Article by India Mara Martins and Pedro Lauria originally for Graphos, from UFPB.
This article is a translation. The original version (Brazilian portuguese) is here.
Resume
The American suburb is marked by a very specific social profile: a white middle class, rooted in a meritocratic discourse and linked to the “American Dream”. Its idyllic immage has been consolidated since the 1950s by suburban sitcoms, but it has also become a counter-image of Suburban Gothic . In these subgenres, humor is presented in a dichotomous and contradictory way, which can be summarized in the following maxims: laugh with us or laugh at us. Our interest in this article becomes the investigation of the use of humor in a third subgenre, this one much more recent: suburban fantastic. Defined by McFadzean (2019, p.1) as a set of Hollywood films that began to appear in the 1980s, where children and teenagers living in the suburbs are called upon to confront a fantastic and disruptive force, such as E.T. – The Extraterrestrial, The Goonies and Back to the Future. The present work then delves into the marketing, narrative and moral role of humor in these narratives, considering both their target audience and their explicitly reactionary syntactic nature, and which, therefore, contrasts the subversive nature of both comedy and fantasy – genres which are based on the confrontation, respectively, of expectations and rules of the real.
Keywords: Suburban Fantastic; Suburb; Humor; Genre; Middle class
Introduction: The American Suburbans and their Representations
What do we think when we hear the word suburb? In Brazil, many will think of the carioca suburbs immortalized in Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ films Rio, 40 Graus (1955) and Rio, Zona Norte (1957), or in soap operas such as Avenida Brasil (João Emanuel Carneiro, Globo, 2012) and Bom Sucesso (Rosane Svartman and Paulo Halm, Globo, 2019-20). Others might think of the idyllic American suburb, marked by identical houses, white picket fences, and green gardens, inhabited by middle-class white nuclear families. This image, of course, was created precisely from the repetitive consumption of representations in audiovisual works that are located in this type of urbanization. The great distinction between Brazilian and US suburbs comes from the term “suburbia” itself – which just means “on the edges of the city”, and does not designate any type of urbanization, architecture or specific demography.
However, most American suburbs present some specific characteristics. The first and most obvious is that if the suburb is built around the city, then it comes after it, being younger than it. This characteristic is fundamental to understanding the dichotomy between suburb and city created by the suburban expansions in the United States in the 1950s. The second common characteristic is that it is not the city. Therefore, by definition, it will present different attributes from the city it surrounds. For example, they will typically have fewer urban facilities, lower population density, and fewer urban problems such as violence, traffic, and pollution (Baumgartner, 1988).
The third characteristic is that precisely because the suburb is not the city – it becomes dependent on it. Whether because of jobs, services, access to urban facilities, or other facilities. Therefore, the more equipped a city, the greater its predisposition to have suburbanization around its surroundings. This realization leads us to another categorical unfolding: between the suburbs and the city, there is a need for infrastructure for commuting as roads, train lines, subways, etc. Those who live in the suburbs and work in the city must commute daily. And if there are no public transport services that connect both, the car becomes a requirement for this displacement. Therefore, in these cases, the suburbs reinforce the characteristics that have existed since their real estate development in the 1920s and 1940s. As Ávila (2004) well summarizes, the United States will have a racial and economic division that can be simplified in the analogy of the “vanilla suburbs and chocolate cities”.
Professor and researcher Bernadette Hanlon reinforces the thesis that the “American dream” would manifest itself more accurately in its suburbs, based on the idea that it is a land of opportunities (2009, p.1), coveted by its origins as a a “bourgeois utopia”, previously only accessible to the elite. At the beginning of her book Once the American Dream (2009) she quotes the historian James Adams in the book The Epic of America, responsible for coining the term American dream. He defines it as:
“[The American Dream is] that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. . . . It is . . . a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position”
(Adams apud Hanlon, 1931, p.404).
Therefore, when we talk about the American suburbs, we are talking about dreams, utopias, and desired standards of living, regardless of the financial condition of that territory. In other words, having a house in a suburb becomes the desire of a large part of a metropolitan population, whether motivated by class ascension, escaping from urban problems, or being “the ideal place to have a family”.
Thus, the current pro-suburb discourse will work with the idea of modernity, facing the decadence and obsolescence of large cities and industrial centers. This dichotomy between suburb and city in the American context also evokes quite different representations when we talk about literary and audiovisual reproductions of this type of urbanization. Author Bernice Murphy makes a didactic summary (table 1) of binary oppositions that between different portraits of the suburbs in literature (2009, p.4):
Suburban Genres
These disparate portraits are instrumental in evoking different audiovisual subgenres set in the suburbs. Let’s start, for example, with the Suburb Sitcoms, marked by the American serial production of the 1950s, always with idealized family models and easily solvable conflicts. Examples of these are The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (Ozzie Nelson, ABC, 1952-1966), Father Knows Best (Ed James, CBS, 1954-1963) and Leave it To Beaver (Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, CBS, 1957-58; ABC 1958-63). Ella Taylor (1989) will describe such sitcom families as “liberal-conservative dreams of a harmonious society free from social conflicts” where comedy helped to assuage frequent tribulations and distract individuals from societal tensions.
The scene above demonstrates a little idyllic and bucolic character of the sitcom suburbs. The quiet streets are an ideal place for children. Source: Series frame.
In these sitcoms, humor is closely linked to the family relationship itself, presented in quick shots of one or another character or from problems of communication between them – never used in a way to make the character suspicious or criticize the suburban lifestyle. The episodes lasted about 20 minutes, and there was no narrative continuity between them (Coontz, 2000), which required that conflicts be presented and resolved in that time gap. Thus, the jokes, usually accompanied by the laughter of a cheerleader, served to demonstrate the unfolding of these conflicts in a lightly and sympathetic way – without further deepening or emotional developments.
Bringing a completely different representation is Suburban Gothic, already well established within genre studies, marked by pessimistic, critical and/or cynical views of the suburb and its residents, breaking with the idealized image of the “American Dream”. One of the most concise and didactic definitions of Suburban Gothic comes from Professor Bernice Murphy: “narratives that arouse suspicion that in the most ordinary neighborhoods, homes and families, no matter how peaceful they seem, are just an event away from an dramatic incident.” d(2009, p.3). This is the case of works like The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975), Parenthood (Ron Howard, 1989) , American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) or Little Children (Todd Field, 2006).
cciSuburban Gothic is a subgenre that demonstrates some of the crises of the suburban middle class. The tension and the mood of apprehension present in the scene above are intensified by the dark color palette and the expressions of the characters. Source: Film frame.
Catherine Jurca in The White Diaspora (2001) brings a quote from Anna Karenina to illustrate these suburban dramas present in Suburban Gothic:
““Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”As a body of work, the suburban novel asserts instead that one unhappy family is a lot like the next, and there is no such thing as a happy family. Divorce, desertion, adultery, illegitimacy, domestic violence, incest, mental illness, suicide, matricide: the term “dysfunctional” is hardly adequate to address the scope of its continuous failure.”
(Jurca, 2001, p.167)
This ironic and acidic look brought into the suburban houses is, without a doubt, a detailed look at the “I” and the “we”. Humor, therefore, is used to laugh at the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of society itself and, more specifically, the suburban middle class. This can be either from comedic scenes in dramas, such as the character Lester Burnham experimenting with marijuana in American Beauty, or as a premise for comedies. This is the case of the spectacularization of life to the point of becoming a TV show in Truman Show ( Peter Wier, 1998), of the (killer) impulses of hyper-protective parents in Serial Mom (John Water, 1994) and dehumanization and prejudice towards social groups portrayed as zombies in Fido (Andrew Currie, 2006).
In these works, laughter is clearly linked to the identification of certain behaviors – whether ours, our family members, or neighbors’. That is, conflicts and problems are already arising from that social structure, being only inert or camouflaged. This makes suburban sitcoms in clear opposition to Suburban Gothic also in terms of humor. After all, if the first has the idea of laughing with the suburban family, the second consolidates the idea of laughing at the suburban family.
However, it is a third subgenre, still very little studied, that perhaps brings a humor structure even more consistent with the suburban perspective of a classist and exclusivist middle class. This is what we will focus on in the following topics.
Suburban Fantastic: Laughing at the Other
The Suburban Fantastic Cinema was first proposed as a film subgenre by Angus McFadzean in a 2017 article and later in a book of the same name in 2019. According to the author, the subgenre would be defined by:
a set of Hollywood movies that started to appear in the 1980s, in which pre-teen and teenage boys living within the suburbs are called upon to confront a disruptive fantastic force – ghosts, aliens, vampires, gremlins and malevolent robots. These films emerged out of adult-focused, suburban-set melodramas, children’s fantasy stories, and old-fashioned sci-fi, horror, fantasy and adventure films and television mainly of the 1950s, and became synonymous with the work of Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Robert Zemeckis and Chris Columbus.Typicalliy marked as children’s films or “family “ films, they were key parts of the childhood of late-Generation Xer’s and Millenials.”(McFADZEAN, 2019, p.1)
In his book, the McFadzean cites dozens of works produced from the 1980s onwards, influenced by the success of Poltergeist (Toby Hopper, 1982) and E.T. – The Extraterrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982). Among them are classics that ended up helping to define our conception of the young Hollywood cinema of the decade such as Gremlins (1984), The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985), Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985), Monster Squad (Fred Dekker, 1987), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (Joe Johnston, 1989) and Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990).
According to McFadzean (2019), suburban fantastic would merge the semantic elements of the fantasy, science fiction and/or horror genre with the semantic aspects of the American suburb. Syntactically, the subgenre tells the story of the protagonist’s maturation/maturing in a synchronized way with the resolution of the consequences caused by the fantastic elements. In other words, a maturation of the “I” from the resolution of the problems brought by the “other” – considered fantastic (or extraordinary). This resolution is almost always built from scenes that use humor and comedy: whether they are monsters like in Gremlins, extraterrestrials like in E.T. , bad guys like The Goonies and Home Alone, or even science experiments like Back to the Future and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Based on this premise, in the following topics, we will delve into possible motivations and developments that help us to understand the role of humor within the subgenre, taking into account all the values linked to the suburb that we saw at the beginning of the article.
– The Humor’s marketing importance
The first and most obvious reason for the use of humor in the subgenre is linked to the demographics of its target audience. That’s because suburban fantastic is one of the (sub)genres through which Hollywood can speak most directly to suburban middle-class families. Thus, humor and comedy play a decisive role in expanding the spectrum of interest in the films.
In addition, the possibility of merging semantic elements, such as school, shopping, and urban areas, with syntactic material from historically established genres, such as romance, action, melodrama, horror, science fiction, and fantasy, gives the great possibility of narrative variations for the subgenre. This possibility of merging not only increased the creative possibilities of screenwriters, but also allowed them to produce works that sought to embark on the success of films in other genres with more specific audiences. McFadzean (2019, p.50) cites, for example, how Home Alone was a children’s version of Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) – an R-rated film. For purposes of comparison, while the Bruce Willis-starring film was a box office success grossing $140 million worldwide, Macaulay Culkin’s career-breaking film made $477 million, making it the third-highest-grossing film in history. Not surprisingly, the record at the time was E.T. – The Extraterrestrial, the forerunner of suburban fantastic cinema.
Moving the discussion a little further, we must consider, beyond the raw box office numbers, the impact that the subgenre had on its audiences. Again I propose to use E.T. – The Extraterrestrial as a case example. It is not unreasonable to think that behind the film’s success was its ability to speak directly to an entire suburban middle class whose children were finally able to go to the cinema to watch a narrative that referred to their subjectivity and sensibility (McFadzean, 2019, p. 26). In addition, their parents, children of the post-war baby boom, could share with their children the experience of their childhood in the suburbs and of films references (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) of their time.
We remember that in the 1950s, fantasy cinema was mainly science fiction and horror films aimed at groups of teenagers who would watch them in drive-ins (Jones et al., 2011; George, 2013). We are talking about works such as War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953), Invaders from Mars (William Menzies, 1953), It Came from Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) , Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956). In this sense, suburban fantastic, targeting younger audiences, and updating semantic references from the childhood of older audiences, managed to sharply expand its audiences and foster the subgenre as we know it today.
Marketing is just the most evident aspect by which humor is justified within the narratives of suburban fantastic. Now we will focus on some other issues directly linked to the syntactic construction of the subgenre – which brings imbrications with the social and economic class represented in their productions.
– The Comedy and Emotional Distancing of Melodrama
As Olson (2001, p.11) and McFadzean (2019, p.15) point out, the melodrama of male maturation is a regular part of the syntax of suburban fantastic. Maturity, in this case, has to do with the heroic awakening (borrowed from the syntax of the Fantasy genre) from the protagonist’s ordeal in demonstrating his courage and self-sufficiency. Ashley Carranza (in Wetmore, 2018), in her studies on Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers, Netflix, 2016-), will import the Self Determination Theory from psychology to explain how the “maturing process” takes place in the subgenre. In her words:
Self Determination Theory describes the psychological method in which a person becomes reliant upon themselves and allows internal drives to focus on the decision making process. This early rite of passage (…) explains the rapid maturation within the characters…(Carranza in Wetmore, 2018, p.15).
Carranza will define that the theory of self-determination underlines three basic psychological needs that every human being has: competence (being efficient in their own environment), autonomy (taking control of their own life), and affinity (creating affective relationships with others). This melodrama is also a syntactic part of another very famous subgenre in filmography and literature: the coming of age dramas. A generic definition broad enough to include works with such disparate themes as The Blue Lagoon (Randal Kleiser, 1980), Christiane F. (Uli Edel, 1981), Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989) and Lord of the Flies (Harry Hook, 1990). This is because maturation is a broad term to designate the learning of different aspects of society: sexuality, the reproduction of a “healthy” lifestyle, cultural learning or even violence. So when E.T. – The Extraterrestrial is designated as one of the central coming-of-age dramas of the 1980s[1], it is essential to understand how this maturation takes place. It is only from this definition that it is possible to understand the values established by its syntax (which will be replicated in multiple works over the course of the decade).
Differentiation rarely explored in the literature, there is a central point of the syntactic detachment of the coming of age dramas and suburban fantastic to be discussed: action. As McFadzean (2017; 2019) emphasizes, in the subgenre studied here – the protagonist’s maturation comes along with the execution of heroic and physical acts, of courage, cleverness, and dexterity. Well-known examples are the boy Kevin setting traps in Home Alone, the children of The Goonies running away from an old pirate ship, or Elliot running away from the authorities in E.T. – The Extraterrestrial. In other words, the familiar melodramas of these characters are not resolved by conversations, exhibitions of feelings, artistic manifestations, or mourning processes – but by adventure and by confronting the fantastic. Something particularly striking in a subgenre where the protagonists have easily relatable problems such as:
(…) fear and anxiety over social dramas of friendship, family, school, bullying and love: the sense of dislocation from moving house (The Lost Boys, Hocus Pocus, Jumanji); the process of coming to terms with parental divorce or separation (E.T., Zathura); the death of a parent (Cloak and Dagger, Jumanji); the arrival of a new neighbour (Fright Night); alienation from the family (Flight of the Navigator, Jumanji, Small Soldiers); the challenge of making and keeping new friends (The Lost Boys, Hocus Pocus, The Hole); the threat of bullies (Explorers, Back to the Future, Hocus Pocus, Jumanji); and the strange new feelings of attraction and desire (The Goonies, Fright Night, Weird Science, Hocus Pocus).” (McFadzean, 2019, p.52).
Humor, in this sense, seems to help suspend disbelief about the action-adventure sequences, allowing the film to “embrace the fantasy”. This, however, ends up making the maturation process occur in a fantastic and unrealistic way. This is particularly striking in an androcentric and white genre, in which the protagonist, instead of dealing with the weight of his emotional dramas, is portrayed as someone who solves his problems based on “good insights” or proof of courage. In other words, Elliot rebuilds bonds with his mother by saving the alien, not by talking with her about the divorce process.
It is impossible not to work on these characteristics within the context in which many of these 1980s films found themselves: that of the Reagan Era and the so-called Reaganite entertainment. Andrew Britton (2009, p.101) defines this concept as “works that sought an acceptable balance between pleasure (in the sense of being an antithesis to mundane problems) and the feeling that – because it was a pleasure – it had no serious relationship with real life”. Walters (2011) talks about a state of perpetual (and institutionalized) spectator’s anxiety caused by the dichotomy between the immediate pleasure of escaping reality when watching the film and the immediate feeling that it was “just a movie” at its end. In other words, humor plays a strategic role in facilitating the suspension of disbelief in these films, allowing the action to be concluded without excessive melodramatic unfoldings – facilitating the commercialization of the movie itself. After all, as much as both E.T. and Krame vs Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979) talks about the divorce and its consequences, the crowds that were going to watch the first one didn’t go to see a version of the second one with aliens.
Let’s take, for example, what occurred in Back to the Future, when, after six weeks of filming, actor Eric Stoltz was replaced by Michael J. Fox as the protagonist. In addition to being considered a problematic figure on the set, director Robert Zemeckis said that Stoltz could not deliver the level of comedy necessary for the film to work[2]. According to Zemeckis, Stoltz viewed the story of the boy trapped in the past as a great existential drama, focusing more on the melodramatic aspects than the potential comedy of the situation. The melodrama would place a degree of demand on the viewer to be convinced by the “ridiculous” premise of time travel. According to Zemeckis, to accept the film’s time travel plot, we would need a certain emotional distance from the hero. And as summarized by Bergson (2004, p.12) “laughter has no greater enemy than emotion”.
So, if, semantically, each of the irruptions of the fantastic brings apprehensions and deals with specific anxieties linked to the maturation process, this brings an emotional cost to the protagonist’s melodrama. After all, it’s hard to identify with a maturing process arising from time travel or the rescue of an alien. The process then becomes speculative – “what would we do if we were in the same situation”. Humor allows everyday melodrama never to get ahead of adventure – thus ensuring the film’s fidelity to its subgenre.
– The Comic Aspect of the Disidentification of the Other
Fantasy in suburban fantastic can have several alignments with the protagonist: it can threaten him (Gremlins), need his protection (E.T.) or give him powers (Back to the Future). Regardless of the alignment, in most Suburban Fantastic films it will be this fantastic element that is most responsible for the humorous moments. This is because this figure of the “other” represents concepts, performativities and/or experiences that are not understood by the protagonist (as they are of the order of the “extra-ordinary”). Comedy in this case arises from the attempt to normalize the use of social rules, usually heteronormative, patriarchal and white or punish what is seen as disruptive.
In Back to the Future, for example, several humorous sequences are built on the premise of Marty having to “educate” his parents in his youth. This occurs in scenes in which Marty tries to control his mother’s sexual attraction to him, as well as in an attempt to teach his father “masculine values”: that is, to physically face his problems and protect his beloved (Dwyer, 2005, p. 25), in line with the Reagan-era ideal of masculinity (ibid., p.23). Another film that follows the same maxim is Harry and the Hendersons (William Dear, 1987) where the humor is precisely in the attempt of a family to tame a “big foot” (figure 3) – teaching what it “needs” ” to live in that society.
In the scene above, Henderson’s family is cutting the Big Foot’s hair and getting his nails done – rites “necessary” for him to fit into society.
Going further, Wojcik-Andrews (2000, p.106) and Stephen Prince (2007, p.64) focus on a particular scene of E.T. to demonstrate how these humorous scenes end up camouflaging assimilation narratives. In this case, we talk about the scene in which E.T. is dressed as a woman (figure 4) and receives what he understands as a negative reaction from the alien. This leads Elliott to conclude that he is “male” – that is, imposing his heteronormativity values on another species. Another moment cited by Prince (ibid.) is perhaps even more revealing about the dynamics behind the assimilation process: when little Gertie teaches the alien to speak the letters of the alphabet. This socialization plot is also very similar to those present in Harry and the Hendersons and other films of the subgenre such as Short Circuit (John Badham, 1986), Monster Squad (Fred Dekker, 1987) and Suburban Commando (Burt Kennedy, 1991).
The alien dressed “as a woman”. Source: Film’s frame.
These assimilation narratives soon evoke Bergson’s (2004) notion of laughter as a social defense against those who refuse or fail to adapt to society’s norms. In other words, bringing a “punitive” character to the spectator’s laughter to those who “dare” to be deviant from social conduct. This, in turn, normalizes our own conduct doing a comic cautionary tale about what happens to those who do not fit into our rules or moral order. In the scope of suburban fantastic, we still bring an ordering of a specific social class: the white American middle class (Baumgartner, 1988).
In this sense, it is particularly interesting to point out how both comedy and fantasy, parts present in the subgenre, are in the role of confronting the expectations of the real. As established by David Roas (2001, p.9), the fantastic provokes the uncertainty of the real in the face of the impossible, destabilizing the rational logic that would guarantee the security and tranquility of the spectator. Even more symbolic is that within these narratives of suburban fantastic, the syntactic construction is precisely that of the resolution of the disruptive element and the “resumption of the status quo” – allowing a return to normality where the rules of the real (and the suburbs) are respected.
Following this perspective, it is crucial to underline that in the aforementioned films, the humor lies in the protagonist’s difficulty in teaching his social practices – and not in his difficulty in learning something from the “Other”. Everything that is taken as learning in this film comes from self-centered lessons (reminiscent of the Theory of Self-Determination) of the importance of the family and its role, as a white man, to preserve it from the attacks of external agents. Such points make it quite clear how the “Other” in these works does not generate any kind of threat to the privileged position of the protagonist, who does not feel obliged to review his privileges or learn from those other bodies. It is from this precept that Prince (2007, p.69) draws attention to how “E.T. represents a domesticated, non-threatening image of the Other (anything that exists beyond the white, middle-class suburban lifestyle). He cites Robin Wood (apud Prince, 2007) to contextualize this discussion in “a nation founded on the denial of the Other, which after the radical feminist movements, (…) figure of the Other that everyone could love, hug and be touched, (…) without disturbing the “American Way of Life” (the ultimate epitome of the suburban middle class).
Wojcik-Andrews (2000, p.127) will bring a Marxist reading that the figure of the “Other” in these films is a commodity with a narrative function linked to the realization of certain patriarchal and capitalist rites. He highlights how these commodities (the “Others”) make it easier for the protagonist (who would have them almost as private property) to acquire more wealth, whether literal or symbolic (romantic interest, family understanding, respect from friends). Thus, the humor itself, when disidentifying the “Other”, would facilitate the perception of him as an instrument that would bring to the protagonist what capitalist society privileges: heteronormativity, monogamous relationships, private property, class status, success, material wealth, etc.
Perhaps the most representative work of this logic in Suburban Fantastic is the comedy The ‘burbs (Joe Dante, 1989). As much as the whole humor of the film is built from the irony of the American suburban man’s paranoia with the “Other” (people who do not fit the heteronormative white nuclear family model) and their need to tolerate the different, the last sequence of the film implodes this construction. In the end, the unsubstantiated paranoia of the protagonists, who commit a series of crimes is what saves the suburb from a family of psychopaths. The humor, again, goes on to reaffirm the values of this white middle-class man – after all, he laughs at the fact that “they were right all along”. The “Other” in this sense becomes the commodity through which the protagonists achieve recognition from their peers (the suburban neighbourhood).
The movie poster separates “The Other”, with sinister symbols such as skulls, chainsaws, and a haunted house, on the left side, from the “traditional suburban dwellers” on the right side. Source: Collectors.com
Final Thoughts
Establishing from the beginning the history of the white middle class in which the American suburb and its representations mainly consist, the present work aims to show how humor can be used to maintain particular social perspectives. Strategic for a subgenre as popular as suburban fantastic – comedy, in addition to its marketing functionality to increase its audience, allowing the films to be watched by the whole family, presents at least two syntactic functions. They are: 1) To attenuate the hero’s melodrama, avoiding further delving into his maturation process; 2) Disidentify the figure of the “Other”, so that it serves as a narrative instrument (or commodity) in the protagonist’s maturation process.
In this sense, despite working with semantic elements of the fantastic, the fantasy genre and suburban fantastic seem to clash in some of their moral foundations. If David Roas (2011, p.28) says that the fantastic (referring to literature, but being able to apply to other formats) is profoundly subversive, when thematically and linguistically confronting the established reality, the very syntactic component of suburban fantastic seems to present a reactionary nature when confronting any possibility of disturbance of the real.
We emphasize that it would be wrong to draw any more consolidated consideration of the subgenre itself, since doing so would require an analysis of a much broader scope. However, the present article seems to suggest that the humor within suburban fantastic is, at least in some cases, instrumental in maintaining a condescending look at the suburban middle class, reaffirming some of its privileges and opposing the critical perspective made by suburban Gothic. In suburban fantastic, it seems that we laugh more at the difficulty of interacting with the “Other”, than we worry about reevaluating our own behavior.
Finally, we emphasize that the present article does not intend to establish condemnatory maxims for the subgenre, by classifying it as conservative or escapist. Like any artistic work, suburban fantastic it is inseparable from the period and environment in which it was made. In this case, in Hollywood during the Reagan years – a decade marked by a nostalgic, suburbanist, and boastful discourse (Troy, 2005; Ehrman, 2005). Today, films like See You Yesterday (Stefon Bristol, 2019) and Vampires x The Bronx (Osmany Rodriguez, 2020) bring completely different perspectives to the subgenre – employing humor to contest and to re-signify the role of the “Other” in the narrative.
For this reason, we end this article by underlining the importance of continuing studies on suburban fantastic – which, unlike the other “suburban (sub)genres”, still has a very recent and diminutive academic production lacking more studies to be incorporated into its analytical corpus and that expands it beyond audiovisual studies – finding its developments in literature, graphic novels, video games, etc.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/watching/lists/sweet-coming-of-age-movies Acessed in 14/12/2020.
[2]https://screenrant.com/back-future-original-marty-fired-eric-stoltz-why/ Acessed in 30/12/2020
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