Rethinking the myth of Suburbia as Paradise Lost (or Why the Suburbs Are More Interesting Than Cities)

In his 1973 book “Suburbia,” photographer Bill Owens showed the world through his black-and-white images and delicately thin captions a place that was riddled with fascinating contradiction. On the one hand, a mythical land, so familiar now it borders on cliché just to describe it: identical streets, floor plans, nuclear families, predictable hobbies (cars, dogs, lawns, children). But also: There’s a crazy look in the vacuuming housewife’s eyes, an awkward imbalance between the portly man who barbeques steaks while his no-less-shapely wife makes salad on Sundays. Soaring divorce rates, Vietnam, women’s lib, gay pride hover mostly at the edges. Looking at these images today we are aware that change is on the horizon and yet we also know things haven’t changed all that much.

I was reminded of Owens’ seminal work (I profiled him for PDN after its re-release in 2000) while flipping through the newly released “Sex Machines” by photographer Timothy Archibald. On the surface, the work is pretty straightforward: Portraits of people with their sex machines (think boxes with levers, gears, and the inevitable oversized dildo) are juxtaposed with first-person accounts of how they came to acquire or invent their device. But Archibald’s work is also a surprising chronicle of the modern suburban landscape. Again, the familiar garages, living rooms, bedrooms, yards, pets, carpets, furnishings. Only in the world he presents to us, the dumpy married couple next door are actually staying financially afloat by selling his photographs of her getting poked by a homemade machine. The recently divorced married man is looking for a nice Christian couple to buy the machine he built as a last-ditch attempt to infuse some life into his faltering marriage.

We don’t think of Suburbia as a place where such things happen. We believe its familiar garages, living rooms, bedrooms, yards, pets, carpets, furnishings can only serve as a setting for more sameness. This is especially true for those of us who fled the suburbs for cities, feeling that our uniqueness would fail to thrive in the Land of Conformity. But what’s abundantly clear in Owens’ and Archibald’s work is that very outward sameness is what allows the unusual to go quietly about its work. As one of the couples quoted in “Suburbia” says: “I find a sense of freedom in the suburbs … You assume the mask of Suburbia for outward appearance and yet no one knows what you really do.”

Why do we who’ve left such places or who’ve never lived in them at all find ourselves surprised when the disparity between the surface and its underside is revealed? Why do we insist on smugly judging this so-called hypocrisy? We are like the atheist who revels in a prominent Christian’s failings, not realizing that the lynchpin of Christianity is not the crucifixion but human imperfection. In other words, born-agains expect themselves to fail. It’s only those harboring an idealized vision of Christianity who are shocked by its shortcomings in practice. And it’s those of us who foolishly believe the myth of Suburbia’s internally and externally consistency who find its so-called flaws so simultaneously fascinating and appalling. What makes Owens’ and Archibald’s work so compelling is not what they present but the prejudices and assumptions we bring to it.

It remains difficult to talk about Suburbia in popular culture, of course, without a nod to the film “American Beauty.” Many, I think, saw the film as an expose on suburban hypocrisy; this is an oversimplification. True, the film critiques the suburban tendency to superficiality, attempting to reveal the true cost of its efforts to preserve the appearance of normality and perfection. And yes the aberrations--pot-selling teen filmmaker, pot-smoking midlife crisis victim--that blight suburban perfection need to be eliminated by the film’s end to restore order. But while Kevin Spacey must die, Annette Benning, who has affairs and slaps herself for failing to sell an awful house, can remain because we know she’ll dry her tears, put her closet back in order, and continue on with her life quietly. Here, too, the shell of normality and sameness in the film actually protects and thereby nurtures so-called “abnormality.”

What it does not protect is any attempt to crack the surface, to take what’s underneath and place it on top. For those who are happy to explore their aberrant side quietly and privately, the suburbs provide a perfect shield. For those who wish to share That Thing Which Makes Them Unique with the world, Suburbia provides no nurturance at all. And isn’t it true that the suburbs’ loudest critics are those who perform their ideas through art, film, literature, and music, those who were expelled from paradise and thus can’t understand or sympathize with those who remain?

In the city, of course, is found another paradise, that of personal freedom and social tolerance. But the cost of placing the private into the public is the act's tendency to take what is strange and confusing and wonderful about the human experience and make it as dull and predictable as three-car garages, mowed lawns, and church on Sunday. If you’re a gay couple who feel safe walking hand-in-hand along the streets of San Francisco, this is a very positive thing. But when it’s possible to roll your eyes in boredom at the decadent display of Burning Man plumage or the sex club around the corner, I wonder if maybe we’ve gone too far, lost something in our eagerness to declare our uniqueness to the world.

And so it is to Suburbia and not the urban landscape that we turn in search of titillation, to challenge our assumptions, and disrupt our cherished myths. If Owens’ and Archibald’s work is any indication, we are not disappointed.