strikingly similar portrayals of unhappy suburbanites. These prosperous but pathetic people are afflicted by shattered marriages, nervous breakdowns, petty criminality, overwhelming loneliness, rank hypocrisy, racism, repression, crass materialism and horribly damaged kids.
These same problems have turned up in a long line of bitter cinematic visions of suffering citizens trapped in tacky tracts and shopping-center sprawl. The multiple Oscar winner American Beauty provided perhaps the most striking illustration of the theme. Kevin Spacey's empty existence crumbled before our eyes as he left his meaningless job and pulled away from his money-mad wife to concentrate on smoking marijuana and lusting after his teenage daughter's cheerleader friend.
This year, two major Oscar contenders again emphasize the horrors of suburbia: In The Hours, the Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman characters come to view suicide as the only escape from stifling suburbs in 1950s Los Angeles and 1920s England. In Far From Heaven, Julianne Moore (again) sees the hypocrisy and intolerance behind the Father Knows Best smugness of her leafy, 1950s Connecticut commuter community.
Other films from Blue Velvet (1986) to Happiness (1998) have focused on the rot below the pleasant surface of desirable residential districts.
Of course, these cinematic fantasies reflect one aspect of reality: Even the most privileged neighborhoods suffer drug busts, marital disasters and even murders. Such scandals hardly define the norm, however, and Americans give little indication of the despair over their personal circumstances so frequently dramatized on film. The overwhelming majority of us (67.9%, says the Census Bureau) own the homes in which we live. Despite the obsessive discussion about the collapse of nuclear families, the percentage of children living in two-parent households actually has increased in recent years — the last Census showed 69.1% dwelling with both parents.
Most striking of all, we report consistently high levels of satisfaction about our living arrangements. In June 2002, the Louis Harris Organization asked respondents, “Do you feel good about…” various aspects of their situations. An amazing 96% felt good about “relations with your family”; 93% expressed contentment with “your home”; and 82% registered satisfaction with “the city, town or county in which you live.”
The Hollywood “suburbs-are-hell” theme, in other words, scarcely connects to the realities of the general public. That helps ensure relatively modest box-office returns for most of the motion pictures conveying this message.
The Value of Hard Work
An anomalous element of The Safety of Objects provides a key to Tinseltown's disconnect with the fundamental elements of middle-class life. The film self-consciously emphasizes the materialism of its tortured characters. Promotional blurbs describe these people as “smothered by the posh comforts of all the material objects that surround them.” But we never see cast members working to earn their seductive goodies.
In the course of an ambitious film with a dozen characters, we learn almost nothing about their jobs. The only individual glimpsed at work is a yuppie lawyer played by Mulroney, who walks out of his firm and into a nervous breakdown when he fails to make partner at the beginning of the film. The others bicker and moan but offer few indications of gainful employment.
The malaise on screen, in short, unwittingly underlines the fact that it's tough to feel satisfaction with material blessings unless you've worked for them. Studies of lottery winners show them suffering from personal doubts and adjustment problems — with notably more difficulties in enjoying their wealth than people who toiled all their lives for their money and rightly feel they deserve it.
In this context, it makes sense that Hollywood looks askance at upper-middle-class Americans. The entertainment industry offers spectacular monetary rewards on a capricious, almost arbitrary, basis, often disassociated from hard (or decent) work. Many analyses of the liberal activism of the show-business elite point to a vague sense of guilt that attaches itself to grandly successful individuals who may suspect that they don't fully deserve their riches and fame. Feeling restless and uneasy with their privileges, some members of the Hollywood establishment naturally will impute the same ambivalence to other Americans who have achieved material success.
What moviemakers seldom acknowledge is that for most suburbanites, the facts of daily life — even with its carpools, PTA meetings, Cub Scout events and barbecues — can seem pretty great, even grand and luminous. My wife and I see these years of child-rearing challenges as fleeting and refuse to feel guilty for savoring the opportunities we share with our kids — opportunities altogether unknown to prior generations.
Those of us writing our real-life scripts in the Great American Middle Class ought to feel proud, not guilty, of the private worlds we've built through relentless hard work.
Film critic Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show focusing on the intersection of politics and pop culture. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
