Abstract
Little scholarly work has been done on the early films of director Penelope Spheeris, yet they provide a fascinating alternative view of American suburbia. In particular, The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), her documentary of the punk rock scene in the Los Angeles area, and Suburbia (1983), her first narrative feature, provide a take on suburbia that runs counter to the dominant narratives of Reagan’s America. In the early 1980s, Reagan’s Morning in America posited suburbia as a place of renewal and revitalization, and the John Hughes teen films became the standard of the genre by positing suburban alienation as a rite of passage on the way to joining a normative social order. In contrast, Spheeris’s films counter these narratives by demonstrating that for many during the period, suburbia was a place of unfulfilled promises, social decay, and fatal violence.
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Taylor, J. (2017). ‘Society Stinks’: Suburban Alienation and Violence in the Early Films of Penelope Spheeris. In: Forrest, D., Harper, G., Rayner, J. (eds) Filmurbia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53175-9_2
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