Edward Scissorhands Analysis

From Fantasies to Phobias: the Shift in Representations of Suburbia in Popular Culture

In the opening image of American Beauty were fast(a) above suburban America, DESCENDING SLOWLY towards a tree-lined street. [1] We receive the voice-over of a depressed suburban father…

My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood. This is my street.
This... is my life. Im cardinal years old. In less than a year, Ill be dead.

Burnhams dissatisfaction with his suburban existence contrasts dramatically with the idealized image of suburban ara offered in television serial in the mid-fifties and 1960s. passim this essay I will be looking at how suburb as a place has changed in usual memory over time. Im going to concenter more specifically on the history of representations of suburbia in pop culture, in films and television series, from the 1950s until today.

Over the knightly fifty years there has been a shift in the representations of suburbia from ornaments of fantasies to landscapes of phobias,[2] from hopeful images of a wholesome family life and economical prosperity in television series in the 1950s and 1960s, to increasingly darker portrayals of suburbia emerging in the 1980s.





So what has aggravated this shift in visions of suburbia from idealised neighbourhood communities, to places of dysfunction and shattered hopes? I believe that the change in representations of suburbia in pop culture reflects the increasingly troubled disposition of our identification to the suburbs as a place.[3] Representations of suburbia have get increasingly complex, paralleling the increasingly complex hopes and fears invested in the suburban landscape as it has expanded over the last fifty years. These fears and hopes are provoked by political, demographic, social and cultural developments in western sandwich society over the last half century. [4]

Television series in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Bewitched, The Partridge Family and skilful Days, convey images of an idealized family...If you want to get a proficient essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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