Spare the Suburbs, Spoil the Culture

Over the weekend NPR used the new film "Little Children" to examine why the suburbs come out so badly in popular culture, and to suggest that "Desperate Housewives"-syndrome may have reached its peak. "There's a real packaged contempt for the suburbs," says Todd Fields, director of the movie, one that represents a certain kind of laziness on the part of artists. Fields believes, according to the story, that "using a suburban setting as a shorthand for alienation and repression reveals the smugly provincial limits of a culture industry centered in cities."

NPR reporter Neda Ulaby bathes in a few suburban clichés, citing the G.I. Bill utopias versus the dystopia of "uniformity, alcoholism, and adultery" of the mid-century burbs, and referring to "The Sopranos" as a "post-Enron" view of the suburbs—we're still working that one out—and "Little Children" as a corresponding "post-9/11" view. Culturally, neither 9/11 nor Enron belongs to the suburbs, of course, but to the country as a whole (and, if anything, to our cities). Tom Perrotta, who wrote the screenplay for "Little Children" as well as the novel on which it is based, calls the movie "less a suburban story than an American story," and suggests that "Maybe they are one and the same. The suburbs are the central American place."