Love and logic keep us clear.

Suburban dystopia, utopia...or just suburbia?

After finallly seeing the film Little Children last night with Gen I found myself thinking a bit about suburbia. Even back in the days of watching the Wonder Years (probably my first major 'experience' with suburbia) I have had a general unease about suburbia. I used to think it could be chalked up to the cookie-cutter-ness aspect of it. While that in large part is a factor, it was my history course in western feminism that I took in my undergraduate degree that this unease was articulated for me from a gendered perspective in a way that I think gets closer to my own unease. Oddly enough, while I'm sure the film is designed to illicit some thought on suburbia, my most pressing thoughts coming out of the film were not on this topic - I think for that perspective I will have to watch the film again. (I just honestly wanted to say "suburban dystopia" as I like the image of it - what would it entail? Or is that term actually an oxymoron?).

The thing that did strike me though was the use of narrative in the film. I am used to narrative being used in films which are maybe slapstick comedy, documentaries, or yeah, that's all I can really think of. The narration in this film was fantastic though. The voice that was used, the intonation as well as the content of the narrative against the actual film was just this short of perfection. Further, unlike a film (which I love) like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the narration is not provided by one of the characters. Rather, it is an unknown and seemingly omniscient voice [a distinction I'll have to think more about....] After the movie, Gen and I briefly discussed the thing that had me curious throughout the film - which was when was narrative employed and when was it not and what does this 'mean'? For those of you who have not seen or heard of the film, it contrasts two major story lines one. Broadly speaking, one is the story line between Kate Winslet's and Patrick Wilson's characters (one of infidelity) and then one about the release into the community of a convicted pedophile. (Funnily enough before going to see the film Gen and I both had framed up our knowledge on the movie in this ways - for me, it was a movie about infidelity and for her she mentioned, oh, the one with the pedophile). In any case, the movie contrasts these story lines in a way that I'm not exactly sure what the message was intended to be though, again, I'd like to see the film again to analyze it a bit more. Without giving too much away, narrative is employed differently with these two story. On second thought, I guess in order to really discuss this I would want to know that you have seen the film first.... (Though I think our post-movie discussion also represents why grad students shouldn't go to movies together!)

This movie also got me thinking about how much I seem to really like the use of narrative in film and television and why I seem to enjoy it so much. When I thought about it almost all my favourite television series are narrated from My So Called Life, Sex and the City, How I met your mother, Scrubs ... Grey's Anatomy even! I guess I just think narrative is neat.

Gender, narrative and film is something I gave a bit of thought to in the case of Sex and the City which like Simone de Beauvoir's work employs a narrative structure. (As an aside I also noticed a copy of the Second Sex on the bookshelf in Kate Winslet's characters office - the only room that she decorated). The series, with the exception of the two parts to the series' finale, 'An American Girl in Paris (Part Une)' and 'An American Girl in Paris (Part Deux)', each episode of Sex and the City contains a central theme which is posed by the show’s narrator (and main character), Carrie Bradshaw while she sits down to write her sex column for the fictional The New York Star. The "theme" of each episode is often formed as a question through a narrative voice-over by Carrie which allows us to follow her thoughts leading up to a phrase such as "I couldn’t help but wonder . . ." and then a flash to her computer screen as she types a question such as: "If we can take the best of the other sex and make it our own, has the opposite sex become obsolete?"

This use of narrative affords a rare television insight into the internal workings of the main characters through Carrie's voice-overs. Some have argued that this is unique in a series about women and that it involves turning the patriarchal 'male gaze' on its head, instead allowing us to view, through use of narrative and
filming techniques, the series through the 'female gaze' - Carrie's. (See, for example, the work of Cindy Royal). I think that viewing the narrative function as a ‘female gaze’ however - given narrative’s function here to serve as a means of creating identification amongst viewers - could work to further a 'gender'/ 'sex' binary rather than problematize it as the notion of "turning the male gaze on its head" suggests.....

That said, the use of narrative in this series points to one of the things I think I find so 'comforting' about narrative - it not only affords for but encourages multiple interpretations of the "texts'" meanings. Narrative in this series is not used "to sum up" the epsisode (which is sometimes the case, see for example Doogie Howser) - there is no explicit "moral of the story" at the end of each episode. Rather, it is often used in the series to create 'open questions'. I won't bore you with an analysis of an actual episode but, I'd encourage those of you who enjoy this series to watch an episode thinking about how narrative is used [okay, you Gen, who is probably the one who'd read this]. In terms of subverting traditional gender norms I think that despite Sex and the City's tendency to sometimes confound conservative cultural norms, we also see the plethora of ways the series can be read as providing us with some critical and practical notions about how film might work to subvert traditional understandings of 'gender' through mass media, and I believe that the use of narrative could be essential to this process.

Hm, anywho - here's the trailer...