ABSTRACT
Starting with the dramatic postwar housing boom of the late 1940s, the suburban communities of the United States have been both the goal towards which middle-class citizens aspired and the social nightmare most feared by the American intelligentsia, of which Hollywood was a part. As early as the 1950s, social scientists like William Whyte and David Riesman decried the depersonalization that came as Americans entered corporate organizations and became part of “the lonely crowd.” As Americans entered the explosive 1960s, filmmakers began to ridicule suburban life in such films as The Graduate. While alienated youth were at the forefront of the early attack on social conformity, by the 1980s the critique of middle-class values and the quest for financial well-being had become a staple of the liberal intellectuals who watched with disapproval the rampant pursuit of wealth in Ronald Reagan’s America. Given this distaste for the conservative values that swept the United States in the 1980s, it is not surprising that before long, the motion picture industry would respond with films that questioned the concept of community embraced by suburbanites in the race to prosperity.1 Among the most penetrating criticisms of suburban life, American Beauty (1999) launched a broad assault against the value system that held sway in modern America at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
