Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and TelevisionDavid R.Coon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Abstract

Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television David R. Coon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.In Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television, David R. Coon, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Washington Tacoma, offers insight regarding presentations of suburbia in recent popular media and the ways in which they reflect American values revolving around issues of gender, family, marriage, race, and privacy. Thematically organized, Look Closer begins with a comparison of American Beauty and Desperate Housewives to exemplify a trend in recent film and television, to create a dichotomy between images of generic suburban subdivisions and narratives that expose dark realities of lives lived in these spaces. Coon sets these images against those of the 1950s and 1960s, proposing that recent narratives subvert the meaning of earlier, utopian spaces to emphasize complexities of life in the suburbs.Look Closer focuses on themes central to suburban identity: tradition, family, community and gender roles. It also considers the precarious character of the suburban middle-class in the early twenty-first century and the difficulty many encounter in maintaining the American Dream. Each chapter utilizes case studies to elucidate a particular theme and suggests how content in film and media relates to issues in the nation at large.Utilizing Pleasantville and The Truman Show, Coon proposes that film uses the intertextuality of suburbia to establish meaning and examines the realities of suburban life relative to idealized rhetoric of other nostalgia-driven narratives. A great deal of this chapter focuses on advertising literature rather than on film and television, which he contrasts with the narratives of Hollywood film to point out that nostalgia-based suburban communities are not feasible realities.American Beauty and Big Love highlight tensions between public and private and how boundaries are negotiated in suburban settings. Coon proposes that discourses of privacy promote conservative values, marginalizing those that do not fit mainstream social norms. His insightful statement that the eyes of neighbors become the metaphorical eyes of a conservative society highlights and substantiates the conventional values that suburbia symbolizes. This section is a nuanced consideration of the negotiation of boundaries (individual, familial, and communal), the existence of hierarchies of privacy, and the ways in which privacy is granted to or withheld from particular segments of the population.Consideration of Far From Heaven and Desperate Housewives clarifies ways in which exclusion and inclusion, based on race and sexual orientation, are negotiated and a facade of homogeneity is maintained within suburban narratives. …