Paranoia In Paradise?

 I really loved going over the multiple critiques of suburbia in the lecture on Urban Sprawl. Films like Revolutionary Road show a potential hidden turmoil hiding underneath the idyllic life of the suburbs. It had me thinking about one of the earliest critiques of suburbia in film in that of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). One of the most commercially successful independent films of all time, Halloween framed the suburbs with a deep and unsettling sense of paranoia. It was unprecedented for such a violent horror story to take place in a setting that was so commonly seen as safe and unproblematic. It’s becoming increasingly more common for paranoia to spread through suburbs. People either want to immediately remove any sort of conflict or pretend to ignore it all together. In Halloween and subsequent films like Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), these terrible murderous tragedies of the past are swept under the rug, to maintain the happy life image of the suburbs. In the same vein, when Laurie is desperately trying to escape the Shape (Michael Meyers), she attempts to garner help at her neighbors’ doorsteps and is met with silence. Nobody is willing to confront her struggle. This is where I believe the idea that the suburbs are used as a kind of purge to remove the “riff raff” that people are so afraid of in cities. Through hoa’s and price inflation some suburbs are able to keep people or ideas out that they disagree with, or would rather not see, and instead exist in their own paradise. Today, almost every home you see has a Ring doorbell camera. While it is indeed a useful tool for a multitude of things, it’s also becoming an extreme stimulus for paranoia. With a camera attached to every home, nothing goes unseen, neighbors spy on each other and strangers who enter their neighborhood, speculating what they could be up to. I’ve seen firsthand facebook groups that will immediately drum up chatter or conspiracy over any little event that happens in a neighborhood. I’m in no way trying to say that all suburbs are entirely a gatekeeping technique, in fact I think the idea of more individual home oriented neighborhoods is a good thing. What I am trying to say is the diversification of said suburbs and the people who live in them could be beneficial to solving this paranoia. Part of the promise of the idyllic suburb is the community of neighbors and I believe viewing the suburb as a less dense version of a city with more community centered buildings or spaces would be a better way to frame them.