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"Suburban life in motion pictures."
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Scenes from the suburbs : the suburb in contemporary US film and television
This book looks again at the filmic and televised spaces we think we know so well. How are these spaces built up? What is it that makes us recognize them as suburbs? How do they function? Vermeulen usesDesperate Housewives, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Happiness, Pleasantville, Brick and Chumscrubber to explore these questions.
eBook
Look Closer
In recent years, the media landscape in the United States has followed a pattern similar to that of the physical landscape by becoming increasingly suburbanized. Although it is a far cry from reality, the fantasy of a perfect suburban life still exists in the collective imagination of millions of Americans. This dream of suburban perfection is built around a variety of such ideologically conservative values and ideals as the importance of tradition, the centrality of the nuclear family, the desire for a community of like-minded neighbors, the need for clearly defined gender roles, and the belief that with hard work and determination, anyone can succeed.
Building on the relationships between suburban life and American identity,Look Closerexamines and interprets recent narratives that challenge the suburban ideal to reveal how directors and producers are mobilizing the spaces of suburbia to tell new kinds of stories about America. David R. Coon argues that the myth of suburban perfection, popularized by postwar sitcoms and advertisements, continues to symbolize a range of intensely debated issues related to tradition, family, gender, race, and citizenship. Through close examinations of such films asAmerican Beauty,The Truman Show, andMr. & Mrs. Smithas well as such television series asDesperate Housewives,Weeds, andBig Love, the book demonstrates how suburbia is used to critique the ideologies that underpin the suburban American Dream.
eBook
Scenes from the Suburbs
This book looks again at the filmic and televised spaces we think we know so well. How are these spaces built up? What is it that makes us recognize them as suburbs? How do they function? Vermeulen uses Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Happiness, Pleasantville, Brick and Chumscrubber to explore these questions.
eBook
The Invention of (YouTube) Ritual and Pierre Huyghe's Holiday
Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day shifts the boundaries between representing and producing rituals. In 2003, the artist scripted a holiday for a freshly built, suburban-style neighborhood in New York State, which he simultaneously turned into a documentary film and quasi-liturgical participatory installation. Beyond the art world, innumerable new rituals are formalizing and circulating through videos online.
Journal Article
Oedipus the King as a Paradigm for Family Trauma Cinema
Radical alienation between family members, addictions of all kinds, child and spousal abuse, child molestation and parentchild incest, sibling incest, loss of one's child or parent, suicide, and murder-all in the family. Because the number of American films dealing with family trauma appears to have increased during the 1990s and especially around 2000, I focus on the millennium. In the runaway hit Little Miss Sunshine, several kinds of potentially traumatic experience are tweaked into comedy, representing a high degree of displacement; The War Zone, with its disturbingly graphic scenes of father-daughter incest, contains very little displacement. Because so much of family trauma cinema is concerned with ferreting out and revealing the origins of the trauma at the root of the respective film, the structure of these films often resembles the psychoanalytic process. Where the two films differ is in their radically dissimilar constructions of time. Because narration is so important in representing trauma, the dissociation or repression that often accompanies it, and the process of remembering it, the element of time is crucial in trauma cinema. Whereas Mystic River proceeds in a linear fashion in its excavation and revelation of childhood trauma, in 21 Grams the trauma occurs in the film's present, and the repercussions of the trauma radiate out through the film's fragmented, scrambled structure, forcing viewers to make sense of the action.
Journal Article
Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. We all know what suburbia is, indeed the majority of us live in it. Yet, despite this ubituity, with no formal definition of the contept, the suburbs have developed in our collective imagination through representations in popular culture, from Terry and June to Desparate Housewives. Rupa Huq examines how suburbia has been depicted in novels, cinema, popular music and on television, charting changing trends both in the suburbs and popular media consumption and production. She looks at the differences in defining suburbia in the US and UK and how characteristics associated with it have shifted in meaning and form.
eBook
Owned : a tale of two Americas
Owned unravels the complicated, painful, and often disturbing history of housing policy in America, shifting perceptions about what the idea of home means.
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