What is it about suburbia that fills us with dread? Even if we live there, it somehow represents for us a kind of spiritual death. We reel out the clichés: identical, cookie-cutter homes; CD collection composed entirely of Norah Jones CDs purchased exclusively from Tesco; kids and a mortgage; middle age, middle class, middle of the road, boring, you might as well be dead. Or else the contrary, a more recent cliché for which we can blame David Lynch: the depravity behind the façade. I don’t know about you, but I can’t see a white picket fence without wondering how many bodies are buried in the back yard. It is understood that the nicer the house, the more contented the family, the more perfectly tended the garden, the more gruesome are the secrets being concealed. Both of these clichés arise from a late-teenage terror of “selling out???. Neither bears much scrutiny.
Certainly, no-one with children will recognise the idyllic-but-boring vision of family life. The presence of a child makes everything chaotic and contingent, to a degree that parents must often wish they had appreciated the dull, cosy years they spent as heroin-addict avant-garde artists in Berlin. And the horror-beneath-the-surface version simply isn’t true in real life. If it were, the sheer size of Ireland’s urban sprawl suggests that cannibalism, Satanism and necrophilia would be out of control in the counties of Kildare, Wicklow and Meath, which is mostly not the case. Even when I observe the Romney family, though something in me whispers desperately “Excavate the garden! There will be heads!??? I know that they are probably almost as happy and cheerful as they appear.
I think it unlikely that the average thirtysomething living in the suburbs is about to crack up and go on a killing spree, or is some kind of Stepford Wife. They are happy or unhappy, usually exhausted. Some may not read the NME every week anymore, but neither did their tastes immediately gravitate to Dire Straits the day they bought the Semi-D. Some have perhaps become more politically conservative, but in my experience, more have drifted leftwards, seeing as they now do, the requirement for public spending on education and health. Some of them are doing all sorts of creative and wonderful things at their kitchen tables and PCs – the blogosphere makes this wonderfully clear. So why does popular culture have it in for them?
There is nothing wrong with a dig at the normals, if it questions a vision of life prescribed by society as desirable for all. Indeed, any satire that punctures such notions is a good thing, and something we might need a little of in Ireland. I have never been to Australia, but I can only imagine that its suburban middle-class life must sometimes be stifling, to produce the kind of hellish caricatures as we see in films like Muriel’s Wedding and Strictly Ballroom. Both films make the case for the value, nay the necessity of eccentricity. There’s a great moment towards the end of Muriel, when one of her glamorous friends finds herself, for perhaps the first time in her life, no longer the centre of attention. Like an enraged child, she screams “But I’m beautiful!??? and we see her face contorted with fury and disappointed entitlement and notice what had passed us by until then: she’s ugly. The moment sums up the film’s critique of conformity for its own sake. Muriel, so long made to feel inferior for not fitting in, is better than every one of them.
It took Muriel all film to realise this of course. Too often pop culture assumes as a first principle that work, family, home, all the stuff that most people actually do with their life, is beneath anyone with a modicum of self-awareness. This is probably because people in bands, or indie film-makers, or writers for hip magazines have yet to realise one morning, as their baby pisses all over their new suit, that there are more pressing things in life than being cool. In fact, they probably tended towards the nerdy in school and college, so it’s hardly a surprise that now that they’ve at last achieved hipness they’re not keen to concede its unimportance. I knew I wasn’t going to like the movie Garden State when Zach Braff’s character arrived at his mother’s funeral and his aunt sang “Three Times a Lady??? in a strong (and, the viewer is to understand, awful) New Jersey accent. The sheer tackiness of her accent was somehow presumed to represent why he behaves so obnoxiously at what is, after all, a family trauma. This is the world he was lucky to ecape, even if that escape was only to life as an unemployed actor. When I got to the scene a few moments later, where Braff sits around, bored, doing drugs with his friends, I could take no more, and stopped watching.
When I was in college, people used to react to news of such commonplace occurrences as people getting a serious job or getting married by murmuring “wow, scary???. But then we were only 19 and 20, and these things were frightening to us. The marriage-suburbs-spiritual death route is not, we have since learnt, the only way through life. It is refreshing to see that sometimes the culture will reflect this, without trying to sell us a phony vision of bungalow bliss. Which brings me to Juno, a film that manages to have it both ways.
The charms of this film are many, and they include a willingness to play with the attitudes that an indie film with a Moldy Peaches soundtrack might be expected to have about life in Middle America. When we met Juno’s stepmother, I was all ready for a Garden State moment. Her name’s Brenda, she’s obsessed with dogs, she runs a nail bar called Bren’s Tens. I was braced for a caricature with a funny accent, a hip kid’s nightmare vision of life in the ‘burbs. So it was a joy when Brenda turned out instead to be a real and admirable human being. Thanks is no small part to Alison Janney’s performance (the acting in Juno is uniformly excellent) she emerges as a smart, warm-hearted woman of steely determination. She just happens to like dogs. The same trick is played even more effectively when we meet Mark and Vanessa, the couple who are going to adopt Juno’s baby. Their house is of a spotlessness which we are invited to consider “eerie???, and photos of them in various uxorious poses line the stairway as Juno goes to snoop around their bathroom. Vanessa, as immaculate as her home, cannot hide how desperate she is to be a mother. “Have you ever felt you were just born to do something???? she asks, earnestly. “Yes??? Juno’s Dad replies, “Heating and air conditioning???. We’ve seen this movie before. The cold, antiscpetic comfort of suburbia, where material affluence fails to compensate for the existential ennui…..and so on. Mark is a slightly different proposition. He plays guitar, and once, maybe, was a pretty cool guy. But again, our assumptions are upended. Later, in the mall, Juno spots Vanessa playing with kids in the crèche area. We brace for something disturbing, for the painfully needy Vanessa to hug someone else’s child just that little bit too tightly, to refuse to return a child to its mother. Instead the camera simply lingers on Juno’s face as she smiles sweetly down on the mother-to-be. Later they meet for a wonderfully tender scene, the moment at which the film wins your heart as well as your head and funny bone. Meanwhile, Mark reaches an apotheosis of cool towards the film’s end, and in doing so loses all the audience’s respect.
Some reviews of Juno have castigated it for effectively not being indie enough, which rather proves my point. The hip aesthetic is often no more than a collection of pop culture references plus a filter of faux-cynicism which cannot, being essentially adolescent, distinguish schmaltz from real emotional power, or dullness from seriousness. Instead, anything insufficiently edgy is parodied or rejected out of hand as just one more product of the hated mainstream. Art made according to this aesthetic assumes most of its audience to be idiots, even as it invites the individual to consider himself the only cool one in the room. I am not here calling for a cultural movement singing the praises of settling down with a family and a mortgage (I have neither, by the way, lest you think this article is simply about me wanting validation from popular culture). Any art operating in the toxic atmosphere of hip irony can never do more than amuse. It’s fear of dealing with the reality of the vast majority of the audience doom it to irrelevance, to the knowing laughter of those who delight only in “getting” the references that pass others by. Even Juno, the hippest girl to appear on our screens for a long time, knows better than that, and she’s only sixteen.