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Neighbourhood Watch

Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson in Little Children
  • Posted at 2:53pm
  • 01 November 2007
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

It strikes me as significant that Tony Soprano drove a red Chevy Suburban in the early days of The Sopranos. Throughout the entire six series we saw inside the mind of a Mafia boss who existed on the outskirts. Operating from New Jersey, Tony's "family" were forever expected to genuflect to New York.

But the suburbs are certainly not lacking in action. Supposed utopias, they promise a better life with their barbecues, sprinklers and long driveways.

In the movies, however, the suburban dream usually masks something much more nightmarish. While affectionately pastiched in films like Edward Scissorhands, the animated Over the Hedge and the 1950s-set Pleasantville, the suburbs work best when injected with a dose of real horror, as in Halloween, Poltergeist and David Lynch's Blue Velvet.

In Todd Field's Oscar-nominated Little Children, a very modern kind of bogeyman causes curtains to twitch: a paedophile (played by Jackie Earle Haley) released from prison to live with his mother. He appears at a local outdoor pool and the kids stampede out of the water – in apparent homage to Jaws. This is typical of the way the surface calm is broken in this particular kind of drama – in Blue Velvet it was shattered by a severed ear found in the grass.

I lived in the suburbs for three years. They weren't very cinematic. I was so bored that I had to move back to London. But I suppose I should be grateful that I wasn't witness to any gangland slayings, serial killers in spooky masks or body parts behind the picket fence.

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