Popular culture is filled with sympathetic characters who provide food for our tables, from Ernest Borgnine’s lonely butcher in the 1955 film Marty and the sweet-tempered grocer Mr. Hooper on the children’s TV series Sesame Street to all those movie farmers triumphing over flash floods, early frosts, and bank foreclosures so that we never run out of Corn Flakes.
The people who put roofs over our heads are a different matter. With the possible exception of the Wall Street tycoon, no one has a worse image than the land developer. The Sopranos gives us the angst of a mobster who strangles people with piano wire—the first season revolved around his recurring panic attacks—but we’ve yet to see a sympathetic movie or television portrayal of a guy who builds suburban subdivisions.
Instead, what we get is Poltergeist. In that 1982 horror film, the developer of Cuesta Verde (Spanish for “costs green”) puts houses on top of a cemetery without bothering to remove the bodies first—a short cut that causes much supernatural havoc, not to mention two unnecessary sequels. And in John Sayles’s 2002 Sunshine State, as low-key a movie as Poltergeist is noisy, the development companies trying to turn a working-class Florida seaside community into a village of McMansions begin by surrounding a cemetery with a golf course (thanks to the corrupt county government’s use of eminent domain). When looking for undervalued properties to buy and tear down, the scout for one homebuilder speaks of finding “the soft underbelly” where he and his boss can “make our assault.” Just as in Poltergeist, the climax of Sunshine State involves the sudden unearthing of human bones, though with happier results.
For screenwriters, death and construction seem to be an irresistible combination. A recurring plot in TV crime drama involves a builder or architect attempting to bury a victim in the foundation of the high-rise he’s putting up. (See, for example, the “Blueprint for Murder” episode of Columbo.) And in sketch-comedy, Monty Python’s Flying Circus once featured John Cleese as an architect whose plans for an apartment skyscraper include rotating knives in the hallways to carve up residents. (“Oh, I see,” Cleese responds when the developers object. “I hadn’t correctly divined your attitude towards your tenants. You see, I mainly design slaughterhouses.”) In Cleese’s defense, his abattoir seems only slightly less uncomfortable than the homes and furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Maybe we’ve never gotten over the tales of Egyptian slaves being buried alive as they built the Great Pyramids. The title character of the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd is a bloodthirsty barber who turns his mostly wealthy victims into meat pies—a kind of fast food for the lower classes. One can imagine a new version in which Todd’s customers end up part of the foundation for an affordable-housing complex. (And many of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics would still work: “The history of the world, my love/Is those below serving those up above.”)
But not all land developers in popular culture are evil. Some are merely stupid and greedy, like the Bluth family on the TV series Arrested Development. (The patriarch of the family may also be treasonous, having been accused of building palaces for Saddam Hussein.) In one episode, daughter Lindsay confronts someone protesting a new housing development: “You know, we’re not the only ones destroying trees. What about beavers? You call yourself an environmentalist, why don’t you go club a few beavers?” Among the adult characters, the only one with a sense of morality is son Michael, who lives in the shoddily constructed model home for a Bluth development that was never built.
Even worse than those who build developments are the people who sell them. The con man trying to unload worthless property in Florida is a stock character going back to the Marx Brothers’ 1929 film The Cocoanuts, in which Groucho tries to reassure a prospective buyer with statements like “Why, it’s the most exclusive residential district in Florida. Nobody lives there,” and “You can have any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco!”
More recently, there was David Mamet’s dog-eat-dog play Glengarry Glen Ross, about Chicago real estate salesmen peddling home lots in Arizona and Florida. The salesmen’s deep suspicion of each other is nothing compared with their hostility toward potential customers. In the 1992 film version, Jack Lemmon describes how he silently bullied a hesitant couple into buying a lot: “I sat there…. Twenty-two minutes by the kitchen clock. Not a word, not a motion…. They signed, Ricky. It was great. It was fucking great. It was like they wilted all at once.”
DON’T FENCE ME IN
The one genre in which homebuilding is a heartwarming activity is the Western, which typically takes place long before the introduction of skyscrapers and subdivisions. Think of the TV series Little House on the Prairie, or countless films about settlers putting down stakes west of the Mississippi. NIMBYism isn’t a factor in these stories, since these new houses don’t block the views in anybody’s back yard.
It’s probably no coincidence that the Western genre peaked during the 1950s—first with films like High Noon and Shane, then with a glut of TV series including Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and The Rifleman. This was the same decade during which the interstate highway system was built, making it possible for middle-class Americans to live further and further from their jobs on bigger and bigger plots of land. Victorian houses with front porches and picket fences—presented in such nostalgic films as 1944’s Meet Me in St. Louis, which was actually set at the turn of the century—fell out of fashion. Instead, more and more Americans bought ranch houses, one-story structures that took up more land than the multistory Victorians and were often surrounded by sprawling yards. The homebuilder’s anthem seemed to be “Don’t Fence Me In” —written by, of all people, urban sophisticate Cole Porter and popularized in 1944. (“Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above/Don’t fence me in.”)
hometown go to pot in It’s a Wonderful Life.
The “No Fences” motto was not always realistic, of course, especially in fast-growing but land-scarce places like Long Island and the immediate suburbs of Boston. And those 1950s Westerns weren’t always accurate, anyway. HBO’s current series Deadwood, a revisionist drama set in a frontier town during the 1870s, forsakes the clichéd image of farmhouses surrounded by fields of wheat in favor of what would now be called smart growth. As set decorator Ernie Bishop says on the HBO Web site, “Our idea was, with 5,000 or 10,000 people suddenly coming into town, every square foot of space was used…So we built stuff everywhere.” When the new sheriff builds a house for his family, it’s within walking distance—and sight—of the saloons, hotel, and most of the potential trouble spots in town. Horses are generally reserved for long trips, not everyday errands, and the main street, though covered in mud and muck, is mostly the province of pedestrians.
Unfortunately, Deadwood is full of unwashed, insanely violent people who pepper their speech with obscenities. The show is, ultimately, an optimistic tale of raw Darwinism evolving into something recognizable as a civil society, but its superficial vileness is what the casual viewer may remember. It’s more comforting to think of the settings in 1950s Westerns, which HBO describes as “those empty towns that had wide, flat streets, colored facades, and a couple of barrels for dressing.” Sounds just like Wellesley.
DREAM HOUSES
The Western craze eventually subsided, to be replaced by depictions of the New Frontier called suburbia. For a time, both trends overlapped on TV, suggesting some kind of cause-and-effect relationship: A slew of character actors died in gunfights on Bonanza so that Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show could concern themselves with lost kittens and broken go-carts.
As the 1960s went on, suburban life became the subject of affectionate ribbing on television and more pointed satire at the movies. The TV series Bewitched mildly satirized suburbia, with the comedy revolving around concern with appearances and the danger of nosy neighbors. With the hedges and gazebos providing an illusion of privacy, it was easy for sorceress Samantha to forget that Mrs. Kravitz lived close enough to see everything that went on in the Stephens household. But the series applauded Samantha for finding fulfillment in American suburbia when she literally had the power to live anywhere she chose. In one episode, she takes her embrace of the suburban ethos all the way to NIMBYism, using her magic to stop the bulldozers from tearing up a nearby park to make way for a supermarket. (What did she need with a supermarket anyway, when she could just twitch a complete meal into existence?)
Movies have always been a bit more cynical about the suburban ideal. As early as 1948, the Cary Grant film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House poked fun at the headaches involved in moving from the city to a supposedly more peaceful life in the burbs. But the developers of cookie-cutter housing subdivisions such as Levittown, on Long Island, couldn’t have been offended by films like Blandings, since they implied that, as bad as a tract house might be, it was a lot worse to build one yourself.
By the 1960s and ’70s, the sterility of suburban life was a theme that crept into films such as The Graduate (1967), The Stepford Wives (1975), Ordinary People (1980), and Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), in which a suddenly jobless couple turn to crime into order to hold on to such amenities as their backyard swimming pool. The twisted-suburb genre may have hit its peak with American Beauty (1999), a parade of adultery, repressed sexuality, frustrated ambition, and sudden violence—much like screenwriter Alan Ball’s subsequent project, the TV series Six Feet Under. Early in American Beauty, there is an aerial shot of the protagonist’s suburban neighborhood, a depressingly similar assortment of homes with white fences, that recalls an opening shot in the 1960 film The Apartment. In that film, director Billy Wilder used a wide shot to include row after row of identical desks in an enormous office, almost all of them occupied by young white men with starched white shirts. Conformity in the workplace, it might seem, naturally extended to the home.
Yet identical houses are not really emblematic of suburbia today. For a good look at the fastest-growing type of housing in America, one would do better to tune in to The Sopranos. Tony Soprano, a mobster who terrorizes businessmen and politicians in northern New Jersey but keeps a wary distance from New York City, owns a McMansion with all the conveniences of modern living, including a big-screen TV. There’s also a long winding driveway that helps to hide the house from the street—and discourages comparison with other homes. Tony’s castle on a hill suggests paranoia and suspicion, rather than any desire to emulate his neighbors, a theme that is obviously underscored by the fact that he literally buries people who cross him. (Not surprisingly, he has his hands in several land development deals.) It all makes the dull conformity of Levittown seem rather quaint.
LITTLE BOXES
While Hollywood was turning over rocks in suburbia, popular musicians came up with their own comments on land development, mostly from an environmentalist viewpoint. Probably the most recorded such song is Joni Mitchell’s 1969 “Big Yellow Taxi” (“They paved paradise/ And put up a parking lot”), which is shrewd in its deployment of details. “Paradise” means different things to different people, but nobody loves a parking lot. More recently, country singer Kate Campbell’s 1994 “Bury Me in Bluegrass” mourns the loss of a family farm where now “they’re gonna build a mall.”
In “My City Was Gone,” released by the Pretenders in 1983, the rock band attacked suburbia from both rural and urban viewpoints. Chrissie Hynde, who wrote the song, laments the proliferation of shopping malls on what was once Ohio farmland, singing, “My pretty countryside/Had been paved down the middle/By a government that had no pride.” Less predictably, she also misses the train station and business district in what had been her densely populated hometown: “My city had been pulled down/Reduced to parking spaces.”
But the reverse imagery of the Talking Heads’ 1988 song “(Nothing But) Flowers” proved that, in pop culture at least, developers can’t please everybody no matter what they do. “This was a shopping mall/Now it’s all covered with flowers,” sings David Byrne, later adding, “I miss the honky tonks/Dairy Queens and 7-Elevens.”
Even if fast-food strips make them nostalgic, few artists show much affection for the cookie cutter houses that make up so many suburban subdivisions. “Little Boxes,” a folk song written by Malvina Reynolds in 1963 and popularized by Pete Seeger, is typical in its contempt: “There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one/And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.” (The song is now used as the theme to the Showtime TV series Weeds, about a suburban mom who sells marijuana to her neighbors.)
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
The many depictions of suburbia as a breeding ground for hypocrisy and amorality (now continuing every Sunday night on Desperate Housewives) may have led to some wishful thinking among New Urbanists during the 1990s, when many central cities experienced slight—and, in most cases, only temporary—population growth after decades of decline. The reversal occurred while hit TV series included Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex and the City, all set in a sanitized version of New York City. Tellingly, however, their characters were almost never seen taking public transportation, attending street fairs, or walking home with heavy sacks of groceries. It’s unlikely that the gourmet coffee shops featured so prominently on Friends and on Seattle–based Frasier caused many suburbanites to move into central cities, but they probably inspired Starbucks to open outlets farther and farther from downtown areas.
The truth is, there is little in popular culture to indicate that the comfort zone of most Americans has shifted from sprawling suburbs to big cities. For example, while shoddily built tract houses are ripe targets for comedy, defects in high-rises are the stuff of disaster movies. (See the 1974 film The Towering Inferno.) Public transit is often used as a setting for crime (the 1994 film Speed and an episode of the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street in which someone is pushed in front of an oncoming subway train), and in the “Marge vs. the Monorail” episode of The Simpsons, it’s shown as both dangerous and a gigantic waste of money.
Negative images of suburban development have always been trumped by even worse depictions of the city, a standard motif in such films as 1928’s The Crowd (a young man’s individuality is erased by the soulless metropolis), 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life (Jimmy Stewart learns that if he hadn’t been born, the Norman Rockwell-like town of Bedford Falls would have been developed into the honky-tonk city of Potterville), 1975’s Taxi Driver (one of many films of the era depicting New York City as a moral cesspool), and the Batman films of the 1990s.
And for every Poltergeist, about perils in a new suburban home, there are dozens of horror films such as 1967’s Rosemary’s Baby (apartment-building neighbors can really try your soul) and 1979’s The Amityville Horror (houses are like Kleenex: avoid used ones).
It may be that development, like the making of laws and sausages, is something we’d rather not witness—just enjoy the benefits.