Movie Review: Suburbia vs. Artifice

Intellectuals hate suburbia. I have never understood why. Perhaps the suburbs are antisocial when compared to the city, perhaps the communities are planned, but then what may appear as antisocial to some is just plain privacy to others. Apart from that, there is something intimately appealing about being able to build one's own independent if also small kingdom apart from the milieu of civilization. (After all, isn't the key to American culture the dialectic between civilization and the frontier.)

"Revolutionary Road" is no exception to the self-justifying slag pile which is the genre of antisuburban art. The movie clearly hates suburbia, but it is difficult to articulate why. Is suburbia merely an artifice to keep the machine of society running? You wouldn't guess it, had you the free Wheelers as neighbors. They seem to make no reservations about ripping one another apart. (Though, given the acting in this film, you might think that suburbia was a bit hammy if you visisted the neighborhood.)

Apparently the Wheelers, like so many other (fictional) bored suburban couples before them thought that they might actually make a difference in the world (and were fortunate enough not to live by their desire for recognition--who knows how many people have let their children starve to death from neglect in some of those bohemian-style art colonies.) The real problem was that they just couldn't shake it off; if not, their lives might have been happy, or at least more peaceful. After all, isn't that what artifice is for?

After having written in this, I should acknowledge that I can't speak with any degree of authority as to whether suburbia is or is not miserable. I lived as un-suburban a life as anyone in a small town could live. My parents were not particularly radical, but there was no more radical place in the state of Idaho than that street on which I grew up: Elm Street, fraternity row, in a house across the street from a brown-stone fraternity, juxtaposing a Southern revival TriDelt sorority and a graduate student apartment complex. Maybe this is the reason why suburbia has always had an appeal--I have never desired to live in suburbia, but there are aspects of it which I admire. However fraudulent it may be, there's no establishment which is much realer and it is much realer than some.