#Plot to suburbia game serial
#Plot to suburbia game tv

America was finally victorious in its long cold war against the forces of global communism. The ‘Burbs was released in the winter of 1989, and by November of the same year the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union had begun to rapidly disintegrate. If anything, Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs offers a counter-thesis to The Comedian’s observation: what really drove America insane wasn’t losing a war but winning one. One of the more memorable lines from Alan Moore’s now-classic graphic novel Watchmen, set in an alternate timeline where America won the Vietnam War, is when The Comedian remarks that had they lost the war, “I think it might have driven us crazy.” The obvious allusion is to the social chaos and upheaval that America experienced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The apparent serenity of Mayfield Place’s two-car garages belies a latent anxiety and boredom among its residents that eventually explodes into a fiery and comedic outburst of collective madness. Their only real connection to each other is a shared interest in finding the best ways to kill time on their summer vacations until they are forced back into their middle management cubicles.įilmed in the late 1980s, during the age of Ronald Reagan and Perestroika, The ‘Burbs is a portrait of a country on the verge of losing its mind. Instead, its residents seem to be a collection of eccentric and economically secure individuals brought together by the whims of the real estate market. Yet there is no true community in Mayfield Place.

#Plot to suburbia game tv

Politics is rarely discussed, aside from when it is shouted at the TV in the form of a question on Jeopardy.

Nights are spent inside watching game shows or late-night television. The neighbor’s children play on well-manicured lawns while their upper-middle-class parents watch from spacious front porches while sharing gossip about mutual acquaintances. Mayfield Place is the apotheosis of 20th-century American suburbia. What is far more interesting, however, is what the film seems to be saying about its own idyllic suburban setting.

#Plot to suburbia game serial

The story proceeds from suspicions about the strange new neighbors, the Klopeks, being a family of serial killers to an ultimately successful search for proof of their wrongdoing, which culminates in the protagonists burning down the Klopeks’ house. There is Art, Ray’s friend, who is also the neighborhood conspiracy theorist Rumsfeld, the unhinged military veteran Ricky Butler, the resident juvenile delinquent and Walter, an old man with the block’s best lawn, which is kept that way in part because he trains his tiny dog to defecate in his neighbors’ front yards instead of his own. The film’s other characters, thankfully for the viewer, are much more quixotic. He is the most relatable character in the film, a classic everyman battling the banal suburban demons of boredom and malaise. The main protagonist, Ray Peterson (memorably played by Tom Hanks), is the classic henpecked husband who just wants to spend his short summer vacation relaxing at home instead of fruitlessly “going to the lake” per the advice of his nagging wife.

Before long, many of the residents of Mayfield Place have convinced themselves that their new neighbors are not only oddballs but murderers. The family, a secretive group of vaguely Eastern European Slavs, immediately manages to arouse suspicion amongst the neighborhood’s sun-baked petty bourgeois with their eccentric habits. The film’s plot centers on a group of bored suburbanites trying to figure out how best to waste their summer vacations until a new family moves in to their cul-de-sac. This is unfortunate, as not only is the film genuinely funny, it contains a scathing, if subtle, critique of late 20th-century suburban society.

Of all the cult films produced in the last half century, Joe Dante’s 1989 black comedy The ‘Burbs remains one of the most under-appreciated.