ABSTRACT
Despite an ‘urban turn’ in the study of the American West, it remains fashionable to disparage subdivisions, sprawl and the perpetrators of both, the real-estate developer. In ‘Tract Homes on the Range: The Suburbanization of the American West’, Robert Bennett traces the ways in which the urban and suburban, until recently, have been overlooked in scholarship of the American West, while he also claims that legions of filmmakers, artists, writers and musicians ‘frequently adapt the Puritan jeremiad specifically to depict suburbanization as one of the West’s deadly sins’ (Bennett, 2011, p. 282). Examples are not hard to come by. Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert comes to mind, with the developer as a classic western villain. One can easily reel off a long list of films that take a similar position – Over the Edge, Down in the Valley – or works that vilify real estate developers specifically such as Chinatown or Junior Bonner.
