Abstract
Suburbs have gone from being the solution to the problem. Once rosy, their popular image is now muddy: unclear and unappealing. In recent years, a growing number of writers have explored the ways in which those images have been articulated through popular media, including novels, magazines, film and television. They have concentrated on themes and plot – in a word, content – and to a lesser extent on the producers’ purposes and the audiences’ responses (Muzzio and Halper, 2002: 545–546). Noting this, and by way of contrast, in Scenes from the Suburbs the Dutch academic Timotheus Vermeulen encourages us to think about other aspects of such representations, considering matters of ‘style, tempo, tone, mood, space, and ideas about epistemic access and distance’ (p. 170). His interest does not lie in the ostensible content of visual media, still less with actual places, but with ‘the qualities of texts … measured as differences within the discursive realm’ (p. 4).
At this point – in the book as in this review – readers will divide sharply into those who proceed with keen anticipation and those who hurriedly turn away. The perspective of cultural studies is divisive. I myself would normally fall into the latter category, and inevitably my assessment is critical. But I will try to be fair.
After clarifying his purpose, over the course of five chapters Vermeulen applies what he refers to as ‘spatial theory’ (p. 7) to develop a close analysis of eight movies or TV series. He acknowledges debts to the likes of David Harvey, Michel de Certeau and especially Henri Lefebvre, but relies most obviously on the ideas of Bachelard, Deleuze and Guattari. His chosen movies are a mixture of the popular – Pleasantville, Happiness – and (at least to me) the more obscure, these being three examples of teen noir, Brick, Chumscrubber, and Alpha Dog. The TV series, both popular, are The Simpsons and King of the Hill.
It is not possible to do justice to the subtlety of his discussion of each work: he not only acknowledges their complexities of meaning but relishes them. And, to be honest, I am doubtful that I can do them justice. But some of his summary observations do indicate the nature of his arguments. Regarding Pleasantville, for example, a movie in which a sunny suburb is revealed as a dystopia, Vermeulen argues that ‘the film’s point is not that Pleasantville is dualistic, split between one and its opposite’ but that it is ‘ontologically unstable’ (p. 171). Regarding The Simpsons, he notes that ‘harsh lines, interruption and flatness … draw attention to the static and fragmented nature of their worlds’ but also suggest ‘complexity and multiplicitousness’ (p. 172). More generally, he suggests that all of the works that he examines embody a ‘sensibility that evokes at once fixity and radical instability’.
He has a point. Scenes from the Suburbs brings out elements of style in these works which have been neglected by other writers and which this reviewer, at any rate, had not previously considered. Social scientists are predisposed to look only at content, to find illustrations of social issues, to debate the accuracy of their representation and to make judgements accordingly. And so, for example, previous commentaries on Pleasantville have emphasised that it is ‘less about a place than about stories of that place’, indicating a ‘desire to displace any serious consideration of the suburban milieu’, replacing it with a ‘hyperbolic fantasy’, while a trailer described it as ‘a place as far from reality as we can imagine’ (Beuka, 2004: 14; Huq, 2013: 86; Muzzio and Halper, 2002: 549). Vermeulen insists, however, that in evaluating such works we should also consider internal aesthetic criteria, such as the use of colour, perspective, juxtapositions and so forth. Even so, conventional questions apply: what criteria did he use in selecting these eight works, and is the sensibility that he sees there uniquely suburban? To answer these questions, we need to consider his method.
To build an argument we usually choose examples, whether they be cities or works of art, because they are typical or else extreme. Vermeulen explains that he wants to cover a range of genres and styles. Fair enough, although it does leave unresolved the issue as to how much weight we should give to each type. But within each genre his criteria for selection is unclear. For example, there are innumerable movies set in American suburbs, including many romantic comedies that lack the stylistic complexity and disconcerting theme of Pleasantville. The inclusion of an example would have complicated Vermeulen’s argument and, if weighted according to its popularity, might even have refuted it. In this regard, the way he explains his choice of teen movies is suggestive. Enumerating (at least) 13 teen sub-genres, he says that he chose examples from the noir sub-category because they involve the transposition to the suburb of a genre associated with the inner city (p. 136). In so doing, he probably tipped the scales towards the discovery of dissonance and irony.
But there is a larger and more important question of method. Collectively, Vermeulen has chosen works that claim to represent the suburbs. ‘Claim’ is the operative word: he tells us that he included ‘cinematic and televisual settings that have been described as suburb by those involved in distributing and marketing the film or the television programme, by those distributing and marketing …, and by those reviewing them’ (p. 17). But he himself (p. 21, 100) refers to at least two of these fictional places in question as ‘towns’: Springville (The Simpsons), and Pleasantville itself. And indeed, in terms of their scale and mix of land uses, these places do seem to be at least as town-like as stereotypically suburban (cf. Muzzio and Halper, 2002: 547). But that is a judgement about accuracy that Vermeulen would not wish to make. That reluctance is problematic. It prevents him from exploring potentially interesting questions about ambiguities and shifts in the popular meaning of ‘suburban’. More importantly for his argument, it casts doubt on the implication – apparent in the title of his book, though never explicitly articulated – that there are modes of representation that are in fact specifically suburban.
Vermeulen has alerted us to some unjustly neglected issues in the representation of urban places. His commentary on specific films, subtle and original, if sometimes difficult, challenges us to think differently about the meanings that films and TV communicate. But it is not clear that his substantive conclusions apply only to suburban, or indeed to metropolitan, settings of any sort. Ultimately, as with a good deal of ‘urban’ research, Scenes from the Suburbs tells us about things that happen in particular places – in this case, of course, fictional – but fails to identify those elements that are distinctive.