The dialectic of suburban living necessitates paradise and hell existing on the same block. The freedom from a city’s garbage bags and car horns, the absence of a city block’s communal eyes keeping watch. The freedom to be here, the unacknowledged fact that you got here because your family could, usually with the red flick of a federal government’s pen. A little room to breathe, a lot of space to get lost. The calm of great quiet, a screaming silence squashing out a lot of voices that don’t quite fit this mold. Soft green lawns, shouting matches in neighboring houses, muffled. I am no Richard Yates. I have not come here to bury the suburbs. But I do think, maybe, that the day I leapt from a humming green electrical box and landed knees-first on the concrete in front of our family’s townhome was the first day my body converted its subconscious anxiety over this land where nothing looked wrong and several things felt so off into a physical something. In my great gashes and dozens of embedded rock flecks was written a little map of suburban crack-up, my first, and far from last.
If there is a poet laureate of suburban ambivalence, it’s Joe Dante. ‘Ambivalence’ instead of ‘ennui’ because his movies don’t seek to land polemical or rhetorical points. Hip as they are to the soft violence of the American suburban project, these are films that elect The Twilight Zone’s murky balance of sometimes-clear meaning and occasional senselessness over the Hollywood studio film’s more literal-minded symbologies. A Gremlin is as likely to be a monster in need of shredding as he is a figure worthy of deep envy: wouldn’t you also like to sit around, jobless and watching movies? In The Howling (1981), the werewolf myth is familiarly laid atop societal anxieties over base appetites—anxieties historically attached, wolfishly, to crises of masculinity—but clouded in its narrative connections to cults of self-improvement and an almost-queer feminine longing. It’s not that Dante’s films are elaborate intellectual contraptions self-consciously negotiating a multiplicity of meanings. Rather, it’s that they’re anything but. Made alongside a rotating, mostly consistent crew of familiar character actors and film craftsmen, the films reflect their director’s clear-eyed sense of living through a few of this country’s most discombobulating historical moments. Joe Dante was born (in the New Jersey suburbs) in 1946. By the time The ’Burbs entered production in 1988, he’d lived through McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Korea, Vietnam, and almost a decade of President Ronald Reagan. What choice does a body have, other than to crack up?
Enter suburban homeowner Ray Peterson. The ’Burbs’ erstwhile hero, a bundle of anxieties shellacked in normalcy’s hues—and so, of course played by early-career Tom Hanks—is at the outset of a week’s long vacation from his job. He has a kid, a dog, a set of new tools, and a wife named Carol (Carrie Fisher). Thanks to Fisher’s perpetually-raised eyebrows, one gets the sense that their marriage is neither party’s fantasy and both party’s reasonably settled inevitability. The Petersons like to watch Jeopardy together some nights, beating the contestants to the questions. She makes breakfast in the morning, he wants to install an automatic garage door opener. They are sub-urbane. Sometimes they stay at a lake house, something Carol wishes Ray would do with his allotted vacation. But no, he wants to spend his time at home.
Why does Ray Peterson choose to spend his vacation at home? It’s the great secret at the master bedroom closet-heart of The ’Burbs. I’d wager it’s the riddle at the heart of the American suburbs, too. As the film opens, one might suspect that Ray fancies himself an amateur L.B. Jeffries. Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) looms over Dana Olsen’s screenplay like an old Victorian. Indeed, even by 1989, Hanks had—with his easy humor, his gentle (but not antagonistic) eccentrism of delivery, and his ability to communicate a moral line—already racked up dozens of comparisons to Stewart. In casting The ’Burbs, Dante called him “…the reigning everyman, a guy that everybody can identify with.” But where Stewart’s Jeffries comes to suspect foul play from the apartment across his viewfinder, Hanks’ Peterson is faced with an altogether more cosmologically worrying possibility: that the Klopeks, his new next-door neighbors inhabiting the decrepit old manse just across his property line, might be—at best—Satanists. At worst, what with those late-night light displays emanating from the basement, they might be out and out demons themselves.
Ray’s not alone in his suspicion. All around the Mayfield Place cul-de-sac—shot on the old Universal Colonial Street lot, that of The Munsters before and Desperate Housewives later, two rhyming “neighbors from hell” stories—Ray’s chorus of neighbors begin to suspect something is awry. With his wife out of town, the platonic ideal of nosiness, Art (the late Rick Ducommun, expertly outfitted and performing like a sticky-handed toddler) maybe does the most to instigate Ray’s suspicion: shoveling the breakfast Carol cooked for her family down his own gullet, Art dishes that the Klopeks’ last house “burnt to the ground…a hideous, raging inferno.” Art’s not alone in his wariness: “Lieutenant” Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), a would-be Vietnam vet who maybe never left the jungle (or maybe never actually went), also thinks the Klopeks are up to no good, though he’d also just as soon take a pistol to Queenie, the poodle from up the street who keeps pooping on his lawn. And Ricky (longtime Dante collaborator Corey Feldman) mostly eggs on his older neighbors’ amateur sleuthing like a gleeful spectator watching reality TV. “A movie?” he asks, incredulous, when a girlfriend suggests they get out of the cul-de-sac for the night. “That’s not real. It’s the same as television. Trust me,” Ricky says, setting up lawn chairs to watch his neighbors bumble around from. “This is real. This is my neighborhood.”
It’s easy to understand why, with Olsen’s screenplay in hand, Imagine Entertainment execs Brian Grazer and Larry Brezner thought of Joe Dante. As genre entertainment, the horror-comedy of The ’Burbs sits comfortably next to past Dante projects like Gremlins (1984) and Piranha (1978). “Dante would be fantastic,” Grazer raved, “because it’s a mixture of comedy, horror, and reality.” As is the case sometimes with executives, a little poetic insight leaks through the PR. Genre familiarity (of horror, of science-fiction) and a certain comedic allowance (mostly on loan from the mutability of Looney Tunes, mostly deployed to sometimes upend those same genre expectations) are crucial elements in the tone and texture of Dante’s filmmaking. So too is the treatment of “reality.” The universes of these texts are not closed off from the “real” worlds behind them. As in his beloved Twilight Zone, the fantastic subject—a hot-shot hot dog aerial ace pilot injected into the body of slighter, weirder man, for instance, or an army of military-chipped toy commandos laying siege to a quiet suburban street—echoes our unfantastic real.
Joe Dante has always possessed a complicated relationship with easy auteurism. He didn’t seek to write the pictures he directed (and didn’t take credit even when he zhuzhed the stories he did work with) and seems mostly bored by the vaunted, gnarly “a film by” label. A film is made by many, he knew and knows, and something like The ’Burbs is as much authored in Hanks’ by-turns steady calm and crash-out performance as it is in production designer James Spencer’s work transforming their backlot set from The New Leave it to Beaver TV series (more suburban horror) into a set that could feasibly suggest small-town monsters before literally exploding outward at its close. “Auteurism,” I suspect Dante suspected in the late eighties and onward, was only as good as a brand expectation that netted you the resources to make another feature. What we have in place of a totality of authorship in his projects, then, is that ever-illusive, nearly-ineffable quality: voice.
Why does Ray Peterson choose to spend his vacation at home, leering around his lawn, welcoming his loonier neighbors’ suspicions to the point of becoming a zealot himself? The question is never answered in Olsen’s script, as Ray’s feeble explanations mostly just let Hanks spin-out. “This is restful,” he insists to Carol, “hanging around the house, just being lazy.” And then he mostly goes out of his mind with cagey suspicion. What exactly happened to Queenie the dog’s owner, Walter (Gale Gordon, Lucy’s old foil from I Love Lucy, another metatextual nod to domesticity’s lunacy), the old man who lives at the head of the street? What exactly are the Klopeks doing digging holes by midnight light? And why has the Peterson dog brought back a human femur bone after digging a hole under the Klopeks’ dilapidated fence?
Those Klopeks, though…they do seem off. Keeping watch one stormy night with Art and Rumsfield, Ray witnesses Klopek the younger (Courtney Gains) drive an oversized garbage bag down, only to wail away at the bag when it won’t fit soundly. Later, when a delegation headed by Carol and Rumsfield’s wife, Bonnie (another Dante troupe-r, Wendy Schaal), knocks on the Klopek door to prove their husband’s conspiracies wrong, Dante and cinematographer Robert Stevens show off their kooks in long shots and terse silences with glee, a You Can’t Take it With You (1938) that you wouldn’t ever want to. As “Uncle Reuben” Klopek, the “stand-up tragedy” sometimes-star/disruptor of Letterman’s Late Night, Brother Theodore is a garbled Lugosi, and when his brother “the Doctor” finally appears, Henry Gibson is in fine teutonic mad science form. An amalgam of cobwebs, candles, and disrepute, the Klopeks’ abode seems destined to bring down property values.
Of that director’s voice: Dante is a master of scrutinizing the regular until you realize it’s humming with monstrousness. American reality is so full of horror and comedy that all you have to do is show it, on its real psychic terms. This is the supertext (and central figurative image) of a rhyming film like Blue Velvet (1986), but in The ’Burbs, wanting to watch isn’t a perversity so much as it is a matter of form. What’s the purpose of a bay window—Bay Window was Olsen’s first title for his script—other than as a panopticon for the peeping-tom? Even before Ring and Flock Cameras haunted our every step, the suburbs were a project founded on property lines, entities that structurally cannot exist without assuming trespassing to be inevitable; one is either a welcome guest or an intruder. When Ray does finally break down, after he and Art go several steps too far, past breaking and entering, straight into house-blowing up, Hanks performs his penultimate monologue as a barnstormer: “Remember what you were saying about people in the ’burbs?…People who mow their lawn for the 800th time and then snap? Well that’s us! It’s not them! That’s us!” It’s not terrifically subtle stuff, but then, what good was subtlety against Reagan’s American muscle? “We’re the ones who are acting suspicious and paranoid, Art! We’re the lunatics! Us! It’s not them!” A house burning behind him, humming in the upper, manic range that even Stewart didn’t much touch, Hanks goes down at the end, the camera pushed in on America’s everyman’s sweat: “It’s us.”
Dante and his collaborators shot at least three endings for The ’Burbs. This monologue’s inclusion, it would seem, was never in doubt. There’s an obvious bravery in letting the protagonist shout a message out loud. From this angle, The ’Burbs is a kind of message movie squarely in line with the anti-corporate and surveillance-wary conscience evident in Dante’s films. Even before the suburban neighborhood resembled the one we can scrutinize today, the idea was founded squarely on the vaunted American traditions of Us vs. Them. White, well-to-do families (and couples hoping to procreate) could afford to move into these outpost settlements, and could afford to leave the cities behind them. Early on, Dern’s Rumsfield throws away a line that refers to the Klopeks as “the foreigners.” Why does Ray Peterson choose to spend his vacation at home? Mostly because he knows that it’s what this system requires of him. His crisis is knowing that there’s something wrong with the way he lives, and he spends the movie’s length scratching until it erupts back up on him.
Joe Dante is no Stanley Kramer. By that, I mean his trust in cartoon plasticity will always supersede any sense of moral obligation he might possess. He does not make message movies—he does not make movies to make messages. Maybe a clear moral line is impossible in any really American movie. In the theatrical ending to The ’Burbs, after Hanks explodes and falls into an ambulance with the immortal line, “I don’t care! I’ve been blown up, take me to the hospital,” The ’Burbs turns, Serling-like. Henry Gibson’s mad doctor’s waiting for Ray in the ambulance with an oversized syringe and a dripping confession. “You saw one of my skulls, didn’t you? Oh yes, I know you did. It belonged to a neighbor of yours…we took the house from them…” And here the Doctor cradle’s Ray’s own skull, his face every inch a Big Bad Wolf salivating. “Perhaps I might just take yours.” The Doctor and Peterson struggle, with the suburban homeowner triumphing and making a citizen’s arrest.
What if the Klopeks actually were the hellish monsters the cul-de-sac chorus assumed they were? In one early ending, originally scripted, never screened, Ray Peterson falls victim to this O. Henry turn. Upon hiring Hanks, Dante sagely knew they couldn’t kill him off without completely alienating the audience. “You know we can’t kill Tom Hanks. What are we going to do?” A second ending, included on the film’s home release as an “alternate ending,” largely follows the narrative beats of the theatrical one, but gives Gibson a similar moment to monologue decrying the meddling suspicions of suburbia. “But when we took it to the preview audience,” Dante recalled years later, “[they] didn’t like that. They wanted these guys to be heroes. You know, ‘We sat and watched the whole movie with these guys—you mean you’re going to tell us they weren’t doing good stuff?’” Is there an idiom as American as, “Go fight city hall”? So Dante chose the ending that gave his movie the best chance of getting in front of the most eyes, that gave those mid-life crisis eyes the best chance of seeing themselves represented up on screen. It ends like a cartoon, like Scooby-Doo, monsters in cuffs, camera craning out.
Maybe somewhere—in the ephemera of an actor’s performance, in the air captured on celluloid—all the possible endings of a film still live in the one that got to multiplexes. Maybe that’s what voice is, in filmed and written fiction: a sense of potentialities only possible in this particular vision. In The ’Burbs, Ray Peterson’s anxiety is well-founded, just mis-applied. The Klopeks inhabit suburbia too, and like the well-to-doers, it’s the ecosystem itself that turns them loose, on each other and on their own neighbors, who turn right back. There’s a current of despair here, in looney tones, a whole stratum of America rendered as a joke made possible by the pressure of keeping up with and then killing the Joneses. Not a message film, but also not not one, it’s the only film that could be made about the logic of “my house” and “yours” and nothing in between.