“Things like this don’t happen in our neighborhood.”

 

In Suburban Gothic stories, many of the characters often have trouble swallowing any kind of major break in conformity (whether that’s a supernatural incident, serial murder, the opening of the Upside Down…). Bernice M. Murphy defines the Suburban Gothic in her book, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture:

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A sub-genre of the wider American gothic tradition that often dramatises anxieties arising from the mass suburbanisation of the United States [which took place during the 1950s and 1960s] and usually features suburban settings, preoccupations and protagonists. (2)

 

Examples include movies like Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999), or TV series like Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and Desperate Housewives. Playwright Jennifer Haley’s Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom also falls within the genre.

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While many of these works take place in a suburban setting, some of them do not. A story with a non-suburban locale can still exist within the genre as long as it is situated both physically and metaphorically between an urban area and the countryside, what author and essayist Robert Beuka describes as a “borderland” space. The suburbs (and environments like them) act simultaneously as physical personifications of the American Dream and of everything wrong with the United States, “a deadening assembly of identikit houses and a breeding ground for discontent and mindless conventionality” (Murphy 5).

 

The plot lines of the Suburban Gothic play upon the suspicion that even the most ordinary-looking neighborhood or family “has something to hide, and that no matter how calm and settled a place looks, it is only ever a moment away from dramatic (and generally sinister) incident” (Murphy 2). These dramatic incidents are more often than not sparked by the supernatural. More importantly, the emphasis is placed upon internal threats. Characters are in more danger from their family or from people in the same neighborhood than they are from the outside world. A common plot trope is the child or teenager under threat. Other common preoccupations have to do with “issues of personal identity and the paradoxical comforts and perils of conformity” (Murphy 4). In other words, the Suburban Gothic explores a closely interrelated set of binary opposites:

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The Suburban Dream:

1. Homely

2. The chance to at least have a home of one’s own

3. Nice neighbors

4. The utopian setting for a better life

5. A safe place for children

6. A place in which to make a fresh start

7. A bucolic refuge from the overcrowded and polluted cities

8. Family focused

9. An opportunity to live amongst like-minded people

10. White picket fences and neatly mown lawns

11. A place insulated from the dangers of the outside world

 

The Suburban Nightmare:

1. Haunted

2. The chance to fall into debt and financial entanglement

3. Neighbors with something terrible to hide

4. A place of entrapment and unhappiness

5. An obvious hunting ground for pedophiles and child murderers

6. A place haunted by the familial and communal past

7. Destroyer of the countryside and devourer of natural resources

8. A claustrophobic breeding ground for dysfunctionality and abuse

9. A place of mindless conformity and materialism

10. Basements, crawl spaces, and back gardens

11. A place in which the most dangerous threats come from within, not from without

 

To what extent does Growing Up Blue conform to the genre conventions of the Suburban Gothic? How does this genre help inform the world of Hometown? What binary oppositions and elements of individualism/conformity does the play address?