George Clooney and the Coen brothers’ new movie Suburbicon shows how discrimination is baked into US city planning. But they are far from the first to see trouble in a genteel neighbourhood

Suburbia was always poisoned. Not much in US history is as blandly shameful as the National Housing Act of 1934. Designed to insure mortgages and encourage home owning, the heart of the policy was “redlining”: underwriting loans in areas deemed safe financial bets, refusing those that were not. America being America, the real red line was racial. As prim new developments sprawled across the postwar nation, banks and mortgage brokers had official licence to reject black applicants – and anyone looking to buy a house where black people lived. For much of the 20th century, if you needed help to buy an American home, being white was not enough. You had to live among other white people, which meant joining the exodus to the suburbs. For everyone else, the picket fence meant Keep Out.

A glimpse of that reality can be found in Suburbicon, the new film directed by George Clooney. Set in 1959, the movie is a comedy, at least sometimes, with a typically acid script by the Coen brothers, although the attempt to deal with institutional racism has the tone wobbling madly. Clooney is surer footed on a more familiar version of the ’burbs, re-telling the old gag about the gulf between upstanding suburbanites and what goes on behind tightly drawn curtains. S&M with a ping-pong bat is the least of it in a thick stew of fraud and murder. You know, the suburbs.

As a genre, the suburban movie has always been a guided tour of the menaces of the cul-de-sac. Sit back and look out for the killer conformity (Invasion of the Body Snatchers); the pinched mob rule (Edward Scissorhands); the car-crash marriages (Revolutionary Road); the joyless adultery (The Ice Storm); the teenage nihilism (Over the Edge). Between 1998 and 1999 alone, the dangers ranged from mid-life ennui (American Beauty) to paedophilia (Happiness) to metafictional bigotry (Pleasantville) to your entire life being a vast and all-consuming reality TV project (The Truman Show). Hang around the suburbs long enough and, as in the ho-hum Stephen King adaptation Apt Pupil, you might even stumble on an elderly fugitive Nazi. Where else would he be?

Of course, the benchmark will always be Blue Velvet, and the opening shots of idyllic sky and red roses. Then David Lynch takes us down into the soul of the suburban world, the front lawn – and in the neatly mown grass, the close-up writhe of warring insects. Boom: there it is, the real suburbia, secretly horrible, throbbing away.

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The assumption has been that suburbia has modernised, progressed, diversified. Available evidence suggests not

But the movies saw something wrong well before that. In the mind’s eye of early Hollywood, the American landscape was a series of sets: Big City, High Country, traditional Small Town. Suburbia was something else: strange new wipe-clean clusters of self-containment. Cinema was quick to note the possible flaws. By 1956, the great Nicholas Ray had rung the alarm with Bigger Than Life, starring James Mason as a suburban schoolteacher hooked on prescription medication and lurching into quasi-fascist mania. In the same era, the melodramas of Douglas Sirk revealed how brutal suburban life was for a woman, locked into an apron and crushed under social expectation. After Sirk came The Stepford Wives, its 70s heroines mysteriously seduced by identikit sundresses and recipe-swaps. For women, the suburbs could be lethal.

Even Steven Spielberg, widely seen as the auteur of suburbia, is more ambivalent than that. This should not surprise us. As a high-school student in Saratoga, California – what he called in his biography an “affluent, three-cars-to-one-household suburb” – the teenage Spielberg found his Jewishness invoked in everything from sniggering insults to routine beatings. Years later, while ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind became classics of the outskirts, both also hinged on the desire to hitch a ride on the first available spaceship.

The dark heart of suburbia was soon a cliche. Watching Suburbicon, it is hard not to feel the most radical film-maker now would tell a story of the suburbs about halfway likable people trying to make reasonable life choices in a place with good schools and convenient retail options. Let’s face it, all these movies about the suburbs were made by and for people who didn’t live there. And now we have Clooney and the Coens, determined to point and laugh at a cartoon of sour closed-mindedness with God knows what going on in the basement.

Oh well. Cry me a river. If what helped fill suburban homes was a grotesque piece of social engineering – ensuring American inner cities and all who lived in them were left to rot – the happy assumption has been that since then suburbia has modernised, progressed, diversified. Available evidence suggests not. Research into the rise of Trump has found that, despite being endlessly reported as a howl of blue-collar rage, the popular momentum came from the suburbs, his base usually sitting on plump incomes from small businesses, steady jobs or retirement plans. It was suburbia that gave the world Trump, and looks ready to again, given the chance.

In Britain, a similar process has seen Brexit processed as a working-class tantrum while the role of home counties Telegraph readers goes under-discussed. Otherwise, the British model is striking for how little it mirrors America. In British film, despite the suburbs being where most potential audiences live, they stay off-camera, unworthy of the interest of writers and directors, only adding to the general sense that the British ended up suburban by accident.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Loving the alien … although ET was set in the suburbs, residents were dreaming of the first spaceship out. Photograph: Allstar/Universal

If the US suburbs can seem unreal, they are – as artificial as the golf courses of Dubai.

In comparison, US suburbia still has a potent hold on film-makers. With history like the National Housing Act buried in the foundations – like the grisly past of the Overlook hotel in The Shining – it makes sense the suburbs would be a fixture in horror movies. Given his experience there, it adds up too that the only horror film Spielberg would make, as writer and producer if not officially director, was a suburban landmark: Poltergeist, the story of a “planned community” illicitly built on a graveyard. Fast-forward through the 80s and we find ourselves with Nightmare on Elm Street and the slashing reign of Freddie Krueger; the unnerving thing is how little the suburbs appear to change right up to the eerie teen freakout It Follows just a couple of years ago.



Then came Get Out, a brilliant riff on the set-up of The Stepford Wives, the malice of the suburbs now trained on black people rather than women. Of course, for all the terror stirred up by director Jordan Peele, to the film’s elderly white characters it was a wonderful fantasy come true. And for much of the American middle class, so too was suburbia: a dream place, free of litter and the poor; racially homogenous, robustly policed, the nuclear family the norm. So ensuite bathrooms and double garages were conjured out of deserts and wilderness.

If the US suburbs can seem unreal, they are – as artificial as the golf courses of Dubai. You get a flavour of that in the photographs of Gregory Crewdson with their giant, cinematic portraits of suburbs at twilight and in darkness. No wonder Freddie felt like such a perfect monster back in the days of Nightmare on Elm Street, eviscerating suburban teenagers in their sleep. On screen, to be suburban is to be asleep.

No wonder either that quite so many of the best suburban movies have such a dreamlike wooze. It is there most of all in the films where kids unravel amid home comforts, in Donnie Darko and The Virgin Suicides. And in It Follows, the leafy avenues slowly give way as the heroine drives towards the city, where old abandoned houses stand as husks.

Which is where this story must surely end. In the clammy moment a few years ago when the thought of Peak Oil was causing panic, it was realised the American suburbs – physically isolated, built to consume – were uniquely ill-suited to change. Now, even if the oil lasts, the logic still holds: the future can only do so much for commuters about to lose their jobs to automation, mowing lawns about to parch or flood. Given enough time, like the golf courses of Dubai, suburbia will go back to nature. This time no red lines will be drawn to save it.