Trouble in suburbia - narratives of suburbia in prose fiction and film

    

Small town suburbia is a strange old place and a place that many of us by our late teens and early twenties long to leave behind what with its seemingly ordinary way of life, limited opportunities and  escape  the frequent reminiscences of nearly always the one person who keeps reminding you of the cringe worthy time that you messed up your lines in a school play you can barely remember or when your six year old self thought walking around town in a Spiderman costume was a perfectly normal way of spending a Saturday afternoon! This sense of adventure during our late teens and early twenties often attracts us away from the suburbia of our childhoods to the bright lights of new places, allure of the city or the exciting enchantment of foreign destinations but somehow paradoxically a decade or so later the cycle for many of us comes strangely full circle when as we settle down and start families of our own, we somehow again find ourselves subscribing back into the same old small town way of life we not so long ago vowed to leave behind forever.

The film and prose narratives of suburbia including Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Peyton Place by Grace Metalious and Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl strongly contrast with the often idyllic images our minds evoke of suburbia with its suburban tree lined streets where Mums push prams and chat on the street corner whilst Dad washes the car on a Sunday, where children play happily till dusk and where the rising smoke of backyard barbecues lingers in the lazy summer haze. Instead they often depict suburbia in a highly sinister light where small suburban towns are rocked and curtains twitch to the news of dark secrets suffused with tragedy, murder, sex and scandal.
 

Richard Yates sensational 1961 novel  Revolutionary Road brought to the big screen in the 2008 film directed by Sam Mendes and starring the winning pairing of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet perhaps critiques the soulless suburbs the most out of the three. It charts the tale of 1950s married couple Frank and April Wheeler who move from New York to 115 Revolutionary Road in sleepy Connecticut suburbia upon the pregnancy of their first child and who seem on the surface at least to be the perfect all American couple who are reasonably well off, good looking, have two children and are very much living the middle class American Dream. This though as we find out is just a façade when April, realising her dreams of becoming an actress and anything more than a suburban housewife to be futile in small town Connecticut begins to feel trapped by the repressing confines of suburban domesticity and longs to emigrate to Paris where she idealistically believes herself and Frank also bored out of his mind with his job in New York as a marketing man at Knox Machines, could perhaps discover a new life and find themselves again away from the stultifying influences of suburbia.

These dreams and new sense of optimism are however abruptly shattered when the couple’s third child is conceived and Frank begins to find to new enthusiasm in his job as both Frank and April stray from their marriage, with Frank engaging in an adulterous affair with his city office colleague Maureen and April has a one night stand with her dull suburban neighbour Shep Campbell as their marriage begins to fall apart and Frank begins to put pressure on April to seek psychiatric help in regards to her troubled childhood and want of an abortion.  

A central theme in the novel and indeed Peyton Place is very much the need for conformity in 1940s and 1950s Middle America and how this often damages the individuals caught up in trying to conform to societal expectations. Yates himself described the book as ‘an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price…’ When you look at those in Revolutionary Road from Frank and April, the Campbell neighbours to Revolutionary Road’s busy body Mrs Givings, that despite all attempting to keep up appearances suffer from their own troubles and inner turmoil that often spill out into public situations.

 My favourite and I think most interesting character in the book though is John Givings who despite being labelled as clinically ‘insane’ is the only one ironically to comprehend the Wheeler’s dreams of emigration to Paris and their dislike at suburbia’s constant desire for conformity. Yates’ novel though ends with a chilling and tragic of endings when April overcome with the state of her life attempts to self- abort her child in the family bathtub whilst Frank is at work only to die from the blood loss leaving Frank and their two children to pick up the pieces of their lives whilst we the reader and viewer are left with a fated image of the American Dream and the resonating tragic fate of those who dared to dream beyond suburbia’s streets.

“It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares anymore; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity"  

 

 

Peyton Place is another one of those New England towns where the red white and blue flag flutters and seemingly all is idyllic until you look beyond the surface where issues of  rape , desire, murder, shame, suicide and moral hypocrisy lie at the heart of this picture postcard community. Metalious’ controversial 1956 novel and Mark Robson’s 1957 film adaptation of the book set from 1937 onwards deals with the dark and ugly secrets the residents of this small town hide depicted through three main female characters.

Constance Mackenzie (Lana Turner) who runs the local dress shop and who beneath her prudish prim and properness feels deeply lonely, sexually repressed and all the while under the auspices of being a widow is hiding the taboo of her illegitimate daughter Allison who she conceived through an extra-marital affair with a married New York man who ran an exotic cloth shop. Allison (Diane Varsi)  meanwhile despite her high achieving and bookish nature is quite the opposite to her mother being very much a dreamer, caring and sensitive with dreams of becoming a writer yet who increasingly feels as she nears the end of high school the repressive expectations of Peyton Place on her own shoulders as she starts a flirtatious friendship with the shy Norman only for both of them to be wrongly accused of skinny dipping and having sex at a local beauty spot by a town busybody. Selena Cross (Hope Lange) is best friends with Allison but is from a poor ‘Shacks’ family and begs the town doctor for a secret abortion after being made pregnant when her alcoholic stepfather Lucas, who is later forced out of town violently rapes her.  The fallout from this series of events is catastrophic as her own mother Nellie wracked with shame and guilt hangs herself and Selena upon the later return of Lucas from the Navy during WW2 murders her stepfather and buries him under the sheep pen.

Similarly to Revolutionary Road you see the seductiveness of suburbia fall away as the plot thickens with the sordid secrets of the town’s inhabitants. Constance is forced to admit after calling Allison a bastard in a fit of rage over her afternoon with Norman that she had never married Allison’s father and that he was already a married man. Allison who is deeply affected by the revelation and shocking discovery of Nellies suicide withdraws from her mother as the rift between them deepens and flees to New York where she becomes a successful magazine writer away from the salacious gossip of Peyton Place. Allison returns to the small town when she attends the trial of Selena, this is a pivotal moment in the book as the town’s residents only just coming to terms with the loss of some its young men during WW2 is forced to face up to its prejudices and double standards that are deep rooted in the community through an unlikely source and figure of authority.  This moment of hard truths occurs when Dr Swain the doctor who carried out Selena’s abortion gives evidence at her trial for murdering Lucas when he states how the town have  ‘become prisoners of our own gossip’ and that Selena was driven to kill through fear of both her stepfather and how the community she lived in would react. At the book’s close as Selena gets acquitted and as Allison reconciles with her mother and Constance finally lets herself fall in love you get a sense that the town although perhaps not entirely changed has begun to realise the flaws of narrow minded small town suburbia. 

 

 Gillian Flynn’s disturbing and intensely dark domestic noir thriller Gone Girl is another and more contemporary insight into the dark side of suburbia. For anyone who hasn’t read the novel or seen David Fincher’s film that starred Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike and Neil Patrick Harris, it follows a couple Nick and Amy who upon both losing their writing jobs in the recession have moved from New York to the small town Midwest and present to the world a seemingly blissful marriage however all is not well behind closed doors. Amy loved her life as a magazine quiz writer in New York and can’t stand small town suburbia she and her husband have ended up in, Amy then mysteriously disappears on the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary leading to Nick as her husband and in a common parallel to many real life cases ends up being put in the spotlight as a sociopathic prime suspect by the police and media. 

What then follows is a deeply disturbing narrative as the dysfunctional nature of both main characters and their unhappy marriage is unravelled as Nick is revealed to have been having an affair whilst Amy plays psychological mind games with Nick by faking her own death and attempting to manipulatively implicate Nick by planting evidence against him including a completely fake set of diary entries where she states that she fears her husband in a clear attempt to frame him for her ‘death.’ Flynn’s novel exceeds in keeping us gripped as we the reader as well as the police and the media often do naturally in such cases of suburban disappearance and suspected murder believe more willingly Amy’s depiction of the dysfunctional relationship as a woman until it is revealed both are unreliable narrators as the story takes a further dark turn of events. Amy approaches her obsessive ex-boyfriend Desi in an attempt to hide herself but later murders him as he becomes possessive of her, then only to return to her husband claiming she had been kidnapped. The film and novels conclusion is perhaps the most disturbing however as despite Nick’s threats to leave Amy and the writing of a memoir exposing her deceit, he is forced to fake his love for her in the public eye and continues to be manipulated by Amy as she falls pregnant and forces him to keep up in an unsettling lack of closure the appearance of a happy marriage for the sake of his child as both continue to live a lie in the heart of Midwestern suburbia.

Suburbia is a place we will all probably encounter in our lives but despite the ordinary image its ability to intrigue writers and filmmakers alike with the dysfunctional human relationships, psychological and emotional turmoil contained behind suburbia’s  closed doors will I think always continue to capture interest and the imagination.