The topography of American movies is changing. Where movies once picked their environments and largely stuck to them-the city, the country, or the suburbs-an increasing number of recent films divide their locales, playing meaningfully on the contrasts between a snug house in the suburbs, a condo in the city, or a farm surrounded by fields.
In ”Big,” the main character-a 14-year-old boy in the body of a 30-year-old man (Tom Hanks)-changes as he commutes between his family`s frame house in New Jersey and his downtown loft in New York City. ”Big Business”
uses its trick plot-two sets of mismatched twins, played by Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler, grow up in different environments-to compare the effects of urban and rural upbringings. And the journey undertaken by the diminutive hero of ”Willow,” from a rural community of ”little people” to a towering castle populated by equally towering villains, transposes the contrast to pseudo-mythical terms.
Traditionally, movie locales have carried a moral code: the goodness and purity of the country vs. the evil and corruption of the city. That code still functions in many cases, but these new films have added a complication. With their emphasis on journeys and transitions between locales, they seem not so much hard-and-clear moral fables as allegories of change and development. The city-suburb-country contrast has become a new way of imagining the process of growing up.
When the movies were first developing their symbolic language in the teens and `20s, suburbs were still a strange new phenomenon. Rural life, as depicted in such D. W. Griffith melodramas as ”True Heart Susie” and ”A Romance of Happy Valley,” was a continuation of a 19th-Century agrarian ideal-innocent, natural, wholesome. When Griffith`s characters went to the city, as in ”Broken Blossoms” or ”Way Down East,” it was at the expense of their souls. The city was the modern Babylon (a parallel made explicit in Griffith`s ”Intolerance”), a center of corrupt, fleshy pleasures, of selfish individualism and mass exploitation.
But at the same time Griffith was making his melodramas, Cecil B. DeMille was developing a very different version of city life in a series of provocatively titled sex comedies-”Old Wives for New,” ”Don`t Change Your Husband,” ”Why Change Your Wife?” DeMille`s city was a sophisticated, fashionable, liberating place; though the traditional values of home, family and marital fidelity always reassuringly asserted themselves in the end, DeMille did allow his characters to experience and enjoy the temptation of discarding the old strictures. Urban life as DeMille imagined it was free, easy and pointedly modern.
Through the `30s, these two ideas existed side-by-side: the country as the image of a comforting past, the city as the embodiment of an exciting future. Both Will Rogers and Fred Astaire could become major stars; as Fox turned out its rural comedies (Variety`s famous ”hix pix”), Paramount prospered with art deco nightclubs and elegant evening clothes. Warner Brothers found an appealing compromise in its urban comedies and crime melodramas: The city became a patchwork of neighborhoods, in which, supremely, an idealized ”Brooklyn” represented the perfect blend of small town communalism and big city vitality.
When the two archetypes crossed, as in Frank Capra`s ”Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” they found a mutual reinforcement. Mr. Deeds offered the city some of his down-home decency and compassion; the city returned the favor by helping him over his naivety. (It`s a narrative pattern that still prospers, though in more brutal terms, in the ” `Crocodile` Dundee” movies.) The director who developed the contrast most expressively was King Vidor, whose characters (in such films as ”The Stranger`s Return” and ”Our Daily Bread”) commuted between the two poles, using the city as an arena for testing their strength and ambition, returning to the country for reflection and renewal.
The war changed all that, designating its heroes and victims from cities and small towns alike, uniting the country in a singularity of effort and emotion that it had never experienced before. After the war, the old constants no longer held. For the returning vet, and for the country as a whole, innocence was only a memory. The bustling big city became the brooding night world of the film noir; the idyllic small town became an acknowledged fantasy world that existed only on the backlot at MGM.
Soon enough, something else appeared. Two streams of refugees, one departing from the decaying city, the other from the stagnant small town, converged at a point that was called ”the suburbs.”
Released in 1948, ”Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” was one of the first films to deal with the suburbs as a social phenomenon, though the land being pioneered by Cary Grant and his family of urban expatriates is still that of the unspoiled countryside. As ”Mr. Blandings” makes clear, the suburb was to be both a refuge from the clamor of the city and a reward for a life well spent-a sort of earthly paradise that opened up once the battle for success had been fought and won.
Nunnally Johnson`s 1956 film ”The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (based on a best-selling novel by Sloane Wilson) made the same point more darkly. For its executive hero, who had killed 17 men as a captain in the war, the suburb was a sanctuary-a desperately needed promise of peace and security. It offered the values of the small town supported by the prosperity of an urban economic base.
Given the importance the suburb assumed in the `50s, it`s remarkable how few Hollywood films chose it as a setting, as if even to tell a story about the suburbs would be to violate their meaning: By definition, the suburbs were a place where nothing happened, and people liked it that way.
It was television, of course, that found its real home in the suburbs. The 20-plus minutes of the situation comedy provided a story structure perfectly suited to the locale: a moral lesson taught in three tiny acts that precluded large action or character development. If the suburb is paradise, the message of the sitcom presents an appropriately supernatural paradox-people get better, but things never change.
Not until the late 1970s, when a movie audience that had never known anything but suburban life began to dominate the box office, did the suburbs achieve a substantial presence on the big screen. For youngsters and nostalgic adults, there were the reveries of the Steven Spielberg school, epitomized by ”E.T.” For itchy adolescents, there were the teen sex comedies that achieved their artistic and commercial apotheosis in Paul Brickman`s 1983
”Risky Business.”
Both of those films are darker than they appear on first glance. At heart, ”E.T.” is the story of a lonely child`s yearning for an imaginary playmate; behind the coming-of-age comedy of Brickman`s tale of a suburban teenager`s involvement with a Chicago prostitute lies some extremely corrosive satire on America`s confusion of love and money.
The suburbs of both films are presented as perfect communities, yet something is missing-represented by the young hero of ”E.T.”`s yearnings to make contact with a world beyond, and by the impulses that draw the teenager of ”Risky Business” to the big city. The suburbs offer everything but experience. The serene isolation that was the main virtue of the suburbs for the `50s pioneers has become, for their children, a kind of velvet trap.
As the generations have shifted, so has the meaning of the suburbs. They are no longer an ending or a just reward, but a starting point-a warm, womb-like place that must eventually be left behind. Adulthood lies elsewhere.
The most superficial and complacent of the teen comedies, such as John Hughes`s ”Ferris Bueller`s Day Off” or Chris Columbus` ”Adventures in Babysitting,” do their best to deny the necessity of departure. The city in these films is simply a storehouse to be raided-for sex, money or adventure-before the characters return to the snug security of the `burbs. There`s no need to grow up when you can help yourself to the best of both worlds. (If the Chicago area has become the location of choice for these films, it`s perhaps because it offers the most visually effective contrast of manicured lawns and towering office blocks.)
In Penny Marshall`s ”Big,” however, the transactions between suburb and city aren`t so simple or one-sided. The Tom Hanks character has been changed by his urban, adult experiences-which include a grown-up romance with a business woman-and though he may return to the `burbs (and childhood) at the film`s climax, it`s not without a strong measure of regret and reluctance.
The loser in this shifting configuration of symbolic geography has been the countryside. The spate of save-the-farm movies of 1984, which drew on the imagery of nobility and simplicity established by Griffith, found no sympathy at the box office. These days, when contemporary films go to the country, they are less likely to discover the finest flowers of humanity than the greedy, small-minded rubes of ”Funny Farm” and ”The Great Outdoors,” the slack-jawed bumpkins of ”Big Business,” or the bloodthirsty cretins of the
”Friday the 13th” and ”Texas Chainsaw Massacre” films. It`s now the country that preys on the city and suburbs; it`s in the small towns that the movies have located our current fears and resentments. The archetype has been inverted.
