Suburban Smackdown: Two Images of Domestic American Life?

[Spoiler Alert: I reveal the end of both films I discuss]

This weekend I watched two films: Marley and Me and Revolutionary Road.  While these two films were both entertaining in their own respective ways, they also portrayed two opposing views of American family life.  Marley and Me represents suburban American life as challenging but ultimately rewarding, while Revolutionary Road conveys suburban ennui to its ultimate catastrophic end.  However, while they clearly argue from different positions, they also tell strikingly similar stories that each culminate in the death of the hero. 

 

Between the two films, Revolutionary Road is far and away the better work, though that shouldn’t surprise anyone.  It’s a beautiful, well acted, and insightful film that (though some facetiously referred it as the sequel to Titanic, for obvious reasons) might be considered a follow-up to Mendes’ earlier American Beauty.  It’s so much of a follow-up, in fact, that I kept wondering how its thesis was really different from that of American Beauty, or a number of other earlier films for that matter.  For example, the original Stepford Wives is an interesting and entertaining, if heavy-handed, exploration of similar themes.  The problem with Revolutionary Road, however, is that its only slightly less heavy-handed and comes thirty years later.  So if it’s a great film it also seems to be beating a dead horse.

 

On the opposite side of the spectrum we find Marley and Me.  My expectations for this movie were about as low as they go.  Though Owen Wilson has been in some decent films (think Wes Anderson’s), Jennifer Aniston lives on the bottom of the A-List barrel.  Plus, the film had a dog, which usually means a gimmicky family film that insults the intelligence of families.  Going in thusly prepared, I was pleasantly surprised.  Yes the film was overly sentimental.  Yes it was clearly promoting a problematic ideology.  Yes it had the usual mix of unrealistically beautiful people in unrealistic situations.  But despite these features, it at least attempted to give some complexity to a cliché story.  Like the Wheelers in Revolutionary Road, the Grogans in Marley and Me have their fair share of challenges.  If the film posits a stereotypical happy ending, it at least punctuates that ending with surprisingly convincing acting and slice-of-life detail. 

 

While these two films have a number of superficial similarities, what I found to be most fascinating was the fact they both end with the death of a major character: in Revolutionary Road April Wheeler dies after trying to give herself an abortion, while in Marley and Me the dog, Marley, dies of a twisted stomach.  Thus, while the two films clearly argue different theses, they’re both explorations of (underlying foundational) violence embedded in American middle-class life.  Maybe it was because I had just watched Revolutionary Road, but just after half way through Marley and Me I realized the dog was going to die.  He had to die, because in any decent story about this topic someone has to die.  This plot device, in turn, seems to characterize a difference that these two films epitomize: a negative critique of middle class, suburban life ends in the death of a major player, while a positive critique of the same provides an expiating character.  Neither of the Grogans have to die because Marley, as a savior, did it for them.  Revolutionary Road, on the other hand, doesn’t let its characters off so easily.  It holds them accountable for their actions and when the story concludes everyone pays.

 

I’m not sure why the story about the American dream is told this way.  Perhaps it’s the influence if Christian mythology on American mythology.  Perhaps those two things are too intertwined to be separated.  What always surprises me, however, is what films like these want characters to be held accountable for.  Of course the suburbs are an emotionally and culturally vapid place.  But is that really the worst of it?  Sure, a lot of people in the suburbs are sad and boring, but what about the environmental, political, and economic problems created by this kind of living?  What about the smog and pollution caused by commuting?  What about educational disparity between suburban and urban schools?  What about racial profiling?  What about a whole bunch of issues that are so frequently absent from films like Marley and Me and Revolutionary Road.  Though both films skim the surface of these issues (which surprised me in Marley and Me), they also relegate them to the backseat and instead choose to focus on the tragedy or triumph of the American family.  Thus, they both boil things down to overly simplistic binaries, which binaries don’t even begin to address the actual problems or opportunities inherent in the lifestyle they portray.