This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

Or, how suburbia [and by extension America] loves conformity and percieved safety
This paper discussed the movie Edward Scissorhands [1990] and the reflection of religion, the corporation and society has on the formation of the city. Polemical in nature, it is not a denouncement of religion, instead it acknowledges the powerful role of religion in society, and how this important part of life shapes our space [and place] in the world.

Edward Scissorhands is the collection of fables and fairy tales not only from the collective history of man, but also from recent American experiences. The classic Frankenstein and Pinocchio story is contrasted with the distinctly American thrill of the new and the allure of progress with the paranoia of the other. The highly stylized neighborhood does not cover the daemons of distrust and isolation that are so eloquently played to by the “Christian” fundamentalist, nor does the blind search for success cover the fractures in the interpersonal relationships of the characters. In the last review, even love cannot triumph over the power of conformity.

Edward Scissorhands is a story of conformity and the perceived danger of the other. Edward Scissorhands is set in any-town USA, a dream town of suburban bliss; the hyper-reality suburbia of Director Tim Burton’s memories, Edward Scissorhands is more than a nostalgic look on childhood and the evolving life of America during the Cold War years. Disintegration of society and abandonment weave their way through the story of a stranger coming to town. Scissorhands is a story of the reliance on and hope of technology; specifically the newest gadget/machine (Edward) – much like the newest car model or the newest refrigerator – the newest gadget that will entice and enliven life for all suburbanites. Edward becomes the false savior to the suburbanite’s routine until he crosses the invisible comfort line; then Edward becomes Satan incarnate, the “modern” Frankenstein sent by the devil to disrupt the serene life of all. What is most interesting is to study and examine how the archetypical suburban image became archetypical, and for what reasons. Why the suburbs became banal, undifferentiated space, and homogeneous is as important as how the neighborhood in Scissorhands reacts to the “other” once inside the protected confines of suburbia.

The sets of Edward Scissorhands function as archetypal elements that trigger our memory of days gone by. The movie spends a majority of time inside the suburb, only going outside infrequently, visiting other locals when necessary. Whether it is the mountains for vacation, the mall for important supplies or the bank, inhabiting the alien landscape for only short period of time before you retreat to the safety of the suburbs. Yet, the surrounding landscape is just a variation of the suburb; another suburb, another strip-mall, another television station. There is no great variation on theme – in buildings, cars, or people – just one great white amorphous blob of homogeneity.

Burton’s fictional world parallels ours in many different ways. The suburb has been seen throughout the last 50 years as a kind of escape, a safe harbor in the time of storm. Why live in the city, when you can escape to the wide-open fields of suburbia? The goal of many of the earlier suburbs was to make a self-sustaining community based on the small village model (City Beautiful – Ebenezer Howard) or a rural cooperative community (Frank Lloyd Wright – Broadacre) effectively set out to isolate the individual, in order to “free” their souls as Wright would often muse. The dream of each individual American owning a plot of land traces back to Thomas Jefferson’s populist platform of returning power to the land (individual land owners), effectively diffusing power, so in turn, a powerful central government does not arise to rule over the land. The idea of owning land is so indelibly linked in our history and psyche, that Americans are willing to sacrifice other needs to satisfy this need. This may be one of the reasons that many suburbs have little or no variation of race, lifestyle or political views. The necessity of owning land, and that land procuring a high return-on-investment (ROI) drives suburbanites (Americans) to choose the “safest” neighborhood – not in terms of crime, natural disasters, or acts of God, but in terms of perceived safety.

Perceived Safety is the function where people fixate on a small sub-set of issues and overlook overriding or higher priority issues. Many trade a long commute for “better” schools, or friends in the city for a three-car garage. At what point does the commute and the large garage reinforce the sense of safety? Common sense tells us that the city is dangerous, and the suburbs are not. Where, and why does this fallacy take root? Why does this appear to be an American-only epidemic? When the other infiltrates the suburb, as when Edward enters the home of Bogg’s house, the perceived balance is upset and the perceived harmony of suburbia is vanquished.

One such root cause of suburbia is from religion itself. In the Judeo-Christian world religion, man is taught that he is evil from birth. Any “pleasures of the flesh” is treated as a mortal sin, and are to be eradicated wherever and whenever possible. In Christianity, God had to send his only Son, and then crucify him to redeem the souls of man. Christians¹ are therefore taught that they should be “little Christ’s” and “that their body, is their temple.” This has a profound impact on the way a person operates in space. To avoid the contact of other evil men is to fend off the evils of the devil. The first settlers of this country were religious outcasts (the Pilgrims) who had fled the cities of Europe for the open land of America.

Compare this with the Religious Fundamentalist (Esmeralda) found in Edward Scissorhands. She is refereed as a “loon” and a “nut-job” in the beginning of the movie, the primary instance of other in the community. Yet, she is other only because of her extreme convictions and lack of social (no family or husband) status, in other terms, she is the flip coin of any other community member. Esmeralda is the most repressed character in the movie, taking her frustrations and emotions out on a solid-state organ in her home-temple. She is so afraid of touching the evil (Edward) that she shies away from him whenever he is near. At the end of the movie, after Edward is transformed into the other, Esmeralda finally finds community and leaves her surface repression. Yet, I have no doubt that in a sequel, Esmeralda and the community, would have reverted to their ways, with Esmeralda becoming other once again.

The crowded city must seem like hell on Earth to a Fundamentalist, a land of whoring, drinking, gambling and other copious acts existing on the same city block without respite. Richard Sennett asserts that, “The street bore the aggressive assertion…the street lacked those qualities of place, however, it did possess certain visual features which made it function well as an economic space.”² The daily struggle between three different superpowers: religion, corporation and state, shape the space around the city and the people inhabiting the space.

The two-dimensional nature of the characters in Edward Scissorhands is a direct reflection on our current society. Marketing plays a large force in our lives, so much so that we have generally become blind to it. Marketing has made an art of recording, analyzing and breaking down into groups (archetypes) the American population. The characters yearn for objects that are out of their reach: Mrs. Boggs wants a new kitchen and living room, the teenage couple wants a van, and the neighbors all want anything new and unique.

A great deal of the film’s time is spent on the life of women in the suburbs. All of the women in the film are depicted as stereotypical housewives with the typical focus on cooking, taking care of the house, talking on the phone with their friends, and general gossip. None of the women appear to have jobs, they are stay-at-home mothers or just lonely spinsters like Joyce Monroe who tempts plumbers for sex during the day. The aberration is Peg Boggs, the mother of the central family, who is an Avon Lady; yet this is not actually that far of a stretch from the life of the housewife. Peg goes door-to-door in the (surprisingly) tight-knit suburb hawking her products. The only time the women seem to gather in person is when something strange, new, or dangerous happens in the neighborhood. Then the calls go throughout the neighborhood and seemingly all of the suburban women condense en mass onto a chosen site to gossip and carry on. The social fabric of the community is woven through the neighborhood women.

In opposition to the focus on suburban women’s life, much of the men’s life is left to inference and educated guess. Two scenes deal with the lemming-like movement of the men to and from work. All of the neighborhood men leave for work and return at the same time, like a pillaging army going to and from their duty. Men, in general, are absent of much of the action in the film. When men are present, the usual reaction to any dialogue or action by the other characters, especially their family’s, is extreme detachment. Their life is lived on another plane, with the main focus being on the suburban measure “success”: personal wealth, goods and the ability to go on nice vacations or sporting events. When the Mr. Boggs is integrated with the other members of the family, his thoughts are still on the same issues: success, fame, and wealth. Kevin Boggs the father of the central family grills Edward in repeated scenes about how he will support himself, if he will get a job, and once a job opportunity arises, Kevin advises Edward in fiscal matters. Kevin is in his own world, aloof of the action in the neighborhood.

The American’s faith in technology to save or improve their lives is directly reflected by Burton’s view of the suburban life. From the very beginning the neighborhood was abuzz with the new visitor to their monotonous life. Once Edward’s “gift” was discovered, he was quickly transferred from a person, to a thing. His commodification was complete once Edward moved from trimming hedges to trimming dog’s hair to cutting women’s hair. Interestingly, it was only the bored housewives that lined up to have their dogs shorn and then themselves. In a short period of time Edward went from odd newcomer to eccentrically valued celebrity.
Paradoxically, in the race for the new and unique meme ³, the women of the neighborhood destroy the uniqueness of the objects of desire. After a short period of uniqueness, the neighborhood reaches equilibrium and mediocrity ensues, this time with sculpted topiaries, dogs with designer haircuts and women with weird haircuts. We can see this cycle today with cell phones that have 15-30 ring tones on them, “for customization.” Each cell phone owner customizes their phone, yet there is only a small data set to derive “uniqueness” from, and millions of other consumers (customers) have that same limited choice. So in the end, there is no real differentialization. Much like the paint color and car type in Edward Scissorhands, where there was a limited (4 colors) set of colors to choose from, and three car body types. In the era of Homo Marketus, choice and difference is an illusion to feed the masses.

Scissorhands deals with the pervasive “cult of personality” that permeates America. At the height of Edward’s so-called fame, Joyce Monroe tries unsuccessfully to seduce Edward, who she sees as the height of sexual manhood. Ironically she tries to find the most human of human desires and emotions in a being that is decidedly not human. Yet, as soon as Edward crossed the line of decency, his celebrity and stature in the community plummeted and he was torn down from the loft highs. Burton’s parody of the typical American reaction to fame and its increasing dependence on the lofty height that propel the “Cult of Personality” perpetrated by the constant need for the new hits home in an extreme fashion as the life of Edward and the Boggs family descend into a “Frankenstein” caricature with the ultimate resolution of death.

The decent to a “Frankenstein” mob at the end of Edward Scissorhands is very indicative of the current state of society. Americans are overworked, an average of 40 hours of work per week compared to 34.6 hours in England and 31.2 hours in Germany ⁴, and are over stimulated. Increasingly, they are becoming sheep out of sheer need to limit their information intake. Like in Scissorhands thoughts of the outside world do not permeate the suburbs, American Suburbanites have small circles of penetrability. Anything outside American Suburb or even region, much less outside the country, grab citizen’s attention unless the events are large enough to disrupt their lives. The decrease of the signal to noise ratio ⁵ in normal discourse has lead to increased lapse of oversight on the Stave and the Corporation, which feeds the cycle all over.

The dispersal of power seen in the 1950’s to the present is a direct effect of the corporation and the state aligning ever so much in order to preserve and sustain order. By enacting laws such as the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, the US Federal government attempted to achieve two major goals: the quick movement of armaments and men for maintaining order (state) and economic growth (corporation). With the advent of quick and easy transportation, the suburb was born as an economic entity from the corporation in conjunction with the state. Corporation and State were not expressly working glove in fist, but a loose network of alliances between Corporate Suburbia and the State emerged by way of marketing. This is advantageous to all: stability is the reason the State exists, while stability is an essential component of capitalism.

By the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the single most compelling argument for sub-urbanization comes from those with products to be sold. Prior to WWII, the idea of waste and planned obsolescence was abhorrent to the American public. In the 1930’s Sheldon and Arens had noted that many people were resistant to the economy of waste. “Scratch a consumer,” they wrote, “and you find an opponent of consumptionism and a fear of the workings of progressive obsolescence.” ⁶ However, after the war and families had money again, customer spending rose and the Americans were transformed into Consumers. Both customer and consumer have evolved definitions of, “A person who buys goods or services”. ⁷ The insidious nature of the change can be found in the root of consumer, consume – “to use (fuel, energy or time), esp. in large amounts.” ⁸ This transformation from use to consume parallels, and is tied by cause and effect, to the Federal Highway Act. Norman Bel Geddes ⁹ and others crafted and advocated brave new worlds where the car defined America and peddled these visions to the masses.
In Edward Scissorhands we can see the effect of consumerism and forced travel on the daily lives of the residents. Each house in the movie is a carbon copy of the adjacent house, which itself is a carbon copy of the archetypical American Dream: working husband, loving wife, two children, a dog, two-car garage all house in a ranch house. Each character is also n archetype, filling their two-dimensional roles as mother, father, sister, son, and family pet. Each character is developed only enough so that you can see just a tiny bit into their lives, the real revealment of self happens when the world comes tumbling down.

The interaction with authority in Scissorhands is also an interesting comment on the state of the suburbs. The only time we see police, is when something wrong is happening: a break in or a man with scissors for hands terrorizing a neighborhood. What was strange was the proximity of the 5-6 police cars that converged on the house that Edward broke into. In effect the African-American policeman was more in tune with Edward than any other person in the neighborhood. The policemen, an extension of the State, eventually helped Edward escape from the mob.

The other external power was the bank, when Edward applied for a loan. Edward had no identification, no Social Security Card, and no driver’s license. During the scene, in the background we see people loading stacks of money into the safe. The quintessential dream of monetary success is brought into the forefront of discussion and the dream is within reach, but taken away in a heartbeat. The State’s bureaucracy and its agent the bank, does not recognize anything outside the norm. The inflexibility of the State is in sharp contrast with the fluid form of Corporation.

Edward Scissorhands is the collection of fables and fairy tales not only from the collective history of man, but also from recent American experiences. The classic Frankenstein and Pinocchio story is contrasted with the distinctly American thrill of the new and the allure of progress with the paranoia of the other. This fear is bound in the history of the suburb and American history. The way America formed, from a small group of religious fundamentalists, to colonists, to revolutionaries, to city dweller, to suburban dweller all speak to why so many Americans live, and enjoy the suburb.

An intense need for housing for returning WWII veterans is the normal excuse for the start of the modern suburbs. Existing housing stocks were ample for the new families, especially in the East Coast, so this reason should be suspect. In reality it was more the combination of post-war exuberance and a well-marketed need that spawned the suburbs. People like William Levitt applied industrial processes to the commercial building market, thus revolutionizing the housing industry. With the dispersion of the masses away from highly central city, the State was effectively protected from any internal threat. With the diffusion of power (individual voters) throughout the country, the threat to the State of armed revolution decreased. ¹⁰ The space of the city corresponds to the amount of control that the State exerts upon it. An example is Washington D.C., the wide boulevards meant for a ceremonial procession, or an armored column. In D.C.’s case, a misapplied 17th Century view of space, “…a supreme irony that the plan forms originally conceived to magnify the glories of despotic kings and emperors came to be applied as a national symbol of a country whose philosophical basis was so firmly rooted in democratic equality” (Reps, 21) ¹¹ The correlation between the wide boulevards and the suburbs are unequal in scale but not in idea. The populous has achieved what Thomas Jefferson wished: a distributed, diffused country of landowners that would be administered. Yet the final goal of Jefferson, of a small government administering the distributed populace did not come true.

Augmenting the State is the Corporation, in terms of control and space. In the final review, the suburbs made the modern corporation and the modern corporation made the suburbs. Without the marketing arm of the Corporation, and the need for installation of conspicuous consumption, modern America would look very different with the resulting built space completely different. The suburb exists as a showcase of Corporate goods and services. These goods and services pacify the populace and through human nature of wanting safety, the suburb became a homogenous entity. This is the world of Edward Scissorhands, the world where the other breaks the normal, and then the normal returns as soon as the other disappears. Stability is both the greatest asset and the worst negative of the suburb; when the daily pattern and cycle is challenged, the suburbanites instinctively defend themselves, regardless if the other is more human or has a better proposition.

It is other, and we don’t care for your kind here.

1. In the sense of openness, I must divulge that I am Christian, a believer of the faith, but not of the religion.
2. Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone, 1996.
   Sennett is making the case that the street comes under different spheres of influence during different periods of time. Ceremony (religion), economy (corporation) and state control the street in different ways.
3. Meme is a sort of cultural/societal fad, yet ever evolving in a Darwinian way. Pronounced like “meem”. See Memetics, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976).
   “Memes are contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a kind of Darwinian selection. As memes evolve, they become better and better at distracting and diverting us from whatever we’d really like to be doing with our lives. They are a kind of Drug of the Mind” – meme central
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics ending 1999
5. “Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning. ‘Signal’ refers to useful information conveyed by some communications medium, and ‘noise’ to anything else on that medium. Hence a low ratio implies that it is not worth paying attention to the medium in question.” jargon file
6. Sheldon, R. and E. Arens (1932) Consumer engineering: A New Technique for Prosperity, New York: Harper and Brothers.
   Sheldon and Arens are the first to employ the phrase “Consumer Engineering” in a means to reach the consumer.
7. Cambridge Dictionary, 2002
8. Cambridge Dictionary, 2002
9. See Futurerama – Magic Motorways General Motor’s Pavilion, New York World’s Fair (1939) and You and Tomorrow’s Roads, Esso Standard Oil Company (1958) – for propaganda of the time from two companies with the most to gain from vast suburbanization and the accompianied driving and infrastructure neccessitated by it.
10. This country has a history of riots spontaneously occurring in urban centers. During the pre-Civil War years there were numerous riots, in New York City alone there were seven riots from the 1765 Stamp-Act Riot to the 1863 New York Draft Riots. Even through the early 20th Century, there were large labor strikes that became violent.
11. John W. Reps, Monumental Washington, 1967, 21