Published in LiP Magazine
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THE END OF SUBURBIA
directed by Gregory Green

review by Brian Awehali
12.12.04

Call it a paradigm shift, a wave of crystallization or an epiphany, but The End of Suburbia will profoundly influence not just your understanding of a problem, but the whole framework of ideas propping it up. It's impossible to walk away from this film without a clear understanding of the catastrophic perils of our oil and automobile-based existence.

The film begins with the post-World War II era of prosperity and highlights how the emergence of suburbia was powered largely by the industrial might of war-fattened automobile giants and the availability of cheap oil. Through a succession of mostly clever (but occasionally heavy-handed) historical film clips and interviews with experts on the subject of oil depletion, director Gregory Greene explores the unsustainable and illogical phenomenon of the completely car-dependent American suburb. As the title of the film suggests, Greene sees very little future for a fossil-fueled way of life that has, for more than 50 years, been identified with the American dream.

Carefully detailing the coming oil collapse—which, if current consumption patterns continue unabated, will arrive within the next half-century—The End of Suburbia makes a convincing case that an oilless future is likely to curtail not just shopping-heavy lifestyles but basic mobility and access to food. Fuel scarcity will make ghost towns out of strip malls and empty, unused runways out of bumper-to-bumper freeways (both mostly appealing prospects); it will also make subsistence gardens out of once-pristine lawns. To leaven the gloom and doom, the film devotes some time to fossil-fuel alternatives, particularly hydrogen and natural gas; it also looks at some ecologically smarter urban and suburban planning.

Suburbia is very far from perfect, however. A naive viewer might wonder if there's even one woman or person of color with anything meaningful to say about oil scarcity or suburbia. Perhaps it's fitting, even poetic, that the demographic group most responsible for the current oil-guzzling beast should be tasked with telling us all what's wrong with it—but that's really not good enough to explain or justify a film in which no people of color appear at all, and in which the only woman present (except for the vintage footage featuring caricatures of ideal suburban housewives circa 1955) seems to have wandered into the background during an interview with one of the many white middle-aged male experts. Such omissions are all the more disturbing given the role that race played—and that the film studiously ignores—in the rise of the suburbs in the first place. It wasn't just an era of prosperity that sent white folks streaming from cities in search of roomy, picket-fenced houses: It was also the well-documented phenomenon of white flight, in which a great many white Americans decamped to the suburbs because they wanted to get away from folks of color, directly contributing to the disintegration of many US cities.

For all its flaws, though, Suburbia's apocalyptic vision forces viewers to confront the urgent need for a world fueled by something other than the fossils of our now-extinct predecessors on the planet. Unless, that is, we wish to duplicate their fate.

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