THE SUBURBS

The secret to the American character (a subtle tribute to David Lynch and David Graeber)

Dr. Bill Maplewood — the good father and husband (and pedophile) from Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998)

After more than a decade since my move to America — or, actually, my immigration to America, which I didn’t want to admit it was — I finally started to understand what Americans are like, where they come from, what they are made of. The short answer is that they are suburban, and it molds their psyche, behavior, and values. This simple truth was hidden from me because for a decade I only resided in the hip parts of LA and NY, which were full of foreigners and Americans who were still in their “adventurous stage” and had not yet crawled back to the suburbs, gotten a house, and spawned.

The truth slowly opened to me as I moved a year and a half ago to a small town in upstate New York — a walkable town, yes, but still ultimately a suburban town with all the trademarks of suburban life. It was so exotic for me — I had never lived like that. In a small house with a backyard! With neighbors mowing their lawns and teenage girls playing ball and frolicking in a cul-de-sac.

In fact, moving here made me realize I used to live in America’s child-free zones before — not because I chose to, but because I naturally fell into a market segment of childless young people. And now, after I had my daughter, I transitioned into a different group, and the segmentation of life here got more obvious.

I was an idiot not to notice this before. How come I didn’t see families? I didn’t give it any thought — I was just surrounded by people in their 20s and early 30s, and it was a pretty homogenous crowd. The way it is now in the suburbs, this same group of people is pretty much nonexistent. There is nobody here aged 18-35. They are somewhere else. They are still blossoming — in college, working in big cities, still “finding themselves.”

It seems like now I live surrounded by a different species altogether. There are kids aged 0 to 18 and their parents aged 40 and on. I’d want to compare this process to a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but I can’t — because the parents around me are not butterflies. They’re the opposite. This is some kind of different process they underwent — maybe of becoming altar boys and choir girls again after a decade plus of sinning in the big city?

What I feel was hidden from me — the deeper truth about America — that it’s a very dual place. What David Lynch captured in his movies — the dark and the light that form the whole of the American: Leland — the loving father. And Bob — the incestuous rapist. I believe this duality is at the heart of the American experience, and I had no idea! I grew up surrounded by American culture in Moscow, but I didn’t notice this split. And why would I — it is the secret after all.

I’ve always loved Paul Verhoeven movies about America — the happy fascism of Robocop, Starship Troopers, and cynicism of Showgirls — the “everything is for sale" sentiment. I thought, yes, what hypocrites. This is real America! Now I think Verhoeven didn’t fully understand America — or he got only one side of it right because he lived only in Los Angeles in a Bel Air mansion and moved here as an accomplished Dutch filmmaker. He didn’t get to see and interact with the other side much, I imagine. He didn’t get to witness the typical lifecycle of an American: The suburban spawning then the move to the big city and then a retreat to suburban spawning grounds.

And these suburban spawning grounds have a very specific social order. Gone are the young days of boisterous conduct. Everyone is serious here. Everyone is goody-goody, proper, and buttoned up. The men work hard and diligently. The women also work hard and diligently and focus all their energies on their children. There is nothing else. And this other side to America — this proper and upright side — is Lynchian too. And it is real. It is not a mask. It is not a joke.

I don’t know how this switch works. But I believe there is an inner change that happens, and it is fascinating. That is why marriage here is serious, much more serious than in Russia. It’s not a part of romantic, spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. It’s an institution where the children are raised, and it’s kind of sacred. You have to find the “one” — the one to get a mortgage with. And the suburbs are where this institution is rooted.

That’s why maybe there is such a sexless vibe in the suburbs — people are in their “commitment to the future of their children” phase. At a kid’s birthday party last year, one guy just introduced himself to me as “Kieran’s dad.” No name. Just dad!

I can see the good intentions in this kind of switch to full Puritan Christian propriety — but does it yield the best results? Is it really necessary for children to live in this kind of environment to flourish? Is it the best way for them to learn about the world, life, and people? I started to suspect that it was not. And I didn’t have much of an idea about it before moving to the suburbs. I was pretty hopeful and naive — I imagined it is like living at the dacha full time — which is a modest wooden house near the city where many Muscovites spend their weekends and summers. All I knew about the “suburban dysfunction” was from watching Tod Solondz films, and I thought maybe it was an exaggeration, a funny caricature. Now I know it is not a mean-spirited caricature — in fact, Solondz is almost dialing some things down, sparing the viewer from the entire truth.

Now I’m convinced that suburbs are a trap — once you grow up in the suburbs, you feel the pull to come back here when it’s time to procreate and become mommy and daddy. And once you do that and become a parent — it is the only role you care to play from now on and thus your kids don’t get to see and know “real” you whatever that means. And this post childbearing identity is so far removed and so strictly demarcated from the younger one that the previous life seems almost antediluvian.

It seems that it is unnecessary violence — middle-aged people feel the need to uproot their lives and move to a new “safer” place to raise children. They need to make new friends — that are just mom and dad friends, even though it’s mostly mom. Dads are too busy working to have any real friends in America…their single-minded workaholic life is even more tragic than a “suburban gossip and a driver-to-kid activities mom” lives.

Being a woman, I feel like the suburbs are the world of the moms — the mothers are the most vital and dominant denizens here. And the dads are left drained, exhausted, and sexually starved, and so they leer at the teenage girls who are the only nubile females in the vicinity. Remember: there is no one here between the ages of 18 and 35. One of the plot lines of American Beauty is exactly this starvation and lusting. It’s treated rather sentimentally in the film. Maybe because director Sam Mendes is a foreigner and doesn’t have Lynchian intimate knowledge of the American psyche?

So I realized that the goody-goody buttoned-up family guy is just the other side of the coin. Part of the duality of the American experience.

The phenomenon of notorious Americans in Russia in the 1990s makes much more sense to me now. I didn’t encounter them since I was too little, but I read about them in The eXile, and it captured the spirit pretty well. Moscow was their Las Vegas back then, where they could indulge in being “bad,” and once they were back home, often with their Slavic trophy wives, they mostly turned back into being “good”. And many were burned — because their Slavic wives don’t have that internal switch to suddenly morph into the suburban soccer mom and happily live in isolation with no friends.

I imagine for Americans, after coming back home from “wild Russia,” it was easy to fall back into their goody-goody selves just like coming back home after a “wild weekend” in Vegas. In the end, the Russian world they got to see and inhabit for a bit was not a binary one with strict segregation, and it was not a world for them to have a proper family and to let the other side of them — the “respectable dad” side — show. They couldn’t really see Russia beyond their shallow binary vision. Not surprisingly “wild” is the most common epithet they use to describe my country while having a dreamy nostalgic look on their face — clearly reminiscing of their past escapades.

As one Harvard-educated New Yorker dared to tell me: he’d never trust a Russian and that Russians have a very different idea of faithfulness. At the same time, he said that there are no number of people killed by the American military and by democratic crusades around the world for him to stop believing in American exceptionalism. Here is a perfect example of a future Westchester dad right there, I thought.

I also realized that the Americans I met and befriended in LA and NY would kind of hide their suburban nature. I get the sense now that they wanted to overcome it and become a new person. I’m not sure they could.

Suburbs create cautious, overly guarded people who are only fully comfortable in the confines of their fortress — big or small, aka a house. And that is the essence of American individualism and the American Dream, and anything that falls short of achieving it feels like loserdom. I couldn’t get it, but clearly when we briefly lived in a rented apartment in San Francisco with our small daughter, we came off to people as very unsuccessful — unable to provide the “normal” life for our child.

So yes, it seems like suburbs are a trap that pulls Americans when they reach adulthood. The city can be a trap too, I guess. I grew up in the centre of Moscow, and I feel the need to replicate the city experience for my daughter — walking to museums without planning, seeing people spontaneously, walking, taking public transportation, watching people… I believe this life makes a different person — potentially more communal, less guarded, more comfortable around different people…not just of their own milieu. Looking back at it I did grow up culturally rich and economically quite poor — which is already an anomaly for America — I also knew and lived next to both kids of a cleaning lady and a rich businessman. I didn’t really differentiate them until much later when I got older. I believe it was a function of the pre-gentrified Moscow, but also it was the outlook of my mom who unconsciously passed it on to me — not to judge people by the stuff they own. She never told me that openly — but it was clear from her conduct with people form different classes and all walks of life. This is so profoundly un-American and I guess I was steeped in this sentiment since before I can remember.

This made me think about another great David — David Graeber. He was an anomaly for America, a real public intellectual, who, like Todd Solondz, had almost a Soviet vibe about him. He spoke in full sentences, read and wrote books, and spent time walking and thinking instead of driving and shopping. I only recently realized that he grew up in Penn South, a somewhat Soviet-style apartment complex in Chelsea that was populated by working-class families. I think it explains why he came off as so peculiar, so un-American. He never lived like an American and never accepted the American way of life as the best and only possible way. Eventually he was forced out of Yale despite his stellar scholarship and had to leave for England while the apartment he grew up in and lived most of his life was taken away from him. I wonder if it’s even possible to stand up against the pillars of American capitalism and still live here, preferably not on the streets?