There’s the old joke about the fish that says “Hey, how’s the water today?” to a second fish, who replies: “What the hell is water?” This is how the movies have come to occupy the suburbs, as a non-space defined by how easy it is to forget it’s anyplace at all. Maybe it’s the infinite connectivity of the internet erasing the sensation of isolation, but films such as Eighth Grade, Edge of Seventeen and their ilk have developed a passive relationship to their provincial suburban setting, regarding it as dull but harmless. Even the films about stagnating adulthood – see: Game Night (no, really, see Game Night) – draw their unease from within, rather than their surroundings.
Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs, which will reach its 30th anniversary milestone later this week, offers modern viewers a portal back to the previous era’s understanding of suburban living as a collection of loaded cultural signifiers. In 1989, the postwar advent of planned communities was recent enough that humanity still fretted over whether relocating out of the rough-and-tumble city would turn vital men and women into sleepy husbands, wives and parents. Dante’s kooky satire focuses on characters convincing themselves they’re not neutered beta males by unearthing the morass of repressed weirdness believed to be squirming under the handsomely manicured exterior of small-town America. They’re eventually proven right, that all their suspicions about something extraordinary busting up their humdrum day-to-day turned out to be well founded. Dante’s wickedest stroke was showing just how badly they needed that to be true.
He found a perfect manifestation of family man restlessness in a young Tom Hanks, coming in hot off Big as an everyman comic presence a decade or so out from his current status as Hollywood’s unofficial heroic dad. When we meet Hanks as Ray Peterson, he’s just decided to use his week off from a vague office job (another symbol of the suburbs’ soul-sapping conformity) for a staycation years before the phrase would be coined. Rather than go somewhere exotic, he’d rather commit himself to finding something novel in his own cul-de-sac. He’s taking a break all right, but only from the monotony.
His interests have been piqued by the Klopecks next door, the eastern European undertones of their family name only the second-most suspicious thing about them in Ray’s estimation. He’s more concerned by the bizarre, inexplicable behaviors he glimpses when they think he isn’t looking: mysterious lights and noises coming from the basement at all hours, digging up their back yard in the middle of a rain storm, car trips all the way from the garage to the curb in the dead of night. Something must be up, and Ray assembles a ragtag crew of simpatico paranoiacs including Rick Ducommun a more pronounced man-child and Bruce Dern as a grizzled, screwloose veteran. Ray clearly relishes the opportunity to play amateur detective with his buddies, barely concealing his underlying sentiments when he sends his wife (a fetching Carrie Fisher!) and son away “for their own safety”.
The key to unlocking the film’s intent may very well rest with Corey Feldman, who appeared as punk teen Ricky Butler just as his mainstream popularity began to wane. Though he joins Ray and the gang on their harebrained mission to unravel the enigma next door, Ricky maintains a Gen Xer’s sense of ironic remove, mostly just amused at the adults’ clumsy efforts to assert control over the situation. He’s having plenty of fun coming along for the ride, but like Dante, one gets the sense he doesn’t unquestioningly share Ray’s headspace.
Feldman couldn’t possibly take this all less seriously; just look at a recently unearthed behind-the-scenes clip of a jittery Feldman goofing around before one take, only to be chastised with a “shut the fuck up, kid, we’re trying to do some acting” from the dearly departed character actor Dick Miller. Feldman winds up like he’s about to sock Miller in the teeth, either playacting the hot-tempered adolescent the press painted him as or just barely suppressing a sincere impulse. Either way, he makes it clear that the age difference has placed him and his character out of joint from the oldsters trying to work. Feldman sees how silly this all is.
Dante has always had a cheeky, subversive side to his games in the playpens of horror and sci-fi, and he has his fun puncturing the masculine ego as all its hot air gets farted out. Because this is a movie, Ray and his cohort must eventually be proven right about the sinister business taking place at the Klopeck residence, but we’re meant to recognize no small measure of ridiculousness in their clumsy investigation. They have no idea what they’re doing, essentially stumbling onto the truth – as Claire Foy so succinctly put it in the recent First Man: “You’re just a bunch of boys.” Ever the forward thinker, Dante had already gotten over the yawning existential void of the suburbs, and he was prepared to have a chuckle at the expense of those who hadn’t.
In his review of the original release, dean of American film critics Roger Ebert dinged what he perceived as a lack of historical context: “It seems recycled out of fairly ancient ideas of what the suburbs are really like (I kept expecting to see Dennis the Menace or Mr Wilson wandering down the street).” Sincerest apologies to the Ebert estate, but surely the director knew what he was doing. A full decade before American Beauty picked up a best picture statuette for portraying the suburbs as a hellacious prison of middle age, Dante had made his peace with them as a locus of unease for aging Boomers nervous about their generation’s slide out of radicalism. He’s writing the neighborhood as an idea and social ecosystem rather than a geography, making the distinction between actual houses and the rows of colonial facades lined up like an old west soundstage – the difference between the suburbs and the ‘burbs.
