American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema

Chapter 3, Utopian and dystopian narratives of suburbia:
As suburbia marks a culturally important and at the same time extremely complex and ambivalent space for Americans, its depiction in fiction is often highly ambiguous as well. Before starting with a detailed analysis of the utopian and dystopian perspectives on suburbia in contemporary American movies, it is necessary to first give a general definition of the concepts of utopia and dystopia as well as an explanation of how these concepts will be used in the further discussion of this book.
The term utopia was firstly introduced by the author Sir Thomas More in 1516, when he published his book Utopia in which he described an imaginary state on an Atlantic island. Borrowed from Greek, the word utopia is ambiguous in its derivation , as its origin can be both ou-topos, meaning no-place , and eu-topos, which can be translated as good place . Thus, the term describes an ideal, perfect society does not exist in reality. Accordingly, utopia is a place that is, in Fern s words, desirable, perhaps, but at the same time unattainable . The typical utopian narrative tells the story of a visitor s guided journey through a utopian society which leads to a comparative response that indicts the visitor s own society , providing him with the image of a possible alternative to his own culture. Thus, the relationship between the protagonist s society and the portrayed utopian culture is always significant for the moral of these stories, as the main character always judges the utopian society by the standards that are inherent to the culture he belongs to. Whether the utopian ideal is, in relation to the protagonist, a wishful vision for the future or represents the longing for [images] of lost paradises and golden ages of the past, it is always locally separated and distant from his actual society. Therefore, access to this perfect world is usually granted to the protagonist only once, making the experience even more precious

Melanie Smicek, M.A., was born in a small town near Cologne, Germany, in 1984. She graduated in English Studies at the University of Cologne and additionally earned a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester. Her interest in the American Culture already evolved in her youth and was strengthened during her time abroad in the USA. Being particularly fascinated by American movies, with American Beauty as her all-time favorite, the author soon observed the significance of suburbia as a cultural space, which motivated her to study the representation of suburbs in American cinema in more detail.