no future for you, no future for me

In an article entitled “Negotiating the Gnome Zone,” Andy Medhurst explores ways in which suburbia has been represented in British popular culture. While he undertakes an extensive examination of examples from cinema and television, he touches only briefly on a wealth of material in popular music that wrestles with the anxieties and contradictions of suburban life.

I am interested particularly in the relationship between punk rock and the suburbs. There is (or was [?]) perhaps no social ideology so opposed to the ideals of suburbia than punk, as evidenced by its subcultural style, music, and behaviour. Yet punk’s contempt for suburbia does not come from the removed perspective of some of its other elitist critics. As Medhurst keenly observes, “most of the groups who castigated the suburbs did so because they knew them all too well from the inside” (265).

In punk rock suburbia is portrayed as a kind of holding-pen. Songs like the Descendents’ satirical 'Suburban Home' echo the Kinks’ 'Shangri-La,' associating the suburbs with stagnancy and a sense of suffocation. Yet unlike many of the films or sitcoms that Medhurst describes, the source of suburbia’s oppressive force is not in a fear of feminization or in “threats from outside or below” (252), but from within. In this case, the culprits are “Mom and Dad.” I’m reminded again of Abigail’s Party, which deals with similar anxieties about the failure of the nuclear family. However, while in Mike Leigh’s play the loss of communication between generations provokes a sense of menace or fear, in punk rock the reaction is anger. (See also the somewhat melodramatic film Suburbia, by Penelope Spheeris.)

Another feature of suburbia that is expressed saliently in punk culture is its association with the inescapable present. Central to many suburban youths’ experience of punk is Medhurt’s depiction of “all those teenagers skulking in the bedrooms of Hendon and Beckenham, [latching] on to this as a sign that escape was possible, that glamour was attainable once suburbia had been transcended” (265). Only in the future, somewhere away from the suburbs, does it seem possible to really live. This vision of escape is so powerful that it often manifests itself as only a dream. Aaron Cometbus of Berkeley, California observes this difference between suburban and city punks:

Pseudo-city kids like me were always giving the suburban punks so much shit, but in a way they were more punk than any of us. They were more lost and fucked up. We were all kids of professors trying to be apathetic, trying to hide from the future. No matter how much glue we sniffed, we would never be able to lose our past. The suburban punks really didn't have any future. They didn't even have a past. (Cometbus zine #40).

Representations of suburbia in punk culture seem to evoke the desperation of George Bowling’s “mental squalor” at the end of Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (246). Suburbs are liminal spaces with “no future,” disconnected from or disillusioned with the past, while the present stretches endlessly on.

the anxiety of everyday objects

In his novel The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan creates a setting in which many of the aspects of suburban life that are conventionally considered to provoke feelings of safety, comfort, and familiarity, in fact provoke their opposites. In the world of Jack and his siblings, family life is disrupted by death and incestuous desire. The stability of community is removed by the destruction and slow decay of the surrounding houses and tower blocks, and the supposed reverie of childhood summers is portrayed as a festering wasteland of garbage and concrete.

In the absence of the stability that is meant to be provided by the orthodoxy of suburban life, a new context is created for even the smallest of things. Objects as commonplace as pipes, garden gloves, chests, mirrors, and bedroom furniture become disassociated from their former contexts and take on a sinister significance. In some cases inanimate objects become signifiers, and even take on the animate characteristics of their signified. This may be observed in the line “He replaced the pipe between his teeth like a missing section of his own anatomy” (11), and in Jack’s observation that “It struck me as funny at the time that [Julie] addressed the gloves and not me” (13). Repeatedly, similar uncanny instances provoke what Freud calls an “intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not.”

As the novel progresses, the sense of objects accumulating and encroaching intensifies to the degree where they mirror the tangling weeds and vines that Jack’s father once worked so hard to keep out of his garden. In the kitchen, “Cigarette ends, plastic cutlery, old magazines, coffee cups and spilt coffee hung untidily about the room.” It is a scene that reminds Jack of the fictional Space Commander Hunt’s reminder that, in this foreign environment, “we do not have gravity to keep things in their place” (82). Similar to the absence of gravity, the absence of certainty in Jack’s environment allows it to take on a dreamlike life of its own, where the familiar landscape of domestic objects is no longer predictable.

Perhaps in as far as McEwan’s novel sets up distinctions between order and disorder, the natural and the artificial, it also blurs them, by allowing the static minutiae of the everyday to take on characteristics of the incontrollable.