UNDER SIEGE: THE DISCURSIVE PRODUCTION OF EMBATTLED SUBURBS AND EMPOWERED SUBURBANITES IN AMERICA, 1976-1992

by Kyle Riismandel

Bachelor of Arts, History, The College of New Jersey, 2000 Master of Arts, American Studies, Pennsylvania State University Harrisburg, 2002

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 16, 2010

Dissertation directed by

Chad Heap Associate Professor of American Studies

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Kyle Riismandel has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy as of December 10, 2009. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Under Siege: The Discursive Production of Embattled Suburbs and Empowered

Suburbanites in America, 1976-1992

Kyle Riismandel

Dissertation Research Committee:

Chad Heap, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation Director

Melani McAlister, Associate Professor American Studies and International

Affairs, Committee Member

Suleiman Osman, Assistant Professor of American Studies, Committee

Member

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© Copyright 2010 by Kyle Riismandel All rights reserved

iii Dedication

The author wishes to dedicate this dissertation to his family: Mom, Dad, Paul, Ellen,

Robert Beers, Ruth Beers, V. John Riismandel, Elli Riismandel, Sally, and Lucy.

iv Acknowledgments

I must first thank my advisor and dissertation director, Chad Heap. Chad‘s keen eye and unflinching standards have helped this dissertation immeasurably. It would surely be less without his input. I would also like to thank committee members Melani McAlister and Suleiman Osman. Melani has been with this project from the beginning, even when it was about many other things. Her agile mind helped pare it down and find the most important, and often most fun, things to write about. Suleiman arrived at GW at just the right time for me. He was hired to teach urban studies as I began in earnest to write my suburban studies dissertation. I was able to call upon his expertise frequently while his cool demeanor and good advice reassured me when I needed it most.

The outside readers at my defense, Libby Anker and Laura Schiavo, provided an invaluable service to the dissertation. I thank them for bringing fresh eyes and new perspectives that helped me rewrite with renewed focus while thinking about new and provocative questions.

The American Studies department at George Washington University funded my graduate study and provided a stimulating intellectual and social community. For those things, I will be eternally grateful. I particularly want to thank Terry Murphy for her support and guidance despite the fact that me and my work had no business being on her radar.

I also would not have finished this dissertation without the faculty and staff of Penn

State Harrisburg where I completed my Master‘s degree. Without their support and encouragement, I would never have gotten into the GW PhD program. In particular, I

v would like to thank Simon Bronner. Not only is he an American Studies legend but he is a fantastic guy. He fought to get me funding to complete my M.A., wrote recommendations, and generally did whatever he could to help. I will always be grateful to him. I would also like to thank my Master‘s thesis advisor, Jessica Dorman. During my time at Penn State

Harrisburg, she became a great friend and supporter long after we had both left Harrisburg.

I have to give thanks for the resources provided by the libraries I frequently visited—both in person and via the internet. Beyond its holdings, the Gelman Library at

GW gave me access to thousands of periodicals whose articles appear frequently in this dissertation. The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library came through when many other repositories did not getting me many texts right when I needed them. I also have a special thanks to the Columbia University Library for having the only copy of the book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, onsite. It let me answer Chad about whether the book really helped us understand the movie. I must also thank the internet. Without

Amazon.com, Ebay, and message boards, I may have missed out on many hard to acquire sources forgotten by time.

The actual writing of this dissertation would never have been completed without the love, support, critiques, and encouragement of my writing group. The Brain Trust, no less powerful than FDR‘s, got me from page one to a finished dissertation—no easy feat.

Besides introducing me to my wife and being an excellent cook, Laurel Clark brought a fresh perspective to my dissertation. As a 19th century historian, she asked penetrating and often unexpected questions that helped me write across disciplinary and temporal barriers.

Laura Cook Kenna, in addition to initiating the ritual of homemade baked goods at each of our meetings, always found a way to make my ideas more interesting, complex, and

vi relevant often pulling out the essential good idea hidden by unnecessary verbiage. Julie

Passanante Elman, besides feeding the group like an Italian grandma, remained an enthusiastic supporter riding the ups and downs of the process right alongside me. She managed to always see the best in my work, and her thoughtful comments helped me stretch beyond what I thought I was capable of. Stephanie Ricker Schulte was my first friend at GW. She and her husband Bret incorporated me into their well-established social circle despite all indications that it would be a bad idea helping me find friendships that last to this day. Beyond that, Steph imposed her clarity of thinking and writing onto my work with a ruthless kindness that sharpened both the ideas and writing in this dissertation.

These ladies are all special, smart people whose names you will already know by the time you read this.

I also found other great, smart friends during my time at GW. Jeremy Hill,

Cameron Logan, Kevin Strait, and Dave Kieran, as well as their significant others, made afternoon drinking, intramural sports, house parties, and, yes, even moving, fun. They are smart, funny, and loyal friends. Getting to know them was one of the best things to happen to me at GW.

When it comes to my family, there is nothing I can put on paper that will adequately thank them for all they have done. All I hope is that they know how much I appreciate their kindness and encouragement through easy and tough times.

Though my Grandma and Grandpa Beers were far away for most of this process, they always supported any way they could. A card, a check, and just an encouraging word on the phone reminded me that they were they if I needed them and that I had no bigger fans.

vii For most of my time at GW, my Grandparents Riismandel lived about a mile away from me. It was a great pleasure to see them so frequently. Each time I would visit, we would have a delicious home-cooked meal or maybe even some Chinese takeout. Through this entire experience, they helped me out in any way they could. Their emotional and financial support was crucial in helping me finish graduate school.

My parents did everything short of press the keys to help me get done. Whenever I visited home, they provided a respite from my troubles—comfort food, laundry facilities, practical advice, and even just a friendly ear. Whenever I needed something, they jumped to provide it. They are my biggest fans who promised to love me whether I finished this dissertation or not. Words are inadequate for the task of saying thanks for all they have done, but it‘s the best I can do to say thanks and I love you.

My brother Paul and sister-in-law Ellen are also a great blessing in my life. They not only gave good advice, but provided many hilarious birthday and xmas gifts that raised my spirits. I hope now that I am done I will get to visit them more often and laugh even more.

Lastly, I want to thank my wife Sally and our dog Lucy. I met Sally just as I began to work in earnest on this dissertation. It is no coincidence that I was more productive after

I met her. She was unyieldingly positive about me and my work. Though she was writing professionally, Sally stayed up late to read every page and comment with an eye toward clarity that made every sentence better. Beyond being a fantastic editor, she supported our family while I completed the dissertation keeping a roof over our heads and food on our table. Lucy, though she did no editing and provided no income, helped keep me sane. Her walk followed by play time every day inevitably brought a smile to my face and reminded

viii me how much fun it was to get up from my desk. Over the past five years, she and Lucy have become the backbone of my life. I don‘t know what it would be like without them and I hope I never do. Thanks, and I love you both dearly. (ps--Sal, please read this out loud for The Goose.)

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Abstract of Dissertation

Under Siege: The Discursive Production of

Embattled Suburbs and Empowered Suburbanites

in America, 1976-1992

My dissertation details a new era of American suburban life marked by endangerment, defense, and empowerment. In the period from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, real events, news media narratives, and popular culture representations associated suburban life and space with endemic hazards eclipsing previous notions of suburban safety and security. In doing so, it proposes a new periodization of postwar suburban history. The first era encompasses the suburb of the 1950s and 60s magazines and sitcoms associated with consumerism and conformity. The second is the era of productive victimization detailed in this dissertation.

In that era, I argue environmental hazards, violent crime, transgressive teens in public space, and explicit, even Satanic, popular culture superseded older, more explicitly political suburban threats such as taxation and racial integration. These emerging threats not only changed the central connotations of suburban life but also enabled suburbanites to increase their local regulatory power. Whether more closely regulating the use of public land through Nimby protests or more strictly vetting the popular culture products that came in the front door of their homes, suburbanites mobilized their presumed victimization to protect and expand their local power and privilege.

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To make this argument, I analyze of a wide range of texts, practices, and real events to demonstrate the complex ways in which they produced American suburbs and facilitated new practices. For example, popular texts like 1979 film The China Syndrome are analyzed alongside the real accident at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, its news media coverage, and the actions of suburban Nimbys protesting plants in their neighborhood to show how they worked together to associate suburbs with new, legitimate threats encouraging defensive actions that facilitated expansions of suburbanites‘ regulatory power.

My dissertation, then, upsets the notion of a fixed suburban identity in the second half of the 20th century. It suggests, instead, the American suburb was a an historically contingent category of knowledge and space fully imbricated in the increasingly media saturated world of postwar America.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iiv

Acknowledgments ...... v

Abstract of Dissertation ...... x

Table of Contents ...... xi

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Nimbys, Nuclear Power, and Toxic Waste: Environmental

Hazard and the Defense of Suburban Privilege ...... 27

Chapter 2: "Fear Stalks the Streets": Crime, Home Security, and the

Making of the Carceral Suburb ...... 81

Chapter 3: Punks, Mallrats, and Out-of-Control Teenagers: The Production and Regulation of Suburban Public Space ...... 121

Chapter 4: Parental Advisory--Explicit Content: Popular Occulture and

(Re)Possessing the Suburban Home ...... 170

Conclusion ...... 220

Bibliography ...... 230

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Introduction

Starting in the mid-1970s, representations, narratives, events, and practices began to shift both the associations and experiences of American suburban life. Threats, both quotidian and extraordinary, superseded the largely bucolic connotations that had defined the postwar American suburb introducing a new era of homegrown, suburban endangerment. New hazards undermined the central tenets of postwar suburban life as safe, clean, and family-friendly, endangering all aspects of that life—public and private, physical and moral. Real tragedies such as the discovery of toxic waste beneath the community of Love Canal, New York in 1979 or the kidnapping and murder of Adam

Walsh in Hollywood, Florida in 1981 made manifest new hazards. Newspapers and magazines detailed those real calamities while suggesting new threats came in epidemic proportions. A wide range of popular culture texts, from 1979 film The China Syndrome to

Don DeLillo‘s 1985 novel White Noise to hardcore suburban punk rock, enhanced and extended these dangers by elaborating threats and amplifying fears in their images and narratives.1 Emerging in the same historical moment, these events, narratives, and representations worked to shift the central associations of suburban life by portraying its spaces and populations as under siege from environmental hazards, violent crime, unruly teens, and morally questionable rock music.

Yet, it was not simply that suburban life emerged as endemically hazardous during this period. Suburbanites altered their practices and routines to protect against these new threats. Through these maneuvers, suburbanites moved to not only protect their hard-won

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privilege and safety but to expand their power through this productive victimization.2 By mobilizing the apparently legitimate endangerment of home and family as produced by co- constitutive real events and media and popular culture representations, they attempted to expand their local sovereignty by shaping the landscape and regulating the movements of people and products within it. In the case of each new threat, suburbanites developed practices and behaviors which sought to mitigate particular hazards while also granting them greater regulatory power over their families, homes, and neighborhoods.

For example, the real environmental threats from the toxic waste dumps at Love

Canal and the near meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979 combined with their narrativization in news media and enhancement and expansion by popular culture representations of toxic danger to spur 1980s suburban homeowners to adopt a new, local, privatist ethic captured in the phrase Not In My Back Yard (Nimby).3 Suburbanites used Nimby to protect the local environment from a seemingly dangerous project while also exert control over the shape of the landscape not otherwise easily accessible to them.

Moreover, they did not use Nimby to defeat nuclear power or pursue a larger political goal.

It was an exhortation of parochial privilege and privatism made possible by legitimate

1 The China Syndrome, directed by James Bridges, Columbia Pictures, 1979; and Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). 2 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 3. Elaine Tyler May was the first to identify this security impulse in suburban life and argue that the suburban home, during the Cold War, held ―the promise of security in an insecure world.‖ May‘s linking of suburban life to this security imperative is an enormously powerful argument that ties the middle class, suburban home to notions of security and safety in a threatening world. 3 Environmental historian Adam Rome has argued suburbia was home to some environmental danger in the period before 1970 due in large part to its rapid expansion. He argues septic tanks and cutting-edge fertilizers silently endangered plants and water helping to support the nascent environmental movement. Despite, the presence of these hazards, environmental threats were not predominantly associated with the suburban landscape. Suburbs still stood in contrast to dirty cities home to industrial pollution. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2

home and neighborhood threat.4 This disruption of the use of space for both corporate and public interests did have political repercussions as the process often shifted more controversial projects to less politically powerful areas.5 Yet, during the 1980s, this deployment of productive victimization was emblematic of both the sense of new, real threats to suburban populations and their ability to use it to express local autonomy.

Still, unlike the other instances of threat and productive victimization, the possibility of criminal victimization proved less powerful. Most of the practices and measures instituted by suburbanites to stop criminals, such as installing home security systems or teaching children safer routes home from school, were defensive. Suburbanties prepared to be victimized but did not find affirmative ways of controlling their local environment. Home security systems provided a sense of safety but also a corresponding sense of fear. The mere act of arming the system reminded the family of their precarious situation. And, once safely ensconced inside the home, the alarm system essentially incarcerated the family. These defensive measures created what I am calling the carceral suburb, a label that connotes the further recession of suburban families into their homes in an attempt to safeguard themselves and that space from pervasive crime outside. The production of the carceral suburb not only valorized the sacred space of the home but also buttressed the sense of danger on suburban streets and the inability to prevent it.

4 William Safire, ―On Language: Happy Soft Landings,‖ New York Times, December 24, 1989. According to this ―On Language‖ column, acronyms such as Nimby that are longer than three letters do not get capitalized besides the first letter. For clarity, I will follow this convention throughout the dissertation though Nimby appears in many incarnations throughout the historical literature. 5 Critics, of course, did exist. The nascent environmental justice movement picked up on Nimbyism as the symbol of middle class irresponsibility especially as Nimbys became more successful at stopping projects. However, it would not be until the end of the 1980s that critiques would go mainstream as Nimbyism failed to be seen as a justifiable political claim. 3

Popular culture mitigated the sense of powerlessness produced by criminal threats and security practices in the form of 1980s crimestopper show America‟s Most Wanted and suburban iterations of the vigilante genre.6 Hosted by John Walsh, the father of suburban crime victim Adam Walsh, America‟s Most Wanted asked its audience to perform limited but proactive tasks to help catch criminals. In so doing, it tried to provide the satisfaction of actively pursuing criminals rather than waiting for them to strike—even though the audience was, at best, phoning the toll free tipline or simply watching each week and then peering out of their windows. Death Wish II and Sudden Impact, both set in suburban locales, nursed more explicit fantasies of active suburban defense. They imagined a simple vigilante justice that pursued criminals rather than waiting for them to strike and certainly did not rely on police or politicians for help.7 These productions highlighted suburbanites‘ lack of power to combat crime by mobilizing their presumed victimization not to expand their influence but to consume television and movies that imagined an active pursuit of criminals.

The emergence of new hazards and defenses had three important consequences.

First, from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, suburbs—long associated with safety and security—were increasingly associated with endemic hazards. Second, the production of those hazards necessitated a strong defense, providing suburbanites with an opportunity to expand their local regulatory power through their productive victimization. Their defensive measures did not simply combat threats but allowed them the opportunity to shape the landscape and tenor of suburban life in ways they might not have without calling upon new

6 America‟s Most Wanted, host John Walsh, Fox Television, 1988-Present. 4

threats. Their responses, too, also worked to produce the sense of constant threats to suburban life and the importance of suburbanites‘ power to defend themselves. Third, the emergence of this reproductive system of legitimate hazard and productive victimization marked a new period of suburban history. By upsetting this notion of a long, uninterrupted era of largely static suburban life, this dissertation proposes a new periodization. The era of conformity and consumerism dissipated in the mid-1970s overshadowed by the period of productive victimization discussed in this dissertation. Though the expansion of their power was uneven, as the responses to criminal threats demonstrated, the production of new, endemic suburban hazards shifted the central associations of American suburbs, often paved the way for the expression of suburbanites‘ parochial power, and reoriented the narrative of postwar American suburban history.

Before this period of suburban history marked by productive victimization, ideas of the suburban—produced in popular culture, news media, popular academic studies, and even the events of everyday life—largely revolved around the problems of postwar abundance and the relationships between members of the nuclear family. Historians of this period have persuasively argued that, despite evidence suggesting everyday life was more complex, American suburbs were discursively produced as white, middle-class havens with pervasive social and architectural conformity and marked by competitive consumerism and cultural bankruptcy.8 On television, perfect sitcom families went through petty trials and

7 Death Wish II, directed by Michael Winner, perf. Charles Bronson, Cannon Films and Golan- Globus Productions, 1982; and Sudden Impact, directed by Clint Eastwood, Warner Brothers Pictures, 1983. 8 Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen. Picture Windows: How The Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Scott Donaldson, The Suburban Myth (Lincoln: iUniverse, 1996) originally published in 1969; Kenneth T. Jackson Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 281-82; Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: 5

tribulations while actual home buyers made perfunctory choices to ―personalize‖ their prefabricated homes.9 Though the vision of a clean and safe suburb may not always have represented life on the ground, it was active, dominant, and served as the last vestige of social and cultural consensus forged in the postwar era.10

Yet, even as suburban life seemed inextricably anchored to a placid vision of consensus and conformity, some cracks in this harmony emerged. As Lynn Spigel has argued, television shows and magazines suggested tensions over sexuality and gender relations in the home and possible avenues to empowerment that would have resonated with large audiences of suburban housewives.11 Beyond these suggestions on television, in the fifties and sixties, sociologists Bennett M. Berger, William Dobriner, Herbert Gans, and

William Whyte explored suburban life in popular academic studies. They found that while suburbs had their problems with competitive and conspicuous consumption, excessive neighboring, and indulgent parenting and spoiling of children, they were not nearly as homogenous or hollow as some critics contended.12 They found suburbia‘s residents largely satisfied with their communities. Writers and filmmakers, too, highlighted some of the critiques that public intellectuals like Berger, Dobriner, Gans, and Whyte were

African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Wiese explores the marginalized images of black suburbanization in the postwar period in Chapter 6, ―‗The House I Live In‘ Race, Class, and Suburban Dreams in the Postwar Period,‖ pp. 143-154. 9 Some archetypal examples of the suburban sitcom: My Three Sons, 1960-1972, ABC and CBS; Father Knows Best, 1954-55 and 1958-60, CBS, and NBC, 1956-57; Leave it to Beaver, 1957-58, CBS and 1959-63, ABC; The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, ABC, 1952-1966; The Brady Bunch, ABC, 1969-1974; and Baxandall and Ewen, 137. 10 May, 208-209. May argues that the suburban family ideal was key to a powerful political consensus valorizing domestic and foreign containment. 11 Spigel, 119-127. 12 Bennett M. Berger, Working Class Suburb: A Study of Auto Workers in Suburbia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); William Dobriner, The Suburban Community (New York: Putnam, 1958); Herbert Gans, The Levittowners (New York: Pantheon, 1967); and William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday Books, 1956). 6

combating.13 John Keats‘s 1957 novel The Crack in the Picture Window and Eric

Hodgins‘s 1946 book Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, which RKO Pictures filmed in 1948, unabashedly condemned bland suburban life by lampooning the crass consumerism of the middle class.14 John Cheever‘s short stories also suggested something amiss with suburban life by highlighting the ennui-inducing emptiness of a safe, middle- class existence.15 Though suburbia was sometimes shown as more complex in these texts, academics, artists, and journalists still were responding to the conformist, vanilla suburb.

After the discursive dominance of the placid, family-friendly suburb, the emergence of endemic suburban hazards and the responses to them was neither spontaneous nor inevitable. Rather, starting in the mid-1970s, social, political and cultural developments facilitated these threats and their reproduction in American culture.

At the most practical level, suburban areas (as defined by the federal government) saw explosive growth through the 1990s, and by 2000 eclipsed the combined populations of rural and urban areas.16 With that growth came the problems and conflicts of larger, more diverse populations such as crime and environmental hazard. Suburbs grew and

13 Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 2003) 148-151. Hayden argues that critiques of suburbia in popular culture texts tended to be about conspicuous consumption and homogeneity. 14 John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Window (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1957); Eric Hodgins, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946) and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, directed by H.C. Potter, RKO Radio Pictures, 1948. See also Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955); and Jean Kerr, Please Don‟t Eat the Daisies (New York: Doubleday, 1957). 15 ―The Wrysons‖ and ―The Swimmer,‖ in John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Vintage International, 2000). 16 Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Special Reports, Series CENSR-4, ―Demographic Trends in the 20th Century,‖ U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2002 http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf (accessed 9-22-09), 1, 8. In the study, suburban is defined as the metropolitan population living outside central cities; and Hayden, 10. Hayden claims, ―By 1970, more Americans lived in suburbs than in either central cities or rural areas. By 2000, more Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities and rural combined.‖ 7

sprawled further into rural areas, bringing with them the infrastructure needed to support large, diffuse populations. Roads, office parks, power plants, garbage dumps, and the like popped up more frequently on the landscape, bringing the suburbanites of the seventies and eighties closer to environmental maladies that were once remote. This period also saw the explosion of consumer electronics and media with the suburban home being the prime venue for new and various forms of popular culture delivery. Video cassette recorders

(VCRs), cable and satellite television, audio cassettes and compact discs became mainstays of home entertainment helping bring a larger amount of products came in the front door and over the air.17 These innovations increased the prominence of media in daily life making film, television, and music increasingly important sites of cultural negotiation.

They also brought into the home more content than any parent could properly vet helping facilitate the backlash against explicit popular culture that was supposedly endangering young, suburban consumers.

At the level of national politics and culture, historians have argued the mid-1970s were understood as a moment of national decline. The country suffered from crippling economic stagflation as well as rising oil prices leading and fuel shortages. In foreign policy, the nation suffered a humiliating dénouement in Vietnam while Cold War aggression was tamped down in the spirit of détente. At home, families were increasingly

17 William P. Putsis, Jr., ―Product Diffusion, Product Differentiation, and the Timing of New Product Introduction. The Television and VCR Market, 1964-85,‖ Managerial Decisions and Economics Vol. 10, No. 1 (March 1989): 38. Introduced in 1975, VCRs were in 40% of households by 1987 while color televisions were in 92% of households.; Thomas R. Eisenmann, ―The U.S. Cable Television Industry, 1948-1995: Managerial Capitalism in Eclipse,‖ Business History Review Vol. 74, No. 1 (Spring, 2000): 19; and Austan Goolsbee and Amil Petrin, ―The Consumer Gains from Direct Broadcast Satellites and the Competition with Cable TV,‖ Econometrica Vol. 72, No. 2 (Mar., 2004): 351, 355. Eisenmann states that 59.5 percent of homes subscribed to cable television while Goolsbee and Petrin claim that by 2004, 70% of households subscribed to cable television with satellite television becoming increasingly competitive each year. 8

torn apart by divorce as the nuclear family became less and less common.18 Historian of the American family Natasha Zaretsky argues these crises ―challenged the exceptionalism at the center of American identity—the idea that the United States did not lose wars, its natural resources were boundless, its leaders wise and secure, and its economy capable of infinite expansion.‖19 President Jimmy Carter summed up this sense of decline in a televised address. He argued that America‘s problems were more than fuel shortages or economic recession but a ―crisis of confidence‖ that threatened American‘s faith in the future.20

The mid-1970s presented a moment of profound anxiety even for the privileged middle class denizens of American suburbs. While subject to the larger forces contributing to a sense of national decline, racial minorities and an indifferent federal government appeared to threaten suburbanites‘ sovereignty and privilege. In one example, historian

Robert Self persuasively argues that California suburbanites opposed racial integration and exhibited suburban privilege by protesting taxation of their property and redistribution of those funds to the crumbling inner-city of Oakland.21 According to Self, these suburbanites crafted a narrative of victimization that belied the great power they held, in which government and inner-city minorities attempted to deprive them of the benefits of suburban living, including home ownership and local sovereignty.22 Historian Matthew Lassiter, too, asserts that a suburban culture of political exclusion emerged around race and civil rights

18 Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 11. 19 Zaretsky, 2. 20 Jimmy Carter, ―Crisis of Confidence Speech,‖ American Experience, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html (accessed 3-22-10). 21 Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 9

that attempted to exempt suburban areas from collective responsibility and encouraged a privatist ethic.23 In the midst of battles over busing, taxation, school control, and racial integration, suburbanites imagined themselves as aggrieved and sought to combat their victimization through locally directed actions to protect their power and privilege.

Building upon that local, privatist (non) politics forged in the sixties and seventies, suburbanites extended and elaborated their local sovereignty through the early 1990s in response to a number of hazards that were less explicitly political than earlier skirmishes over education, race, and taxation. For example, suburban parents, spurred by teachers and academic experts, moved to protect their homes and children from popular culture products like heavy metal albums and fantasy role-playing games (RPG) like Dungeons & Dragons that supposedly promoted occult worship, suicide, murder, and substance abuse. Rather than organize a boycott or seek legislation to outlaw these ―hazardous‖ popular culture products, concerned parents and the organizations they created, such as the Parents Music

Resource Council (PMRC), worked to educate individual parents about the supposed links between popular culture products and teen suicide , substance abuse, and occult worship.

These concerned parents and culture critics provided suburbanites a new moral rationale to regulate their homes and children more closely and urged them to act locally in parenting guides, educational videos, numerous media appearances, and on telephone hotlines.24

Moreover, these tactics were particularly suburban as they focused on empowering

22 Self, 256-90. 23 Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 2. 24 Parental guides included Tipper Gore, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987); Pat Pulling with Kathy Cawton, The Devil‟s Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children for Satan? (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1989); and Rising to the Challenge, Parents Music Resource Council, Video Visions, 1988, 2nd edition. 10

individual parents to police popular culture to not only protect children but expand their influence over homes and popular culture more broadly.25 In this example and others, with their homes, families, and local sovereignty endangered on multiple fronts, suburbanites relied on a legacy of locally-directed, privatist defenses to consolidate regulatory power over their local spaces and ensure that power remained.

These emergent local suburban politics resonated with and were undergirded by ascendant conservative values championed at the national level by Ronald Reagan and his administration. Through the 1980s, Republican politicians and other culture critics, especially those of the Christian Right, valorized home and family while admonishing artists and distributors of supposedly objectionable content helping provide suburbanites with legitimate grounds for an active defense against it. For example, President Reagan commissioned the Attorney General‘s Commission on Pornography. In 1986, the commission published its final report. In it, the commission condemned the amount and types of pornography available while recommending citizens protest the sale and distribution within their full Constitutional rights.26 In this instance and others, the Reagan administration and culture critics made it palatable to attack mass culture and use the sanctity of the family, particularly the innocence of children, as a rationale.

25 According to Marjorie Heins, culture critics and concerned parents were stepping into the void created by Reagan-era deregulation and hands-off approach to media. She claims the Federal Communications Commission did not find one violation of the indecency standard between 1978 and 1987. Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth ( New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 109. 26Attorney General‘s Commission on Pornography, ―Part 3: Law Enforcement Recommendations Chapter 2: Recommendations for the Justice System and Law Enforcement Agencies,‖ Attorney General‟s Commission on Pornography Final Report, July 1986, http://www.porn-report.com/302-pornography-justice- system-recommendations.htm (accessed 3-20-10); and Attorney General‘s Commission on Pornography, ―Part 2 Overview and Analysis of Commission‘s Findings Chapter 8: The Role of Private Action,‖ Attorney General‟s Commission on Pornography Final Report, July 1986, http://www.porn-report.com/208-private- action.htm (accessed 3-20-10). 11

The Reagan administration also created a national political climate which empowered people at the local level. By emphasizing the primacy of privatism and localism in American life, they combined a sense of cultural aggrievement with a sense of spatial empowerment. In his first campaign for the Republican nomination for president in

1976, his slogan was ―Let the People Rule.‖ Elaborating on this theme later, Reagan said,

―The states and local communities have been demeaned into little more than administrative districts, bureaucratic subdivisions of Big Brother government in Washington.‖27 This perspective, successfully emphasized by the Republican party in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections, encouraged individuals to see themselves as sovereign, autonomous actors on the American landscape unencumbered by government or the rights of minorities.

The 1980 Republican platform called for ―Secure and Prosperous Neighborhoods‖ as part of restoring ―the family, the neighborhood, the community, and the workplace as vital alternatives in our national life to ever-expanding federal power.‖28 These were the governing assumptions and values of the Reagan coalition as they swept into office in

1980. They had a salutary effect on suburbanites feeling under siege from a number of new threats. The promotion of localism created an environment that supported the righteousness of local sovereignty and the legitimacy of parochial power and privilege.

Toxic waste, prowling criminals, rowdy teenagers, and Satanic rock music were not to circumscribe suburban agency in the 1980s. Suburbanites‘ power to govern their

27 Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (New York: Random House, 2001), 455. 28 John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, ―The American Presidency Project: Republican Party Platform of 1980 (adopted July 15, 1980)‖ Santa Barbara, CA: University of California Santa Barbara, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25844 (accessed 2-1-2010). 12

neighborhoods deserved to be embellished according to the ascendant politics of the 1970s and 80s.29

As part of the historical era detailed above, this dissertation approaches the suburb as a constructed category of meaning and a discursively produced space. It seeks to find how the American suburb was produced, understood, trafficked, and reproduced in culture and practice.30

To this end, I examine the many ways in which suburban life and space was articulated through the complex interactions between news media, popular culture representations, real events, and everyday practices to produce a new idea of the suburb as hazardous. I examine media and popular culture closely because, as Christina Klein in her study of Cold War Orientalism in American culture argues, ―The realm of culture, far from being wholly separate from the realm of politics, offers a privileged space in which politically salient meanings can be constructed and questioned, where social categories can defined and limited, where shared values can be affirmed and contested.‖31 Films, television shows, novels, songs and other pieces of mass culture negotiated the category and space of the suburb in an increasingly large number of media outlets. Yet, these texts

This was largely included as a rebuttal to the perceived failures of Carter‘s urban policy and to court white, urban ethnic voters. However, this policy trajectory and rhetorical emphasis also had the effect of further empowering suburbanites‘ sense of local power. 29 Suleiman Osman, ―The Decade of the Neighborhood,‖ in Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 106-127. Osman argues that the 1970s were the decade of the neighborhood when local place and community were emphasized as the building blocks of American life and the key to urban renewal. 30 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse of Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 28. This idea follows from Foucault who argued that ―we must grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes.‖ 31 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7. 13

were not direct representations of public opinion. Instead, as Lynn Spigel argues they form

―an intertextual context—a group of interconnected texts—through which people might have made sense of television and its place in everyday life.‖32 I analyze these texts and their co-constitutive relationships to discover how Americans made sense of suburban life and space.

However, the negotiated, contingent meanings of American suburbs did not come from popular culture and media alone. In this dissertation, practices and events are also interpreted as (re)producers of the associations of American suburbs.33 Read alongside other texts, practices and events can be analyzed for their content and roles in discourse to help creating meaning. Murray Forman, in his book The „Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Hip-Hop, undertakes a similar task. Using the music and practices of rap and hip-hop, Forman examines how artists and fans produced and organized urban space upsetting and, in some cases, reinforcing established modes of domination and subordination.34 This is a useful insight for this dissertation as representations of suburban life in popular culture and media along with the actions of suburbanites themselves structured and made meaningful the American suburb.35 This approach also helps examine how representations and practice can work together to create spaces of power, resistance, and privilege. In this case, suburbanites mobilized cultural representations to protect and

32 Spigel, 2. 33 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 5. 34 Murray Forman, The „Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Hip-Hop (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 35 Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 64; and Michael Shapiro, ―Moral Geographies and the Ethics of Post-Sovereignty," Public Culture 6: 479-502. 14

extend their authority over local spaces and, in doing so within that historical moment, further branded themselves as powerful.36

This study, then, is not a search for the ―real‖ or ―true‖ suburb of the past or an inquiry about a conspiracy to protect suburban privilege but an investigation of its shifting meanings and uses as articulated in a historically specific discursive field of events and representations.37 This approach relies on Melani McAlister‘s analysis of the workings of discourse in her book Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle

East, 1945-2000. She argues, ―what we examine here is not a conspiracy, nor a functionalist set of representations in the service of power, but a process of convergence, in which historical events, overlapping representations, and diverse vested interests come together in a powerful and productive, if historically contingent accord.‖38 My study seeks

36 Yet, this dissertation differs from Forman and another scholar of hip-hop and urban space, Tricia Rose, because it is largely concerned with texts not created by those mobilizing them to claim or alter spaces. Both Forman and Rose demonstrate how rap and hip-hop culture were used to reclaim spaces and create politics of place and race. Suburbanites, though similarly astute in using narratives and representations to create spaces of power, most often did not create the texts or events that facilitated both their endangerment and their empowerment due in no small part to the fact that the broader culture already privileged them in numerous ways that producers and followers of hip-hop were not. Still, these works have powerfully informed how I have accounted for the production of power in particular places and among specific populations. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 37 My approach is in contrast to the broader, essentialist approach of scholars who have sought to identify the basic characteristics of postwar American suburbs while emphasizing change in grand sweeps such as an area moving from being understood as a suburb to a new designation like edge city, technoburb, or some other new formation. Kenneth T. Jackson exemplifies the essentialist approach in his seminal study of postwar suburban growth in the United States, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America. He argues there were essential characteristics of postwar American suburbs as delineated by the legal and governmental entities that facilitated the growth of postwar American suburbs. He posits that suburbs were non-farming residential areas with middle- and upper-class homeowners, a daily commute to work, and relatively low population density. Kenneth T. Jackson Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 281-82; Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), x and Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1992); and William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, ―Bold New City or Built-Up ‗Burb,‖ American Quarterly Vol. 46 No. 1 (March 1994), 1-30. 38 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945- 2000, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 8. 15

to use this idea to find how and why new ideas about suburban life and space emerged and how they became naturalized through texts and practices that overlapped, revised, and reinforced one another. In choosing this approach, I hope to demonstrate how the threats from environmental contamination, violent crime, disruptive teen behavior in public, and moral degradation in popular culture seemed not only likely but intrinsic parts of suburban life that facilitated the protection and even extension of power and privilege.

As a discursive study of the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, I have attempted, in the best ways allowed by available source material, for the proliferation of popular culture and news products in a wide variety of media venues. The large amount of evidence and sources has meant that it is nearly impossible to account for each incident or representation that may have been relevant to this study. Instead, I consulted many sources, both niche and popular, in the most prominent venues and forms—newspapers, magazines, films, television, novels, fiction and non-fiction books—in the ongoing negotiations of the meanings of suburban life. Popular news media, in particular, comprise a significant amount of evidence throughout the dissertation. Though not without biases and political prerogatives, the narratives in newspapers and magazines provide an account of the events of the day as well as forums for the prevailing thoughts of the day.39 I do not use news media to establish the truth of my claims, but mobilize them as a significant piece of the discourses forming the suburbs. In total, the texts chosen were the dominant sites in

39 Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 1-2. In the introduction to her book, Lisa Duggan argues strongly that the daily newspaper is neither objective nor arbitrarily organized. Yet, they have the power, within the particular structures of the medium and the choices of its creators, to shape public perceptions about their world. 16

which people making sense of suburban life and out of which broad and deep national narratives were carved.40

Though much of the evidence addressed in this dissertation comes from national media and popular culture, some is aimed at smaller, niche audiences. They are included to demonstrate the ways in which new associations of suburban life were becoming more pervasive and presented to specialized audiences. For example, I examine hardcore punk music and zines from southern California that had limited distribution and audiences because they provided a crucial opportunity to see suburban teens representing themselves and their local suburban ―scenes‖ as marked by violence and confrontation in much the same ways the national news media depicted the culture of suburban hardcore. Further, when read alongside popular entertainments like films Over the Edge (1979) and Fast

Times at Ridgemont High (1981) as well as new regulations of teens in public places like the shopping mall, it becomes clear material aimed at diverse audiences trafficked in the same images and ideas of suburban life demonstrating the pervasiveness of these concepts.41

I include real events based not only on their relevance to the topic of suburban life but their reverberations in culture. In each chapter, there are real events which precipitated both media representations and actions by suburbanites. The kidnap and murder of Adam

40 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 297. Williams uses a similar approach to discussing racial melodrama in American culture. She argues, ―By admitting this larger purpose and multimedia perspective, it has been possible to trace a genealogy of the constructions of racial virtue and villainy across the broad workings of the melodramatic in theater, musicals, film, popular fiction, and popular 'non-fiction' as well as in media events like the Simpson trial.‖ Essentially, such an expansive topic, requires an expansive inquiry into various forms of evidence. Williams admits that she began her study looking only at film but soon realized that racial melodrama had influence across many different media. 17

Walsh precipitated not only a television movie, but new educational initiatives and hundreds of news articles addressing the ―epidemic‖ of kidnappings like his. For hazards like these to have the power to threaten suburbanites, they had to be plausible, even likely.

This also accounts for the inclusion of real events and their iterations in media and popular culture. The idea that real disasters such as the accident at Three Mile Island or the ritual suicides by suburban metalheads actually happened lent heft to claims of endangerment by suburbanites seeking to expand their local regulatory power and the cultural texts that elaborated and enhanced new hazards. Though many incidents similar to those analyzed in this dissertation likely occurred, they did not have the prominence or pervasiveness to shape the broader discourses of suburban life as the ones in this dissertation.

Still, real events and representations in news media and popular culture did not have a necessary temporal connection. Their relationships within discourse helped one make sense of the other. In some cases, news media and popular culture representations publicized a threat and ordered subsequent similar real events through their narrativization.

In others, the impact of an actual accident, murder, or disturbance was amplified by their portrayals in cultural outlets. One text‘s relationship to other texts helped them make sense of each other while conferring cultural legibility and power. Working in concert, these events and representations developed recognizable types of dangerous and friendly characters, mapped hazardous and safe spaces while creating frame through which to understand subsequent lived experiences and representations.

41 Over the Edge, directed by Jonathan Kaplan, Orion Pictures, 1979; Warner Home Video, 2005; and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, directed by Amy Heckerling, Universal Pictures, 1982. 18

With its focus on the interplay of texts especially those from popular culture and media, this dissertation tries to bring cultural history to studies of space and place particularly urban and suburban studies. I am attempting to bring popular culture and media to the fore to add a unique dimension to the scholars of the new suburban history.

They have challenged widely-held assumptions about suburban America in the twentieth century as socially and culturally homogeneous, geographically isolated, and architecturally redundant through rich social and political histories that made use of extensive archival research.42 In total, these works have created a different picture of

American suburban life that includes racial minorities, exposes class tensions, and links national political shifts to suburban developments although they have largely ignored media and popular culture.43

By placing narratives and representations at the center of my analysis, this dissertation will bring to light another under-analyzed piece of suburban history. What follows through the rest of the dissertation is an attempt to build on the work of scholars who do place cultural texts at the center of their analysis of urban and suburban life. Some

42 These have included many prominent books exploring the diversity of suburban life and its place in American social and political history such as Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer‟s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland; and Wiese, Places of Their Own. 43 Still, this has not been a well-traveled road of inquiry. I believe part of the failure to explore cultural representations more vigorously was to avoid further marginalization or misunderstanding of the roles of people and groups other than middle class whites because so many suburban primary texts do not represent the diversity that has been shown to be present on the ground in American suburbs. I acknowledge there is a danger in rehearsing my argument that I reproduce a limited social and spatial vision of the past. While that may be a pitfall, I am striving in this dissertation to exhume and analyze a discursive history that largely did elide racial and class differences. The primary source material shows that race and racial difference were not 19

scholar have already begun this project. Eric Avila in Popular Culture in the Age of White

Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles and Stephen Macek in Urban

Nightmares: The Media, The Right and the Panic Over the City consider the ways in which popular culture played roles in shaping the physical landscape, the ideas Americans have held about urban and suburban spaces, and the political ramifications of those ideas.44 This dissertation goes further in analyzing the texts and practices producing suburban life and space by delving into the ephemera, the banal, and the once popular but now forgotten such as educational board games of the eighties created to help suburban kids navigate public space, B-movies prevalent on cable television of the 80s like Class of Nuke Em High

(1984) and Joysticks (1981) and heavy metal music videos.45 These texts are not just incorporated to be analyzed individually but put in conversation with other evidence to find out how they worked together to make suburbs seem more dangerous and empowered suburbanites to grasp for more provincial power.

In Chapter One, ―Nimbys, Nuclear Power, and Toxic Waste: Environmental Hazard and the Defense of Suburban Privilege,‖ I examine the emergence of legitimate environmental threats, both everyday and extraordinary, in suburban life and how those hazards enabled suburbanites to shape their local environments according to their own prerogatives. I choose to focus on spectacular real events such as toxic waste dumping at

Love Canal and the accident at Three Mile Island to emphasize the new, catastrophic

widely part of the discourses shaping suburbia in the period under review. Rather, the suburbs were produced as a white world that conferred suburban privilege on its residents, no matter their race. 44 Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Steven Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006). 45 Class of Nuke „Em High, dirs. Richard W. Haines, Michael Herz and, Lloyd Kaufman, Troma Entertainment, 1986. 20

possibilities of suburban environmental danger. These two events are also emphasized because of their reverberations in media and popular culture suggesting a wide-breadth of the production of these particular threats. Popular culture texts also produced environmental threats. The China Syndrome (1979) worked in concert with the accident at

Three Mile Island and its news coverage to associate nuclear power plants with inherent danger. Still, others suggested more insidious, everyday threats. From high culture‘s

White Noise (1985) to middlebrow fare exemplified by The Incredible Shrinking Woman

(1981) and exploitation fare such as The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Class of Nuke Em High

(1986), these texts portrayed suburban locales suffuse with toxic hazards.46 They are included because they show the range of audiences and venues for the production of suburban environmental threat. Taken together, these events and texts worked to associate suburban life with real, imminent hazards that required action to prevent. Suburban responses to these threats were articulated in local protests known as Not In My Back Yard

(Nimby) that mobilized real and imminent environmental threats to keep out supposedly dangerous projects particularly nuclear power plants. Presented and enacted in this way,

Nimby was used as a legitimate home and neighborhood defense. Through the productive victimization of environmental hazard, suburbanites sued Nimby to reshaped their local landscape by displacing these projects.

Chapter Two, ―‗Fear Stalks the Streets‘‖: Crime, Home Security and the Making of the Carceral Suburb,‖ explores a different, emerging threat to suburban life at the end of the 70s—violent crime. This chapter analyzes the discursive production of the physical

46 The Incredible Shrinking Woman, directed by Joel Schumacher, Universal Pictures, 1981; and The Toxic Avenger, dirs. Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman, Troma Entertainment, 1984. 21

security of American suburbs and the strategies and tactics undertaken by suburbanites to protect home and family in a world of increasingly pervasive criminal hazards. In particular, I focus on suburban crimes that were highly visible in the media of the 1980s to demonstrate the pervasive sense of a rise in suburban crimes even in the face of statistics that suggested otherwise. News media narratives of an early-1980s wave of burglaries and first-person accounts enhanced suburbanites‘ sense of vulnerability by describing how home invasions shattered their bucolic existences and their fundamental assumptions about suburban life.47 The Adam Walsh abduction and murder in 1981, its news coverage, and dramatization in the 1983 television movie Adam, featuring educational segments that taught viewers to view their local spaces—malls, schools, sidewalks—more suspiciously, brought into homes the sense of increasing vulnerability to crime by suggesting that kidnappings like his were increasingly commonplace.48 Fox television show America‟s

Most Wanted, is also analyzed because it propagated the notion that criminals were always right around the corner and maintained a direct connection to suburban crime through the figure of host John Walsh, Adam Walsh‘s father.

To protect against criminal hazards, suburbanites installed home security systems and initiated new safety practices and educational regimes. The installation of home security systems gave suburbanites a method of defense they could control and some semblance of power in the face of a wave of home invasions.49 New educational regimes

47 Susan Ladov, ―Speaking Personally: Our Homes Have Become Our Castles Under Siege,‖ New York Times, January 18, 1981; and Linda Saslow, ―Once Upon a Time in the Safety of the Suburbs…,‖ New York Times, June 27, 1982. 48 Adam, directed by Michael Tuchner, Alan Landsburgh Productions, 1983. Aired originally on NBC on October 10, 1983. 49 Judith Valente, ―Bucolic Burglary Wave,‖ Washington Post, April 7, 1978; U.S. News & World Report, ―Crime in the Suburbs - Pros Take Over,‖ April 17, 1980; Ronald D. White, ―Burglaries Up Sharply 22

taught to children and parents to fear public space as well as how to safeguard themselves from kidnappers and pedophiles. Yet, these measures were largely defensive essentially effective when victimized. Criminal threats and the measures to protect against them undermined suburban power and privilege rather than expanding it. In the place of actual empowerment were popular culture fantasies of active pursuit of criminals in suburban locales. Suburban iterations of the vigilante genre, Death Wish II (1982) and Sudden

Impact (1983), shift their aggrieved protagonists to suburban environments to pursue criminals who have evaded capture and prosecution. With the familiar themes and plots of vigilante justice transported from the familiar urban landscape, these films both produced the suburb as home to crime and imagined a fantasy of righteous revenge in the active pursuit of criminals that mitigated suburbanites‘ powerlessness in the face of real crime.

In Chapter Three, ―Punks, Mallrats, and Out of Control Teenagers: The Production and Regulation of Suburban Public Space,‖ I detail the threats and responses to the disruption of public spaces by teenagers. I analyze seminal teen films Over the Edge

(1979), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1981), as well as low-budget cable fare like

Joysticks (1981) that associated teens with public disturbances and transgressive behavior in recreation centers, shopping malls, and arcades. I supplement these popular culture representation with numerous news media accounts of teenagers‘ loitering, drinking, and

in the Washington Area,‖ Washington Post, September 24, 1980; Robert E. Thomasson, ―Burglar Slain in Westport, Conn., Linked to Hundreds of Robberies,‖ New York Times, October 26, 1980; Richard D. Lyons, ―Portrait of a Master Thief Who Long Eluded Police,‖ New York Times, December 13, 1980; Robert Hanley, ―Major Increase in Burglaries Troubled New York Suburbs,‖ New York Times, January 19, 1981; Kathryn Tolbert, ―Keeping Crime At Bay,‖ Washington Post, April 23, 1981 and Ronald D. White, ―House Burglaries Up 74 Percent,‖ Washington Post, June 4, 1981; Andree Brooks, ―Adapting to the Rise in Suburban Crime,‖ New York Times, February 7, 1982; and Thomas McCarroll, Richard Woodbury, and John Greenwald, ―The New Fortress America,‖ Time, September 13, 1983, 2. 23

fighting in these same spaces.50 I also look to less popular sources that directly addressed suburban teens in public. Hardcore punks living and performing suburban California provided another vision of suburban teen misbehavior that threatened public order. Their portrayal in news, films The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) and Suburbia (1984), and their own music linked their presence in public to violent confrontations, loud music, and substance abuse.51 Suburban towns responded by regulating teens and their spaces more closely. According to the leading journal of the shopping center industry, Shopping

Center World, mall owners employed more professional security staff and relied more heavily on technological advances to focus teen patrons on shopping rather than loitering.52

Some towns even moved to close arcades and recreation centers to deny teenagers a public place to congregate. Measures to regulate teen‘s public spaces the lure of home video games systems among others facilitated their movement out of public space and back into the home where they could be more closely monitored. These measures also signaled a new conception of suburban public space without significant teen populations that

50 Robin DaSilva, ―The Young American and the Flight Toward Drugs,‖ Washington Post, July 3, 1977; Vernon C. Thompson, ―Landover Mall's Security Force: ‗An arrest a day,‘‖ Washington Post, July 14, 1977; Larry Elkin, ―The American Style: Suburban Mall Breeds New Species,‖ Associated Press, July 31, 1981; Leah Y. Latimer, ― ‗Mall Rats‘: Idle Youths Become Street People of Shopping Center,‖ Washington Post, Feb. 21, 1983; Ted Gest with Jeannye Thornton, ―As More Crime Invades the Shopping Malls,‖ US News & World Report, June 11, 1984, 70; and Dan Kane and Cheryl Imelda Smith, ―Mall Rats Bring Thefts, Fights, and Drugs,‖ Post-Standard, March 20, 1988. 51 The Decline of Western Civilization, directed by Penelope Spheeris, Spheeris Films, 1981; and Suburbia, directed by Penelope Spheeris, New World Pictures, 1984; Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2005. 52 Shopping Center World ,―Security…How to ‗Defend‘ Your Investment,‖, November 1977, Cover; Charles J. Hura, ―Fire Protection: ‗Vital to Uninterrupted Operations,‘‖ Shopping Center World, November 1977, 16; Shopping Center World, ―Security is Upgraded by Effective Use of Lighting,‖ November 1977, 18; Shopping Center World, ―Shoplifting is Number One Problem,‖ November 1978, 39; Dr. Harold Gluck, ―Beating the Shoplifter‖ Shopping Center World, March 1979, 30; Anthony N. Potter, ―Mall Security Field Changing to Meet Needs of the Industry,‖ Shopping Center World, February 1983, 26; and Mike McCaffrey with Larry Oxenham, ―Find the Shoplifter – If You Can,‖ Shopping Center World, May 1983, 160. 24

subjected all in it to greater scrutiny leading to controversies over what actually constituted suburban public space.53

Chapter Four, ―Parental Advisory—Explicit Content: Popular Occulture and

(Re)Possessing the Suburban Home,‖ argues that, despite the valorization of the home as a safe space, real tragedies, concerned parents, and culture critics proposed the idea that teens were endangered at home too. Dangerous popular culture products supposedly threatened suburban life with messages supposedly promoting promiscuous sex, occult worship, suicide, and murder.

Brought straight into suburban homes over the air and through the front door, hazardous music and games endangered not only young consumers but undermined the sanctity of the suburban home. Suburbanites, spurred by teachers and academic experts, saw popular culture products like heavy metal albums, videos played on MTV, and fantasy role-playing games (RPG) like Dungeons & Dragons coming in the front door as morally hazardous. Narratives of suicide pacts and ritualistic murders in suburban locales demonstrated not just the deleterious moral effects but the deadly consequences for suburban audience of listening to heavy metal or playing occult games.54 Suburban parents acted to reassert control over what kinds of material came into their homes in the wake of

53 Cohen, 274-278. 54 Perceived threats from the culture industries to middle class, suburban children were not new in the 1980s. James Gilbert notes in his introduction to A Cycle of Outrage that furor over the effects of culture on supposedly impressionable minds has been traditional reaction to products that could corrupt childhood innocence. In the book, he details a new iteration—the feared effects of mass culture, especially comic books, on teenagers and children in the 1950s. Gilbert‘s focus is largely on social outcomes of changing notions of mass media especially with regard to families and children. In this dissertation, the threats from popular culture are placed within a matrix of other threats to suburban life suggesting a shift in the connotations of a particular category of meaning, the American suburb. James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America‟s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 25

numerous news stories about Satan-inspired suicide and murder by heavy metal fans.55

Parent organizations like the PMRC, rather than seeking a centralized solution to the

―problem‖ of dangerous popular culture, raised awareness of these threats and empowered parents to reassert the borders of their home and police their children‘s popular culture choices more effectively. As these suburban parents, and their acolytes, promoted a sense of the suburban home as under siege from amoral products coming through the front door and over the air, they used that victimization to justify and promote increased parental autonomy over the home and their children.

Together, these chapters are intended to demonstrate the depth and breadth of the production of threats to suburban life that emerged in the period under review, and suburbanites‘ attempts to mobilize that endangerment to protect privilege and expand parochial power. The story of environmental hazard in Chapter One provides a quintessential example of this process in the era of productive victimization.

55 Associated Press, ―Missing Genius'' Apparently Tried Suicide, Police Say,‖ August 12, 1980; Tom Zito, ―Dungeons and Dragons: In This Fantasy Land Of Power and Treasure, You Don't Play Around,‖ Washington Post, September 7, 1983; Margaret Hornblower, ―Youths' Deaths Tied to Satanic Rite,‖ Washington Post, July 9, 1984; Ed Bradley, 60 Minutes, ―Dungeons & Dragons,‖ 1985 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbcWKWp2UE4 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lN0nrrynb8 (accessed 9-2-09); Associated Press, ―Parents of Teen Who Killed Self Sue Singer Ozzy Osbourne,‖ January 14, 1986; James S. Newton, ―Suicides Put ‗Burnouts‘ in Spotlight,‖ New York Times, March 13, 1987; Jane Gross, ―Bergenfield Adults View Youths Who Lack Hope,‖ New York Times, March 18, 1987 and Larry Martz with Peter McKillop, Andy Murr, and Ray Anello, ―The Copycat Suicides,‖ Newsweek, March 23, 1987, 28; and Sandra Chereb, ―Lawyer: Judas Priest Album Sent ‗Boys Over the Edge to Eternity,‘‖ Associated Press, July 16, 1990. 26

Chapter 1: Nimbys, Nuclear Power, and Toxic Waste: The

Environmental Hazards of Suburban Life

In 1978, housewife Lois Gibbs believed she and her family had moved into the perfect community. Love Canal, NY had schools, playgrounds, churches and grocery stores.1 However, she made a harrowing discovery: twenty tons of toxic waste were buried beneath her son Michael‘s elementary school, seeping into the ground and water supply.

Gibbs consulted her brother-in-law, a chemist. He told her that a number of the chemicals hidden in her community could be dangerous in small amounts and possibly the cause of her son‘s multiple maladies which included asthma and epilepsy among others. Not long after her discovery, Gibbs recruited her neighbors and created a local organization, the

Love Canal Homeowners Association, to find who was responsible, remove the waste, and deal with its consequences. They would make Love Canal a flashpoint for the environmental movement and a significant event for changing views of the suburban environment—a revelation about latent toxic dangers and their devastating consequences in suburban communities.

On March 28, 1979, only a year after Lois Gibbs discovered the toxic secret causing her community‘s ills, reactor number two at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, PA had a problem. Due to a stuck valve, coolant was not getting to the reactor to reduce its temperature resulting in a near meltdown and the release of small amounts of radioactive steam into the air. Though nuclear meltdown and massive

27

casualties did not follow, Three Mile Island, nonetheless, became synonymous with failed government regulation, corporate malfeasance, and, more generally, with the increasing likelihood of disaster at a nuclear power plant that could destroy its surrounding suburban communities.

Though the disasters at Love Canal and Three Mile Island were not the only environmental problems in the United States during the 1970s, they were highly publicized and vividly represented suburban environmental danger. While Love Canal led directly to the creation of Superfund to clean up ownerless industrial sites and the accident at Three

Mile Island reinvigorated anti-nuclear activists and spurred new regulations, these events and subsequent controversies converged with popular culture representations to produce the increasing sense of a suburban environment in danger from chemical waste and dangerous toxins.2 In analyzing the emergence and reproduction of suburban environmental threats, this chapter highlights texts like The China Syndrome, a nuclear power disaster film that eerily presaged the events at Three Mile Island; critiques of ubiquitous and chemical-laden household products in Don DeLillo‘s White Noise (1985) and Lily Tomlin‘s film The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981); as well as exploitation fare like The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Class of Nuke „Em High (1986), which posited a suburban landscape suffused with toxic waste.3 Together, these texts worked with real disasters—and their portrayals in the news media—to create a discursive environment that

1 Superfund 365, ―Video 004: Lois Gibbs On Love Canal, Part I,‖ 10 min., 10 secs., http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/superfund/video.html (accessesed 1-27-09). 2 Newsweek, ―Part 3: Yesterday‘s Toxics: Superfund,‖ July 24, 1989. 3 The Incredible Shrinking Woman, directed by Joel Schumacher, Universal Pictures, 1981; The Toxic Avenger, directed by. Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman, Troma Entertainment, 1984; and Class of Nuke „Em High, directed by Richard W. Haines, Michael Herz and, Lloyd Kaufman, Troma Entertainment, 1986. 28

produced threats and facilitated suburbanites‘ movements to protect themselves, and only themselves, from the new dangers on their local landscapes.

This reorientation of the understanding of the suburban natural environment from bucolic to toxic was in itself an important historical shift. However, it also initiated a response from suburbanites who became more invested and active in protecting their local environment.4 Finding a middle ground between pro-growth, free-market conservatives and far-left environmentalists, suburbanites carved out a political strategy that was avowedly non-political in thought and action, essentialized in the phrase ―Not In My Back

Yard‖ (Nimby).5 Locally focused and with limited goals, suburbanites resisted public projects ranging from nuclear power plants and garbage dumps to jails, AIDS clinics, and daycare centers by invoking a non-partisan logic of home defense against broadly understood environmental threats. It was not that these projects were not necessary or worthwhile, but, through the early 1990s, suburbanites felt they could be dangerous and were able to stop them by arguing that these projects endangered their local environment, broadly construed. Should these projects exist, according to Nimbys, they should not be in

4 Environmental historian Adam Rome essential argues suburban environmentalism began when the first wave of suburban building suffered from a variety of environmental problems that spurred ―progressives‖ to move incrementally toward a suburban environmental movement that he argues was mostly focused on limiting growth. This early period, between 1946 and 1970, as Rome depicts it, differs from the Nimbyism and local, group politics that I argue emerged later. Still, Rome identifies within this suburban environmentalism two impulses, idealism in desiring to preserve and protect the natural and pragmatism in fearing the environmental dangers to home and family, which became more fully expressed through Nimbyism in the 1980s. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 5 Matthew Lassiter makes a similar argument about Southern suburbanites who opposed federal government integration policies as I am making about Nimbys in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Lassiter claims Sunbelt suburbanites were not committed activists or ideologues, but rather, locally-focused relying on their, ―populist identifications of suburban residents as homeowners, taxpayers, and schoolparents [sic].‖ Similarly, I argue that Nimbyism was locally-directed and essentially non-ideological approach to solving suburban problems that was, at some level, a consolidation of race and class identities through spatial relations and 29

suburbanites‘ backyards. In 1988, Boston Globe reporter Bella English encapsulated the

Nimby technique aping their typical lament. ―We are not opposed to the (homeless, mentally ill, retarded, AIDS patients). We believe they should be cared for, but not here. It is too (urban, rural, populated, unpopulated). Those people would be better off (in your neighborhood, anyplace else, Mars).‖6 In that formulation, proclaiming ―Not in my back yard!‖ was supposed to appear as a common-sense position that allowed for publicly necessary projects while deflecting the responsibility for housing them. Buttressed by actual and imagined environmental disasters, suburbanites of the 1980s could legitimately claim that nuclear power, for example, was necessary but the risk of a plant or nuclear waste facility near their homes was not worth the reward of an operating power plant.

By the mid 1970s, the environmental protection movement of the previous two decades made the fear of environmental disaster seem plausible and they moved to actively defend against it. Like many social movements, the environmental movement has been fractious with multiple overlapping groups and goals. Yet, despite any real or perceived differences, groups under the banner of environmental protection had successfully raised

American consciousness about ecological issues, expanded its influence and become a legitimate, recognized stakeholder in American politics. Its proponents successfully lobbied the government during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations to pass federal laws protecting the environment. The battery of protective acts included the

Clean Water Act (1963), the Clean Air Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973), and the creation of Earth Day in 1970, a day dedicated to raising awareness of

organization. Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 7-8. 30

environmental issues.7 These were important signposts in the environmental movement.

The passing of laws demonstrated the legitimacy of claims of an endangered environment and signaled the environmental movement as a major political stakeholder. These successes laid the groundwork for Nimby protests.

As the environmental movement gained legitimacy and power in shaping the

American landscape, suburbanites accessed that reserve to make reasonable claims about their local environment just as Lois Gibbs and Love Canal‘s Homeowners Association did by agitating for assistance with the toxic waste endangering their community. Indeed, the environmentalist critique was particularly useful to suburbanites because it posited natural surroundings as increasingly under siege from corporate interests and in need of defense.

In this context, it was not difficult to imagine that a new project would likely endanger its local environs and in some way solidify the idea of that local community through its endangerment. Lawrence Buell has noted this process writing that environmental movement, ―has promoted a self-conscious, informed sense of local self-identification, victimage, and grassroots resistance encapsulated by the image of ‗communities‘ or

‗neighborhoods‘ nationwide combating ‗unwanted industrial encroachment and outside penetration.‘‖8 The sense of a specifically local victimization and necessary, although limited, resistance was an outgrowth of the environmental critique that strongly informed suburban community resistance to industry. Environmental danger became part and parcel of Nimbyism even as it enhanced environmental injustice by displacing dangerous projects.

6 Bella English, ―The NIMBY Syndrome,‖ Boston Globe, November 16, 1988. 7 Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformations of the American Environmental Movement (Washington: Island Press, 2005), 176. 31

Though they invoked environmentalist values to preserve and extend their local autonomy, Nimby suburbanites and environmentalists were not necessarily aligned in ways that were mutually important to both parties. Through economic stagflation and the energy crisis of the 1970s, environmentalism was marginalized in the discourses shaping suburbia in favor of consumer interests, meaning the costs of suburban life and development were primarily understood in economic rather environmental terms. Environmentalism only emerged as relevant within the discourses constructing the suburbs once its claims had been legitimated on the national stage and the dangers of industry to suburban life were made manifest, disseminated, and reproduced widely in popular culture and news media. In this new climate, suburbanites were encouraged by to see their natural surroundings as likely hazardous, filled with so-called toxic ticking time bombs, and moved to protect themselves and their homes. In this process, Nimbys used the appearance, if not the fact, of being innocent victims besieged by environmental danger to remain outside traditional politics by seeking nothing more than local control of their environment and the protection of their neighborhoods.9

This chapter, then, is about the discursive conditions that posited a suburban landscape surrounded by environmental hazard, that facilitated the emergence of the suburban ―Not In My Backyard‖ (Nimby) movement, and that made it a potent protest, shaping the American suburban landscape at the behest of suburbanites. Though the impulse, if not the term, for segregating dangerous or undesirable projects has been present throughout modern American history, this iteration was a historically specific suburban

8 Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 41. 32

Nimbyism. This Nimbyism was enabled by particular sets of ascendant social and political values that recognized a wide spectrum of environmental hazards and privileged localism, privatism, and the sanctity of the suburban home. Eventually, because of its success,

Nimbyism grew to include not just opposition to projects that were understood as ecologically dangerous but projects seen as more broadly hazardous or disruptive to the suburban environment, such as prisons, medical clinics, and day care centers. These latter projects would not necessarily contaminate the air or water, but would endanger or inconvenience suburbanites and taint their local environment.

Nimbyism required that environmental threats appear legitimate and numerous.

This was achieved most prominently through the co-constitutive interaction of cultural representations of threats and the appearances of real hazards. The coverage of the accidents at Love Canal and Three Mile Island, and the film The China Syndrome focused on corporate incompetence and failure of governmental oversight and strongly suggested corporations and government could not be trusted to safely build and administer projects like nuclear power. Subsequently, popular culture representations picked up the narratives of suburban environmental danger. The exposure to everyday toxins, brought to light by the catastrophe at Love Canal, was amplified and expanded by various texts. White Noise,

Don DeLillo‘s award-winning novel, detailed the mundane and extraordinary toxic dangers of suburban life emphasizing the tenuous safety of a supposedly secure environment.10 The

9 Eckardt C. Beck, ―The Love Canal Tragedy,‖ EPA Journal, January 1979. 10 New York Times, ―Notable Books of the Year: Christmas 1985,‖ Dec. 8, 1985. Critically acclaimed upon its release in 1985, Don DeLillo‘s White Noise was among the most lauded novels of the 1980s. Among its accolades, White Noise won the 1985 American Book Award while being named a New York Times notable book of 1985, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Award for Fiction for 1985 alongside Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and the winner Anne Tyler‘s The Accidental Tourist. 33

films of independent studio Troma Incorporated, including The Toxic Avenger and The

Class of Nuke Em High, brought the fifties monster movie to the suburbs, linking the chemically-enhanced population of fictitious New Jersey town Tromaville with its toxic setting. The Incredible Shrinking Woman also emphasized everyday threats from chemicals in myriad products that were supposed to make life easier but actually shrink housewife Pat Kramer. These representations, chosen for their explicit suburban settings and thematic alignment, produced the sense that there were multiple environmental threats to suburban life that emerged as unusual but became expected parts of suburban living. In doing so, these representations helped justify Nimby protests and a reassociated the bucolic

American suburb with environmental danger.

Although suburban Nimbyism had been invoked to stop many different projects, it had a disproportionately large impact on the nuclear power industry. On its face, nuclear power did not seem to be a uniquely suburban environmental issue. In the heyday of nuclear power plant preparation and production in the 1960s and 70s, many were built or planned in suburbs with the idea that they would serve both major metropolises and new developments. Many plants actually ended up being built in suburban places such as the

Dresden power plant outside Chicago and the Oyster Creek reactor in Lacey, New Jersey.

In other cases, plants were originally planned for ―remote‖ locations, but ended up being very close to suburban towns because of the suburban expansion that took place during the same period of nuclear power plant growth in the 1960s and 70s. Whether originally built in suburban areas or encroached upon by growth, nuclear power plants were becoming part of the suburban landscape.

34

“Energy Too Cheap to Meter”

—New York Times, August 7, 1955

Before the discursive turn against nuclear power, the industry promoted it as a cheap, clean way to produce energy. Civilian nuclear power plants were invented and installed in the United States following atomic discoveries made during the Second World

War. They were to provide what one booster of nuclear power said would be energy ―too cheap to meter.‖ Some reservations about the power of the atom remained, given the horrific images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially as Cold War hostilities heightened and nuclear arsenals grew around the globe. Recognizing that many would be wary of nuclear power given its associations, President Eisenhower called for nuclear power to be developed as a force for good in 1954, a project he dubbed ―Atoms for Peace.‖ By the time the first civilian reactor went online in 1957 at Shippingport, PA just over twenty-five miles outside of Pittsburgh, an editorial in the New York Times proclaimed, ―This greater importance [of the Shippingport plant] is that of a symbol of the dream of all rational humanity. That dream, from the very first, has been that the enormous power in the atomic nucleus might be used for the benefit of mankind and not its destruction.‖11 Nuclear power, symbolically detached enough from nuclear war and amply supported by federal investment into the first reactors as loss leaders, was able to flourish in the 1960s.12 After the initial federal investment helped establish material and economic viability, private

11 New York Times, ―Atoms for Peace,‖ Dec. 20, 1957. 12 Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 299. Weart contended, ―The great majority of citizens, however, kept waste problems in the background alongside science-fiction exaggerations, all obscured behind the dazzling visions of Atoms for Peace.‖ 35

companies and contractors began building their own plants and had opened twenty-two commercial plants by 1971.13

The nuclear power industry continued to grow in the early 1970s, due in part to the oil shortages created by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) that controlled a large percentage of the world‘s supply. In 1973 alone, forty-one new nuclear power plants were ordered. Cultural anthropologist Gary Downer argues that ―nuclear power became America‘s technological ticket to national independence and continued progress for the entirely new reasons that oil was foreign, coal was hazardous, and solar was infeasible.‖14 However, this would be the last year large numbers of new plants were ordered.15 Beginning in 1978, no new plants were ordered, and the idea of nuclear power as a safe, reliable source of energy was being undermined by the emerging environmental movement, increased federal regulation, and the aftermath of the serendipitous events of

1979.

Although nuclear power as a path toward energy independence had support during both the Nixon and Carter administrations, the regulatory process was toughened as the environmental movement gained legitimacy and sharpened its critiques of both government and industry. In the midst of tightened regulation and increasing protests, federal support of nuclear power had an important effect. Though the focus was on increased regulation, new standards were supposed to make nuclear power safer through a more strenuous licensing process that was intended to give nuclear power the stamp of safety even if not

13 Harry Henderson, Nuclear Power: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2000), 37. 14 Gary L. Downey, ―Risk in Culture: The American Conflict over Nuclear Power,‖ Cultural Anthropology Vol. 1, No. 4 (Nov. 1986): 398. 15 Henderson, 37. 36

actually ensuring its safe production. Downer characterized the perception of danger in the industry in the pre-Three Mile Island world: ―Nuclear hazards were viewed more as outstanding problems to be resolved as the technology developed than as potentially serious weakness that had to be removed prior to development, primarily because they were thought to be negligible in magnitude.‖16 Indeed, public opinion polls showed support for nuclear power in the 1970s. According to a New York Times poll from July

1977, 69 percent of Americans approved of building more nuclear power plants, and 55 percent approved of having a plant constructed in their community.17 The danger of a catastrophic accident at a nuclear plant seemed remote while consumer benefits were tangible.18

Through most of the 1970s, the voices emphasizing the dangers of nuclear power were marginalized in part because they were not uniform or part of a visible, national movement.19 Historian of nuclear power Spencer R. Weart described pre-1979 opposition as small and lacking exigency, allowing power companies to avoid or ignore them.20

Those ―hardy critics,‖ as Weart called them, were, despite their small numbers, somewhat

16 Downey, 397. 17 Adam Clymer, ―Poll Shows Sharp Rise Since ‘77 In Opposition to Nuclear Power Plants,‖ New York Times, April 10, 1979. 18 Eckstein, 41. 19 After serving on a nuclear submarine in the Navy, it was not too surprising that President Carter supported nuclear power. Still, during the 1976 presidential campaign, he called for safer nuclear power to be part of national energy policy rather than the focus. Upon taking office, Carter proved to be more pro-nuclear than he had said. He appointed James R. Schlesinger, a strong proponent of nuclear power and former Nixon cabinet member, as the first Secretary of Energy in 1977, an appointment Ralph Nader called a ―betrayal.‖ Schlesinger was quoted as saying that, ―nuclear power continued to be an essential element‖ in the battle for energy independence and the risks of reactors like those at TMI were ―relatively trivial.‖ He would eventually resign after he failed to acknowledge the dangers of nuclear power and the impact of the changing associations of the industry following the accident at Three Mile Island. ―Transcript of First Campaign Debate Between Ford and Carter,‖ New York Times, Sept. 24, 1976; and Richard Halloran, ―Schlesinger Praises Atomic Power Role,‖ New York Times, March 31, 1979. 20 Weart, 301. 37

successful in opposing nuclear power locally. Some groups legally intervened to stop construction, while others used more traditional forms of direct-action protest such as blocking builder‘s access to power plant construction sites.21 Most of these groups were made up of local people seeking to stop nuclear power in their community and were only marginally part of larger, national organizations—until the accident at Three Mile Island.22

The unity of anti-nuclear groups through the 1970s developed more because of parallel thinking about perspectives and goals than because of coordination of a national agenda, despite the aspiration of some anti-nuclear leaders to spread the movement nationwide.23

Until 1979, the possibility of slowing or stopping construction on nuclear power plants was often determined by the intensity and dedication of local opposition to causing costly delays in courts and at work sites. As increased federal regulations had made the process of building nuclear power plants lengthier and more complicated, opponents were given more opportunities to slow work but were also forced to maintain their opposition over longer periods of time without the support of a national organization. In one instructive example, long-term opposition to the Shoreham nuclear power plant on suburban Long Island, NY was invigorated by the accident at Three Mile Island. After years of sustained opposition, Long Island Nimbys were reluctantly drawn into the battle over nuclear power when it seemed the idea of a plant near their homes was foolish. With

21 Downey, 390. 22 Dennis A. Williams with Phyllis Malamud , Jeff B. Copeland, and William J. Cook, ―The No Nuke Movement‖ Newsweek, May 23, 1977. 23 Margaret Hornblower, ―In the Trenches of the 'Nuclear' Battle,‖ Washington Post, February 22, 1977. Hornblower noted that the anti-nuke movement in 1977 was a grassroots effort that had organized ballot initiatives against nuclear power in six states and that the organizers of the movement were seeking to spread the anti-nuke agenda through nationwide coordination. 38

the added support of Long Island Nimbys, nuclear power opponents successfully stopped the opening of the plant in their neighborhood.24

Announced in 1965, the Shoreham plant began construction in 1973. While other plants around the country were proposed and built during that period without incident,

Shoreham suffered numerous delays and setbacks in the years between its announcement and the twin events of 1979, the accident at Three Mile Island and the release of The China

Syndrome. The interruptions had two primary causes. The first was the shifting political environment in which the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) was trying to build their plant. As noted earlier, the regulatory process had been toughened due to successful lobbying by environmental activists to ensure protection of the natural environment in the building of power plants. As the approval process became longer and more difficult, costs increased and delayed recouping those costs even longer. The second hindrance came from the activities of a committed and tenacious coalition of local groups opposed to the

Shoreham plant who, armed with mounds of data on the environmental dangers of nuclear power plants, were able to slow Shoreham at every turn.

One of the major regulatory changes that hindered the building of the Shoreham plant, as well as many other plants, was the passage of the Environmental Policy Act of

1970 which stated that companies must consider the environmental impact of any major or significant projects and publish those findings in an environmental impact study (EIS).25

24 For a discussion of policy and regulation at Shoreham see Joan Aron, License to Kill?: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Shoreham Power Plant (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997). For a thorough exploration of Shoreham as the epitome of the plight of nuclear power in the United States see Kenneth F. McCallion, Shoreham and the Rise and Fall of the Nuclear Power Industry (Westport: Praeger, 1995). 25 The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, Public Law 91-190, U.S. Statutes at Large 83 (1970), http://www.nepa.gov/nepa/regs/nepa/nepaeqia.htm (accessed 4-1-07). 39

Although the act did not require companies to do anything about potential problems found during the study, the legacy of the law was transparency in the building process. The information gleaned from the impact reports was used by third parties, or ―intervenors‖ as they were known, to pressure companies to take environmental concerns seriously and perhaps change plans lest they incur protests. In the case of Shoreham, the passage of the

Environmental Policy Act came in the midst of planning for the plant. These reports gave activists a plethora of information about possible environmental damage the plant might cause, and they used that information to flood hearings (at the Atomic Energy Commission and, later, hearings held by state and local agencies) with queries, causing numerous delays. Due to these delays and cost overruns, Shoreham would take over a decade just to be built and would never run at more than five percent capacity before being shut down in

1989.26

“A Disaster Movie Comes True”

—Tom Zito, “Picturing a World that Won’t Stand Still,”

Washington Post, April 27, 1979

Despite the committed opposition to nuclear power at places like Shoreham, nuclear power in suburban locales would not be slowed until the twin events of 1979—the accident at Three Mile Island and the release of the film The China Syndrome. Those events provided vivid examples of the potential dangers the industry posed to local communities, emboldened the anti-nuclear power movement, empowered non-activist suburbanites to make Nimby claims against nuclear power, and severely damaged the

26 Economist, ―Lights Off on Long Island,‖ April 29, 1989. 40

industry.27 In the wake of these events, subsequent protests like the No Nukes film and concerts and new environmental disasters legitimated fears of disaster in suburban communities while popular culture texts expanded and enhanced the variety of environmental threats enabling Nimby protests across the country through the 1980s.

Accidents had taken place at domestic nuclear power plants before 1979, chief among them a partial core meltdown at the Enrico Fermi Plant outside Chicago in 1966.

However, they occurred without much fanfare. The Fermi accident was barely covered in the news media. More than a month after the accident, the New York Times reported that nuclear power critics claimed that the accident could ―set back the breeder program by more than 20 years,‖ but it seemed to have no lasting impact on the popular associations of nuclear power or the growth of the industry.28 Though it was nearly as severe as the one at

Three Mile Island, the Fermi accident faded away as it lacked a popular culture companion like The China Syndrome and the hyperbolic news coverage afforded the accident at TMI.

In an era when nuclear power was an energy panacea, a mishap at a power plant was a misstep rather than a disaster.

In the years between the Fermi and TMI accidents, popular culture representations, such as the science fiction novel The Nuclear Catastrophe and the television movie Red

27 Historians of nuclear power Gary L Downey and John Campbell persuasively argue that the industry was in decline in the era preceding the accident at Three Mile Island. Long waits for federal approval combined with huge capital outlays put power companies years from making a profit off of nuclear power plants. Tactics, like those used to protest the Shoreham plant, were successful in slowing the growth of nuclear power by increasing costs rather than by turning public opinion or branding nuclear power as irrevocably dangerous. Yet, they downplay the importance of TMI and TCS in shifting the associations of nuclear power for the average person. As successful as intervenors may have been in slowing the building of nuclear power plants, in 1979, it still seemed likely that the plants would be built, just at greater cost. TMI and TCS hastened the demise of nuclear power by inculcating largely disinterested citizens in Nimby protests of a supposedly dangerous industry. Downey, ―Risk in Culture‖; and John L. Campbell, The Collapse of an Industry: Nuclear Power and the Contradictions of United States Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 41

Alert, both from 1977, were representative of how popular culture texts produced nuclear power. As skeptical portrayals of the safety and security of the industry, they gained little traction even while portraying the catastrophic danger of accidents at nuclear power plants.29 Red Alert, based on a novel by Harold King, depicted an accident at a Minnesota plant and the investigation into what happened. The movie suggested that plant managers, builders, and regulators endangered the safe functioning of the nuclear plant because of laziness and an inefficient bureaucracy. Red Alert‟s themes were echoed in the The China

Syndrome and in the coverage of the accident at TMI. However, without the corresponding real-life accident to reinforce the fears raised in its narrative, Red Alert was just another television movie of the week.30 The Nuclear Catastrophe concerned a nuclear meltdown caused by an earthquake near a Southern California nuclear plant. The authors wrote the book to express their anti-nuclear views and to demonstrate ―that the risks [of nuclear power] are more menacing than the potential.‖31 Yet, the book never became a bestseller and did little to spur an anti-nuclear power movement. Though these texts foreshadowed the risks of building and operating plants, the dangers from nuclear power, especially in populous suburbs, were marginalized.

28 Gene Smith, ―Nuclear Power Hits a New Snag,‖ New York Times, November 13, 1966. 29 Red Alert, directed by Billy Hale, Paramount Television and CBS Television, 1977; and Bett Pohnka and Barbara C. Griffin, The Nuclear Catastrophe (New York: Ashley Books, 1977). The title of Red Alert may be an allusion to the 1958 novel of the same name by Peter George which forms the basis of Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). 30 Internet Movie Database, ―Board: Red Alert,‖ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076605/board/nest/85623493, (accessed 7-20-2009). On a discussion board about the movie hosted at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), two posters commented that as children the movie scared them especially Spengler1 who remembered ―watching this [Red Alert] and being slightly scared. I live very close to a nuclear plant and everytime [sic] I see those huge stacks pumping out steam I remember this movie.‖ However, it seems that most viewers were not terribly frightened by the vision of nuclear power in the film as the possibility of nuclear disaster seemed remote. 31 Pohnka and Griffin, book jacket. 42

The China Syndrome, a thriller about an accident at a California nuclear power plant, was released on March 16, 1979, twelve days before the accident at Three Mile

Island. Though it was an historical coincidence, the film and the accident were not simply serendipitous. While the accident may have made the makers of the film seem ―right‖ about nuclear power, the film also provided an instant reference point after the accident, a familiar moniker and narrative for nuclear meltdown that helped make sense of the events at TMI.32 Further, though the film was released before the accident, it was enhanced by

TMI as it was shown to be a prescient, astute piece of popular culture that could not be dismissed as Hollywood fluff but instead as a key for thinking about nuclear power.

Finally, these two events were pivotal texts shifting the discourses about nuclear power and the suburbs. The accident reified the fears of The China Syndrome and legitimated more general fears about suburban disasters which, in turn, were reproduced and elaborated in news and popular culture narratives. These events, their coverage in the news media, and subsequent representations created a lasting sense of danger around nuclear power plants and their neighboring suburban communities, enabling Nimby protests and a wider resistance to other ―dangerous‖ public projects.

The film begins with the camera soaring over rolling hills and power lines to reveal

Ventana Nuclear Power Plant safely nestled in the suburban landscape outside of Los

Angeles. A television crew led by reporter Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) arrives there to do a story explaining the ―magical process‖ by which matter is turned into energy, and how

32 U.S. News & World Report, ―Do TV ‗Docu-Dramas‘ Distort History?,‖ May 21, 1979, 51. According to the article, ―Controversy also has engulfed the movie ‗The China Syndrome,‘ which opponents say greatly exaggerates the dangers involved in operation of nuclear power plants. Defenders, however, claim that the Three Mile Island reactor accident in Pennsylvania proved that makers of the film were right.‖ 43

this will make America less reliant on foreign oil. As they look down on the control room, an alarm sounds. Cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) begins surreptitiously recording. Amid the confusing mélange of gauges, buttons, valves, and indicator lights, plant manager Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) attempts to diagnose the problem. A second and third alarm sound and are shut off as Goddell and his assistants make increasingly panicked attempts to slow the steady rise of pressure in the reactor. ―We‘re almost at steam level!‖ someone hisses. The operators are shown flipping buttons and hitting switches chaotically, but nothing seems to be working. No one knows what to do. Godell takes another look at the gauge that showed high pressure in the reactor. He taps it lightly, and it begins to descend. Panic ensues as the men realize that they have been dumping water out of the reactor and are about to uncover the core to deadly effect. Once Godell has identified the problem, he directs the men with the proper fix, and after several tense minutes, the indicators return to normal.

The crew, although not legally allowed to film the control room, has captured the frantic scene, and Kimberly Wells returns to the station with ―the top story.‖ But the network executives, fearful of their liability for broadcasting illegal video, will not allow the piece to be aired. Although the piece is shelved, Wells and her crew pursue the story.

In doing so, they find failure at every level of the industry; forged documents allowed the construction of faulty reactors, mismanagement exacerbated construction problems, and virtually no emergency plans existed. The investigation also reveals the nuclear power industry‘s efforts to suppress public airing of these failings and the likely effects of the

44

cover-up. The China Syndrome strongly argued that disasters at nuclear power plants were likely to happen because of a confluence of mismanagement and poor regulation.

In the early morning of March 28, 1979, twelve days after the release of The China

Syndrome, an alarm sounded in the control room for reactor two of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania approximately ten miles outside the state capital of Harrisburg. Setting off a scene reminiscent of the chaos of the control room in

The China Syndrome, the alarm signaled that cooling water had stopped running to the reactor core increasing the pressure in the reactor. Engineers opened an emergency valve to decrease the pressure but were unable to shut the valve once the pressure had been sufficiently decreased. The open valve allowed cooling water to be released and the core to continue to overheat. None of the indicators in the control room told the managers on duty that the valve remained open so no one knew about the dangerous loss of coolant.

Thinking the core had enough cooling water, plant operators slowed the flow of water eventually exposing the core and partially melting it.

In the days following the accident, state and federal officials worked with

Metropolitan Edison (Met Ed)—the owner and operator of the Three Mile Island plant—to try to stabilize the reactor and limit the release of radioactive gas. This was no easy task, as experts disagreed as to the correct methods to avoid a larger disaster. This confusion among the scientists on the nature of the problems (including the size of a possibly flammable hydrogen bubble in the reactor) caused confusion among the governmental officials who had to disseminate accurate information and instructions to the surrounding areas. In particular, Pennsylvania governor Richard Thornburgh had to balance the risk of

45

meltdown and radiation exposure to the local community with the risk of pandemonium if a full evacuation was ordered unnecessarily. He chose to recommend the evacuation of pregnant women and children under five which caused many others to become fearful and leave as well. On Sunday April 1st, three days after the initial accident, it was determined that the hydrogen bubble could not burn or explode.33 The most immediate and catastrophic danger had been avoided. However, the failures of Met Ed as well as those of the state and federal government in regulating nuclear power and handling the emergency, would have far-reaching effects that would enable Nimby protests and undermine the nuclear power industry for years to come.

After the events of March and April 1979, no new nuclear plants were ordered, and construction on many others simply stopped.34 Historian of nuclear power John L.

Campbell argues that although these events are easily-identified signposts in the decline of nuclear power and generated a large amount of media coverage, they were really just punches on the way to the canvas for the industry.35 This argument is compelling. The industry was in decline due to a confluence of factors including long waits for federal approval, huge capital outlays to build plants that put power companies years from earning profits, and small, but numerous and effective local protests against nuclear power.

However, it is not my argument that the events of the spring 1979 structurally crippled the nuclear power industry. Instead, the convergent narratives of nuclear disaster in suburban environments helped shift the fundamental associations of nuclear power from being cheap,

33 Thomas O'Toole and Edward Walsh, ―A-Reactor Core Is Cooling, Gas Bubble Still a Hazard,‖ Washington Post, April 2, 1979. 34 Campbell, 3-4. 35 Campbell, 4-8. 46

safe, and reliable to toxic and risky while helping enable Nimby protests by legitimating fears of nuclear power catastrophes.

The two intertwined events of Spring 1979 contributed to a sense of nuclear power as risky and dangerous in two specific ways. First, they worked together to create a narrative of failure at all levels of the nuclear power industry which severely diminished public trust in government, scientists, private industry, and media to safely regulate and distribute nuclear power. The mismanagement of the TMI emergency itself as well as the bungled media relations by Met Ed as well as state and federal government during the accident engendered a distrust of the institutions tasked with regulating nuclear power to work effectively in the public interest to prevent and deal with crisis and, ultimately, fostered a distrust of nuclear power itself to provide safe energy. The China Syndrome, coming out only two weeks before the accident, laid the groundwork for just such an understanding of the entities associated with nuclear power by depicting shady regulators, money-hungry corporate executives, and risk-averse media companies too concerned with the bottom line. The narrative of Three Mile Island and the film focused not just on failures of pumps and gauges, but of people to make sound decisions and foreground the best interests of the public. In The China Syndrome and accounts of the TMI accident, the plant managers never really believed a catastrophe could happen, placing their faith in the engineering of the plants. They emphasized how corporate and government officials failed to build the reactors correctly, to assess and react appropriately to dangerous situations, and to spread credible information effectively.

47

Second, with that distrust, catastrophe seemed more likely even endemic to nuclear power. After the spring of 1979, nuclear meltdown seemed not only possible but the likely outcome of an continued reliance on nuclear power. As was written in Newsweek in 1979,

―Now, the nation knows all too well about the China syndrome, reactor meltdowns and life‘s chilling ability to imitate art even in the nuclear age.‖36 The title and its association with the real accident at TMI created a shorthand that signified nuclear disaster and catastrophe even for those who had never seen the film. Even years later in a highly lauded

PBS documentary about Three Mile Island, The China Syndrome was invoked as shorthand for nuclear disaster and inextricably linked to the accident at TMI.37 Despite the fact that no one was actually hurt by the accidents, in both the film and at Three Mile Island, after these events, there was no longer a place in the cultural imagination for a ―minor‖ accident at a nuclear power plant. That new reality was intensely underscored by the disaster at

Chernobyl in 1986. The film and the accident co-constructed one another providing accessible narratives of incompetence and evidence of danger. They legitimated fears of nuclear meltdown by demonstrating the common mistakes that would likely lead to an accident and made mainstream fears of nuclear disaster, once relegated to environmentalists, liberal activists, and luddites. Nuclear power plants were made always already disastrous.

In the film, the crisis of credibility was severe. Power plant owners and regulators were depicted as exaggeratedly corrupt. Profits, not safety, were the bottom line for the

36 Dennis A. Williams with Martin Kasindorf, Gerald C. Lubenow, and Ron LaBrecque, ―Beyond ‗The China Syndrome,‘‖ Newsweek, April 16, 1979, 31. The article also noted that The China Syndrome was a reference to a cataclysmic nuclear meltdown going through the earth all the way to China. 37 American Experience, ―Meltdown at Three Mile Island,‖ Public Broadcasting Corporation, 1999. 48

nuclear power industry and media corporations. The plant owners falsify safety documents to build the Ventana plant and get government approval for another flawed plant called

Point Conception. To make the argument that the nuclear power and media corporations in the film are greedy and reckless, the filmmakers cleverly make Lemmon‘s Jack Godell the surrogate for the audience because he, rather than Fonda‘s Kimberly Wells, has more integrity on the nuclear power issue. He emphasizes that he believes in nuclear power, going so far as to say he loves the Ventana plant. However, after the accident, he finds the falsified documents and attempts to release them to the press and is killed. Although it appeared that the malfeasance and incompetence of the characters in the film were farfetched fantasies of Hollywood screenwriters, the accident at TMI gave new legitimacy to the claims of The China Syndrome, especially as the details of the accident emerged.

The official and media narratives of the accident at Three Mile Island reinforced those of failure and neglect in The China Syndrome. Not long after the accident, President

Jimmy Carter appointed a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the accident. Chaired by president of Dartmouth College John Kemeny, the committee exposed the failures at TMI and of the nuclear power industry more generally that endangered local communities across the country. The Report of the President‟s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile

Island found there were human failures at every stage—building, management, oversight, and emergency administration. They wrote, ―[a]s the evidence accumulated, it became clear that the fundamental problems are people-related problems and not equipment problems.‖38 Emphasizing their point, the committee continued, ―We mean more generally

38 John G. Kemeny, Chairman, Report of the President‟s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, ―The Need for Change: The Legacy of TMI,‖ October 1979, 8. 49

that our investigation has revealed problems with the ‗system‘ that manufactures, operates, and regulates nuclear power plants.‖39 In addition to sloppy oversight by the Nuclear

Regulatory Commission and poor maintenance by Met Ed, the committee drew attention to inadequate training for an accident resulting in confusion getting and dissemination reliable information. Of the operators on duty the morning of March 28th, they wrote that ―each was a product of his training—training that did not adequately prepare them to cope with the accident at TMI-2. Indeed, their training was partly responsible for escalating what should have been a minor event into a potentially devastating accident.‖40 With such a complex topic as nuclear power, poor training helped cause an inaccurate assessment of the situation and hindered distributing the right information which was crucial to not only fixing the problem but instilling the public with a sense of confidence and trust in the administration of nuclear power.

Confusion about was and could happen was manifest in the daily media coverage of the accident where local and national news organizations dealt with contradictory reports fuelled by the failure of scientists, public relations personnel employed by the power company, and the government to agree on an accurate narrative and strategy to deal with the public. Articles declared a ―Credibility Meltdown‖ and that ―Officials Explain Human,

Mechanical Errors at Plant.‖41 An Associated Press report in Harrisburg‘s Patriot News published March 30th, the day after the accident, chronicled the various bits of conflicting information about radiation release, the topic the public needed the most advice about. In

39 Ibid. 40 Kemeny, 13. 41 New York Times, ―The Credibility Meltdown,‖ Mar 30, 1979; and Bill Richards, ―Officials Explain Human, Mechanical Errors at Plant,‖ Washington Post, March 30, 1979. 50

his lede, the author noted the ongoing nature of the information flow, ―The answers about radiation after Wednesday‘s accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near

Harrisburg were slow to come and confusing. They were still confusing on Thursday.‖42

After recounting the multiple bungled television news conferences on the first day of the accident, the story gave an hour-by-hour account wherein the characterization of the accident by various officials moved from minor to significant to severe to minor once again.43 In fact, the mayors of Goldsboro and Middletown, towns surrounding the plant site, were not immediately notified about the accident nor were they given specific instructions about what to do.44

The President‘s Commission also reflected widespread dissatisfaction with the dissemination of the straight story.45 Rather than a deliberate ―cover-up,‖ the commission found that facts were often wrong and the manner in which the were distributed was not reassuring. ―We therefore conclude that, while the extent of the coverage was justified, a combination of confusion and weakness in the sources of information and lack of understanding on the part of the media resulted in the public being poorly served.‖46 Press briefers were often not sufficiently knowledgeable, but, more crucially, Met Ed, and the

42 Patriot News, ―Radiation: Who Said What?‖ March 30, 1979. 43 Ibid; and University of Pittsburgh, ―Video: The Dick Thornburgh Papers,‖ http://www.library.pitt.edu/thornburgh/collection/series19.html (accessed August 2006). The press conferences held on the first day of the crisis held by William Scranton, Jr., lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and the officer charged with overseeing Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA), were emblematic of the failure to manage not just the emergency, but the public‘s perception of it. This site contains many of the press conferences during the crisis. The contrast between the quality of information and pure stagecraft in the early press conferences and those conducted later by Nuclear Regulatory Commission scientist Harold Denton and Governor Richard Thornburgh is marked. The later conferences were more informative, direct, and controlled than the chaotic scenes featuring Scranton. 44 Roger Quigley, ―Goldsboro: Tranquility and Anger,‖ Patriot News, March 30, 1979. 45 Kemeny, 19. 46 Kemeny, 18. 51

Nuclear Regulatory Commission were both sources of significant misinformation for the government and the public.47

Interviews conducted by students from Dickinson College, located in Carlisle, PA about thirty miles from TMI, in the aftermath of the accident, confirmed the crisis of institutional credibility and, at a deeper level, expressed a more general growing dissatisfaction with government and corporations. One representative example was a college employee who worked in the area of Three Mile Island. She was asked whether the accident caused her to doubt the government‘s policies. She responded, ―It didn‘t help. It really didn‘t help. But it‘s something I‘ve been thinking for quite a while.‖48 Editorial letter writers echoed this sentiment. Gerald Thompson wrote one of a series of letters by disgruntled citizens published in the Washington Post in the aftermath of TMI. He wrote,

―There is one clear lesson to be learned from the nuclear power plant disaster: that we can‘t trust the nuclear power industry or their apologists at the Nuclear Regulatory

Commission.‖49 This doubt was not short-lived. Writing for The Nation a year after the accident, McKinley C. Olson detailed the continued loss of trust between residents near

Three Mile Island, their government, and the owners of the plant.50 He wrote that the citizens of Middletown, home to TMI, ―have an inordinate respect for authority. Most of them were willing to put their blind trust in nuclear power simply because the government and the business told them that nuclear power was safe, cheap, efficient, and reliable.

47 Ibid. 48 Dickinson College, ―Interview with College Employee #2,‖ conducted July 16, 1979, http://www.threemileisland.org/downloads/399.pdf (accessed September 2006). 49 Gerald Thompson, ―Three Mile Island: The Initial Reaction,‖ Washington Post, April 4, 1979. 50 McKinley C. Olson, ―Middletown Revisited: After T.M.I.—A Meltdown of Trust,‖ Nation, April 19, 1980, 465-468. 52

Today they know better. That faith has been shattered. They have been frightened.‖51 As these and other articles demonstrated, the rhetorical battle over nuclear power was being lost by industry and government because the public had lost confidence in their ability to manage something so dangerous.

In the President‟s Report on the Accident at Three Mile Island, the commission concludes their overview by saying that, unless problems are fixed, public confidence will be destroyed and so will the nuclear power industry.52 The seeming failure of the government, Met Ed, and nuclear power experts to apprehend the situation quickly and provide guidance became one of the enduring legacies of the accident and, according to

Newsweek, bore a striking resemblance to those in The China Syndrome.53 Although no one died as a result of the accident at TMI, or, as Jack Goddell repeated in The China

Syndrome after being questioned about the accident ( ―the system works‖), the dominant image of the industry from these events was that the system did not work. Citizens across the country asked: How can we feel safe about living near a nuclear power plant if we don‘t trust the people who regulate and run it?

“The Nuclear Issue Becomes Suburban”—

Pat Squires, New York Times, May 20, 1979

The shift of nuclear power‘s image from safe and reliable to dangerous and risky had significant political and policy effects as well. Before the problems at TMI were even solved, officials in South Carolina, home to many nuclear power plants, had already begun

51 Olson, 465-66. 52 Kemeny, 25. 53 Williams, ―Beyond ‗The China Syndrome.‖ 53

reconsidering their reliance on this type of energy.54 Yet, the most significant impact of the new connotations of nuclear power as catastrophes-in-waiting on the suburban American landscape was the new life given to the local protests against nuclear power plants. As one journalist put is, ―This blow-up of dire publicity has left the nuclear boosters without an atom‘s worth of intelligent rebuttal.‖55 That is, the arguments of anti-nuclear activists had been lent great credence and inspired others to oppose nuclear power in their backyards. In some places, such as suburban New Jersey, protests erupted anew, or, as The New York

Times phrased it, ―The Nuclear Issue Becomes Suburban.‖56 While this activism was just emerging in some locales, other long-standing suburban nuclear power battles at Seabrook,

NH and Shoreham, NY intensified, turning in favor of nuclear power opponents. These plants had been protested by hardcore local activists such as the Clamshell Alliance at

Seabrook and the Sound and Hudson against Atom Development Alliance (SHAD) at

Shoreham since the plants were announced in the sixties and seventies.57 However, following the accident at Three Mile Island, the release of The China Syndrome, and the subsequent No Nukes protests, the challenges to nuclear power development intensified and widened because everyday suburbanites saw themselves and their environment imperiled by nuclear power.58 Though they may not have been environmental activists in

54 Wayne King, ―Concern Rises in South Carolina, Home of Many Nuclear Reactors,‖ New York Times, April 1, 1979. 55 Colman McCarthy, ―Nuclear Industry: Chased by Doubts,‖ Washington Post, March 29, 1979. 56 Pat Squires, ―The Nuclear Issue Becomes Suburban,‖ New York Times, May 20, 1979. 57 Williams, ―The No Nuke Movement‖; and Kirk Victor, ‗The Nuclear Turn-On,‖ National Journal, September 9, 1989, 2196. 58 A.O. Sulzberger, Jr., ―Nuclear Critics Plan Political Moves and Mass Protests,‖ New York Times, April 7, 1979; and John T. McQuiston, ―Shoreham Action is One of Largest Held Worldwide,‖ New York Times, June 4, 1979. The authors noted that a series of protests and demonstrations were planned for the weekend following the accident, in Indian Point, NY and in Wisconsin. 54

the traditional sense, they were moved to protect themselves from dangerous nuclear power.

Writing for the editorial page of the New York Times Long Island section, Island resident Francis Brady vented frustration with the ongoing conflict over the Shoreham nuclear power plant being built on the North shore of Long Island that would serve the suburban communities of Suffolk County. ―If my speculations are not responsible or funny, neither is the construction of a nuclear power plant on the shore of a dead-end island inhabited by some three million people. Partisans in the nuclear debate, take note: I (and perhaps others) don‘t care who is right. Just argue about it somewhere else, will you please?‖59 Brady‘s statement not only showed dismay over the Shoreham situation, but represented a fundamental suburban impulse in the post TMI/The China Syndrome world.

After 1979, suburbanites like Brady did not care how the situation got resolved as long as something as dangerous as a nuclear reactor was not in his or her community. The Times even noted that, ―Francis Brady lives on the Island, but not too close to Shoreham,‖ indicating a growing sense that being on Long Island was already too close.60

The protest against Shoreham was successful in delaying construction of the plant largely because of committed, local opposition that intensified after Three Mile Island and

The China Syndrome. Until 1979, there was much debate about environmental versus economic values on suburban Long Island. In the midst of an energy crisis, residents often wished for some solution, be it nuclear or otherwise. The Atomic Energy Council made essentially this point in a staff report on LILCO‘s bid for the Shoreham plant in 1972

59 Francis Brady, ―The Shoreham Getaway,‖ New York Times, January 31, 1982. 60 Ibid.. This tidbit is in the author‘s info section. 55

writing that the, ―need for the power is said to outweigh any damage to the environment.‖61

The plant was supposed to lower energy bills and provide tax relief.62 That debate made up most of the public hearings about the plant.63 Meanwhile, the hard-core activists kept the movement against the Shoreham plant alive until the Spring of 1979.64 That Spring‘s twin events gave evidence that the environmental damage of a plant may well mean widespread death of local populations and turned many to the cause of Shoreham anti-nuclear activists.65 The hardcore activists were being supported by average suburban residents of

Long Island, in small ways that included letters to the editor, and in larger ways, like supporting particular political candidates. Their support added to a larger movement against nuclear power even if they were only opposed to it in their backyard. In the previous era, LILCO portrayed those opposed to Shoreham as gadflies costing consumers money with every building delay.66 However, by 1983, the contest between economic and environmental values was no contest at all. Long Island‘s suburban voters expressed their

Nimby opinion and supported the re-election of Suffolk county executive Peter Cohalan, who reversed his position on Shoreham to be elected.

61 David A. Andelman, ―A.E.C. Staff Report Backs Nuclear Plant for LILCO,‖ New York Times, Dec. 5, 1972. 62 Carter B. Horsley, ―Little Community on L.I. Welcomes Big Neighbor,‖ New York Times, Oct. 1, 1970. John Bellport, a town councilman in nearby Brookhaven and president of the Shoreham Civic Association, said in 1970 that the Lloyd Harbor Group protesting was using scare tactics and ignoring the very real reduction in tax rates from 30 dollars for every 100 of assessed value to 6 for every 100. 63 Carter B. Horsley, ―Nuclear Plant Hearings Near an Exhausting End,‖ New York Times, March 21, 1971. 64 McCallion, Shoreham and the Rise and Fall, 25. 65 Suffolk County executive Peter Cohalan had run against an incumbent in his own party and won largely because of his opposition to Shoreham. Further, opposing Shoreham would be the official policy of subsequent county executives through the plant‘s decommissioning. 66 Vince L. Sailor, ―The High Price of Gadflies,‖ New York Times, April 9, 1978; and Thomas J. Burke, ―Shoreham and the New Gadflies,‖ New York Times, August 6, 1978. 56

―I don‘t think the county is in any way qualified to say whether that plant is safe or not,‖ Cohalan was quoted as saying in a 1982 New York Times article. He continued, ―I think it‘s an issue that has been completely swung out of proportion.‖ Less than one year after making that statement, Cohalan based his 1983 re-election bid on his opposition to opening Shoreham, on the grounds that it had not been proven safe.67 During that campaign, Cohalan debated LILCO chairman Charles R. Pierce about Shoreham‘s future to express his change of heart.68 Cohalan said, ―The question we‘re addressing here from the standpoint of Suffolk County is public safety and public safety only.‖69 While Cohalan played to his constituents by focusing on the safety issue, Pierce wanted to emphasize the economic benefits to LILCO customers. Cohalan retorted, ―We feel that those who tell us that we should put the plant on line because of the economics are asking the government officials of Suffolk County to spin the wheel of fortune and take a gamble on the plant never having an accident, purely because of the economic necessity involved.‖70 That exchange encapsulated the shifting perception of nuclear power by suburban residents.71

The natural environment, especially Long Island Sound, despite years of postwar development, was thought by Island residents to be a natural treasure to be protected from nuclear power. Despite a last-minute bid by the George H.W. Bush administration to save the plant, Shoreham was sold by LILCO to the state of New York for one dollar and fully

67 New York Times, ―Sizing Up the Counties,‖ December 26, 1982. 68 New York Times, ―Long Island Goes Nuclear or Bust,‖ February 27, 1983. 69 New York Times, ―Excerpts from Debate on Issues in Shoreham Nuclear Plant Controversy,‖ March 11, 1983. 70 Ibid. 71 Cohalan was narrowly elected, due in part to the presence of a third party conservative candidate that siphoned votes in a largely Republican county. All three candidates for County Executive opposed Shoreham although they differed on what to do if it was not opened. Michael Winerip, ―Cohalan‘s 57

decommissioned in 1989.72 Shoreham‘s closure marked a triumph for local environmental activists and Nimbys on Long Island.73 While other nuclear power plants did go online during the 1980s, Shoreham had been stopped by an effective coalition of average suburban residents and fervent ideologues. However, nuclear power was not the only threat to the natural environment to emerge on the suburban landscape in the 1980s.

Insidious, everyday threats further marked suburban life as hazardous and facilitated the

Nimby ethic.

“The Neighborhood of Fear”—

Time, December 2, 1980

In 1980, two years after neighborhood activist Lois Gibbs began voicing her concerns about the possible relationship between twenty tons of buried chemical waste and the high rate of medical maladies in her community, President Jimmy Carter called Love

Canal a ―tragedy,‖ fuelled by toxic waste that had silently destroyed an entire community with chromosome damage, birth defects, miscarriages, and cancers.74 The disaster at Love

Canal was not the only environmental problem in the United States, but it was one of the most publicized and, most importantly for this chapter, it became emblematic of corporate malfeasance, failed government oversight, and suburban environmental danger. Further, the disaster at Love Canal helped initiate a view of the suburban environment as home to lurking, silent killers in the soil and water, while spurring legislators to act to safeguard

American communities. Suburbanites, however, also worked to safeguard themselves.

Opposition To Nuclear Plant is Seen as Boon To Re-Election,‖ New York Times, June 3, 1983; and Frank Lynn, ―Narrow Victory Puts a Damper on Cohalan Plan,‖ New York Times, November 13, 1983. 72 Victor, ‗The Nuclear Turn-On.‖ 73 William Glaberson, ―Coping in the Age of Nimby,‖ New York Times, June 19, 1988. 58

After the consciousness-raising brought on by Love Canal and the spate of popular culture representations that introduced and dramatized the toxic dangers of everyday suburban life, suburbanites were empowered to expand their Nimby protests and continue to shape their local environments and protect their homes.

The disaster at Love Canal raised the stakes of environmental disaster to be the very survival of middle class, suburban families. As one Love Canal resident said, ―We‘ve lived in fear for a long time. Now we‘ll wonder what we‘ve passed on to the children.‖75 By raising the stakes and suggesting the unknowable and unintended consequences of corporate and industrial waste practices, Love Canal imbued necessary projects like garbage dumps, jails, and homeless shelters with the taint of environmental disaster. When given a choice, suburbanites often chose to block a project because as Newsweek put it,

―there is no doubt that chemical time bombs are ticking away in the environment - and that locating all of them, let alone disarming them, will prove all but impossible.‖ Nimbyism, then, was not simply an expression of class, racial or ideological position, but rather a practical and powerful way to voice fear over specific, local dangers that also justified enhancing suburbanite‘s local regulatory power.

While Love Canal spurred a suburban housewife to become part of the environmental justice movement and became a national news flashpoint, most suburban

Nimbys retreated to their homes once a local battle was over. According to the EPA, there were many other toxic cites in the U.S. ―Unfortunately, Love Canal is only the tip of a tremendous toxic iceberg. A 1978 Environmental Protection Agency study identified

74 National Journal, ―Carter Proposes 'Super Fund' for Hazardous Cleanup,‖ June 23, 1979, 1055. 75 Time, ―Neighborhood of Fear,‖ December 2, 1980. 59

32,254 toxic waste dumps around the U.S., some 800 of which posed ‗significant imminent hazards‘ to public health.‖76 Yet, the unique circumstances and media-savvy campaign of the residents near Love Canal made that disaster synonymous with toxic waste. The internecine, low-stakes Nimby battles being fought all over the United States in the 1980s rarely featured victimization, danger, or media attention on the level of TMI or Love Canal.

Instead, these battles often flew under the national news radar. But they were enabled by the national discourses of environmental awareness and victimization brought on by those earlier tragedies, suburban activism, and their reverberations in the news and popular culture.

Like many of the real events discussed in this dissertation, the tragedy at Love

Canal was depicted in a television movie about the ―American Dream, undone by modern technology.‖77 Aired in 1982 on CBS, Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal portrayed the everyday threats posed by toxic waste and the actions taken by committed, local citizenry.78

The film‘s consolidation of the narrative of the years of struggle by the residents of Love

Canal strongly buttressed the notion of disempowered and endangered suburbanites and pointed to limited, local action as the best way for them to protect themselves, their families, and their investments. It focuses on the Gibbs family as they discover son

Michael‘s many maladies and their cause. Lois becomes a reluctant activist working to organize her neighbors to protest the do-nothing attitude of school and town administrators.

In the film, she says that she is not a radical. Rather, she says, ―All I want is to be safe and

76 Time, ―A Nightmare in Niagara,‖ August 14, 1978. 77 Fred Rothenberg, ―Fighting-The-Establishment Stories On CBS And PBS Tonight,‖ Associated Press, February 17, 1982. 60

healthy. All I want is for my kids to be safe and healthy. I don‘t want to be dumb anymore.‖ In trying to protect herself and her family by tirelessly lobbying the federal government to get involved, she motivates her neighbors—who wonder, ―Where am I supposed to sleep when my own house is killing me? Where am I supposed to go?‖—to get involved. The film fused multiple and overlapping news media narratives into a single, two-hour movie that dramatized the real fears suburbanites had, not only of exposure to dangerous, invisible chemicals but of the loss of power over their local community.79

Further representations of toxic suburbia echoed and expanded the range of threats and fears that called for Nimby defenses. White Noise and The Incredible Shrinking

Woman (TISW) imagine a suburban world populated by products designed to make everyday life easier and more fulfilling. However, like the suburban world inhabited by

Lois Gibbs or the protesters of the Shoreham nuclear power plants, these texts also showed a suburban environment replete with toxins from chemical sprays and processed foods that seem to have only dangerous repercussions. For Lily Tomlin‘s Pat Kramer, in The

Incredible Shrinking Woman, the repercussions are obvious. Her helpful products, rather than making her household duties easier, cause her to shrink, finally reducing her to a curiosity for daytime television. DeLillo‘s characters are less sure of the effect of everyday products and environmental hazards on their bodies, creating a nihilistic world where everyone has a vague malady of indeterminate origin. While these are two distinct

78 Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal, dir. Glenn Jordan, Filmways Television, 1982. Broadcast on CBS. 79 Tony Schwartz, ―Lois Gibbs Fights the Battle of Love Canal,‖ New York Times, February 17, 1982. New York Times television critic Schwartz derisively said of this television movie, and the genre more generally, ―Life is more complex than the film‘s pat solutions suggest, and if you‘re looking for ‗Crime and Punishment,‘ you won‘t find it here. But what you will get is an entertaining story about a tenacious woman 61

representations of toxic suburban life, one campy and broad, the other complex and nuanced, both build on the fear of environmental pollutants, converging with and amplifying public consciousness of these dangers in the era of Love Canal, Bhopal, and

Superfund sites. These representations not only enhanced the feeling of danger in everyday life but helped create a sense of suburban American victimization, belied by narratives of lives of relative ease.

White Noise is the story of Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney, his fourth wife

Babette, and their children from previous marriages in the suburban town of Glassboro ―at the end of a quiet street in what was once a wooded area with deep ravines. There is an expressway beyond the backyard now, well below us, and at night as we settle into our brass bed the sparse traffic washes past, a remote steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.‖80 The book chronicles the events leading up to, during and following an ―airborne toxic event,‖ the result of an accident involving a train carrying Nyodene D, a toxic chemical with unknown effects on humans. Throughout the book, the characters contemplate the hazards of contact with Nyodene D as well as mundane chemicals, like those in sugarfree gum and plastic lawn chairs, and thereby begin to consider their tenuous existence in a seemingly safe suburb in which they sense danger around every corner. The fear of death has become so pervasive that a pharmaceutical company capitalizes on it by secretly manufacturing an experimental psychotropic drug,

Dylar, to suppress this fear (rather than treat the effects of Nyodene D or other chemicals).

However, it is deemed too dangerous and is not made commercially available—though it

who triumphed.‖ This didactic tendency, though artistically maligned, did work to give a straightforward account of a complicated issue and story that more directly produced threats to the suburban environment. 62

can be procured for a price. Ultimately, none of the main characters die from their exposure to Nyodene D or everyday hazards, but they all suffer from a nearly debilitating fear of death. Indeed, this is the most important aspect of the book for this dissertation— the way in which fear is produced as endemic to the suburban environment itself. For

DeLillo, it is the stage for countless, daily interactions with toxic industrial and consumer products integral to middle class American life.

The title of the novel refers to, among other things, the specter of danger and death lurking in daily life.81 White noise was the very nature of the problem rather than a specific threat. It is my argument that this specter of death, prowling among the quotidian aspects of life like toothpaste and hairspray and the spectacular disaster of a toxic industrial accident, can be understood as DeLillo‘s formation of a suburban environment under siege.82 The enduring fear was not only of actual contamination from toxic chemicals but the possibility, the near certainty, of toxic contamination; the likelihood that everyday objects were a threat to health, a thousand lurking environmental threats becoming the toxic white noise in the background of suburban life. The book and the kinds of danger it portrays harmonized with other texts depicting the slow, toxic decay of the suburban

80 DeLillo, 4. 81 New York Times book critic Christopher Lehman-Haupt offered his interpretation of the title of the novel, ―‗White Noise,‘ the title of Don DeLillo‘s ninth and latest novel, refers to death.‖ He goes on to discuss DeLillo‘s analogy between sound and death—the way in which both are ever-present in postmodern life. Christopher Lehman-Haupt, ―Books of the Times,‖ New York Times, Jan. 7, 1985. 82 In this article, Heise identified many of the same elements of White Noise as I do in this chapter such as the ubiquity of hazards that come not only from the possibly catastrophic train accident as well as daily products and practices. She says, ―On the contrary, the novel abounds in pointed or casual references to the multiple technologically generated risks that the average American family encounters in daily life‖ as part of the risk society. However, Heise‘s argument concerns the book‘s intersections with theories of risk analysis. It does not address the book in a particular historical context or its interactions with other texts as I am attempting to do in this chapter. Ursula K. Heise, ―Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel,‖ American Literature 74.4 (2002), 747-778. 63

environment that undergirded Nimby claims of environmental hazards and enabled their remaking of the suburban landscape according to their local, often private, prerogatives.

Jack and Babette constantly talking about death, how it is all around them yet they can never pinpoint just where it is coming from and when they will actually die:

―What if death is nothing but sound?‖

―Electrical noise.‖

―You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.‖

―Uniform, white.‖

―Sometimes it sweeps over me,‖ she said, ―Sometimes it insinuates itself into my mind, little by little. I try to talk to it. ‗Not now, Death.‘‖83

While acknowledging the futility of their project, Jack and Babette are trying to become comfortable with the pervasive hazards in their lives. For example, Babette is attempting to quit smoking by chewing sugarless gum and comes to a realization about her modern suburban life. Her daughter warns her that the sugar substitute in the gum causes cancer in lab rats. Babette replies that without the gum she will either not be able to quit smoking or gain more weight—both things that will kill her.84 DeLillo creates these quandaries and offers no easy solutions, but rather limited choices that stave off immediate death that ultimately create more anxiety and a continued search for safety from peril.

Still, DeLillo offers a drug, Dylar, that, rather than cleansing the home and the landscape of dangerous chemicals, works psychotropically to remove the fear of death that is so pervasive in the novel. Dylar works by returning its users to a nostalgic mode of

83 DeLillo, 198. 84 DeLillo, 41-43. 64

existence before catastrophes like Love Canal and Three Mile Island, before the existence of the pervasive sense of environmental danger and the lingering fear of silent death. By masking the fear of death, or more accurately, the fear of possible individual implication in a disaster, Dylar harks back to an era when environmental killers were truly silent and suburbanites like Jack and Babette were happily ignorant. DeLillo‘s deployment of Dylar as a curative served to further the idea that the suburban home and family were in constant danger by underscoring the impossibility of escape from the dangers in diet soda additives or a chemical spill in the middle of town, except through idyllic unawareness. The removal of the fear of death deals with the impulse behind Nimbyism in this era because although

Nimbyism was undergirded by environmental claims, it was essentially an impulse to safeguard the suburban home and family, to restore a sense of safety and control to individuals. Dylar serves as a kind of ingestible Nimby tablet that, while not giving its user the sense of autonomy over the local environment as Nimbyism does, works to remove threats from view but not eliminate them entirely.

In the context of the mid 1980s, when anti-government feelings were ascendant and failures of industrial regulation were being made manifest, White Noise contributed to this

Nimby-friendly trope. DeLillo‘s damnation of government response to disaster comes in his portrayal of Simuvac, a government-funded organization in charge of simulating evacuations in preparation for a disaster and, ostensibly, organizing evacuations during an actual emergency. Simuvac is short for ―simulated evacuation,‖ and a Simuvac official suggests that, ―The more we rehearse disaster, the safer we‘ll feel from the real thing.‖ 85

85 DeLillo, 139 and DeLillo, 205. 65

This constant rehearsal reinforced the sense of an imminent, local disaster, making catastrophe seem likely, even perfunctory part of suburban living.

The portrayal of Simuvac in real and simulated emergencies in the novel highlights

DeLillo‘s view that suburbs seemingly required a sense of order and coherence to feel safe.

However, to have that order, disaster and its response must be rehearsed and made an omnipresent part of suburban life. The suggestion was that not just any suburb, but your suburb‘s environment could and likely would be tainted by hazardous chemicals. The uncertainty and danger on the suburban landscape was part of a new discursive productions of suburban life. By participating in national discourses of an imperiled suburb through the articulation of accumulated local environmental threats, White Noise undergirded and furthered the Nimby project to safeguard suburbia by making disaster seem both imminent and local.

These inverted priorities and the inability to handle crisis continue to undermine emergency management as the airborne toxic event eerily lurches on in the novel. Echoing the inability of Metropolitan-Edison, the state of Pennsylvania, and the federal government to diagnose the problem at Three Mile Island and dispense credible information, Jack is never told with any degree of precision what will happen to him because of his exposure to

Nyodene-D. He finds out only that officials need more time to determine whether he will live or die (as they would anyway). Although they had authority because of their

―expertise‖ and simulation practice, Simuvac and town officials are basically incompetent.

The evacuation is more a result to Simuvac‘s adherence to their own mission of organizing evacuations in a disaster than of any rational measure to ensure safety. Jack says,

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―Remarks existed in a state of permanent flotation. No one thing was either more or less plausible than any other thing.‖86 Echoing Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh‘s arbitrary call for women and children to evacuate the Harrisburg area following the accident at Three Mile Island, Simuvac‘s decisions are tainted by a sense that no one really knows what to do.87 Beyond stoking fears of contamination, this incompetence instilled doubt in the ability of government and corporations to do the right thing.

DeLillo underscores that what threatens home and family was man-made and, rather than just killing people directly, creates a toxic natural environment endangering people through so-called secondary disasters like the devastation at Love Canal. He says about the black cloud of Nyodene-D, ―This was death made in a laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a simple primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to our control. Our helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of a man-made event.‖ The implication is that man-made disasters were becoming naturalized, an expected risk of middle-class suburban life. This contribution to the discourse of environmental peril does not simply suggest a valorization of the natural environment or its protection as a solution or goal.

Rather, issues of environmental damage are transmuted into issues of control. In the novel, characters face their (in)ability to control their reactions to environmental disaster and their possible deaths by taking Dylar. The drug erases their fear while, more broadly, in actual suburbs, Nimbys responded to the sense of a hazardous suburban landscape through local actions to remove environmental risk from (only) their local environment.

86 DeLillo, 129. 67

In addition to the familiarity with large-scale disaster through Simuvac rehearsals and the release of Nyodene-D, DeLillo peppers White Noise with acknowledgements of everyday threats. Jack‘s son matter-of-factly informs him that ―When plastic furniture burns, you get cyanide poisoning,‖88 or that there is going to be plane crash footage on the news.89 This constant rehearsal is supposed to add calm and reassurance, but actually creates more tension and does not provide the comfort in certainty that the disasters on television do. Jack describes his family watching the news, ―We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.‖90 Those catastrophes, though tragic, had a certainty in their end because of their magnitude. That stands in marked contrast to the everyday fears of toothpaste or even cigarettes where one never knew when or if they would die.

Like White Noise‘s ―death made in a laboratory,‖ The Incredible Shrinking Woman features an even more direct critique of the toxicity of everyday products. As Lily Tomlin, playing Patricia ―Pat‖ Kramer, walks out of her local grocery store with her two unruly children in tow, she is accosted by a film crew. They are filming a commercial for Cheese

Tease, cheddar cheese in a spray can, and ask her to honestly assess the product for the commercial. She, like everyone else, hates the synthetic cheese ―product.‖ Then, as they drive home, one of her kids accidentally unleashes an aerosol spray nearly choking everyone in the car. Tomlin‘s voiceover follows this sequence, ―There I was, safe in the

87 Thomas O‘Toole and Bill Richards, ―Mass Evacuation of A-Plant Area Rejected,‖ New York Times, March 31, 1979. 88 DeLillo, 103. 89 DeLillo, 64. 68

belief, that nothing unusual ever happens in Tasty Meadows.‖ Intended to be ironic, the statement and the opening sequence set the agenda of The Incredible Shrinking Woman as anti-corporate and suggests something more sinister at work in middle class suburban

America, with its chemically created products.

Not long after her chemical exposure in the car, Pat and her advertising executive husband, Vance Kramer (Charles Grodin) go to bed and begin to make love as the camera pans away from them across the room highlighting fifty-some aerosol cans. The next morning Pat begins to shrink eventually becoming as small as a Barbie doll. She and

Vance immediately go to doctors who cannot figure out what is wrong. She ends up at the

Kleinman Institute for the Study of Unexplained Phenomena whose motto is ―Science is

Truth Found Out.‖ The viewer soon learns the benefactors of the Institute are corporate

CEOs who plan to shrink the world while remaining regular-sized with an antidote made from an extract of Pat‘s blood. While the film is an overwhelmingly silly treatment of suburban life, it does feature a consistent critique of corporate America for exposing families to pervasive, dangerous chemicals. Pat‘s shrinking is directly linked to exposure to chemically laden products which reduce her ability to be a good mother, housewife, or mom. Indeed, these products do not make her life easier but exceptionally more difficult providing an example of a slightly skewed suburban world where the consequences of exposure to toxic products is not immediate death or cancer but the comical shrinking of an adult.

In the film, the Kleinman Institute‘s researchers tell Pat that her shrinkage is the result of a combination of ―flu shot, tap water, the glue, the perfume, talcum powder,

90 DeLillo, 64. 69

bubble bath, hair conditioner, setting lotion, mouth wash, hair spray, breath spray, feminine hygiene spray, deodorant, toothpaste, detergent, eye drops, nose drops, hair coloring, diet soda, birth control pills, and smog, set off by an imbalance already present in your system.‖

That diagnosis mimics what researchers know about many chronic diseases. People are often already predisposed to a particular condition which only becomes apparent when triggered by something outside of the body. In this case, the list of exterior triggers is comically long implying it is amazing more people are not adversely affected by contact with common household items and products. They appear as ticking ―time bombs‖ of toxic substances found in every suburban home.

The chemicals that make Pat tiny also render her unable to perform any of her daily duties for her family. In a disturbing sequence, Pat dons a sexy outfit and climbs into bed with her full-sized husband. Luckily for the audience, Vance moves and manages to eject

Pat onto the floor thereby sparing the audience the vision of a 6-inch woman attempting to have sex with a regular-sized man. Pat is now also unable to control her children or manage her household. Once she becomes tiny, Pat can‘t effectively cook or clean or keep her children from misbehaving. The chemicals in her everyday life have caused her to recede from visibility. Though those chemicals were promoted as assistance for overburdened suburban housewives, the film argues they cannot actually replace mothers or wives. The filmmakers contend that chemical sprays and cleaners are dangerous tools that can undermine traditional family relationships and demean women‘s work in the home.

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While White Noise and The Incredible Shrinking Woman produced a suburban world inundated with toxic consumer products and irresponsible corporations, two films made by the independent studio Troma films, Class of Nuke „Em High and The Toxic

Avenger were exploitative, didactic treatments of the toxic suburb.91 These two films take as their primary setting an everyday American suburb matter-of-factly littered with environmental hazards. In the world of these films, toxic waste, nuclear cooling towers, and hazmat suits are seemingly appropriate parts of the suburban landscape. Indeed, industrial waste was omnipresent in their portrayal of the suburban landscape and participated in the same discourses of a hazardous suburban environment by articulating similar central concerns over the likeliness of toxic contamination in everyday life. For example, like the constant Simuvac disaster drills in White Noise, students in The Class of

Nuke „Em High participate in ―routine nuclear emergency evacuation drill‖ that emphasizes the likelihood of contamination from the nuclear plant right next door to the school. The importance of these films was not necessarily in their plots—nerds getting revenge on their tormentors—or archetypal characters— bookish geeks, meat-headed jocks, and overbearing parents and principals—but in their settings and assumptions that echoed and extended emerging discursive concerns with suburban environmental danger.

91 Washington Post, ―The Movie Channel,‖ Oct. 13, 1988; and Washington Post, ―Showtime,‖ Oct. 30, 1988. These films got significant exposure in the predominantly suburban outlets of cable television and home video. After limited theatrical runs in the New York metro area where the films were produced, Class of Nuke „Em High and The Toxic Avenger played on pay cable movie channels like The Movie Channel and Showtime in the fall of 1987 and throughout 1988. Class of Nuke „Em High would be listed as playing for 10 weeks on either Showtime or The Movie Channel between October of 1987 and November 20, 1988.In fact, as both a cultural and financial strategy, Troma produced films mostly for the home video market seeking to create movies with cult followings that in the previous 15 years would only be seen as midnight movies in urban theaters. To develop this cult following, Troma specialized in comic-horror B-movies with high concept premises, low-production values, liberal doses of sex and violence, and explicit gore that, surprisingly, was renowned in the pre-digital effects age. This formula proved to be successful as Troma 71

The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke „Em High, set in Tromaville, known as the toxic waste capital of the world, are both what Vincent Canby called, ―satiric comic-horror films of stomach-turning grossness and exhilarating tackiness,‖ that detail what happens when radioactive nuclear waste contaminates the local population.92 There is rotting and burned flesh, green sludge pulsating from school water fountains, and grotesquely misshaped human features on characters contaminated with industrial waste. However titillating this grotesquerie was, it seemed an almost obvious result of living in a imperiled by nuclear waste. In Nuke „Em High, Tromaville High School, stands in the shadows of the town‘s nuclear plant. Arrogant and greedy plant operators, the norm for filmic portrayals of nuclear power plant managers, allow waste to seep into the school‘s water supply. The polluted water turns protagonist Warren into a muscle-bound freak, like the Incredible

Hulk, who battles a demon in the school‘s boiler room saving his girlfriend Chrissy from the monster and the Cretins, honor students transformed by the waste into a vicious gang.

The Toxic Avenger has a similar story. Melvin, a pipsqueak from central casting, tries to kill himself after being humiliated by a group of jocks including two named Slug and Bozo.

He jumps out a window and accidentally lands in a truck full of nuclear waste carelessly left outside the school. The waste transforms him into a hideous mutant, the Toxic

Avenger. Looking like a fallout victim, Toxie uses his superhuman strength to fight crime on the streets of Tromaville. He spends the next hour of the film helping the residents of

Tromaville fend off the jocks.

managed to turn a profit in the home video market and even rose artistically and critically above the dozens of other horror and schlock films of the mid-80s. 92 Vincent Canby, ―Screen: ‗Class of Nuke ‗Em High,‘‖ New York Times, Dec. 12, 1986. 72

The films, shot at the same locations in Northern New Jersey, featured familiar tree- lined streets and fluorescently lit school classrooms and hallways. The Class of Nuke „Em

High‟s opening shots pan from views of streets, schools and kids to a sign that reads,

―Tromaville: The Toxic Waste Capital of the World‖ finally focusing on the high school in the shadow of the looming cooling tower of the nuclear power plant. The final shot of the opening rests on the towers as the skies around them turn a portentous purple and black hue. The editing and arrangement of elements in the frame signal the plant as both ominous and natural to the suburban locale. The landscape of Tromaville seems incomplete without the specter of the power plant yet Tromaville High School still seems to sit far too close to a repository of nuclear waste.

The coding of the cooling towers as inherently dangerous was due to a new, predominant understanding of the possible danger of nuclear power following the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. For example, on the original poster for the theatrical release of The China Syndrome, there are no cooling towers or even direct references to nuclear power. Upon release for home video rental and sale, the movie cover showed the heads of the three lead actors over the nuclear power plant cooling towers using the controversy over nuclear power to help sell the film. In their coverage of the accident

Three Mile Island, Time and Life magazines put only the foreboding images of the cooling towers on their covers, the first time nuclear power plants had been on the covers of those magazines.93 Time‟s cover simply superimposed the phrase nuclear nightmare over the towers while Life used a picture of the towers shrouded in a purplish fog. The mushroom cloud had been a direct representation of the danger of a nuclear explosion functioning as

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an image of the result of an explosion of a nuclear bomb, but, after 1979, the cooling tower now represented the potential for nuclear holocaust. The image of the tower consolidated the image of the mushroom cloud and nuclear fallout along with the possibility of secondary environmental disasters of a nuclear meltdown. The tower thus became the catch-all for nuclear fears. For the Troma films, the mere appearance of the cooling towers on the landscape infers danger of a particular sort—nuclear meltdown, cancer clusters, contaminated water and air—that were familiar to audiences.

“Nimbys Are noisy. Nimbys Are Powerful. Nimbys Are Everywhere.”—

William Glaberson, New York Times, June 19, 1988

As environmental threats were established and reproduced throughout American culture, Nimbys laid what seemed to be rightful (political) claim to feeling endangered by a public project such as a landfill or power plant.94 Given these threats and enabled by the apolitical logic of home defense, Nimbys wanted undesirable projects out of their community and did whatever necessary to achieve that goal. In 1988, New York Times reporter William Glaberson described Nimbys, their tactics and objectives this way,

Nimbys are noisy. Nimbys are powerful. Nimbys are everywhere. Nimbys are people who live near enough to corporate or government projects—and are upset enough about them—to work to stop, stall or shrink them. Nimbys organize, march, sue and

93 Time, ―Cover,‖ April 6, 1979; Life, ―Cover,‖ May 1979. 94 Warren Ross, in a editorial for the New York Times debating the merits of Nimbyism, argued that suburbanites were the only authority figures on the safety of public projects. That is, experts could not be trusted to prioritize the community‘s security. He wrote, ―If nothing else, Nimbys force close scrutiny of what is proposed, and as the residents of Love Canal, Bhopal and Three Mile Island know all too well, the experts are not always right or the sponsors sufficiently responsible.‖ Warren R. Ross, ―The Right to Protect Our Own Backyards,‖ New York Times, July 24, 1988. 74

petition to block the developers they think are threatening them. They twist the arms of regulators. They fight fiercely and then, win or lose, vanish.95

Glaberson got to the essential nature of Nimby protests. They did whatever was required to stop a project and then, with the fight over, receded from public view. Nimbys were rarely interested in expressing a firm ideological opposition to a garbage dump or an

AIDS clinic. They had had limited, local objectives. They wanted local control of their neighborhoods and Nimby protests were a potent way to get it in the eighties. With this limited agenda, they made environmental claims without necessarily being environmentalists because they were not necessarily interested in furthering a broader political agenda.96 Enabled by the valorization of the environment and sanctity of the home, suburbanites could more effectively assert autonomy over the uses of land in their communities while largely avoiding ideological entanglements.

While Nimby activities are hard to document because of their limited and local nature rendered them somewhat invisible unless a disaster on the level of Love Canal was discovered, news articles do reveal the wide range of Nimby disputes around the country.

A survey of these stories suggests Nimby actions were intensely parochial movements against often mundane projects in suburban communities around the country. From

Massachusetts to New Jersey to Florida and California, Nimby protests were springing up all over in the 1980s and early 1990s. In Gloucester and Quincy, MA, suburban residents

95 William Glaberson, ―The ‗Not In My Backyard‘ Movement is Now a Potent Anti-Development Force,‖ New York Times, June 19, 1988. 96 Walter Truett Anderson, ―Environmentalists Come in All Stripes,‖ Oregonian, December 22, 1989. In this article, Anderson explored the fracturing of the modern environmental movement explaining that one prominent faction has become Nimbys who, ―are not interested in ideology, spirituality or rolling back the clock. They just want to keep their local communities from being destroyed by development and/or pollution.‖ 75

were able to block the siting of a home for the mentally ill in their neighborhoods.97 In

1987, a garbage barge left New York City but could not come into port because suburbanites throughout the mid-Atlantic region were able to stop the waste from being deposited in their communities.98 Still other places like Bellvue, WA were able to block the building of a new power station in their community despite the need to update the infrastructure of the region.99 Nimbys in the South were even able to destroy or move trailer parks so as to preserve property values of permanent homeowners while Basking

Ridge, NJ residents opposed a helicopter pad in their neighborhood.100 This list of Nimby activities while incomplete suggests suburbanites believed they were entitled to protect a wide range of interests because their happiness and environmental safety trumped the perceived public good done by a municipal or corporate project. They were not simply parroting environmental critiques but extending and revising them to include any number of local grievances broadly understood as environmental.

Conclusion

The interaction of real events, news narratives, and popular culture texts associated suburban America with environmental disasters and fears of more. These representations, in some unique ways, produced a sense that environmental risks were ever-present, even common in suburban communities. They could be unleashed at any time, by accident or

97 Jordana Hart, ―Neighbors‘ Fears Stall New Homes for Mentally Ill,‖ Boston Globe, April 11, 1989. 98 Sam Roberts, ―Growing Reply to Society‘s Ills: ‗Not in My Yard,‘‖ New York Times, June 25, 1987. 99 Larry Lange, ―Neighbors Protest Power Station,‖ Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 6, 1991. 100 Michael Pousnerhousing, ―Not In My Back Yard…,‖ Atlanta Journal and Constitution, April 21, 1991 and John T. McQuiston, ―In the Suburbs, Backyard Politics Comes Naturally; Crowded Skies,‖ New York Times, June 10, 1984. McQuiston‘s article cited Nimbys in suburban Basking Ridge, New Jersey who 76

design, and the consequences would be felt in suburbanites‘ backyards. In depicting these fears about hazards in suburban communities, these texts helped produced a discursive landscape where claims about local control of a suburb could be articulated and legitimately acted upon because nothing less than the safety of home and family were at stake. The threats produced in these texts gave new context and meaning to suburbanite‘s actions by facilitating the pursuit of Nimby prerogatives to shape their local surroundings.

By the end of the eighties Nimby attitudes had been naturalized. The New York Times reported in 1990 that ―neighbors, these days, are much less likely to submit to municipal authority with docile good citizenship‖ because as Syracuse‘s Post-Standard argued in an editorial ―no one wants nuclear waste, even the low-level stuff, anywhere nearby; no one wants an incinerator, or worse yet, a landfill down the road; no one wants nearby farmers to work sludge into the soil.‖101 Local expression of private will through the articulation of environmental values protected privilege and expanded suburbanite‘s control over their communities.

However, Nimbyism did not survive the 1990s as a particularly forceful or legitimate political position. With cultural representations removing a crucial site for the reproduction of threats by moving away from dramatizing environmental hazards to the suburbs and assault from both sides of the political spectrum, Nimbys were robbed of the justification for their opposition while being painted in the news media as out-of-touch,

opposed a helicopter landing pad for the national AT&T office in their town because of noise and the danger of a crash. 101 Jack Rosenthal, ―On Language: Acronym Power,‖ New York Times, August 5, 1990; and Post- Standard, ―NIMBY*? But Trash Woes Are Ours to Cure,‖ Editorial, February 21, 1989. 77

localist, elitist, and selfish.102 Branded as such, Nimby came to be an epithet denoting an irresponsible middle class suburban attitude rather than justifiable method of home defense.

Those on the right decried Nimby opposition to office parks in ever-growing rings of suburban towns as anti-growth while those on the left, increasingly invested in environmental justice, rejected the inequality proffered by the relocation of undesirable projects foisted on less politically powerful communities.103

Beyond the critiques of their politics and agendas, Nimbys were victims of their own success. The federal government continually reviewed and improved environmental laws and procedures because of local agitation including the implementation of the

Superfund program to clean up abandoned waste sites.104 Corporations, as required by new laws and often at their own behest, adopted some environmental values seeking to inoculate themselves from such critiques. Further, Nimbys had made themselves legitimate stakeholders in the development of suburban land. Companies and governments began dealing directly with Nimby interests before building hoping to avoid a public spectacle that may turn public opinion against a project. In some cases, communities would get some kind of monetary compensation (lower taxes, reduced power rates, etc.) for allowing a particular project to be built in their town.105 With the simple justification of protecting

102 Nancy Vogel, ―Is California Bursting at Its Seams?‖ California Journal, July 1, 1991; Joyce Murdoch, ―In Bethesda, Low-Income Housing With All the Extras,‖ Washington Post, April 5, 1993; Terry Nelson, ―Don‘t Burst the Building Boom,‖ Editorial, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 14, 1995; and Dan Kalb, letter to the editor, San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 1995. 103 Gottlieb, 3-4; and The Center for Health, Environment, and Justice‘s journal Everybody‟s Backyard were prominent Nimby critics and continue to the present day to support environmental justice causes. The journal, founded by Love Canal activist Lois Gibbs in 1983, arose out of concern over the siting of industrial dangers and to oppose the Nimby ethic which pushed projects into minority communities. 104 Environmental Protection Agency, ―Key Dates in Superfund,‖ http://www.epa.gov/superfund/action/law/keydates.htm, (accessed October 2006). 105 Howard Kunreuther, ―Please! Choose My Backyard!‖ Christian Science Monitor, September 19, 1990. In the article, Professor Decision Sciences and Public Policy and Management Howard Kunreuther 78

their homes and families at any cost carrying less weight, Nimbys pursued their prerogatives through more traditional political means such as running for office in local governments. Very often those candidates were elected because of the political and spatial segregation enjoyed by most suburbs that had consolidated municipal power over small, largely homogeneous areas during the previous thirty years.106

Though Nimbyism was not a cohesive or readily identifiable social movement like those for African-American or women‘s civil rights, it, and the discourses that enabled it, were powerful in shaping the suburban landscape and the predominant associations of suburban America. As I have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter, there were large and small-scale Nimby skirmishes in suburban communities across the United States that expressed a new relationship to environmental hazards and new exercise of spatial regulatory power. Foremost, environmental dangers were seen less as aberrations on the suburban landscapes than the expected outcome of government and corporate failures to protect average citizens. Seemingly disparate representations of suburban environmental hazard coalesced at a time when activists and some governmental officials were already sounding the alarm about the dangers of toxic waste and chemicals. Suburbanites, seeing these threats in numerous places, sought to protect themselves in the most efficient way possible. Nimbyism offered that avenue to power. Justified by the logic of home defense and the legitimate belief in environmental danger, Nimbys plausibly opposed public projects that could endanger their community.

detailed successful instances of compensation for siting and good strategies for satisfying corporations, government, and residents. 106 This suburban political consolidation, marked by class and racial divisions, has been noted by other scholars including most prominently Mike Davis in City of Quartz and Matt Lassiter in Silent Majority. 79

The unique historical conditions that gave rise to Nimbyism and the association of suburban life with environmental dangers also helped produce a suburban environment understood as imperiled by crime. In the next chapter, I will explore how criminal threats, from an ―epidemic‖ of home invasions to kidnappers presumably stalking suburban streets, emerged in news narratives and popular culture representations of families and homes shattered by violence. This discursive shift enabled new practices suburbanites adopted to supplement and circumvent a seemingly failing criminal justice system. Those new practices extended suburbanites‘ individual power over their homes but nonetheless reinforced a sense of everyday danger and vulnerability.

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Chapter 2: “Fear Stalks the Streets”: Crime, Home Security, and the

Making of Carceral Suburb

According to news media and popular culture postwar suburban America was marked in large part by its seemingly safe environs. Film and television portrayed a serene landscape safe for families while news reports of suburban crime were few and far between. During the postwar period, crime was produced as an urban phenomenon that had contributed to massive relocation of the American population to the suburbs.1

Beginning in the late 1970s, however, suburbia‘s reputation as a safe haven began to erode.

In a 1980 article for U.S. News & World Report, William L. Chaze signaled this shift writing ―serious crime—on the rise again—is casting a pall . . . not only in the nation‘s big cities but in the suburbs as well.‖2

In the late seventies and early eighties, news media depicted a ―Bucolic Burglary

Wave‖ shattering notions of a secure suburban home.3 In the pages of newspapers and magazines, journalists and suburban homeowners themselves highlighted the sense of unease brought on by endemic suburban crime, the failure of suburban life to live up to its postwar image, and the search for a security in this new suburban world. Popular culture texts enhanced and extended fears of victimization from imminent criminal threats too.

1 Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Kruse, White Flight; Lassiter, The Silent Majority; Self, American Babylon; and Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis. It has been argued by these scholars that the safety of the suburbs was an attraction of suburban life in the postwar period and that further decentralization of the American population into suburbs during the 1960s and 70s was part of larger political and social shifts as people moved away from the eroding urban core to follow jobs, avoid racial discord, and purchase larger, cheaper homes. 2 William L. Chaze, ―Fear Stalks the Streets,‖ U.S. News and World Report, October 27, 1980, 58. 3 Judith Valente, ―Bucolic Burglary Wave,‖ Washington Post, April 7, 1978. 81

The 1983 television film Adam brought to life the news narratives of Adam Walsh‘s 1981 kidnapping and murder, and his parents‘ subsequent battles to raise awareness of the problem of missing children. Framed as a story of the American dream devastated by a suburban kidnapping epidemic, Adam depicted a family torn apart by unexpected violence and the battle to protect suburban families where they lived.

Seemingly failed by a criminal justice system that could not stem the rising tide of crime, suburbanites turned to private, local solutions to protect themselves. In increasing numbers, homeowners turned to alarm systems to secure their families inside the home reducing the area of safe space in suburbs around the country. The Walsh murder and its iterations on television and in the news did not just retell the Walsh‘s story, they also helped initiate new practices designed to help suburbanites protect their families. In the television movie, educational segments bookending the program alerted parents to the abduction epidemic and ways to protect children while new educational regimes were enacted to prepare children for the dangers of suburban spaces from strangers and family members alike. These new security practices—such as installing a burglar alarm, educating children about the dangers from strangers, or finding a safer route home— ignored centralized measures focusing instead on what individuals could and should do to protect themselves and their families. They were hyper-local measures, with a focus on new technologies and practices that suburbanites could control and implement under the premise that crime could not be stopped. However, those measures were largely defensive reflecting an attempt and, to some degree, the failure of suburbanites to exercise power over their local spaces. Homes could mostly be secured but required locking families

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behind alarmed doors and windows. Children could be taught how to avoid kidnapping or predators but suburbanites could not find or eliminate these threats in the manner they dealt with the other threats detailed in this dissertation.

Helping to salve wounded suburban privilege and power were narratives and images of agency and revenge unfettered by law and powered by righteous anger and victimization. During the same period as criminal threats emerged, suburban iterations of the urban vigilante film series Death Wish and Dirty Harry brought street justice to quiet, sunny neighborhoods. The films, Death Wish II and Sudden Impact, provided suburbanites a fantasy of individual power to find and stop criminals before they can act again. Yet, these films only highlighted suburbanites‘ defensive posture in the face of real criminal threats and their inability to be locally empowered as they would by other threats.

Premiering in 1988 on Fox, America‟s Most Wanted, hosted by Adam Walsh‘s father John, mitigated suburbanite‘s powerlessness when imperiled by crime. Though the program suggested crime was omnipresent, it invited viewer participation of a circumscribed sort.

The limited viewer involvement of scanning their neighborhoods for fugitives and calling the toll free number to alert authorities allowed viewers to imagine themselves as part of the process of actually catching criminals rather than passive victims in a persistently defensive stance.

These co-constitutive changes in media, popular culture, and everyday practice transformed the central associations of the suburban landscape from the safe cul-de-sacs mythologized on 1950s and '60s sitcoms to a suburban environment presumed to be under sustained attack from violent criminals. Real crimes and their pervasive reproduction in

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popular media created the sense of a suburban landscape suffused with endemic criminal dangers and cast the average suburbanite as a likely victim of crime whose only recourse were defensive actions. These discursive changes and the security measures they called forth created the carceral suburb; a place where the protections against crime not only attempted to safeguard the home but reminded suburbanites of pervasive criminal hazards and encouraged a view of the world outside the home as dangerous. This stance and the new security devices it employed and the defensive practices it engendered were everyday reminders of danger and the need for vigilant personal action to remain safe.

This is not to say that the discursive constructions of American suburbs had been unsullied by suggestions of criminal behavior before the mid-1970s or that crime itself was not actually on the rise from the late seventies through the eighties.4 Charting crime— particularly suburban crime—is difficult, as statistics for particular types of areas are not available and national statistics were subject to errors and differences in the classification of crimes at the local level. Nonetheless, the discursive field of crime and security into which crime statistics were disseminated was already shifting to depict pervasive, violent threats on the suburban landscape from kidnappers, murderers, and rapists, which added to the panoply of other emergent suburban hazards. The statistics, viewed in that field, did

4 United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, ―Key Facts at a Glance: Four Measure of Serious Violent Crime,‖ http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/4meastab.htm and http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/cv2.htm; ―National Crime Victimization Survey Violent Crime Trends, 1973-2005,‖ http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/viortrdtab.htm; and ―Violent Crime Rates,‖ http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm, (all accessed 9-10-2008). According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, a phone survey of American households, the number of households per 1000 reporting a violent crime remained steady between 1973 and 1985 with a high of 52.3 in 1981 and a low of 45.2 in 1985. Between 1986 and 1990, the rate dropped to an average of 43.5 followed by an upswing again through 1995. However, the total crime index, which is, ―the estimated number of homicides of persons age 12 and older recorded by police plus the number of rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults from the victimization survey whether or not they were reported to the police,‖ reported an uptick in violent crime in 1982 and a slow decline through 1986 followed by another increase through 1993. 84

seem to support the narrative that crime was increasing, especially in suburban areas.5

Statistics themselves, then, created and distributed as arbiters of fact, were received in an environment where crime was thought to be rising independent of those statistics. Though more complex and indefinite on the nature of crime, these statistics worked together with other emergent narratives, representations, and experiences to eclipse the notion of the safe and secure suburb.

“Our Homes Have Become Our Castles Under Siege”

—Homeowner, Susan Ladov

According to media reports and suburbanites themselves, a wave of alarmingly frequent home invasions hit American suburbs during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The

―Bucolic Burglary Wave‖ seemed to engulf American suburbs as homeowners were increasingly victimized by daytime bandits who struck while parents were at work and kids were at school.6 Newspapers cited burglary statistics to suggest that burglaries were on the rise in suburban areas outside Washington, DC and New York City. Other sources reported that 29 percent of all households experienced a theft or violent crime other than murder.7

5 Associated Press, ―Crime Up 8 Percent in 1979, FBI Reports,‖ April 30, 1980; Gary Kriss, ―Rise in Crime Reported,‖ New York Times, July 20, 1980; Associated Press, ―Crime Rate Up 10 Percent Nationwide, Rising Sharply In Rural Areas,‖ October 15, 1980; Associated Press, ―Violent Crime Soars by 13 Percent,‖ March 31, 1981; Julia Malone, ―Violent Crime: New Vigor in the Search for Solutions,‖ Christian Science Monitor, April 1, 1981; Mark Shields, ―Crime: The Issue the Voters Raised,‖ Washington Post, June 26, 1981; and Christian Science Monitor, ―Crime Fears: What You Can Do,‖ September 16, 1981. These news articles suggest that crime was indeed rising and placed the release of federal crime statistics within that narrative through the mid-1980s. In these articles, there was a sense that crime was out-of-hand, and that the suburbs were not spared property and violent crime. So, even though seemingly objective measures by law enforcement show a relatively stable crime rate, they were mobilized to be a reflection of people‘s sense of increasing crime and an impetus for political change toward getting ―tougher on crime.‖ 6 Valente, ―Bucolic Burglary Wave.‖ 7 Ronald D. White, ―Burglaries Up Sharply in the Washington Area,‖ Washington Post, September 24, 1980; Robert Hanley, ―Major Increase in Burglaries Troubled New York Suburbs,‖ New York Times, January 19, 1981; Kathryn Tolbert, ―Keeping Crime At Bay,‖ Washington Post, April 23, 1981; and Ronald D. White, ―House Burglaries Up 74 Percent,‖ Washington Post, June 4, 1981. 85

Though these statistics did suggest rising property crime and burglaries in particular, their mobilization was part of a larger narrative of a wave of home invasions that helped produce the sense of suburban crime wave.

Supplementing news stories citing hard evidence of a burglary epidemic were narratives of burglars striking suburban communities in broad daylight. Exemplary of these narratives was U.S. News & World Report. The magazine asserted in 1978 that suburbia ―once idealized as a quiet haven for the crime-wary, increasingly is becoming the target of smooth-working gangs of burglars.‖8 Further, during this same period, the stories of professional burglars Paul Joseph Hass and Bernard C. Welch emerged to illustrate the sense of pervasive threat from burglary only suggested by crime statistics. Haas was a career criminal who was finally caught when a homeowner shot and killed him during a break-in. Known on Long Island as the ―North Shore Burglar,‖ Haas was suspected of between 400 and 600 burglaries in New York and several other states during 1978 and

1979.9 The Washington, DC area had its own ―superthief,‖ Bernard C. Welch. According to neighbors and acquaintances, Welch was a ―polite, courteous and unassuming, the sort most men want their sisters to date. He never called attention to himself.‖10 Cutting such a figure, Welch‘s tactics were the epitome of suburban crime—quiet but dangerous, able to strike at any moment without warning. Although it was not reported how many burglaries he committed, police said they were, ―incredulous at the amount of material Mr. Welch stole. It will require some 20,000 pages to catalogue just the material found in the

8 U.S. News & World Report, ―Crime in the Suburbs - Pros Take Over,‖ April 17, 1980. 9 Robert E. Thomasson, ―Burglar Slain in Westport, Conn., Linked to Hundreds of Robberies,‖ New York Times, October 26, 1980. 86

basement of the Great Falls home, more than 50 boxes and crates full.‖11 These two men alone burglarized hundreds, possibly thousands, of suburban homes. Yet beyond their individual crimes, these career burglars‘ stories served as media signposts of a larger epidemic of routine home invasions that helped shift associations of suburban life from safe to hazardous and facilitated the embrace of new tactics to protect the suburban homestead.

As the New York Times reported in 1982, ―The dramatic rise in burglaries has made suburbanites more conscious of home security.‖12 Suburbanites, who once left doors unlocked and windows open, felt compelled by news reports and neighbors‘ tales to turn to elaborate security systems to protect themselves against a proliferation of burglaries.13

News stories portrayed a real, persistent threat from home invasion that could seemingly only be dealt with effectively through private means like installing a home security system.

These stories depicted ―brazen thieves‖ causing ―a wave of home burglaries that has engulfed suburban areas nationwide‖ in the early 1980s.14 That wave enabled suburbanites to see their environment in a new way. Suzanne Sprawel, a resident of the Connecticut suburbs, summed up the changing view of suburban life. ―You used to think that because you lived in a suburb you would be O.K. . . . Now you have to be alert no matter where you live.‖15 And being alert was not simply about paying more attention to surroundings or being quicker to call police. Alarm systems offered a way to protect the suburban home without relying on a law enforcement system that was apparently ineffective in combating

10 Richard D. Lyons, ―Portrait of a Master Thief Who Long Eluded Police,‖ New York Times, December 13, 1980. 11 Ibid. 12 New York Times, ―Home Security Systems Sound the Alarm,‖ April 25, 1982. 13 Louise Cook, ―Part I: The Problem,‖ Associated Press, May 17, 1977. 14 Hugh A. Mulligan, ―Thieves Rush In,‖ Associated Press, October 31, 1980; and New York Times, ―When Fear is the Burglar,‖ March 2, 1982. 87

the wave of suburban burglaries. As U.S. News & World Report put it, ―People from coast to coast are acting on their own to obtain better security, no longer content to rely on law- enforcement officials alone for protection‖ because as system owner Ginny Tyzzer said,

―it‘s a great comfort knowing you won‘t be surprised coming home.‖16 Yet, while these systems offered more control over the space of the home and an increased sense of protection, they also served as a constant reminder to their users that their homes were under siege and law enforcement alone could not be counted on.

News narratives presented an attack on the home as probable and home security systems as the last, best, and most reasonably priced defense for suburban families. While many articles offered simple tips on first steps to making the home more secure, alarms systems seemed the better and more popular option.17 A resident of a Greenwich,

Connecticut suburb confessed to the New York Times in 1980, ―You can‘t live here anymore without a burglar alarm system … It‘s a way of life. Just about everyone I know has been robbed.‖18 In a similarly-themed Chicago Tribune article from 1981, ―Here‘s

How—Short of a Moat—to Protect Your Castle,‖ author Patricia Yoxall emphasized the primacy of a burglar alarm in protecting the home. She quoted a police security expert as saying, ―Alarms are about your only defense unless you have someone sitting in the house all day.‖19 These stories demonstrated how news media narratives of rising crime worked to undermine suburbanites‘ views of their neighborhood as the safe, quiet alternative to

15 Andree Brooks, ―Adapting to the Rise in Suburban Crime,‖ New York Times, February 7, 1982. 16 U.S. News & World Report, ―The People‘s War Against Crime,‖ July 13, 1981, 53; and Thomas McCarroll, Richard Woodbury, and John Greenwald, ―The New Fortress America,‖ Time, September 13, 1983, 2. 17 New York Times, ―Home Security Systems Sound the Alarm.‖ 18 Bruce Hager, ―Burglar-Alarm Fines for Faulty Devices,‖ New York Times, September 21, 1980. 88

urban life while explicitly advising their readers that installing a security system was a crucial defensive measure to restore a sense of safety and control.

Some newspapers featured first-person narratives of suburban homeowners victimized by crime that invited readers to vicariously experience the author‘s victimization. In describing firsthand the horror of having the sanctity of their homes violated, these homeowners relayed the ongoing sense of unease caused by a burglary.

Susan Ladov, of Wayne, New Jersey, wrote her narrative as part of a series in the New York

Times entitled, ―Speaking Personally: Our Homes Have Become Our Castles Under Siege.‖

Ladov attempted to capture the continuing sense of fear and powerlessness that followed a burglary of her home. ―Each time I return home, though, there is a moment when I imagine somebody retreating at the sound of the garage door opening. Walking into my bedroom, I remember my icy fear when two embroidered handkerchiefs lying on the floor told me that someone had been through my dresser drawers. I feel violated by strange hands that felt their way through piles of nightgowns and underwear.‖20 By telling her story with great detail and emotional specificity, Ladov crafted a narrative of violation that other homeowners could relate to. The ongoing trepidation about entering her own home lead Ladov and her husband to reluctantly install an alarm system. The story reflected the tradeoff of having a security system: though ostensibly ―safe,‖ she wrote, she was also

19 Patricia Yoxall, ―Here‘s How—Short of a Moat—to Protect Your Castle,‖ Chicago Tribune, June 13, 1981. 20 Susan Ladov, ―Speaking Personally: Our Homes Have Become Our Castles Under Siege,‖ New York Times, January 18, 1981. 89

―angry and saddened … when I recall the vanishing pleasure of wide-open windows‖ as opposed to her new ―secure‖ lifestyle.21

Linda Saslow moved with her family to escape the portent of urban crime and enjoy the relative freedom of suburban life. She wrote as part of the same New York Times‟ series, ―We followed the promise of security, and one by one our plans were thwarted; our dreams were shattered. And we have sadly been forced to compromise on our ideals, as slowly we began to contradict our original plans.‖22 The suburbs that she remembered from her youth had turned into a dangerous landscape where ―burglar alarms and panic buttons have been installed in more homes than ever before,‖ a place where she and her husband ―fear the consequences of allowing our children to play unsupervised in the neighborhood.‖23 Ladov‘s and Saslow‘s accounts epitomized the feelings about the new, dangerous suburb where homeowners felt compelled to protect themselves even at the expense of what they felt made the suburbs a nice place to live. They were experiencing a new way of thinking and dealing with hazardous American suburbs and promoting this new framework and its concomitant practices to other suburbanites in the newspaper.

Just as burglaries were on the rise and people like Susan Ladov and Linda Saslow were looking for ways to protect their homes, the burglar alarm industry was making alarm systems a viable defensive measure. They made them more reliable and technologically advanced while selling them in more place for lower prices. Technological advances— including electronic parts that were being made smaller and more cheaply—allowed the

21 Ibid. 22 Linda Saslow, ―Once Upon a Time in the Safety of the Suburbs…,‖ New York Times, June 27, 1982. 23 Ibid. 90

industry to expand its services from a traditional focus on protecting banks and other large commercial enterprises to the private home market right at the very moment that it seemed suburban home invasions were increasing.24 In the home protection market, electronic monitoring systems ranged from simplistic Radio Shack sets homeowners could set up themselves to professionally installed, elaborately coded systems that not only sounded an alarm but alerted authorities to a breach of the home.25 The newer systems, even the professionally installed ones, were not only cheaper but well-suited to the average suburban family, because after professional installation they were so easy to use. Without much maintenance or expertise, the systems provided instant notification of an attack to homeowners, private security forces, local police, or all three. Though these systems still relied on police to be totally effective in capturing a burglar, they did provide suburbanites with a greater sense of control over their homes. Oftentimes they worked just by deterring a would-be home invader with signage, without an assistance from law enforcement.26

No firm statistics exist on the number of alarm systems installed in suburbs in the

1980s, but their visibility in public discussion indicates that they were being installed at a significantly higher rate than in the previous era. One alarm company owner from suburban Connecticut asserted in 1980, ―I've been in business for 20 years, and I've never been so busy.‖27 Public policy makers, too, were acutely aware of the increasing popularity

24 Steven J. Marcus, ―Home Barriers Against Theft,‖ New York Times October 13, 1983. 25 New York Times, ―Home Security Systems Sound the Alarm.‖ 26 Steven Macek argues for a more city-centric view of suburban security measures. He posits that these safety innovations simply heightened fear of the central city by further stigmatizing it as being outside the zone of safety. While that may be accurate, his argument does not account for the ways in which suburbs themselves were understood as dangerous specifically because of security measure that served everyday reminders of danger. Macek, Urban Nightmares, 32-35. 27 Diana Shaman, ―Long Island Housing: As Daytime Burglaries Rise, Homeowners Add Alarms,‖ New York Times, October 5, 1980. 91

of home alarms. In the debate over the 1983 federal crime bill, members of Congress expressed the concern that without more funding for law enforcement, only the most affluent Americans would be protected, because only they could afford to protect themselves with home alarms. At the local level, town administrators predicated the expansion of cable television into suburban areas in part on cable companies providing two way services like electronic security monitoring. Moreover, the growing number of false alarms to which suburban police found themselves responding demonstrated the dramatic growth of suburban home security systems. Most systems functioned correctly when they alerted police and homeowners to a tripped system. The problem was that the systems were most often tripped by erroneous alarms, caused by any number of accidents, rather than by a burglar or rapist climbing through a window.28 False alarms became so frequent and profligate that many jurisdictions moved to a fee system where homeowners were required to pay local police when they responded to a false alarm so that tax revenue would not be wasted.29

Yet, whether the systems caught criminals or were set off accidentally, home alarms helped shift the tenor of suburban life. They contributed to the creation of the carceral suburb hinted at in the first-person narratives of burglaries and their emotional fallout. While these systems did most of their job merely by providing an increased sense of safety, they also served as a constant reminder of omnipresent, invasive dangers to the suburban home. The simple ritual of arming and disarming the system with every entrance and exit constantly reminded the suburban family of a possible home invasion. The arming

28 Susan Chira, ―A Crackdown on False Burglar Alarms,‖ New York Times, October 2, 1983. 92

ritual at once reinforced the need for vigilant personal practices to prevent crime and, normalized the sounding of the alarm by making it an everyday event. Rather than denying the threat, then, these security measures produced and even enhanced the sense of danger, creating a situation where suburban families likely felt in some way like prisoners in their own homes. Homeowner Susan Ladov lamented this daily reminder of her incarceration,

―I will resent having to think, before turning a door knob or cranking a window, whether the alarm is on or off.‖30

Further, the system was a reminder of more than the threat from home invasion. It served as a symbol of the loss of what the suburb had once meant and an impetus for nostalgia for a suburban lifestyle that, while powerful, likely existed only in the popular imagination. Clark Mulford, who worked in the home alarm business in Fairfield County,

CT reasoned, ―People hate to buy these systems … It‘s admitting defeat. It‘s admitting that this is the way things are.‖31 Another homeowner said, ―It‘s a terrible way to live, but I‘ve become accustomed to it; sure beats lying awake at night trembling at every rustle of the trees against the house.‖32 Linda Saslow ended her first-person narrative of suburban crime with the hope that the new suburbia of the 1980s may yet be transformed again to the suburbs of her youth. ―Disillusioned and frustrated, we continue to hope for the day when once again we can enjoy suburban living for all the qualities that allured us, once upon a time.‖33 No matter the actual protection or peace of mind they provided, home security systems served as material reminders that crime had become an ever-present part of

29 Thomas McCarroll, Richard Woodbury, and John Greenwald, ―The New Fortress America‖; and Hager, ―Burglar-Alarm Fines for Faulty Devices.‖ 30 Ladov, ―Speaking Personally.‖ 31 New York Times, ―When Fear is the Burglar.‖ 93

suburban life and reminded many of a discursively produced utopian vision of the suburban past as safe and secure.34

“I Had the Disneyland Life in the Suburbs. I Thought Crime Happened

Somewhere in the Inner City . . . I Know Now That's Not True.”

—John Walsh

Though home invasion and suburban responses to it had begun to shift connotations of idyllic suburban life to something darker, another event and its reverberations through media and popular culture would alter how suburban space came to be viewed and traversed. On July 27, 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh accompanied his mother Reve to the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida to shop for lamps at Sears. While speaking with a salesperson, Reve left her son in the store with other boys playing video games.

Moments later, she returned and could not find her son. Adam‘s parents initiated a frantic search. They posted flyers, called Adam‘s friends‘ parents, and appeared on local and national television hoping to raise awareness about the case and hopefully bring their son home unharmed. Two weeks later, despite the largest search for a child to that point in

Florida history, Adam‘s head was found in a canal in Vero Beach, Florida, a little over 130 miles from where he was abducted.35 Following the grisly discovery of Adam‘s remains,

32 Hugh A. Mulligan, ―Thieves Rush In.‖ 33 Saslow, ―Once Upon a Time.‖ 34 Setha Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Though Low and Blakely and Snyder are right that gated communities begin to grow during the period covered by this dissertation, they are not discussed in this study because their explosive growth did not really occur until the mid-1990s. Further, their visibility in the discourses shaping the idea of the suburban was low. Through the early 1990s, the security innovations, including more vigilant personal practices and installation of home security systems discussed above, were more prominent. 35 Despite the high profile of the crime and the efforts of law enforcement, the case remained unsolved for many years. However, on December 16, 2008, Hollywood police announced that, after a review 94

the John and Reve doggedly lobbied Congress for new kidnapping laws to empower the

FBI and local authorities to move more quickly in the case of a missing child.

Their high-profile efforts triggered widespread coverage in the national media about a kidnapping epidemic that only intensified in the wake of the dramatization of the

Walshes‘ story in the television movie Adam, which first aired in October of 1983 with subsequent airings over the next few years.36 The interweaving narratives of the news media coverage and the television movie about Adam‘s tragic abduction worked together to bring attention to the issue of child abduction, transform the way kidnapping was viewed, and depicted suburban spaces as imperiled by kidnappers and pedophiles.

Furthermore, by suggesting an everyday threat to suburban children, the mobilization of the narratives of the Adam Walsh kidnapping urged new defensive and educational measures to protect against these newly emergent dangers. Educational campaigns, seen in television commercials and board games, taught children and parents how to navigate unsafe suburban streets and what to do in the case of an actual abduction.

Adam Walsh‘s abduction and murder received national media exposure that raised the profile of child abductions by strangers.37 Before Adam, there had been few, if any, national stories about a suburban kidnapping like his. Etan Patz was a New York City child kidnapped on his way to school in 1978. His case received attention in the New York

of the case, they were confident that Otis Toole, convicted murderer and confidante of child molester and murderer Henry Lee Lucas, was responsible for Adam‘s murder. 36 Aired originally on NBC on October 10, 1983. Adam: His Song Continues, the 1983 movie with new photos of missing children added to the end, was aired in 1986. 37 Phillip Jenkins argues that 1977 was the year of the child because that was the year that the view of children and their rights shifted. A movement against molestation, abuse, and child pornography appeared on the political agenda. This movement helped pave the way for the fears over the abductions of children by strangers to emerge. Phillip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of the Eighties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 111. 95

area when his parents created a private organization to find missing children, the Etan Patz

Action Committee.38 His story, however, did not significantly disrupt Americans‘ ideas about the location and character of crime as Etan was abducted from a New York City street during some of the city‘s darkest days. In addition, since he was never found, Etan‘s story did not have the narrative closure that might have helped his case transcend his local media market.

Adam‘s story, however, struck a nerve feeding into parents‘ nascent fears of suburban crime, which had been heightened by the many narratives of burglary and home invasion. The news media narratives of the Walsh murder as a random, horrific act in a seemingly safe suburban space became the archetypal kidnapping story and, ultimately, the frame for understanding subsequent kidnappings. According to newspaper accounts, Adam

Walsh led a ―very sheltered life‖ and was ―a well-behaved youth who never talked to strangers‖ who was stolen in broad daylight, likely abused, and then murdered.39 By depicting Adam‘s abduction as brazen and his murder as heinous, these news stories set the stakes for protecting children from stranger abductions.

Through their media campaign to keep Adam‘s story in the news, even as interest waned and no leads emerged, John and Reve Walsh helped bring national attention not only to their son‘s case but to the plight of all missing children. After appearing on several regional television programs, the Walshes went on the nationally televised Good Morning

38 Mary Cantwell, ―The Long Year of the Patz Family,‖ New York Times, June 8, 1980. 39 United Press International, ―Still No Sign of 6-Year-Old Boy Who Vanished from Toy Department,‖ July 29, 1981; and Associated Press, ―Head Identified as That of Missing Youth,‖ August 11, 1981. 96

America.40 That appearance moved what had been a regional story about a single kidnapping into the national consciousness as the prime example of a growing epidemic.

On the show, the Walshes told their story and talked about some other missing children who had been overlooked by the media and law enforcement. John Walsh emphasized that even if Adam were dead, he wanted to be on the show to talk about the other missing children.41 Just a few hours after that appearance, the Walshes received the call that

Adam‘s remains had been discovered in the ravine in Vero Beach.

The combination of their appearance on national television and the breaking news of the discovery of Adam‘s body propelled the Walshes and the supposed epidemic of suburban kidnapping even further into the national spotlight. The Walshes were able to use their visibility and their public devastation to lobby for new laws, publicize the cases of other missing children, and educate parents on the dangers to their children. Adam‘s story and his parents‘ advocacy became touchstones for narrativizing the threat from kidnappers.

For example, as the New York Times called for action on missing and abducted children, the paper juxtaposed Adam‘s story with the announcement that over fifty thousand children were abducted each year and, as the story implied, met an end like Adam‘s.42 Newsweek claimed thousands of children were abducted every year, and most were never found.43 It later turned out that the estimated number of missing children—oft quoted in 1980s news

40 John Walsh with Susan Schindehette, Tears of Rage: From Grieving Father to Crusader for Justice: The Untold Story of the Adam Walsh Case (New York: Pocket Books, 1997), 136. John Walsh wrote that after the first few days of the search for Adam, he overcame his skepticism of the media and embraced it as a way to find him and publicize the problem of child abductions. Walsh was able, then, through this ordeal, to develop a saaviness in crafting and disseminating narratives about his family and crime more generally that he would put to use as host of America‟s Most Wanted. 41 Walsh, 142. 42 New York Times, ―Action Urged on Lost Children,‖ November 22, 1981. 43 Gelman, Agrest, McCormick, Abramson, Greenberg, and Zabarsky, ―Stolen Children.‖ 97

accounts as fifty thousand to two million—was exaggerated. Though many children went missing, most were runaways who returned home within 48 hours. The majority of the others left home purposefully as runaways or were abducted by a parent or family member as part of a custody dispute. According to the federal government, stranger abductions accounted for something closer to 75 missing children a year.44 Yet, Adam‘s story became the symbol of the supposedly widespread threat of stranger abductions of children, suggesting suburban streets were dangerous places for kids.

Adam‘s story and his parents‘ activism helped raise awareness about child abduction and catalyze new organizations to protect children. But it was not until the airing of the television dramatization of their story that ―the nation was galvanized to stop child snatching and find other missing ‗Adams.‘‖45 Adam effectively consolidated the story of Adam‘s abduction and murder, covering in under two hours the entire story: the kidnapping, the murder and the aftermath, when his parents lobbied for stronger kidnapping laws and better law enforcement response to child abductions. The film refreshed the public memory of Adam‘s gruesome murder, and transformed it too, as audiences did not just see grieving parents on television asking for help but a fair-haired child heading off to certain doom at the mall. It propelled stranger kidnappings back into the public consciousness two years after his murder. Creating a national cause, Adam brought the problem of missing children directly into American living rooms, establishing

44 Neal Karlen with Nikki Finke Greenberg, David L. Gonzalez, and Elisa Williams, ―How Many Missing Kids?‖ Newsweek, October 7, 1985. In this article, experts from the Department of Health and Human Services, FBI, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children disagreed about the number of missing children especially those abducted by strangers. According to the article, FBI statistics revealed only 67 stranger abductions in 1984 which, given later studies, seems much more likely than the higher figures cited in the mid-1980s. 98

that child abduction was not just possible, but that it could happen in the safest of locales, like the Walshes‘ sunny suburban town, if proper precautions were not taken.46 Despite some backlash against the hysteria over child abductions, the overwhelming trend inaugurated by the Walsh story was of a new mindfulness about the vulnerability of children to stranger abduction, irrespective of how accurately that threat was portrayed.47

The film raised both the sense of danger and the stakes of suburban crime.

Through the retelling of the Walshes‘ story and the educational segments at the beginning and end of the program, Adam linked his murder with new suburban safety concerns and argued strongly that Adam‘s abduction was part of a kidnapping epidemic that could be thwarted only with education and action. The film began with a public service message about kidnapping presented by Facts of Life star Nancy McKeon and her brother Phil who appeared on the television show Alice. They recited facts about kidnappings in the United States and reminded the audience to stay tuned at the end of the movie for tips to help prevent their own son or daughter from becoming a statistic. After the film, the last shot of the fictional Walsh family dissolves into a shot of the real Walsh family asking for help from viewers. Nancy and Phil McKeon then return to tell parents what they and their children should know in case of a child‘s abduction. The list included maintaining up-to-date photos and dental records, and because kidnappings were on the rise, they reiterated, these bits of information, no matter how small, could be crucially

45 David F. Whitman, ―Missing Children: What Makes Search So Tough,‖ U.S. News & World Report, August 19, 1985. 46 Karlen, ―How Many Missing Kids.‖ 47 Eugene Kraybill, ―Scaring Our Kids,‖ U.S. News & World Report, February 10, 1986. Kraybill, a father of three, wrote that though it is a tragedy when any children are abducted, relatively few are actually abducted by a stranger. Instead, he suggested the public should focus on the broken homes which he argued spurred most runaways and child abductions by family members. 99

important. These segments demonstrated the new educational impulse that put the onus on parents and children rather than law enforcement to stop abductions—even going so far as to have the hosts suggest that if parents did not institute these new measures, children would be in grave danger from kidnapping, molestation, and murder. By emphasizing private action rather than simply asking for more help from law enforcement, the end segments emphasized an emerging suburban perspective that focused on limited, private solutions to emerging social problems.

After the final educational segment, a photo montage of missing children was shown in hopes of a viewer recognizing one of them since law enforcement had been unable to locate them. This direct appeal to the audience for help was successful in generating leads and finding some kids.48 Subsequent airings of the movie showed pictures of more missing children with even President Reagan personally pleading for help in finding missing children.49 U.S. News & World Report claimed that ―every time ‗Adam‘ is aired on television with photographs of missing children following the movie, the number of calls to the national center‘s hot line triples.‖50 By showing photos of missing children,

NBC not only gave some missing kids a chance Adam never had by tapping into the broadcast power of network television, but directly linked their plight to Adam‘s, raising the stakes for audience participation.51 Shown at the end of a movie about Adam Walsh

48 Thomas Ferraro, Washington News, United Press International, April 30, 1985; John Shanahan, Domestic News, Associated Press, April 30, 1985; Sandy Rovner, ―Hot Line of Hope,‖ Washington Post, May 1, 1985; 49 Thomas Ferraro, ―President to Make National TV Plea for Missing Children,‖ United Press International, April 25, 1985. 50 Whitman, ―Missing Children: What Makes Search So Tough.‖ 51 Herbert Mitgang, ―‗Missing II: Have You Seen this Person,?‘ on NBC,‖ New York Times, January 22, 1986. Following Adam and its re-airing with new pictures of missing children, NBC would air Missing I, 100

and educational segments about preventing tragedies like his, the sense was that those children shown in the pictures were victims of stranger abductions. However, in nearly all of the cases of those that were found, the children were victims of the far more common parental or acquaintance abduction.52 In 1985, by the count of The Center for Missing and

Exploited Children, out of 841 children found through the Center‘s efforts publicizing pictures of missing children on television and milk cartons, 685 had run away from home while 134 had been abducted by a parent as part of a custody battle, and only nine were abducted by strangers.53 Yet, Adam had powerfully shaped the discursive production of both kidnapping and suburban streets. By linking the larger problem of kidnapping to

Adam‘s particular case, the film framed kidnapping as a matter of protecting children from perverts and murderers lurking on suburban streets. Viewers were not just to feel empathy for Adam and his family, but to use those feelings to mobilize to protect themselves and others by reorienting their daily lives around maintaining safe practices.

Yet, the film must build sympathy for the Walshes for the educational segments to be effective. Adam does this by demonstrating the quotidian nature of their lives, showing the Walshes as an average suburban family and their experience as one that could happen to any family in the audience. The film opens on an exterior shot of the Walsh home on a sunny, tree-lined Florida street. Inside, the family is eating breakfast before John Walsh

(Daniel J. Travanti) heads to work and Reve Walsh (JoBeth Williams) takes her son Adam with her to the mall. The shots of sunny weather and a cheery family breakfast are quickly

Missing II, and Missing III which showed new photos and re-created kidnappings hoping to help find more children. 52 Economist, ―Missing Children,‖ April 27, 1985, 44. 53 Ibid. 101

and ominously contrasted as Reve and Adam enter the mall. She leaves him with some other boys to play video games while she goes to the lamp department. When she returns after only a few minutes, Adam and the other boys are gone. The soundtrack kicks in with distorted, disorienting synthesizer tones to emphasize her surprise and disorientation at her son‘s disappearance. As reality sets in, Reve searches frantically for Adam. He is paged by mall security while Reve and her mother-in-law comb the shopping center to no avail.

Shortly thereafter, John arrives at the mall and helps with the search. From this point forward, the filmmakers assumed the audience had some familiarity with Adam‘s demise.

Rather than focusing on the mystery of Adam‘s whereabouts, the film centers on the

Walshes‘ travails with law enforcement and the media, highlighting their moments of greatest anguish and despair. The focus on the failures of law enforcement, the general ignorance of suburban police departments about kidnappings, and the emotional fallout from the discovery of Adam‘s remains broadened the story and helped to jolt the audience into action.

One of the film‘s key themes is the inability of the police to help the Walshes.

Though law enforcement officers are portrayed as well-intentioned, they are shown to be ill-equipped to deal with a child abduction. The police officers in the film remain calm— too calm, it seems, given the enormity of the situation. They form search parties, call other jurisdictions and put out word to local television stations. Yet, no one manages to read the notices sent between local police departments advising them to be on the lookout for stolen cars or children in a timely manner. In a pivotal scene, John Walsh happens upon a long printout in a corner of the Hollywood police department, at which point he and the

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audience realize that the word about Adam is not getting out effectively. That failure is compounded by the revelation that the FBI‘s hands are tied unless Adam has been transported across state lines or a ransom request has been made. John exclaims that the

FBI has a database of missing cars but not missing kids. Because the viewer is presumed to know the terrible outcome of the kidnapping, the failures of the local police and the FBI serve as a visceral and damning reminder of the grave failures of law enforcement in dealing with child abduction. Though ―the cops meant well,‖ they were not up to the task, according to John Walsh.54 He said in his testimony before Congress, ―What have I learned in 2½ years? That every parent‘s nightmare is a reality in America. That most laws are medieval, or nonexistent, as they relate to child safety and protection . . . This is

1984 not 1954. No matter how protective your environment is, or you think it is, tomorrow‘s victim could be your child or grandchild.‖55 These portrayals lent credence to the exhortations to the audience, during the educational segments, to be actively involved in protecting children.

These errors fresh in the viewer‘s mind, John and Reve are shown lobbying

Congress for the passage of the Missing Children‟s Act. The law had been under consideration before Adam Walsh‘s murder, written to make it easier for jurisdictions to exchange information about unidentified dead bodies and missing children. The clear failures of law enforcement in the Walsh case and their exposure in the film helped demonstrate the need to pass the Missing Children‟s Act. Following the first airing of the film, the law was strengthened and then passed by Congress. The result, the Missing

54 Walsh, 107. 55 Subcommittee on Human Resources, ―John Walsh Testimony,‖ 45,47. 103

Children Assistance Act of 1984, was aimed directly at fixing the shortcomings articulated in the film and by John Walsh during his lobbying and appearances in the media.56 The law established a toll-free number to report information about missing children and established a national resource center to disseminate this information so that the federal government could track missing children as accurately as they could track stolen cars. In doing all of this, the law provided an infrastructure for regular people to protect children and find those that were already missing.

Even though new government action was spurred by the Walsh case, the organizations that drove the effort to find missing children were not government entities. A few had predated the Walsh case stepping in to directly assist families and the police with missing children cases. Grassroots initiatives, like Childfind (formed in 1980), were invigorated with donations and volunteers while new organizations sprang up to educate families about the threats from kidnappers and find missing kids following Adam‟s airings.57 In fact, all of the money authorized by the Missing Children‟s Assistance Act of

1984 funded the private, non-profit Center for Missing and Exploited Children to serve as a national clearinghouse for information regarding missing children.58 While these initiatives did much to protect children and help families, they were organizations dedicated to highlighting the threat to suburban families and facilitating local action to protect them.

56 House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Education and Labor, 98th Congress, Hearing on H.R. 4971, April 9, 1984, 44. According to then Congressman Paul Simon (D-IL), ―That bill, however, would not pass and become law were it not for the first witness we have here today, John Walsh, who, along with his wife, are the very courageous parents of little Adam whom many of you have heard about on TV. And I am grateful to you, John, for all you‘ve done. This Nation (sic) is a better nation for what you have done on behalf of the memory of your son.‖ 57 Child Find of America, Inc., ―About Child Find,‖ http://www.childfindofamerica.org/about%20Child%20Find.htm (accessed April 2009). 58 Missing Children's Assistance Act of 1984, Public Law 98-473, US Code 42 (1984), 5771. 104

Besides providing material and logistical support to families and police, these organizations worked with toy manufacturers to create board games that elaborated the threats to children and sought to teach them how to avoid these hazards. Emblazoned with

Adam‘s iconic Little League uniform photo, ―The Child Awareness Game,‖ developed by the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center in 1986, was created ―to educate adults and children about how to avoid dangers that exist for children in our society.‖59 In that game, the players move along the board through a number of dangerous scenarios in everyday suburban locations with rewards for safely evading a dangerous situation. In one instance, a game player, who has been grabbed by a stranger in a shopping mall, is instructed to kick their abductor and scream that he is not their parent. In other game scenarios, the home itself is the site of danger. One reads, ―You are staying overnight at a friend‘s house. The father comes into the bedroom to tuck you in, and he has no clothes on. Should you: Tell your parents nothing about what happened? [wrong]; Tell your parents about what happened when you arrive home?‖60 Another instructs a child home alone to lock all doors and never answer the phone.61 According to this game and the emerging genre it represented, not even a sleepover at a friend‘s house or being in one‘s own home was considered safe without the proper precautions. Other board games, like Pressman Toys‘

―Safely Home‖ (1985), helped players learn how to deal with an abduction or an encounter with a stranger by wending their way through a game board full of familiar, bucolic suburban locations, such as single-family, detached homes, schoolyards, sidewalks, and

59 Judy Mann, ―From Caution to Hysteria,‖ Washington Post, April 9, 1986. 60 Ibid. 61 Lawrence Kilman, ―Child Protection Game Endorsed by Adam Walsh Center,‖ Associated Press, June 12, 1986. 105

playgrounds. All of the games in this genre, including ―Strangers Dangers,‖ ―Don‘t Talk to

Strangers,‖ and ―The Child Awareness Game,‖ had similar setups in helping children learn about the many dangers in their neighborhood and how to avoid them.62 The games suggested that familiar places like home, school, or the mall could be dangerous—some by bearing the imprimatur of the Adam Walsh center, and others by echoing the concerns raised by his abduction and murder—and that children needed special knowledge to navigate them safely.

By the late 1980s, the Adam Walsh case had already cast a long shadow on suburban life. Having brought to light a supposed epidemic of strangers abducting children in broad daylight and inaugurating a series of new educational endeavors and defensive practices, Adam‘s story also created a new authority on crime: his father, John Walsh.

Walsh parlayed his public role as a spokesman for victims‘ rights into a job hosting a new reality show dedicated to catching fugitives, America‟s Most Wanted. On it, he became a weekly reminder of real dangers to middle class families.

“A Nightmare of Reality”

In 1988, Fox Television, languishing in fourth place among the big four television networks, debuted a show dedicated to catching fugitives and preventing crime. Unlike many locally produced shows featuring ―crimestoppers,‖ America‟s Most Wanted was a slickly produced, nationally broadcast show determined to get viewers to help find the most dangerous criminals on the loose in America. This show, along with two other shows that

62 Barbara Kantrowitz and Connie Leslie, ―Teaching Fear,‖ Newsweek, March 10, 1986. The authors described many games including ―Strangers Dangers‖ where ―players -- children as young as four years old -- negotiate a route from school to home that is filled with potential hazards: sinister-looking strangers offering 106

premiered in 1987, Fox‘s Cops and NBC‘s Unsolved Mysteries, ushered in a new era of reality television programming that blurred the lines between news and entertainment in a bid to do public service while drawing big ratings.63 America‟s Most Wanted was successful at doing both. The show was a hit, and criminals were being captured because of viewer tips.64 Beamed into millions of homes each week, the show not only flogged its audience for information but reminded them of pervasive criminal dangers that they need to protect themselves against.

The casting of John Walsh as host gave the show credibility in urging its audience to be wary, helped inoculate the show against many critical reviews of its exploitative tendencies, and proved an important connection between the crime depicted on the show and suburban life.65 As both the father of a murdered child and a well-respected advocate for missing and exploited children, Walsh was chosen because he could speak with

candy or a ride, vacant houses, railroad tracks. The winner is the first player to arrive home safely, no easy task.‖ 63 Jerry Buck, ―Television ‗Wanted‘ Gets Its Man,‖ Associated Press, May 17, 1988. This article compared and contrasted America‟s Most Wanted, Cops, and Unsolved Mysteries. Premiering in 1987, Cops focused more on the tasks of beat officers on the street than on invoking the help of the viewing audience to catch criminals. Debuting in 1988, Unsolved Mysteries did ask for the help from the audience, but the show ranged wildly from asking for information on murder cases to UFO sightings. It was this focus on paranormal events that distinguished Unsolved Mysteries from America‟s Most Wanted likely explaining the success of America‟s Most Wanted to this day long after the cancellation of Unsolved Mysteries. Earlier incarnations of the reality genre were mostly on the Public Broadcasting System. The most successful series was An American Family which premiered in January of 1973. The show followed the lives of the Loud family during which parents Pat and Bill were filing for divorce and son Lance emerged as the first openly gay character on television. 64 Monica Collins, ―Broadcast Crime Busters; 'Wanted' Captures Its Audience,‖ USA Today, March 2, 1989; and America‟s Most Wanted, ―Homepage,‖ http://www.amw.com/ (accessed September 14, 2009). According to the America‟s Most Wanted website, since the show started airing 1,088 criminals have been captured because of viewer intervention. 65 Other people under consideration to be host of the show were author Joseph Wambaugh and former Marine Corps commandant Paul X. Kelley, but they did not bring the appropriate associations to the show. Phil McCombs, ―John Walsh's Pursuit; 'America's Most Wanted' One Year Later,‖ Washington Post, April 25, 1989. 107

authenticity and power on issues of victimization and crime.66 Thomas Herwitz, a vice president at Fox Television Stations rejected the idea of hiring a professional to host the show, insisting they hire a real person eventually settling on Walsh because he ―bridges the gap, since his own life has been affected by crime.‖67 A preview of the show in Portland‘s

Oregonian identified the compelling mix Walsh brought to the show. He was ―the unabashed outraged citizen whose passion and zealotry bristle through. . . . He is the crusading aggrieved parent.‖68 Due to his advocacy work, he was not seen as exploiting his victim status to become host of the show. Instead, he was portrayed in the news as a genuinely concerned advocate and tough crime fighter who ―looks like J. Edgar Hoover‘s dream of a G-man.‖69 Walsh was a figure that the average viewer was supposed to relate to, a suburban dad whose life had been destroyed by senseless violence, and a larger-than- life crusader for justice who audiences could admire, respect, and welcome into their homes weekly.

During promotion of the show, especially during its inaugural season, Adam

Walsh‘s murder was constantly used to frame America‟s Most Wanted, as a suburban crime and as the impetus for John Walsh‘s tireless fight to stop criminals.70 Bob Niedt, in a

66 Steven Erlanger, ―Manhunting in an Armchair,‖ New York Times, February 2, 1988. 67 Ibid. 68 Peter Farrell, ―Sniping Crimestoppers Recruit Viewing Posse,‖ Oregonian, September 19, 1988. 69 Ibid. 70 Beyond those otherwise noted, there were numerous instances of Adam‘s story being connected to the mission and success of America‟s Most Wanted. Catherine Shahan, ―Fox Television Unveils Show Searching for ‗Most Wanted‘ Criminals,‖ United Press International, February 2, 1988; David Briscoe, ―TV Show Credited With Capturing Some of America's 'Most Wanted',‖ Associated Press, March 28, 1988; Buck, ―Television's ‗Wanted‘ Show Gets Its Man‖; Collins, ―Broadcast Crime Busters‖; Greg Joseph, ―‗Wanted‘ A Huge Neighborhood Watch,‖ San Diego Union-Tribune, June 16, 1989; Jim Sullivan, ―'Most Wanted' Least Wanted by Felons,‖ Boston Globe, April 14, 1990; Amy Ellis, ―Host Is Caught Up in ‗Most Wanted' Show,‘‖ St. Petersburg Times, July 7, 1990; Robert P. Laurence, ―Crusade to Catch Culprits,‖ San Diego Union- Tribune, February 7, 1991; Peter Farrell, ―Here‘s a Guide to TV‘s Version of the Real World,‖ Oregonian, March 3, 1991; David L. Shaw, ―‗Wanted‘ Host to Speak in Auburn,‖ Post-Standard, April 11, 1991; Dan 108

review of the show for Syracuse‘s Post-Standard, characteristically referenced John

Walsh‘s past: ―John Walsh is alive and driven and hopeful there will never again be a son who is taken away from his father and family and friends in such a swift, brutal way.‖71 In interviews, Walsh also invoked his own story. For example, in his interview with Niedt,

Walsh prefaced his opinions on law enforcement by saying, ―I‘m speaking as the victim, the father of a murdered child.‖72 In a New York Times Magazine piece on the show,

Walsh described the impetus for his transformation from suburban dad to television crime fighter. ―At 35, I thought I had the American dream . . . A good job, a great family and a home in sunny Florida. Then, one morning my wife went to the store, and Adam was abducted. The killer was never found.‖73 Even four years into the show‘s run, Adam‘s story was still being invoked. In an article about the show‘s 200th capture, USA Today identified Walsh, as the father of an abducted child, to be the unique ingredient of the show. ―And they have something no one else has: John Walsh, the show‘s host. . . .

Walsh‘s 6-year-old son, Adam, was kidnapped, molested and decapitated in 1981. The murder remains unsolved.‖74 The show was inextricably intertwined with Walsh‘s personal story about his son‘s murder and the shattering of a seemingly perfect suburban life. In whatever venue he appeared, including most prominently as host of America‟s

Sewell, ―‗America's Most Wanted‘ Host Gets ‗Sad Satisfaction‘ from Major Arrest,‖ Associated Press, April 26, 1991; Deborah Hastings, ―Using Television to Capture Criminals,‖ Associated Press, April 27, 1991; Ed Siegel, ―It's Not Fiction. It's Not News. It's Not Reality. It's Reali-TV,‖ Boston Globe, May 26, 1991; Janis D. Froelich, ―Drama in Real Life,‖ St. Petersburg Times, June 5, 1991; Sean Piccoli, ―Living on the Edge: There's No Hiding from Fear,‖ Washington Times, February 19, 1992; Brian Donlon, ―Hosting Real-Life Dramas // Narrators Set the Tone,‖ USA Today, March 9, 1992; Donna Gable, ―Missing Children Are ‗Most Wanted‘ in ‗92,‖ USA Today, September 11, 1992; and Brian Donlon, ―‗Most Wanted‘ Still Hard at Work,‖ USA Today, November 19, 1992. 71 Bob Niedt, ―Crime Stopper: John Walsh and America‘s Most Wanted,‖ Post-Standard, August 2, 1988. 72 Ibid. 73 Frank J. Prial, ―Freeze! You‘re on TV,‖ New York Times Magazine, September 28, 1988, 56. 109

Most Wanted, Walsh brought his son‘s case and all of its associations with him. As a victim, he was a reminder that crime happens even in the suburbs and, as an advocate and the host of America‟s Most Wanted, he reminded viewers to be vigilant in protecting themselves lest tragedy befall them.

How the show was conceived and actually worked is key to understanding its role in producing crime as ubiquitous. In format, the show functioned much like a telethon with

John Walsh relaying information while urging his audience to call in with whatever information they could contribute. Appearing at the end of each show, Walsh would sign off with a variation of ―And remember, you can make a difference.‖ The show also featured re-enactments of crimes done in a visceral low-budget style. Through these mini- movies, America‟s Most Wanted conveyed the moral rigidity of the vigilante films discussed later in the chapter. The producers exhaustively reenacted the crime leaving little doubt as to the alleged criminal‘s guilt while inciting sympathy for victims by melodramatically portraying victims and their families after their lives have been shattered by crime. The reenactments were described by the New York Times this way, ―The camerawork is hand-held; the music is urgent; there are a number of scenes in which guns are pointed or fired into the camera lens.‖75 These reenactments were key to achieving the show‘s purpose as they brought jarringly violent recreations of real crimes into American living rooms helping their vision of crime be the vision of crime in America. The producers used graphic violence in the reenactments to attempt to give the audience a sense of the magnitude of the danger as well as to make the audience feel their participation was

74 Donna Gable, ―‗AMW‘ Honors 200th Capture,‖ USA Today, May 7, 1992. 75 Erlanger, ―Television: Manhunting in an Armchair.‖ 110

of critical importance to stop criminals from committing more heinous crimes especially given the not so subtle suggestion that a criminal may soon be pointing a gun at them. One

Fox executive had some trepidation about the reenactments or ―brutal video,‖ as he called it.76 However, brutal video was the way to generate interest in the show and communicate an urgent message to the audience about the pervasiveness of crime and their role in preventing it. It was supposed to motivate people into supplementing police work by defending their homes all from their Barcaloungers. That was the mission of the show as

John Walsh saw it. ―The American public needs to know that [violent criminals] are out there. This is not a screenwriter's nightmare. This is a nightmare of reality.‖77 This insistence on portraying a real, pervasive threat was what gave the show such resonance. It compounded other media portrayals of violence lurking on neighborhood corners with the force of exploitative recreations all framed by the persona of John Walsh and its associated meanings as victim and crusader.

Unlike Walsh‘s campaign on behalf of missing children, America‟s Most Wanted was far less critical of law enforcement. Instead, the show operated under the premise that no organization could keep up with crime or with the wily criminals who eluded them at every turn. Indeed, moving the audience to act in circumscribed ways to support police was part of the mission of the show.78 In an interview with television critic Tom Shales,

Doug Linder, the producer of the America‟s Most Wanted, talked about how the show fit into the criminal justice system: ―This show is sending a subtle message that the criminal

76 Ibid. 77 Shahan, ―Fox Television Unveils Show.‖ 111

justice system doesn‘t work.‖ Linder went on to say that many of those who call the toll- free number hang up when they hear someone answer because they didn‘t believe someone would actually be there to listen.79 Walsh and America‟s Most Wanted were careful not to totally undermine the system nor endorse vigilantism. ―I‘m not a cop,‖ Walsh said. ―Nor am I some kind of vigilante. But there are 280,000 fugitives out there, and this is a chance to show that Americans can make a difference.‘‖80 This explanation represented the balance the show was trying to strike, and the politics in which it was engaged. Rather than airing an all-out critique of law enforcement each week, the show emphasized cooperation and made the ―subtle‖ suggestion that the criminal justice system was failing, while asking its audience to do what they could from the safety of their Lay-Z-Boy, because as Walsh emphasized at the end of each episode, ―you can make a difference.‖

The particular kind of activism the show advocated pitched itself to a suburban audience. In asking for the audience‘s assistance by peering out windows and phoning in tips rather than taking more direct action, Walsh and the show‘s producers hoped to find a balance between citizen activism and vigilante street justice. Watching the show and calling in information was a circumscribed action that supplemented the existing structure of criminal justice just as a security system or a gated community did. And, like other preventive behaviors, these actions were all local and limited with some sense that viewers who called in tips were protecting themselves as much as anyone else. This appeal was a particularly suburban mode of address that resonated with other kinds of limited and self-

78 It was mentioned prominently on the show that it was produced with cooperation from federal and local enforcement including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So, perhaps it did not behoove Walsh or others to be critical of law enforcement. 79 Tom Shales, ―Fox‘s ‗Most Wanted‘ A Worrisome Success,‖ Oregonian, May 20, 1988. 112

controlled actions suburbanites were using to protect themselves from other dangers. It mobilized suburbanites‘ increasing sense of victimization as discussed earlier in the chapter to protect themselves and their neighborhood through apolitical actions that, whether intentionally or not, allowed suburbanites to feel as though they were acting primarily in the defense of their homes and families.

John Walsh and the producers of America‟s Most Wanted went to great lengths to spur this kind of audience action, but warned them not to turn to more direct confrontation such as vigilantism to stop crime or catch criminals. By the premiere of America‟s Most

Wanted in 1988, the vigilante film genre had already provided explicit, violent narratives that endorsed reducing crime through extra-legal means. Portraying the vigilante as moral redeemer within a neatly constructed moral universe, the vigilante film provided a seemingly viable, although outsized, way of thinking about and dealing with crime.

The first urban vigilante films of emerged in the early 1970s when Richard Nixon called for a return to ―law and order.‖ They featured the righteous vigilante defending white middle class victims on urban landscapes filled with minorities and criminals. These images were intended to be visceral reminders of the supposed failures of the liberal state in decaying urban centers.81 These films were essentially exploitation fare that expressed white, middle class aggrievement and imagined salvation through the vigilante ―as nothing less than the redeemer.‖82 In the early 1980s, the vigilante genre shifted locales. Since the release of the original Death Wish and Dirty Harry films, the genre had run aground with

80 Prial, 56. 81 Macek, 203-213. 82 Vincent Canby, ―‗Death Wish‘ Exploits Fear Irresponsibly,‖ New York Times, August 4, 1974. 113

many poorly executed, low-budget imitations set in American cities.83 In seeking to explore new ground and capitalize on the perception that suburban crime was on the rise, these two pillars of the vigilante genre shifted their stories of persistent crime and extra- legal response out of the city and into the suburbs. In Death Wish II, released in 1982, architect/vigilante Paul Kersey moves to suburban Los Angeles to start over after the horrors of the first film, while ―Dirty‖ Harry Callahan moves to a quiet community on the coast of California in 1983‘s Sudden Impact.

Death Wish II and Sudden Impact maintained the vigilante genre‘s critique of the criminal justice system while asserting that the suburban environment, too, had become dangerous. These two films presented an alternate vision of suburban crimes and the solutions to them. 84 Their vigilante justice provided another way to think about suburban crime; a fantasy that presented an active defense instead of the largely defensive devices and practices used by suburbanites to protect themselves. Stoked by images of graphic violence and feelings of powerlessness, Death Wish II and Sudden Impact created an alternate suburban world where justice could be served with moral clarity and without the

83 Death Wish, directed by Michael Winner, Dino De Laurentiis Company and Paramount Pictures, 1974 and Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegel, perf. Clint Eastwood, The Malpaso Company and Warner Brothers Pictures, 1971. Dirty Harry, the original modern vigilante film, demonstrated these essential elements. Harry Callahan must eschew protocol and go beyond the law to catch the Scorpio killer terrorizing San Francisco with random sniper shootings. The tagline for the film exaggerated not only the single- mindedness of the vigilante but also his righteousness, ―You don't assign him to murder cases, you just turn him loose.‖ Harry Callahan doesn‘t need to be told to stop crime, no matter the method. Other films in the genre include the other films in the Dirty Harry series, Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), as well as the television movie Outrage (1973), Walking Tall (1973), television movie The Death Squad (1974), The Psychopath (1975), Deadbeat (1976), Breaking Point (1976), Taxi Driver (1976), The One Man Jury (1978), Exterminator (1980), Fighting Back (1982), Young Warriors (1983), Vigilante (1983), The Executioner: Part II (1984), Exterminator 2 (1984), The Annihilators (1985), Sudden Death (1985), The Ladies Club (1986). 84 Vincent Canby, ―Film: ‗Impact,‘ With Clint Eastwood,‖ New York Times, December 9, 1983. In his review of Sudden Impact, Canby noted the thematic similarities of these films writing, ―The screenplay bears a remarkable resemblance to ‗Death Wish,‘ especially in its impatience with the system of justice.‖ 114

messy involvement of law enforcement or waiting for passive measures to ensnare a dangerous criminal.

Death Wish II opens with helicopter shots of the sprawling landscape of greater Los

Angeles, a sunny alternative to the first Death Wish‟s New York City in crisis. Though

Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey seeks a quieter lifestyle on a quiet, tree-lined street, he is not left alone for long. While spending the day at an outdoor market with his new girlfriend, Geri Nichols, and daughter, Carol, who has been institutionalized following her assault in Death Wish, Kersey is mugged by a gang who steal his wallet. The muggers use the information on his driver‘s license to find his house and break in. Kersey is knocked out cold while the gang rapes and murders his the maid. The intruders abscond with Carol to their hideout inside an abandoned mansion where they continually rape her. In an escape attempt, Carol mistakenly jumps out of a window to her death. Kersey calls the police after the attack, but he already seems to know there is very little they can or will do.

With more senseless and brutal violence against Kersey‘s family, the vigilante plot is re- energized by the penetration of violence into the seemingly safe suburban spaces where he has sought to retreat.

After the attack, Kersey searches for the gang by living a double life. During the day, he remains a devoted boyfriend and successful architect while at night he stalks his prey on skid row. The transition between the two landscapes is stark and enhances the moral clarity of the series set in the first Death Wish. His suburban home is always shown as sunny, clean, and quiet. On skid row, Kersey mingles with drug dealers, addicts, and street preachers while searching for the gang. The movement back and forth between

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locales tracks a movement between respectability and criminality and in some way acts as a mode of slumming for the audience as the thrill is doubled by Kersey‘s own voyeurism and vigilantism. Further, his ability to take a room in this location and live the double life suggests his ability as a respectable, middle-class person to transcend the criminal things he does and locations he frequents because of the righteousness of his mission. In the world of the vigilante film, he is not a criminal, but a one-man justice system who can do bad things but not be essentially bad himself. This notion is reaffirmed in the film when Kersey evades his own arrest and prosecution for killing the gang because the police fears that his

―crimes‖ would be seen as noble by the public-at-large. At the end of the film, he returns to the suburbs—he has helped remake them as a safe space.

Released a year after Death Wish II and featuring the iconic line, ―Go ahead, make my day,‖ the Clint Eastwood directed Sudden Impact takes detective ―Dirty‖ Harry

Callahan out of San Francisco. Following his illegal seizure of evidence that sets a criminal free, Harry is forced to go on a vacation. However, in his new, quiet, suburban town, Harry becomes involved in a local serial killer case with no solid leads. Soon after his arrival, Harry meets artist Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke). They meet for a drink and their conversation turns to crime and justice. Jennifer says, ―This is the age of lapsed responsibilities and defeated justice. Today an eye for an eye means only if you‘re caught and even then it means an indefinite postponement and, ‗let‘s settle out of court.‘‖ Harry is intrigued if not overwhelmed by a beautiful woman essentially endorsing his worldview.

Unbeknownst to Harry, Jennifer‘s views were formed years earlier by a violent incident. In previous scenes, the audience sees her and her sister gang raped on the beach leaving her

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sister in a catatonic state much like Paul Kersey‘s daughter in Death Wish. Years later, returning to the scene of the crime, Jennifer finds all of the perpetrators going about their normal lives reinforcing the notion of violent criminals living freely in a suburban setting.

Spencer then decides to exact her own revenge leading to a rash of mysterious killings the local police are unable to solve.

As Harry works the case and dates Jennifer, he discovers she is responsible for the mysterious killings in the town. The film builds to a climax as Spencer attempts to finish off the last two members of the gang that raped her and her sister. She discovers one of them is the police chief‘s son, who has been left in a catatonic state after a car accident.

The chief tells Jennifer he will essentially look the other way on her killings to be rid of the

―scum‖ responsible for her attack. As in the Death Wish series, vigilantism is sanctioned by police seeking expedient solutions to crime and necessary help in cleaning up the streets. However, Jennifer‘s vigilantism presents a dilemma for ―Dirty‖ Harry, as he endorses the elimination of criminals but also, if somewhat perversely, believes in the rule of law. Before he makes his decision about whether to turn Jennifer in, she delivers a searing critique of the justice system that encapsulates the politics of the vigilante genre.

She pleads, ―What, are you going to read me my rights? Where was this concern for my rights when I was being beaten and mauled?… There is a thing called justice. Is it justice that they should all just walk away?‖ Already sympathetic to her cause, Harry is swayed by her argument, and tells the local police that a gun found on one of the rapists was the one used in all the other killings.

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Death Wish II and Sudden Impact helped change the cognitive map of the suburbs to include crime while promoting a fantasy of individual agency that actually caught criminals rather than avoiding them. The actions of Kersey and Callahan embrace the suburban ethic evident in other arenas of suburban life. As explored in chapter one,

Nimbys successfully exercised power over their local environments while suburban parents and police, as explored in the final two chapters, consolidated their regulatory power over public space when threatened by unruly teens and hazardous popular culture products.

However, with regard to crime, suburbanite‘s actions were limited to passive behaviors.

They prepared to be victimized and organized their lives around its likelihood rather than actively searching for and eliminating threats. The suburban iterations of the vigilante film provided an outlet for this activist fantasy by showing the efficient removal of crime and criminals by empowered victims.

By asking its audience to act as a supplement to the work of law enforcement,

America‟s Most Wanted proved not only the fantasy of vigilantism impossible, but helped highlight suburbanites‘ limited power in the face of crime. The audience was told to assume that their local landscape was home to fugitive criminals, but to be ready to merely call the 1-800 number if they actually encountered one. However, audience members were discouraged from being just passive victims as John Walsh insisted. He said, ―As I began to understand that tragedy, I decided not to be victimized by fear or revenge, but to share my realization that each of us can help—must help—stop crime. That‘s what America‟s

Most Wanted is all about.‖85 As an armchair vigilante, then, the viewer could enjoy the visceral thrill of looking for a wanted criminal and vicariously enjoy their arrest by law

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enforcement, knowing they or someone just like them had played a part. USA Today characterized the show as thriving ―on a collective preoccupation with random crime and voyeuristic crime-solving. Is your neighbor a runaway killer with a new identity—and an incriminating ‗Mom‘ tattooed on his behind?‖86 Though it was largely passive, watching the show and looking for criminals let suburban viewers imagine they were actively participating in their own defense against crime, and helped make the show a hit.

Conclusion

Overlapping discourses of crime and home security in the 1970s and ‗80s produced imagery, practices, and ideas that reshaped the fundamental associations of the suburban landscape with regard to crime. The discursive production of perils ranging from burglary and kidnapping to rape and murder in suburban places made crime appear endemic to suburban life and facilitated suburbanites‘ creation of the carceral suburb with life organized around defending against pervasive threats. ―Fear of crime‖ had, according to the New York Times, ―become so ‗alarmingly pervasive‘ in the United States that it has altered the way people live.‖87 Through the portrayals of crime and violence in Adam, suburban vigilante films, America‟s Most Wanted, or even in the newspaper each day, suburbanites were experiencing crime and being left with a nagging suspicion that, unless they took steps to protect themselves, they were next. Their new impulse to protect themselves spurred growth in the installation of home security systems and fuelled new endeavors to educate suburbanites about safe practices on newly dangerous streets.

85 U.S. Newswire, ―Attorney General Barr Presents Justice Department Awards,‖ Dec. 14, 1992. 86 Erlanger, ―Television: Manhunting in an Armchair‖; Monica Collins, ―Broadcast Crime Busters; and USA Today, ―‗Wanted Captures Its Audience,‖ March 2, 1989. 119

In the next chapter, the behavior of suburban teenagers in public and the various representations of it in media would also change the ways in which suburban space was imagined and traversed. Shopping malls, recreation centers, and other teen-dominated places were associated with the dangerous behavior of teens in public that, in turn, lead to new regimes of discipline for suburban public space.

87 Selwyn Raab, ―Crime, Fear Seen Changing Habits Around the U.S.,‖ New York Times, September 17, 1980. 120

Chapter 3: Punks, Mallrats, and Out-of-Control Teenagers: The

Production and Regulation of Suburban Public Space

Adam Walsh‘s abduction from a shopping mall in broad daylight helped to recast suburban spaces as imperiled—especially for children—by anonymous criminals stalking public places. In the wake of this tragedy, the shopping mall industry scrambled to develop new practices to safeguard that space, seeking to protect itself as well as its customers.

Malls created new procedures to deal with missing children and sponsored events to have children fingerprinted and photographed for their parents‘ records.1 The Walsh incident brought to light the centrality of the mall in suburban life, and its apparent dangers as a public space.

However, Adam Walsh‘s murder and the supposed kidnapping epidemic of the

1980s were not the only catalysts shifting the understanding and regulation of shopping centers and other suburban public spaces. The central argument of this chapter is that narratives and representations in news media and popular culture, uses of public space by suburbanites, and tactics of social regulation transformed suburban public spaces in the

1980s to accommodate developing perceptions of those spaces as at once hazardous to and because of teenagers. While teenagers were subject to the same looming cultural, moral, environmental, and criminal hazards that threatened other suburbanites, they were also increasingly produced as threats themselves; threatening to those who legitimately used

1 Randi Henderson, ―Some Oppose Teaching Fear of Strangers,‖ San Diego Union-Tribune, February 17, 1986. 121

public space (i.e., shoppers in a mall) and ―good‖ kids (shopping or working) who could be turned ―bad.‖

News media narratives and popular culture representations nearly inextricably linked suburban teens with particular public spaces and cast any teenager in them as likely disruptive and possibly criminal. The 1979 film Over the Edge provided a vivid depiction of out-of-control teens who cause their recreation center to close because it was a breeding ground for their violent behavior and substance use.2 At approximately the same moment, recreation centers across the country began to struggle to stay open because of their associations with unruly teenage behavior. Through the end of the 80s, municipalities closed or repurposed teen centers from Milwaukee to Florida signaling the power of the image of the dangerous public teen.3 Representations in newspapers and self-produced fanzines also associated the public performances of sneering suburban punk rockers and their scene with hostility, violence, and disorder. Director Penelope Spheeris‘s films—The

Decline of Western Civilization (1981) and Suburbia (1984) —as well as the lyrics and music of hardcore itself enhanced those associations. Hardcore punk music and its social scene was positioned directly against middle-class suburban life of its participants helping create a hostile climate for bands‘ public confrontations with police. 4 The discourses of suburban public life produced shopping centers, too, as teen spaces rife with their misbehavior. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) showed teens using the mall as a

2 Over the Edge, directed by Jonathan Kaplan, Orion Pictures, 1979; Warner Home Video, 2005. 3 Milwaukee Sentinel, ―Suburb‘s Teen Center Deserves 2nd Chance,‖ September 16, 1977; and Amelia Davis, ―Largo Teens Want to Keep Pool Room, Center As Is,‖ St. Petersburg Times, May 16, 1987. 4 The Decline of Western Civilization, directed by Penelope Spheeris, Spheeris Films, 1981; and Suburbia, directed by Penelope Spheeris, New World Pictures, 1984; Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2005. 122

venue for scalping concert tickets, finding sexual partners, and getting high.5 Similarly, newspapers and magazines contained stories about legions of teen mall patrons, ―mallrats,‖ who made shopping centers their homes away from home.6 These narratives portrayed the

―proliferation of teenagers at malls‖ leading to ―prostitution, drug sales, gang rivalries and excessive drinking -- all of which can erupt into deadly violence.‖7 Even the video game arcade, once believed to be a way to contain rowdy teens in shopping centers, became known as a hazardous teen space home to transgressive behavior despite rules specifically intended to prevent problems.8 The emergence of the arcade as a dangerous space spawned outlandish popular culture representations like the teen exploitation film Joysticks (1983), which further implicated arcade teens in deviant behavior.9

Even though not all teens in public were criminals, in their movement through suburban spaces, they were redolent of the image of the dangerous teen seemingly ubiquitous in central suburban public spaces. These news media and popular culture narratives of their disruption and misbehavior in public enabled increased policing of those spaces that changed the tenor of suburban public life by. Many suburban communities shut down or severely curtailed the operating hours of recreation centers and arcades where teens congregated. Shopping centers modernized and professionalized their security forces to crack down on the nuisances of shoplifting and highly visible loitering that discouraged

5 Fast Times at Ridgemont High, directed by Amy Heckerling, Universal Pictures, 198‘2. 6 Bob Levey, ―Teens View Center As ‗Their‘ Community,‖ Washington Post, January 1, 1981; and Mike Sager, ―Malls--Hubs of Often Centerless Suburbia Become Home Away from Home,‖ Washington Post, February 9, 1983. 7Ted Gest with Jeannye Thornton, ―As More Crime Invades the Shopping Malls,‖ U.S. News & World Report, June 11, 1984, 70. 8 Ray Pelosi, ―Amusement Centers Change Again, But Profit Potential is Still Strong,‖ Shopping Center World, September 1983, 41 9 Joysticks, directed by Greydon Clark, Jensen Farley Pictures, 1983. 123

shopping by other customers. Mallrats and arcade addicts, their freedom severely curtailed by malls‘ new disciplinary regimes, moved back into the home. There, they were protected from the dangers of suburban public life, and the public was protected from them.

Hardcore punks, limited in their ability to congregate in public, often left their local environs to go to big cities where they could find more amenable spaces for performing and socializing. These regulations of teens in suburban space further produced the notion of a dangerous suburban landscape. They also increased the scrutiny of public places for all who entered them leading to disputes about whether shopping malls constituted public space.10 Lastly, the marking of public teens as dangerous and their expulsion from public space valorized the space of the home as presumably safe for teenagers.

“Over the Edge is a Funeral Service Held at the Graveside of the Suburban Dream.”

—Roger Ebert, “Review: Over the Edge,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 1, 1980.

The suburban teen alienation and ennui films of the late 1970s and early to mid-80s promoted particular discursive constructions of out-of-control teenagers such as the runaway, the mallrat, and the valley girl. Narratives of these dangerous teens highlighted the spatial and emotional alienation of runaway suburban teens, punks, and good-kids- gone-bad that helped mark real teens in public as both dangerous and imperiled. Jonathan

Kaplan, director of Over the Edge (1979), and Penelope Spheeris, director of the hardcore punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization(1981) and the fictional film about suburban punks, Suburbia (1984), suggested that their work was ―documenting‖ a modern, suburban teen experience that belied the visions of happy sitcom families and myths of the

10 Cohen, A Consumer‟s Republic, 257-289. In this chapter, Cohen explores the shrinking of suburban public space as it was replaced by quasi-public spaces such as the mall and the problems of such 124

nuclear family.11 To upset those expectations, the films portrayed a suburban landscape suffuse with hazards from and to teens, through realistic depictions of disintegrating suburban families and teens fending for themselves in embattled public spaces. In these films, teens leave broken homes to form new ―families,‖ commit crimes to make ends meet, and menace average people in the public spaces available to them. The visceral presentation of the material created powerful images of teen rebellion and suburban discord that associated public teens with misbehavior and danger, thus helping to initiate and legitimate the regulation of teens and public space so that they could be reintegrated into the home or expelled from suburban life altogether.

Over the Edge was arguably the definitive portrayal of suburban teen anarchy during the period under review. Co-written by a former newspaper reporter, Charles S.

Haas, the film was based on the reporting of his San Francisco Examiner colleagues, Bruce

Koon and James A. Finefrock, of events that took place in the suburban town of Foster

City, California in 1973. In the front-page article, ―Mouse Packs: Kids on a Crime Spree,‖

Koon and Finefrock told the stories of pipe bomb explosions, graffiti on shopping center walls, and other criminal activities, all perpetrated by pre-teenage gangs of ―mousepacks‖ in Foster City.12 The article presented a lawless landscape in which teen and pre-teen violence was a frightening aberration unfamiliar with crime especially from its youth population. According to the article, Foster City government had to account for the activities of the ―mousepacks‖ in every foray into public. For example, junior high school

liminality for free expression and uses of the space. 11 Over the Edge, DVD director‘s and writers‘ commentary; and Suburbia, DVD director‘s commentary. 125

students must be let out forty-five minutes before the high school students so that the younger students could not be mugged by the older ones. Koon and Finefrock wondered whether the situation in Foster City may be ―a fluke or a harbinger of things to come,‖ but clearly indicated with a long list of juvenile offenses that Foster City was a harbinger of suburban danger to come.

Over the Edge filled in the story of Foster City‘s ―mousepacks,‖ extended the observations of the reporters to produce indelible images of suburban teen misbehavior.

Set in the fictional planned community of New Granada, Colorado, a stand in for the generic American suburb, Over the Edge attempted to explain what led teenagers to misbehavior and violence. The film depicted suburban teens as bored and angry because of a stultifying suburban environment that did not adequately account for their needs. In doing so, Over the Edge helped usher in a national discourse of the out-of-control suburban teen that helped facilitate the closer regulation of public space and the movement of teens back into the home.

Superimposed over a static shot of the bleak landscape surrounding New Granada is a short preface that attempts to put the misbehavior of suburban teens in context: ―In 1978

110,000 kids under 18 were arrested for crimes of vandalism in the United States. The story is based on true incidents occurring during the 1970s in a planned suburban community of townhomes and condominiums where city planners ignored the fact that a quarter of the population was 15 years old or younger.‖ With that preamble, the writers and director communicated that they were attempting to make a social problem film—a

12 Bruce Koon and James A. Finefrock, ―Mouse Packs: Kids on a Crime Spree,‖ San Francisco Examiner, November 11, 1973. 126

realistic portrayal of the failures of suburban development to address the needs of a teenage population who was predisposed to do dangerous and destructive things. Specifically, the film depicts the worst-case scenario for suburban teens who lack sufficient recreational outlets. The teenagers in the film (played largely by non-professional actors) drink, do drugs, vandalize, assault, and even kill each other. Roger Ebert noted in his review that

―the particulars of the plot aren‘t all that important; we‘re supposed to absorb a feeling of teen-age frustration and paranoia and we do.‖13 Moving beyond the intimations of the

Examiner article that was the source material of the film, Over the Edge portrayed New

Granada‘s youth population, spurred by boredom and frustration, turning the bucolic potential of a planned community into a hellscape and associated suburban teens with dangerous, transgressive behavior.

Yet, on the desolate landscape of the film, where construction sites are silent and new housing sits empty, New Granada does have something for its teen population—a recreation center. Apart from their school, this is the only space that has been created specifically for them. In the opening sequences of the film, the recreation center appears as an oasis. It is populated by teenagers and younger kids who play games and socialize all afternoon until the center closes at 6 p.m. with its patrons returning home to dinner with their families. However, because it provides the only space for teens to congregate, the recreation center soon becomes home to more dangerous activities like drinking, drug use, and after-hours loitering. In a review of the film, the Christian Science Monitor described the center as ―The only place for the kids to hang out,‖ that ―quickly becomes tedious, and since the ‗bad‘ kids are lumped there with the ‗good‘ ones, mischief occasionally brews—

13 Ebert, ―Over the Edge.‖ 127

and the community holler for the center to be shut down.‖14 As the review noted, the consequences of mixing ―good‖ and ―bad‖ kids lead parents, police, and teachers to identify the center with facilitating the corruption of ―good‖ kids with alcohol, drugs, and sex than with any positive goal the center was trying to achieve.

The corruption of ―good‖ teens in public and the chaos of teen centers, as presented in the film, were at the core of the news media narratives of debates over real recreation centers. According to these reports, centers were often closed or turned into less teen- specific community centers because of their increasingly nefarious associations and municipal encounters with actual disruptions.15 According to the Milwaukee Sentinel,

Greendale, Wisconsin closed its recreation center in 1977 because of flagging attendance and reports of criminal activity.16 In 1980, a Dunedin, Florida center was opened explicitly to cater to all of the town‘s residents to avoid becoming an exclusively teen hangout, with all that designation seemingly entailed.17 The St. Petersburg Times also perpetuated the story of out-of-control teens at the recreation center. In an article about a Largo, Florida center, a Florida Parks and Recreation commissioner proposed changing a recreation center into a community center because ―We have had a lot of problems. Some of the teen-agers are very disruptive and have done a lot of damage . . . They have put dead cats on their

[senior citizens‘] cars.‖18 Other centers, sponsored by civic or religious groups, remained open but held little sway over suburban teens, as these spaces were even more regulated

14 Christian Science Monitor, ―Shorttakes,‖ January 28, 1982. 15 Julie Brossy, ―Reaching Out to Community; Community Center Fills Void for Seniors, Teens,‖ San Diego Tribune, December 5, 1988; and Terry Rodgers, ―Oceanside to Turn Building into Community Center,‖ San Diego Tribune, March 30, 1990. 16 Milwaukee Sentinel, ―Suburb‘s Teen Center Deserves 2nd Chance.‖ 17 Valeria M. Russ, ―Recreation Center to Open Saturday,‖ St. Petersburg Times, January 31, 1980. 18 Davis, ―Largo Teens Want to Keep Pool Room, Center As Is.‖ 128

than school, home, or the mall, and therefore less attractive to teens.19 These narratives of center closures perpetuated the ideas put forth in Over the Edge. Teen recreation centers were dangerous places and should be changed into community centers or closed altogether.

News media narratives further enhanced the sense that suburban teens and their communities were better served if teens stayed home to socialize in the presumably more tightly regulated environment of the suburban home.

Lacking the recreation center or any other place to socialize, the teens in the film are not successfully reintegrated into their homes. Rather, they continue to misbehave across the landscape of New Granada, proving to be a greater menace and emphasizing the danger of the aimless, suburban teen in public. For example, their unruliness interferes with the town‘s fortunes. As evidenced by unfinished tract houses and open fields marked for construction, New Granada has failed to attract investors. To rejuvenate their flagging economy, prominent local businessmen try to lure investors from Houston. They try to portray New Granada as not only a good investment but a good place to live and raise a family, far better than the city. Though the recreation center is supposed to be closed, on that day it is accidentally reopened. As the police attempt to close it back down, a violent confrontation erupts between officers and patrons, scaring away the Houston investors who witness the chaotic scene. Consequently, the center is closed again, this time permanently.

The town then convenes a meeting at the junior high school to discuss New Granada‘s problem teens. Once the parents are all in the school, the kids lock them in and riot in the

19 For example, the Millwood Presbyterian Church outside Spokane, Washington opened an ―alternative recreation center.‖ It was essentially a center that would provide a safe place for teens to congregate unlike other recreation centers. Tim Hanson, ―Center for Teen-Agers Will Open Saturday,‖ Spokesman-Review, February 16, 1985. 129

hallways and parking lot of the school. They steal from the main office, shoot guns and destroy and vandalize everything in sight. When the police arrive to rescue the adults locked inside the school, the teens flee toward the recreation center. The police car chasing them crashes into the center resulting in a fiery explosion. The center burns to the ground in a symbolic and literal end to teen social life in the town. The ending was not an arbitrary narrative choice. It highlighted the problem of bored suburban teens and their supposed propensity for violence without proper recreational activities. In so doing, the film also initiated a set of narratives and representations of suburban teens as liminal figures on the verge of dangerous, sadistic acts supposedly engendered by life in the suburbs. And, in turn, this portrayal invited parents, police, and teachers to regulate the public spaces frequented by teens.

Narratives of the suburban teen as bored and dangerous were elaborated and extended through the 1980s in other popular culture and news media texts. Those narratives and representations further marked suburban teens as likely malevolent figures whose presence in a public space helped initiate and legitimate its closer regulation. In the music and social scene of hardcore suburban punk rock, in the films The Decline of

Western Civilization(1981) and Suburbia (1984), and in impassioned news media narratives of runaways and forgotten suburban teenagers throughout the 80s (as in Over the

Edge), suburban public space was being redefined as hazardous to and because of teens.

Yet, in the narratives and representations that follow, teens did not simply conquer these spaces and leave mayhem in their wake. The stories and lived experiences of these spaces produced and reproduced conflict between teens and authority figures as the hallmark of

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public teens and the spaces they chose to frequent. Those narratives and representations perpetuated the image of the violent public teen, invited regulation of the spaces they frequented, and contributed to the notion of a hazardous suburban landscape marked by conflict.

“I Want to be Stereotyped/I Want to be Classified/I Want to be a Clone/I

Want a Suburban Home”

—Descendents, “Suburban Home,” Milo Goes to College, 1982.

Rooted in largely non-professional, communal performance spaces, suburban hardcore punk, as it emerged in and around Los Angeles in the late 1970s, was not a commercial venture. It was, instead, a largely suburban music form produced by suburban teens and young adults for an audience made up of their peers. The music and its social scene were public manifestations of suburban teenagers‘ disaffection with what they perceived as bland, predictable lives marketed as an American ideal by mass culture, but which were actually marked by neglect and often shattered by divorce and abuse.20 In their music, hardcore punks represented themselves as outcasts in their suburban communities.

Simultaneously, they echoed postwar critiques of suburban life by portraying those communities as stultifying havens of middlebrow pleasures and emotional repression. In playing their music and spreading their message about teens‘ sorry situation in postmodern suburbs, bands performed in co-opted public spaces such as homes, church basements, and restaurants. Though they were representing themselves, suburban hardcore punks served to

20 Leerom Medevoi sees this same dynamic between rock and roll music and its suburban audiences of the 1950s. Although, in that case, he argues that youth rebellion was packaged and sold as an identity that was supposed to control teen rebellion, spurred by suburban life which, he argues, was the worst of urban and rural life. Rather than an identity that could contain rebellion, hardcore was a direct articulation of suburban 131

enhance their status as dangerous public figures. Hardcore was an outlet and an identity for rebellious suburban teens—a subculture as formulated by Dick Hebdige in Subculture: The

Meaning of Style. These punk rockers had ―expressive forms and rituals‖ and were

―treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons.‖21 They had the presence of difference in dress and decorum which signaled their insularity to insiders and opposition to outsiders. Further, they positioned themselves against the dominant order of their local communities, marking themselves as objects of discipline while simultaneously reaffirming that order through their regulation and expulsion.22 This proved to be the crucial aspect of the emergence of suburban punks. They were identifiable public figures expressing an anti-suburban view in combative public performances. Suburban punks were not performing and socializing in cloistered venues but in the very suburban places they decried.

Beyond the actual music and its public performances, representations of the suburban punk music scene in the 1981 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization and the 1984 narrative film Suburbia (in spite of clear intention to soften the image of the hardcore punk) also suggested suburban punks were dangerous figures bringing the violent associations of their public performances to a national audience. Penelope Spheeris, who directed both films, used documentary and fictional narratives to locate punks‘ disaffection with their disintegrating families in suburban locales and show the results of those failures.

Decline depicted live performances featuring the hallmarks of hardcore punk shows—

tensions that fomented rebellion and confrontation. Rebel: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 92-94. 21 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 2002), 2. 22 Hebdige, 3-4, 74-89. 132

audience-band interaction, aggressive dancing, and violent confrontations. The performance footage linked hardcore punks with undesirable, seemingly anti-social behavior. Spheeris, also the editor of The Decline of Western Civilization, intercut performance footage with interviews of bands and fans and slice-of-life segments that connected hardcore punks‘ music and combative behavior to their suburban upbringings.

1984‘s Suburbia continued Spheeris‘s exploration of hardcore as she wrote and directed a fictional film based on her experiences with the scene. A gritty docu-drama, that film elaborated the themes of Decline, building on its credibility as a ―true‖ portrait of the hardcore scene by featuring real bands and non-professional actors and shooting on location in punk venues. Critics maintained that she gave context to the hardcore scene and treated its members evenhandedly, but Spheeris‘s films, both presented as coming directly from real life, contributed imagery and narratives of dangerous suburban punks as part of a broader discourse of out-of-control suburban teens.23

The hardcore scene, through its music and public performances, and its representations in fanzines, news media, and popular culture, created a recognizable and dangerous suburban teen type—the hardcore punk. Alongside disaffected recreation center teens as well as mallrats and arcade addicts discussed later in the chapter, the hardcore punk became another reminder of the dangers to and from teens in public and called forth new regulations of suburban public space to remove punks from view.

23 These reviewers noted the evenhanded treatment of punks in The Decline of Western Civilization. They argued that Spheeris, rather than exploiting the scene, gave context to punks‘ behavior and sought to see hardcore from the perspective of its fans and artists. Janet Maslin, ―Miss Spheeris‘s Punk Verite,‖ New York Times, July 5, 1981; Robert Palmer, ―Punk: Re-Forming Rock,‖ New York Times, July 8, 1981; Richard Harrington, ―In the Punk of the Night; Penelope Spheeris and the Underground Shock,‖ Washington Post, November 10, 1981; and Richard Harrington, ―Zooming in on Punk Movies,‖ Washington Post, November 10, 1981. 133

The first suburban hardcore song, ―Out of Vogue,‖ was recorded and released in

1978 by the Orange County California band Middle Class on their extended play (EP) seven inch album, Out of Vogue.24 As the first suburban hardcore album, Middle Class set the tone visually, musically, and lyrically. Even before the record was played, the band‘s name and album cover rooted their music in a typical suburban milieu. The cover showed two young girls in the middle of a tree-lined street, cars parked in driveways and on the street, and rows of houses neatly arranged along the block. With the band name, Middle

Class, in the top right corner and album name, Out of Vogue, in the bottom right, framing the girls, the scene feels both familiar and distant. The girls appear content, but the street scene looks expansive, boring, and perhaps a bit sad. Layered over this image of an average suburban street, Middle Class, as a band name, could not have been more didactic.

They were stating their band‘s perspective as teenagers from the suburbs who were uncool or ―Out of Vogue.‖ Although Middle Class would never achieve the popularity or longevity of other influential hardcore bands such as Black Flag or Dead Kennedys, their first EP was an important milestone in the discourses producing suburban life—these were

―typical suburban teens‖ playing their own music about their own suburban lives.25

When the record was played, the listener heard a fast, loud, monotonal blast of four two minute songs. It was over before it started and begged multiple plays for fans who wanted to grasp the music and the lyrics. When the album was played again, half- sung/half-yelled lyrics presented critiques of the middlebrow culture that surrounded them.

They eschewed bland suburban life and the latest trends of popular culture for the

24 Middle Class, ―Out of Vogue,‖ Out of Vogue, Joke Records, 1978. 134

seemingly more authentic subculture of hardcore. They sang on the EP‘s title track, ―We don‘t need no magazines/We don‘t need no TV/We don‘t want to know.‖26 Describing their music in 1978, the band identified the rage at the heart of hardcore, ―There is a certain amount of anger in the music but its [sic] kind of directionless, were [sic] not mad at any one person, were [sic] not mad at fascists or communists or anything like that, were [sic] just generally mad.‖27 Middle Class‘s comments, viewed in context with their lyrics and music, suggested their rage was induced by their boring, comfortable, middle class lives.

In expressing their anger, the band created the archetypal attitude and lyrical touchstones of suburban hardcore—alienation, disaffection, and anger—all channeled through fast, aggressive music played live at violent, public performances.

The music and lyrics of hardcore bands like Middle Class combined the fast-paced sound and do-it-yourself production of the United Kingdom and East coast punk rock movements (epitomized in America by New York City‘s The Ramones) with the outlook of disillusioned suburban teens.28 Yet, Steven Blush, an historian of the hardcore scene, warns that even though ―hardcore was the suburban American response to the late-70s punk revolution. . . . it would be wrong to say, ‗If you understand punk, you understand

Hardcore.‘‖29 That was because much of hardcore expressed a distinctly American, suburban perspective, adding new content and stylistic innovations to an established

25 Flipside, ―The Middle Class,‖ Issue 9, August 1978, http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/flipsideissue09.html (accessed November 8, 2009). 26 Middle Class, ―Out of Vogue.‖ 27 Flipside, ―Interview with Middle Class,‖ Issue 12, December 1978, http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/flipsideissue12.html (accessed November 8, 2009). 28 David E. James, ―Hardcore: Cultural Resistance in the Postmodern,‖ David E. James, ed., Power Misses (London: Verso, 1996), 224. James argues that hardcore punks were ―taking the anger, negativity and the antiprofessionalism of English punk as a point of departure‖ to create suburban punk where ―hundreds of bands sprang up in garages in the endless, homogenized cinder-block tracts.‖ 135

aesthetic of rebellion and misanthropy. Hardcore bands screamed and sang about fear, rejection, anger, and depression caused by what they thought was a stifling, generic landscape and the barely concealed dysfunction of the nuclear family. To some degree, these kinds of critiques of suburban life were not new when they emerged in hardcore lyrics. The myth of suburban perfection had been (and continues to be) debunked by filmmakers, academics, and writers.30 The music was reminiscent of earlier critiques of postwar suburban life. But because of their suburban pedigree, hardcore punks infused their critiques with an intensity and specificity absent in critiques leveled by artists and intellectuals of the previous generation. Punks presented suburban life from a suburban perspective. They portrayed it as a stultifying fantasy replete with mass cultural delights masking abusive, fractured homes. In writing and performing these songs, hardcore punks created the themes— alienation, anxiety, boredom, and ennui—around which the scene coalesced. By critiquing suburban life so vehemently, suburban punks set an aggressive and confrontational tone for their performances in public spaces and inspired altercations with the authority figures they derided.

Many hardcore bands both mocked and reveled in middle-class mass cultural delights like beer and television demonstrating an ambivalent relationship with suburban

29 Steven Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001), 12. 30 Narratives of suburban imperfection have trafficked well in American postwar culture with books, films and television on the topic winning awards and critical praise. For example, 1980‘s Ordinary People and 1999‘s American Beauty both were awarded Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Other films on this topic include Neighbors (1981), Pump Up the Volume (1990), The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), Todd Solondz‘s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Happiness (1998), and Rian Johnson‘s Brick (2005). Novels include Richard Ford‘s suburban novels The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), and Lay of the Land (2006), John Updike‘s Rabbit novels, as well as novels turned into films like Richard Yates‘ Revolutionary Road (1961), film (2008), Ira Levin‘s The Stepford Wives (1972), film (1975) and (2004), Jeffrey Eugenides‘ The Virgin Suicides (1993), film (1999), Rick Moody‘s The Ice Storm (1994), film (1997), Tom Perrotta‘s Little Children (2004), film (2006), and Alice Sebold‘s The Lovely Bones. (2002), film (2009). 136

identity that harked to postwar criticisms of suburban life as vapid and consumerist.

Embracing them as seemingly the only entertainment available to them, hardcore punks simultaneously mocked middle class pastimes for their perceived emptiness of value and authenticity. Hardcore punk pioneers Black Flag sang sarcastically about prime time television as the singular cultural outlet of suburban life in ―TV Party.‖ Lead singer Henry

Rollins screams ―I wouldn't be without my TV for a day (Or even a minute)/Don't even bother to use my brain any more (There's nothing left in it)‖ while the rest of the band yelled the names of popular shows (Alice! Three‘s Company!).31 In ―Six Pack,‖ the band treats alcohol—like television—as a staple of suburbia that mediates the banality of everyday life, highlighting the pointlessness of comfort-obsessed middle-class life. ―Born with a bottle in his mouth,‖ singer Henry Rollins opines, ―They say I‘m wasted all the time/What they do is a waste of time.‖32 Other bands, like Manhattan Beach, California‘s

Descendents, also created short, punchy songs about banal amusements. Their song, ―I

Like Food,‖ does little more than declare the band‘s love for eating food as opposed to

―dining‖ puncturing the pretentiousness of bland suburban cuisine.33 While these topics seem likely subjects for songs by teenage boys, they also served to denote the particular relationship of the suburban punk to mass culture. At once, these bands and their audiences found pleasure in drinking beer, eating junk food, and watching television because they were the only recreational activities available to them, empty gestures that passed the time.

Simultaneously, hardcore bands mocked these hobbies as mindless, boring, and suited to

Award winning television shows debunking the myth of suburban perfection included The Simpsons (1989- present), Married… with Children (1987-1997), and The Sopranos (1999-2007). 31 Black Flag, ―TV Party,‖ Damaged, SST, 1981. 32 Black Flag, ―Six Pack,‖ Damaged, SST, 1981. 137

the suburban life of their parents. Mass culture did not fulfill the suburban punk‘s needs for excitement, community, and cultural fulfillment. Their opposition to it signaled their larger stance against middle class suburban life that was carried into live performances that invited confrontation.

Beyond critiquing suburban consumer culture, hardcore bands also focused on destroying the façade of perfect suburban families. On their song ―Mrs. Jones,‖ the Circle

Jerks, ask the eponymous parent, ―Do you know what your kids are doing?‖ They sing that, ―Youngest Debbie‘s skipping class/ Grades so poor she‘ll barely pass,‖ noting finally,

―The family ties are breaking down/ There‘s not much to do to save them.‖34 Similarly,

Youth Brigade sang in 1984, ―You don‘t understand the way we feel … You say that we should not complain/You hear it over and over again/But you don‘t seem to realize/How uncertain you‘ve made our lives.‖35 According to these punks, their parents had expectations that could not be met and an idea of family that was unrealistic and ultimately unproductive for those who didn‘t fit the mold. As for those who did fit the mold and follow their parents into middle class banality, their fates were worse. The Descendents sum up this dim view in their song, ―Suburban Home.‖ Lead singer Milo Aukerman glibly intones, ―I want to be stereotyped/I want to be classified/I want to be a clone/I want a suburban home.‖36 Hardcore punks‘ songs focus on family life, boring landscapes, and mass culture delights present a damning critique of suburban life from suburban teens themselves. They not only depict middle class life as bankrupt and stultifying but present

33 Descendents, ―I Like Food,‖ Fat, 1980. 34 Circle Jerks, ―Mrs. Jones,‖ Wonderful, 1985. 35 Youth Brigade, ―You Don‘t Understand,‖ Sink with Kalifornija, Frontier Records, 1984. 36 Descendents, ―Suburban Home.‖ 138

themselves as avowed opponents of it. That stance, contained in the lyrics and sound of the music, would matter as hardcore punks moved into public space. They created a social scene that exemplified the antagonism and anger in their music that often manifested itself in aggressive dancing and violent confrontations.

The hardcore scene was not simply about the style and content of the music. The members of the scene needed physical spaces to congregate, share their anger, and create their community. With a dearth of spaces available for that kind of assembly, suburban punks had to create ad-hoc spaces to socialize, practice, and perform in what become known in the parlance of hardcore as a ―scene.‖ Peter Belsito and Bob Davis, documenting the scene in their 1983 book Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave, highlighted the situation for suburban Los Angeles punks in the late 70s: ―Kids in L.A. have no real physical center to hang out in. Everything is spread out in endless suburbs.

There‘s a constant feeling of dislocation.‖37 That dislocation invited the purveyors of hardcore to commandeer spaces and make them their own. These spaces were not stadiums and, for the most part, not the traditional rock clubs that were part of the burgeoning Los Angeles music scene on the Sunset Strip. Instead, hardcore bands and their fans frequented house parties, church basements, recreation centers, beach parties, their own makeshift ―clubs‖ in local restaurants, and any another space they could seize to assuage their dislocation. Sociologist Donna Gaines argues that for hardcore punks, ―The

37 Peter Belsito and Bob Davis, Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave (Berkeley: The Last Gasp of San Francisco, 1983), 11. 139

general idea was to do it yourself, to create immediate rupture, quick community, in a place you could call your own.‖38

However, creating that quick community was not without its consequences. Shows invited closer regulation by police because of the violent nature of the music and the audience‘s enjoyment of it. Punks, in their own zines, noted the prevalence of violence at shows usually blaming club owners and police for the confrontations.39 Punk journalist

Jack Rabid wrote in his zine The Big Takeover about his 1980 experience at a Black Flag show at the Starwood, a small hardcore club in California, ―I remember driving back by myself to Santa Barbara that night in my parent‘s little Chevette, my head bleeding all over the seats‖ from the slam-dancing and being assaulted by police attempting to break up the show.40 In its January-February 1983, punk zine MaximumRockNRoll (MRR) exhorted satirically, ―Stop the Presses! Late Bulletin! RIOT ON THE SUNSET STRIP!!!‖41 The article began, ―Hollywood police swept done on and tried to close yet another punk gig and hundreds of punks fought back.‖ According to MRR, by 1983, police confrontation was a given at a hardcore show. In the introduction to Flipside issue no. 22 in December 1980, the author bemoans a spate of conflicts caused by police who didn‘t let fans enjoy a show

38 Gaines, 196. 39 Done for little or no money, zines provided concert and album reviews, interviews, and scene reports. Zines, because they were made by fans, were irregularly produced, poorly constructed, and often lasted no more than a few issues. However, zines with the largest readership such as MaximumRockNRoll, Flipside, and Suburban Voice, lasted for many years and served to tie together places and audiences with the bigger scenes of greater Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, D.C. In these zines, there was no pretense of objectivity. The reporting is matter-of-fact and the style gossipy as the comings and goings of band members and scenesters are recounted often using only first names. The intent, from reviews to scene reports, was to evaluate what was good and cultivate it. 40 Jack Rabid, ―Punk Goes Hardcore,‖ Theo Cateforis, ed., The Rock History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007), 198. Rabid‘s account of the Black Flag show was originally featured in his zine, The Big Takeover, Issue 4, 1981. 140

and leave peacefully. Instead, police broke up the show mid-performance only heightening the tension.42 In zine narratives of police confrontations, punks blamed police who did not understand their behavior and would not allow punks to police themselves. MRR argued that the show that ended in a riot was ―orderly, by any standards, and that it was just another case of police harassment of punks in Southern California.‖43

Mainstream media saw the confrontations between punks and police differently.

The New York Times rock critic John Rockwell promoted the hardcore scene as artistic but essentially violent. He described the violence of hardcore in Los Angeles as ―sometimes diffused by parody, welcomed as cathartic, or explained away as outside agitation (i.e., visitors to Hollywood clubs from beach towns that most people think are part of L.A. in the first place). But at other times, the violence simply seems to define the hardcore scene.‖44

The reference to violence between punks and with police and neighbors was part and parcel of the representation of the hardcore scene in the news media. The Los Angeles Times noted in an article titled ―Battle over Punk Rock Club Reflects Rift in Values,‖ that

―confrontations have become weekend occurrences outside Cathay de Grande, a Chinese restaurant in Hollywood that gave up on subgum and fried rice three years ago, replacing its menu with punk rock shows four nights a week.‖45 Despite presenting punks‘ view that they were being singled out, author Stephen Braun frames the discussion with references to

41 MaximumRockNRoll, ―Stop the Presses! Late Bulletin! RIOT ON THE SUNSET STRIP!!!‖41 Number 4, January-February 1983, http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/mrrissue04.html (accessed November 8, 2009). 42 Flipside, ―Intro,‖ Issue 22, December 1980, http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/flipsideissue22.html (accessed November 8, 2009). 43 Ibid. 44 John Rockwell, ―Disks That Clarify Los Angeles Rock,‖ New York Times, April 4, 1982. 45 Stephen Braun, ―Battle over Punk Rock Club Reflects Rift in Values,‖ Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1984. 141

violence and expulsions from other venues through the mid-1980s. He wrote, ―Clubs featuring punk rock tend to have short life spans in the Los Angeles area. Most have closed under public and official pressure,‖ Closing the article, Braun emphasized his point,

―Since the punk movement‘s infancy in Los Angeles, clubs featuring punk acts have opened and flourished, only to close under public and governmental pressure.‖46

Despite these competing narratives of who was at fault for violent punk shows, one thing remained uncontested. Violent altercations occurred so often that confrontations with police became the hallmarks of live hardcore performances. The presence of raucous, sometimes intoxicated teens, loud music, and violent slam-dancing/moshing in public created an environment of confrontation that associated hardcore punk shows with violence. In their concurrent chronicle of hardcore published in 1983, Belsito and Davis described an experience at a show in 1980 that demonstrated the implications of a violent hardcore punk show. ―The next night‘s show with the Circle Jerks broke out in a riot highlighted by a sixteen-year-old skinhead being pushed face-first through the glass doors.

So much for Punk [sic] at the Florentine Gardens.‖47 These shows altered the associations of a performance space, and linking punks‘ presence within it to hostility and bloodshed made it difficult for punk shows to be booked at legitimate venues. This further helped move hardcore to marginal suburban spaces.

As violence became the hallmark of hardcore punk performances, even the most popular bands like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, had trouble booking shows at the few

46 Ibid. 47 Belsito and Davis, 62. 142

remaining legitimate punk rock clubs.48 Bands, increasingly excluded from mainstream venues because of fights among punks and with police, played even more in peripheral places. According to Steven Blush, shows went down in ―marginal sites in low rent

‗hoods—usually a VFW hall, church basement, or dilapidated warehouse.‖49 In moving to these sites, punks fomented hardcore as a suburban scene by moving further into the communities where many of its musicians and fans lived. Due in part to their marginality, many of these venues have remained invisible to history so there is little to help the outsider feel and understand the physical spaces of the hardcore scene.50 Still, some evidence of the marginality of the scene exists in hardcore zines and show flyers from the late seventies through the mid-eighties. One of the most notorious nodes of hardcore was the Church, an abandoned house of worship in Hermosa Beach, California. Black Flag made this their rehearsal space and makeshift apartment alongside runaways and misfits who joined the hardcore scene.51 A writer in Flipside said of the Church, ―you gotta head for the suburbs. The Church is the best place to see and feel punk rock, or else those one

48 Craig Lee, ―Four Teen-Metal Labels of Love,‖ Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1981. The Los Angeles Times noted this phenomenon as early as 1981. Lee wrote, ―The hard-core punk bands of L.A. are finding it progressively harder to find places to play live, due to radical rock shows‘ notorious, if slightly exaggerated reputation for vandalism and encounters with the police.‖ 49 Blush, 276. 50 The hardcore scene did have venues that regularly hosted hardcore gigs but most only stayed in business for brief periods of time because of violent clashes with police outside the venue and difficulty in making money from the hardcore scene. According to show flyers and zines some of the more frequent venues included the Starwood 8151 Santa Monica Blvd. Hollywood, California, Mabuhay Gardens 443 Broadway San Francisco, California, Hong Kong Café 425 Gin Ling Way Los Angeles, California, Madame Wong‘s Chinatown Los Angeles, California, Masque 1655 N. Cherokee Los Angeles, California, and Cuckoo‘s Nest 1714 Placentia Avenue Costa Mesa, California; and Flipside, ―Intro and Nooze,‖ Issue 17, December 1979, http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/flipsideissue17.html (accessed November 8, 2009). This issue of Flipside has a good rundown of clubs that were hosting punk shows at the time. As the author indicates, rundowns like his were necessary to keep track of which clubs were open and friendly to hardcore. 51 Azerrad, 16; and Belsito and Davis, 45. 143

off gigs that we go all out to thrash the hall.‖52 In Penelope Spheeris‘s documentary The

Decline of Western Civilization (discussed in greater detail later in the chapter), the Church is shown to be a graffiti covered basement with small closets that band members slept in.

The Church was a typical hardcore space. It was cheap, small, and was only in use for a short time. Black Flag and their compatriots were eventually evicted for making too much noise. They moved to the ―Worm Hole‖ in Hermosa Beach where they were eventually run out by the town council because of the large numbers of vagrants and runaways that congregated outside.53 Spaces like the Church became familiar haunts that exemplified and extended representations of hardcore punks as dangerous teens, out of control in public spaces, that would result in closer scrutiny and greater regulation of teens in public space.

Beyond infamous spots like the Church, show flyers from that era reveal that the spaces of hardcore were varied and often fleeting because of the notoriousness of the scene.

Many concerts took place at short-lived clubs while others happened at restaurants-cum- punk rock venues on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Regular sites included the Hong Kong

Café and Mabuhay Gardens, a Filipino restaurant that periodically opened and closed because of the disturbances caused by punks.54 Other flyers simply identify the location of a show with an address. In 1979, 5629 Hollister Avenue, in Goleta, California (currently the location of a car dealership on a busy street), was presumably the address of a small

52 Al Flipside, ―Intro,‖ Flipside, Issue 16, October 1979, http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/flipsideissue16.html (accessed November 8, 2009). 53 Flipside, ―Flipside Interviews Black Flag,‖ Issue 22, December 1980, http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/flipsideissue22.html (accessed November 8, 2009). 54 Operation Phoenix Records, ―Middle Class and Agent Orange flyer,‖ 1979, http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/undergrounddiscography/reviews/flyer- middleclassagentorange1979.php (accesses July 6, 2009). These flyers were the lifeblood of promoting hardcore punk shows because they directed fans and bands to shows in otherwise non-descript places; and 144

hall, apartment complex clubhouse, or even a vacant lot where punks put on a show. These documents suggest the transient nature of the hardcore scene because of its reputation for violence, and at once suggest the necessary and the need for movement to avoid police and put on shows according to the musicians‘ own standards.

Director Penelope Spheeris‘s documentary about California hardcore, The Decline of Western Civilization, provided another representation of suburban teens and the hardcore scene that marked them as dangerous outsiders in their suburban communities. Filmed between December 1979 and May 1980, the film profiled six seminal hardcore bands:

Black Flag, Catholic Discipline, Circle Jerks, Fear, The Germs, and X. In chronicling these bands, Spheeris also attempted to show how suburban kids ended up in the hardcore scene—and ended up placing the blame squarely on parents.55 In the film, Spheeris intercuts interviews with punks (in which she documents their unwillingness to explain their own anger) with other interview segments in which they describe being rejected by family, friends, and society, suggesting a strong link between feeling out-of-place in their suburban environments and finding a home in the hardcore scene. The film juxtaposes these interview segments, often set against a brick wall and lit by a single bulb, with performance footage showing teens sporting aggressive haircuts (like the mohawk) and frantically slam-dancing. Though it was ultimately a sympathetic portrait of the hardcore scene, the film reinforced the cultural narratives and images of suburban punks found in their own music and performances as well as in the news media. Hardcore‘s association

Donna Gaines also makes this point, ―Participation in the scene was made possible only by word of mouth. Fliers, occasional street sheets, were the only clue.‖ Gaines, 196. 55 Harrington, ―In the Punk of the Night.‖ In an interview promoting the film, Spheeris said, ―Children are created by their parents, so the older generation needs to look at these people and say 'What did 145

with violence was even used to market the film as a voyeuristic journey into a violent subculture with the tagline, ―See it in a theater . . . where you won‘t get hurt.‖56 The documentary exposed the insular California scene to millions, promoting the overwhelming sense that teens who listen to or play this music or who wear punk clothes were anti-social and to be feared.

Spheeris drew even stronger links among punks, outcasts and their suburban environment in her first narrative film, Suburbia, released in 1984. This film widened the world of suburban punks beyond their music scene to explore the world of suburban runaways. Working alongside similar news media narratives, the film examined the vulnerable yet menacing suburban runaway. For Spheeris‘s characters and the real runaways portrayed in the news media, leaving home was not an affirmative choice, but rather the option of last resort precipitated by an untenable family situation. Suburbia tells the stories of how middle-class, suburban youth no longer feel safe or wanted in their homes and choose instead to live among friends in the hardcore scene. In the film, a group of teens from the Los Angeles suburbs who call themselves ―The Rejected‖ (TR) have left their homes, by choice or by force, to form a new ―family‖ with other runaways in an abandoned house.57 Echoing the portrayals of runaways in Suburbia, the New York Times depicted runaways and the teen homeless leaving home because of divorce, alcohol and

I do?' instead of putting the blame off on the kids. The L.A. punk generation is one where the parents didn't have enough time for their kids.‖ 56 Ibid. 57 Washington Post film critic Richard Harrington summarized the plight of The Rejected this way, ―Abused or ignored by their parents, hounded for their externally shocking trappings, blamed for every fault but the San Andreas, a dozen of them have banded together in a boarded-up, unheated husk of a house set in the middle of an abandoned California tract dwarfed by a busy freeway. It is a chilling No Man's Land, a Kiddieland by default.‖ Richard Harrington, ―Suburbia; A Sobering, Sensitive Tale of Runaway Punks Surviving in a Blighted World,‖ Washington Post, February 11, 1984. 146

drug abuse, physical or sexual abuse, or general disagreement about house rules.58 One such Times article featured an interview with Sandra Booth, director of a sanctuary program in Huntington, CA, who seconded this point: ―More typically, juvenile runaways don‘t want to leave home, but have such poor relationships with their families that they feel they must get out before the situation deteriorates further or they are pushed out.‖59

Spheeris, in the DVD commentary of the film, said this was her express purpose in making the film. She sought to explore the dark side of suburbia where families in Brady Bunch suburbs were disintegrating, and teens were left with few safe options.60

The discursive convergence between the film and news reports of homeless teens had another effect. Their portrayal in Suburbia, alongside numerous troubling news reports in the 1980s, linked suburban runaways and teen homeless with the notorious hardcore punk underground. That enhanced their association with crime and violence that may not have existed on suburban streets.61 In the film, ―The Rejected‖ created a safe, alternative family community in an abandoned house owned by the county government. Newsweek offered a similar story of runaway survival in a suburb of Philadelphia. ―Some runaways

58 Edith Hornik-Beer, ―Center for Runaways Seeks Host Families,‖ New York Times, November 23, 1980. 59 Judy Glass, ―Runaways: Why Do They Go,‖ New York Times, August 30, 1981. 60 Suburbia, DVD commentary. 61 Other examples of news articles about suburban runaways include: George E. Jones, ―America‘s Youth: Angry…Bored…Or Just Confused?‖ U.S. News & World Report, July 18, 1977; U.S. News & World Report, ―Behind Growing Worry over Runaway Youths,‖ January 15, 1979; Wolf Von Eckardt, ―Children in America: Yearning for the Childhood of Yesterday,‖ Washington Post, July 28, 1979; Lynn Darling, ―Pour Me Another Tequila. Make it a Killer. Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic,‖ Washington Post, April 8, 1980; U.S. News & World Report, ―Help, Not Jail, To Set Young Offenders Right,‖ November 10, 1980; Steve L. Perkins, ―‗Rat Pack‖ Youth: Teenage Rebels in Suburbia,‖ March 11, 1985; U.S. News & World Report ―‗Runaways,‘ ‗Throwaways,'' ‗Bag Kids‘ -- An Army of Drifter Teens,‖ March 11, 1985; Bill Kazco, ―Mother to Hundreds Has Simple Secret for Coping With Kids,‖ Associated Press, December 20, 1987; Pete Axthelm, ―Somebody Else‘s Kids,‖ Newsweek, April 25, 1988; Gloria Wright, ―Teens Travel from Shelter to Shelter,‖ Post-Standard, July 25, 1988; Tom Coakley, ―Slain Girl Had a History as a Runaway,‖ Boston Globe, 147

try to re-create the communality of the ‗60s crash pad; when one makes some money, many will rent a room together, splitting the windfall on wine, dope and food. . . . teen transients even built their own haven in the woods with lumber stolen from construction sites, complete with escape tunnels.‖62 In these representations, runaway suburban teens emerged as public figures who created their own safe homes, stole to survive, and lived in near squalor to avoid abuse and neglect in their former family homes.

In Suburbia, too, ―The Rejected‖ make a new home for runaways, punks, and misfits fleeing dangerous families. They commit crimes and barely survive on the margins of suburban life, further associating teens in public with transgressive behavior. From the outside, the TR house looks like a typical ranch-style home. Inside, however, the walls are covered with graffiti and roaches. The house is over-crowded with teen refugees. The opening minutes of the film make this explicit. Main character Evan and his younger brother Ethan are shown in their mother‘s house as she berates Evan for stealing liquor and not taking out the trash. Despite these typically rebellious acts, Evan is shown earnestly, if ineffectively, trying to support his single mother while she is an overbearing presence who does not have her sons‘ best interests at heart. Following this episode, Evan goes to the local hardcore punk club and gets caught up in the community of the ―The Rejected.‖ He eventually takes his brother to go live in their makeshift home. Their trauma, like that of the other house members, gains them admission into the house. The kids at the ―TR‖ house

November 8, 1988; and Michael Kilian, ―Two Teenagers Charged after High Speed Chase,‖ Post-Standard, June 13, 1989. 62 Lynn Langway with Renee Michael, Mary Lord, Dianne H. McDonald, Barbara Burgower, and Rick Ruiz, ―A Nation of Runaways,‖ Newsweek, October 18, 1982. 148

take advantage of their suburb‘s safety to steal food and supplies for their house. They just walk into open garages and take what they need.

Soon, the house becomes a problem for residents of the town, suggesting the fear of marginalized teens congregating in public. A group called ―Citizens Against Crime‖ intimidates the ―TR‖ to force them out of the abandoned house, essentially ejecting them from their suburban town. The group contends that these are not regular kids but ―mental rejects‖ who are dangerous to the rest of the town. The ―Citizens Against Crime‖ eventually attack the house, and, although they are repelled by the occupants of the house, they run over Evan‘s brother Ethan as they flee. The movie ends with his death. That bleak ending suggests no one wins when runaway teens are not treated with compassion. If they fail to be reintegrated into a stable, loving family environment, the film seems to contend, suburban streets become moral and physical battlefields.

In a 1985 U.S. News & World Report chronicle of the increasing number suburban teen castoffs, Steve L. Hawkins described a situation much as it appeared in Suburbia— teenagers escaping untenable home lives to live on their own or with other runaways. He wrote, ―Reflecting a trend seen in many American suburbs, as many as 30,000 troubled youths from middle and upper-middle-class families are wasting their formative years, authorities say, killing time in discos, video parlors, shopping centers and other hangouts.‖63 Articles, like this one, from the late ‗70s through the mid-80s, highlighted the problem of out-of-control teens and suburban runaways and the desire to reintegrate them

63 Steve L. Hawkins, ―‗Rat Pack‘ Youth: Teenage Rebels In Suburbia,‖ U.S. News & World Report, March 11, 1985, 51. 149

back into the home.64 In 1981, U.S News & World Report detailed America‘s ―Troubled

Teenagers‖ were ―deeply troubled, unable to cope with the pressures of growing up in what they perceive as a world that is hostile or indifferent to them.‖65 Some, such as ―Widow

Who Took in ‗Street Kids‘ is Killed,‖ played up the criminal threats from these teens.66

Many ―throwaway kids‖ were roaming the streets as a public menace.67 A Washington

Post article detailed the struggle of a Potomac, Maryland mother who was so unable to cope with her daughter‘s behavior—stealing cars and taking drugs—that she asked a court to help her.68 News narratives of runaway teens built on images of out-of-control teens, such as those in the hardcore punk scene, and worked with films like Suburbia to reinforce the message that teens were running away from home or being kicked out—but staying local to imperil their suburban towns.

Through the 1980s, teens had fewer places to congregate in public space. The figure of the public teen was infused with hazardous connotations while both licit spaces such as the recreation center and illicit ones like abandoned housing and appropriated venues were foreclosed. Suburban teens were left little choice but to frequent the suburban mall—the central and seemingly safest, public space that welcomed everyone and their money.

“Teens and Malls. They’ve Gone Steady since Not Long After Malls Became

America’s Main Street under a Roof -- and the Attraction is Growing. . . . And,

64 According to the Los Angeles Times, some parents hired a professional to track down runaways and get them to enter mental health facilities to help them move back into the family home. Ann Japenga, ―The Pursuer: Runaways Are His Business,‖ Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1982. 65 Stanley N. Wellborn, ―Troubled Teenagers,‖ U.S. News & World Report, December 14, 1981. 66 Associated Press, ―Widow Who Took in ‗Street Kids‘ is Killed,‖ June 7, 1982. 67 New York Times, ―Shelters and Streets Drawing More ‗Throwaway‘ Kids,‘‖ June 3, 1983. 68 Judith Valente, ―Girl, 13, Into Drugs, Sex,‖ Washington Post, June 19, 1977. 150

Though Most of the Kids Tend to be Well-Behaved, They Bring with Them Fights,

Thefts, Noise and Drugs.”— Dan Kane and Cheryl Imelda Smith, “Mall Rats Bring

Thefts, Fights, and Drugs,” Post-Standard, March 20, 1988.

Developed and marketed in the postwar United States as the primary place for shopping, socializing, and participation in suburban public life, the shopping mall had become, by the late 1970s, the central space of a decentralized suburban American landscape.69 During the shopping center building boom of the 1970s and 80s, the mall became synonymous with American suburban life.70 Its status as quasi-public space has posed problems concerning civil rights, free expression, and gender and economic equality, explored most notably by Lizabeth Cohen. But the more important matters for this chapter, and this dissertation, concern how the mall, as a space central to the understanding of the suburbs, was discursively produced as a space dominated and often disrupted by teens.

Already visible in other public venues and discursively produced as dangerous, possibly criminal figures, the suburban teen was also an object of scrutiny in the shopping center. A rise in teens frequenting malls, and a sense of domination of that space, amplified by narratives of crime and misbehavior in the daily newspaper and on the movie screen,

69 For a concise history of the shopping mall see, Kenneth T. Jackson, ―All the World‘s a Mall,‖ American Historical Review, Vol. 101 No. 4 (October 1996) 1111-1121. For further reading on malls and public space see, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer‟s Republic, 257-289 and Margaret Crawford, ―The World in a Shopping Mall,‖ in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: Scenes from the New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); For general shopping center history see, Nancy E. Cohen, America's Marketplace: The History of Shopping Centers (Lyme, Connecticut.: Greenwich, 2002); For the history of Victor Gruen and the indoor mall see, M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); For the history of American architecture and shopping see, Richard W. Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997). 70 International Council of Shopping Centers, ―A Brief History of Shopping Centers,‖ June 2000, http://www.icsc.org/srch/about/impactofshoppingcenters/briefhistory.html (accesses December 2008). 151

resulted in a rendering of the mall as overrun by teens, a haven for mallrats and arcade fiends. Yet, it was not simply that teenagers in malls were hazardous to profits or to public life more generally. Teenagers were also possible victims of unruly groups of mall patrons or potential recruits for non-consumer activities in the mall, like loitering and drinking.

The emergence of the mall as a teen hangout and of the teen as a dangerous and endangered figure initiated new security practices to police the mall. New spaces, like the arcade, were developed to focus this large contingent of possible shoppers on consumption. Yet, they too became associated with dangerous teens. With these spaces continually becoming less inviting to teen populations, teens increasingly withdrew from public life as they moved back into the home to socialize and play video games.

Today the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High is mostly remembered for Jeff

Spicoli, the stoned surfer played by Sean Penn. The film and eponymous book, based on

Cameron Crowe‘s year posing as a student at a suburban San Diego high school in 1979, are engaging depictions of the teenage world of American suburbs, and how that world was being shaped by their presence.71 The opening sequence of the film, set to the Go-Go‘s song, ―We Got the Beat,‖ is an establishing shot of Sherman Oaks Galleria Mall in suburban Los Angeles, called the Ridgemont Mall in the film.72 The next shot cuts to the inside of the mall as the camera shows each of the main characters and how the mall relates to their personality: ticket scalper Mike Damone (Robert Romanus) cruises the center

According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, 16,000 malls were constructed in the 1980s, the most of any decade. 71 Cameron Crowe, Fast Times At Ridgemont High (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981). I will be focusing on the movie in this chapter because it is the more well-known of the two and because the film is a streamlined version of the events in the book. The only significant between the book and the film was the book‘s marketing as a true story. Still, in both the film and the book Crowe essentially does not appear as a character. 152

atrium trying to ply his wares; Perry‘s Pizza waitress Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason

Leigh) takes a fresh pie out of the oven. The opening montage shows the mall, including the smoky, blinking arcade, as a predominantly teen space. Only a few adults mill about, shown only to emphasize their inappropriateness in the shopping center. The opening montage also establishes that, for the teens in the movie, the mall serves as a routine, everyday space like school or home. In the film and in suburbia at large, the mall is intimately connected to their identity and with a sense of spatial order.

Fast Times subverted bygone notions in media and popular culture of the suburb as simply a spatial articulation of traditional family values where public space was safe and the public teen was a good citizen vulnerable only to outside influences. Rather, the film offered the mall as home to multiple transgressions that are presented as quotidian acts.73

Scalping concert tickets was presented as a legitimate enterprise alongside customary mall work, like taking tickets for the cineplex or working the fry-o-lator at a fast-food restaurant.

Jeff Spicoli and his surfer ―buds‖ routinely smoke pot before school and roam the halls and the mall high.

Sex and sexuality are also presented as natural, even as the reason for working in the mall. Stacy says to her slightly older and more sexually experienced co-worker, Linda,

72 Fast Times at Ridgemont High, DVD commentary. 73 Lynn Spiegel has persuasively argued that early television shows with a suburban setting emphasized simple family disputes and straightforward conflict resolution within the span on one show. I would extend her argument to say that most family sitcoms through the cancellation of The Brady Bunch in 1974 followed this format and presented tame subject matter compared to later innovations. Further, more controversial material was usually relegated to shows with a distinctly urban setting such as All in the Family. Suburban films of the postwar era also rarely delved into the lives of teens as straightforwardly as the films discussed in this chapter. This is not to say that film dealt with suburban life in quite the same way as sitcoms, but the emphasis on realism and darker subject matter remain fixed on the lives of adults in films such as William Wyler‘s The Desperate Hours (1955) or Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969). Spiegel, Make Room for TV, 136-137. 153

―You told me I would get a boyfriend working in the mall.‖ Later, Linda prods Stacy about losing her virginity, ―What are you waiting for? You are fifteen already.‖ Soon after that conversation, an older customer at Perry‘s asks Stacy out. Ron Johnson, a so-called ―fox,‖ does not become her boyfriend. Instead, they go on one date that ends up inside the dugout of a little league field where 26-year-old Ron deflowers 15-year-old Stacy. The scene is presented without a hint of judgment. Later in the film, Stacy has sex with a classmate, leading her to get pregnant and choose to have an abortion with no involvement from parents, teachers, or even the baby‘s father. All of these incidents are depicted matter-of- factly, suggesting not only the normalcy, but the inevitability, of suburban teen sexuality, particularly a laissez-faire attitude about older men seducing high-school girls. These behaviors were rooted in the opportunities afforded by the seemingly unregulated

Ridgemont mall. The behavior of the film‘s teen protagonists, and its resonance with other representations in popular culture and in the news media, further suggested that teens were engaging in dangerous behavior. Increased oversight and discipline of mall space, in this context, appeared imperative.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the extended area of the shopping mall was depicted in the news media as the space that filled a void for suburban teens, a ―mecca for teens‖ and ―more home than home.‖74 It offered amusement from fast food, arcade games, and movies. Its largely unregulated spaces, like atriums and parking lots, allowed teens to do other things like drink alcohol and have sex. Still, the shopping center was not entirely unregulated, just less so than school or home. The mall, in fact, was understood as safe enough, compared to other public spaces, to allow parents to feel comfortable with teens

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being there, and for teens themselves to feel little fear of crime or zealous monitoring of their behavior. A suburban mother from Syracuse echoed this point in a 1988 newspaper interview: ―Part of me says when you get a lot of kids together it‘s not a healthy thing. The other part says they have to have someplace to go that‘s not on the street corner. At least it‘s well lit. I know she won‘t get raped.‖75 However, though the mall of the 1980s seemed a safer public space for teens than a public street corner, the shopping center would become associated with danger because of poor teen behavior in the mall and its elaboration in news media and popular culture, which emphasized teenagers‘ disruptive, even criminal behavior.

Still, as texts like Fast Times at Ridgemont High suggest, the shopping center was advantageous for its teen patrons because it afforded freedom of movement while mall owners, shopping center security forces, and parents had mixed feelings because the mall was a reasonably safe space that also seemed to facilitate spending money and troubling behavior among its teen patrons. Washington Post columnist Bob Levey wrote of the liminality of the shopping mall space in 1981. The first half of his article promoted the safety, fun, and sense of community the mall provided for teens with few other places to congregate. One subject of the article, Steve Rader, 15, said he will be at the mall day after day because, ―This is like a community of friends for me. This is where I feel comfortable.‖76 Rader was portrayed as legitimately frequenting the mall. He worked there and spent money while hanging out with friends—all sanctioned activities. Yet, later

74 Levey, ―Teens View Center As 'Their' Community.‖ 75 Dan Kane and Cheryl Imelda Smith, ―Mall Rats Bring Thefts, Fights, and Drugs,‖ Post-Standard, March 20, 1988. 76 Levey, ―Teens View Center As 'Their' Community.‖ 155

in the article, Levey identified the ―dark side‖ of the mall being a ―teen mecca.‖

―According to Montgomery County, Maryland police, the plaza's Lot 19 -- a parking area along the northwestern edge of the shopping center -- is notorious as a nighttime gathering place for young drinkers, or vandals, or both.‖77 According to Levey, without an increase in security personnel, the Montgomery Mall, and others like it, would continue to see fights and disruption of mall spaces. The presence of the ―good‖ teen, like Steve Rader, alongside the drinking rabble-rousers in the parking lot highlighted the tenuous position of suburban teens in public. They were both dangerous to the primary purpose of the mall, selling goods and services, and vital to the shopping center‘s ability to make money, as more of them flocked to malls as largely unsupervised social centers.

The ubiquity of teens in mall gave rise to an effort by the news media to name the phenomena. They dubbed teen denizens of the shopping center ―mallrats.‖ Though any teen at the mall could be assumed a mallrat, not every teen was, according to security guards and mallrats themselves. Rather, a mallrat was someone who, ―thanks to two 20th century phenomena—the shopping center and the computer chip … may never again know the heat of summer. Instead, they may become what some Albany security guards call

‗mall rats,‘ taking up seasonal residence in shopping malls, living on soda, ice cream and fast food and spending uncounted hours in air-conditioned arcades.‖78 Mallrats were essentially teens who spend most of their free time in the mall with no particular agenda other than ―hanging out.‖ As such, they became objects of scrutiny for mall authorities because of their loitering and potential for disrupting mall space. News articles said, ―They

77 Ibid. 156

[mallrats] shift from place to place, moving in small knots, unnoticed by the average shopper,‖ and ―gather in the sorts of numbers that once collected at drive-in diners and drive-in theaters. And, though most of the kids tend to be well-behaved, they bring with them fights, thefts, noise and drugs.‖79 Teens in the mall, even those who were not mallrats, came under increasing scrutiny because, just by being in the mall, they conjured the image of disruptive teens without an agenda, prone to misbehavior and disruptive to the spatial order of the mall. Seen through the same discursive frame that posited other teens in public, like hardcore punks, as dangerous, mallrats helped recode the mall as teen space, which meant it was likely a hazardous place.

One possible solution to the problem of unruly teens in shopping malls was to give them a place of their own where they could spend their money and largely be kept from disrupting business in the rest of the mall. Video game arcades seemed to be just this solution. However, the checkered history of arcades, especially in shopping centers, tells a different story. The video game arcade of the 1980s moved from being promoted as a way to contain public teens to being understood as another home to teen misbehavior that helped legitimate the expansion of shopping center security and facilitated the movement of video games and their players into the home.80

Starting in the mid-1970s, coin-operated electronic video games began to crop up in various public spaces, to the delight of teenagers and adults alike. Kids after school and

78 Larry Elkin, ―The American Style: Suburban Mall Breeds New Species,‖ Associated Press, July 31, 1981. 79 Leah Y. Latimer, ―‗Mall Rats‘: Idle Youths Become Street People of Shopping Center,‖ Washington Post, Feb. 21, 1983; and Kane and Smith, ―Mall Rats Bring Thefts.‖ 80 Rochelle Slovin, ―Hot Circuits,‖ in Mark J.P. Wolf, ed., The Medium of the Video Game (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 145. Slovin argues that video games ―shifted from immersive, social 157

businessmen on lunch breaks found standalone machines in pizzerias, convenience stores, and bars.81 As the industry matured and more games became available, aggregating the games in one space provided a way to maximize profits. In suburban places, this meant the introduction of arcades into established retail spaces like shopping malls where teens were already gathering.82 However, mall owners and parents realized clustering teens in one space, while distracting them from disrupting other mall spaces, could also lead to security problems. 83 Shopping centers required arcade owners and operators to implement strict rules to safeguard arcade space.84 Some of the rules, like prohibiting alcohol and gambling, were designed to stop the transgressive behavior associated with urban pool halls and pinball arcades upon which video game arcades were based.85 Other rules limiting eating, smoking, and loitering were aimed at curbing teen behavior in mall space more generally.

These rules became harder to enforce as teens flocked to arcades to play games and hang out often engaging in the activities specifically prohibited by arcade owners.86 In this respect, arcades were victims of their success. According to the Associated Press, sales of arcade video game machines grew from $50 million in 1978 to about $900 million in

experiences in arcades (where, according to some academic studies, more than half the time participants would watch, ‗hang out,‘ and socialize rather than play) to solitary, home-based entertainment.‖ 81 Kathleen Ennis, ―Aargh! Swoosh! It‘s Video Games,‖ Washington Post, Dec. 11, 1980. Ennis described the ubiquity of coin-operated video game players, ―Videomaniacs can be found everywhere here: In singles bars, mingling around Asteroids; in arcades, spending the last quarter of their allowances to beat the high score on Space Invaders; in nightclubs, vying for a spot at Galaxian between acts, and in fast-food restaurants, grabbing a quick game of Astro Fighter before heading back to work. They're kids, businessmen in three-piece suits and unemployed writers. And, many of them will readily admit, playing electronic games is more than a mere pastime. It's a lifestyle.‖ 82 Pelosi, ―Amusement Centers Change Again, But Profit Potential is Still Strong,‖ 36. 83 Jura Koncius, ―Video Games: Regulating America‘s Latest Craze,‖ Washington Post, October 8, 1981. 84 Ibid. 85 New York Times, ―Video Games Win in Arcades,‖ August 23, 1980. 86 Slovin, ―Hot Circuits,‖ 145. 158

1982.87 With those new machines came new, large groups of arcade patrons who became harder to police as their numbers increased.

In news articles, the story was not whether teens in arcades would be disruptive, it was how disruptive they would be. Local officials feared, ―adequate supervision would not be provided and the place would become a hangout for teen-agers who would cause problems for police.‖88 According to the news media, these officials were right. ―In town after town, local officials are struggling to cope with a craze that has swept the country:

Arcade videogames that gobble up the time and money of America's teenagers.‖89 In

Carlsbad, California, a new arcade dramatically increased complaints about teen behavior in the Plaza Real Camino Shopping Center.90 The mall manager complained, ―A day does not go by that customers do not call this office complaining of the arcade and its patrons,‖ because its teen patrons on the ledge of a nearby bookstore and block its entrance, they congregate at a bank of telephones and ―inhibit their use by mall customers.‖91 As the number of patrons increased so did profits, but the space of the arcade became harder to police while news media associated it with unruly teen behavior.

Alongside and within news stories of teens in arcades were others about the fears of parents and school administrators that identified the arcade space as the cause of other unacceptable teen behaviors. Ronnie Lamm, president of the Middle Country Council of

Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) of Long Island expressed recurrent fears, ―These

87 U.S. News & World Report, ―Videogames—Fun or Serious Threat,‖ Feb 22, 1982, 7. 88 Shelagh Kealy, ―Asteroids Machines Hook All Types and Ages; Home and Bars Now Sound Alike,‖ United Press International, August 2, 1981. 89 U.S. News & World Report, ―Videogames—Fun or Serious Threat,‖ 7. 90 Lola Sherman, ―Council Gives Video Arcade a Replay : Carlsbad Vote Ignores Advice of Planners, Police on Teen Hangout,‖ San Diego Union-Tribune, November 21, 1984. 91 Ibid. 159

arcades fan and encourage gambling and antisocial, aggressive behavior.‖92 A Louisiana high school counselor made a similar point. He believed the games themselves can be

―wholesome recreation,‖ but arcades ―can be a breeding ground for drug dealing.‖93 Much like fears about the mall at-large or hardcore punk shows, the arcade was believed to be a transformative place where ―good‖ kids turn ―bad.‖ As one mother put it, ―We hear unacceptable language and see antisocial behavior in the arcades. Only the bad kids go into them, and we worry about the young children not old enough to make value judgments.

Those without strong moral codes can be drawn in.‖94 The arcade restrictions implemented to safeguard the arcade were seemingly not working well enough to satisfy concerned parents or mall administrators. The space of the arcade itself, even though it was designed with a teen audience in mind, was produced by concerned parents and the news media as simply hazardous; within its bounds ―good‖ teens turned ―bad‖ and transgressive teen behavior was culturally acceptable.

Popular culture portrayals of arcades did not do them many favors. Some films, like horror anthology Nightmares (1982) and science fiction adventure The Last Starfighter

(1985), gave the sense that video games were trance-inducing addictions capable of disrupting otherwise normal lives. More light-hearted fare, like Pinball Summer (1980) and Joysticks (1983), showed the arcade as home to teenage debauchery.95 The latter films were part were part of an exploding exploitation genre that sought to attract a teenage

92 Ellen Mitchell, ―Video Game Rooms Targeted by Towns,‖ New York Times, Dec. 13, 1981. 93 Keith Henderson, ―Video Arcades: Pool Halls of the 80s?‖ Christian Science Monitor, June 30, 1986. 94 New York Times, ―The Battle for America‘s Youth,‖ January 5, 1982. 95 The Last Starfighter, directed by Nick Castle, Lorimar Films and Universal Pictures, 1984; Nightmares, directed by Joseph Sargent, Universal Pictures, 1983; and Pinball Summer, directed by George Mihalka, Film Ventures International, 1982. 160

audience by featuring supposed fads—like video games or roller derby—and liberal use of foul language and depictions of sexuality, focused mostly on female nudity seen most prominently in the Porky‟s series. Though they were a small part of the teen exploitation fare of the 1980s, arcade movies made explicit connections between video game arcades and transgressive suburban teen behavior. Comically amplified to appeal to their teen audiences, these movies suggested that the concerns of parents, mall operators, and town administrators may have been exaggerated. However, by trafficking in the standard motifs of eighties exploitation fare while making light of the colorful media image of the video game arcade, these films were also elaborated on those narratives preserving and promoting the arcade‘s association with teen sex and substance abuse.

In Joysticks, teen customers and employees of Bailey‘s arcade must defend themselves against concerned parents and business owners who object to the behavior of the arcade‘s patrons. The actual space of Bailey‘s arcade is presented as capable of altering the activities of its patrons and employees, turning all who enter into freewheeling bacchanalians. All of the characters, including skilled game players Jefferson and Eugene, nerd employee Eugene McDorfus, and anti-social punk King Vidiot, enjoy sex, drugs, and alcohol as a result of their association with the arcade. The main critic of the arcade,

Joseph Rutter, played by Joe Don Baker, agitates for its closing, emphasizing its lurid reputation. On entering Bailey‘s Arcade, he exclaims, ―You are hit by a stench of filth that covers the premises.‖ Portraying himself as a concerned parent of a wholesome teen patron of the arcade, he says that what happens there every day is a testament to moral decay in

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society. Exaggerating the concerns of real parents across the country, Rutter believes the arcade is a breeding ground for both decadent and anti-social behavior.

Ultimately, the teens who frequent Bailey‘s don‘t defend their behavior or the sanctity of the space of the arcade as much as deflect responsibility. Like justifications provided by mallrats about why they misbehave, he main characters, by rationalizing their behavior, claimed they were forced to misbehave in the arcade because they had no other outlet besides hanging out at the mall, the 7-11, or the arcade. Their already limited options to congregate in public would be limited further if the arcade were to close. While not intended as a realistic portrayal, the predominant images of the film conformed to those imagined by the arcade‘s critics promoted in the news media. In that formulation, they were teen hangouts that endangered ―good‖ teens with their proximity to ―bad‖ teens.

Despite the filmmakers‘ attempts to present arcade hijinks in the film as essentially harmless, Joysticks echoed and enhanced visions of transgressive teens in public further associating the arcade with poor teen behavior and helping facilitate movements to more closely police it.

The local experiences with transgressive behavior in arcades, the coverage of these events in the news media, and the arcade‘s portrayal in popular culture worked together to facilitate stricter regulation of teens in public. In some places, communities moved to ban arcades or limit access to those over seventeen.96 For example, Bradley, Illinois passed an

96 Beyond those discussed below, other places where bans that limited access were attempted or instituted included Mesquite, Texas, Brookhaven, New York, Centereach, New York, Marlboro, Massachusetts, Oakland, California, Coral Gables, Florida, West Warwick, Rhode Island, Durham, New Hampshire, Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Hialeah, Florida. Robert Sangeorge, ―Supreme Court: Pool Halls to Video Arcades,‖ United Press International, November 8, 1981; Mitchell, ―Video Game Rooms Targeted by Towns‖; New York Times, ―The Battle for America‘s Youth‖; Associated Press, ―Two Cities Ban Video Games for Youngsters,‖ February 10, 1982; Hilary DeVries, ―Pow! Bang! Towns Zap Video Games,‖ 162

ordinance prohibiting children under the age of sixteen from playing video games in arcades located in shopping malls.97 White Plains, New York banned arcades altogether in their Galleria Mall.98 In 1983, Vienna, Virginia, too, banned businesses from having more than three video game machines because ―parents are worried about kids wasting money, staying out of school and ‗hanging out‘ around the popular machines.‖99 Like the suburbanites profiled in earlier chapters, rather than looking to state or federal lawmakers, citizens concerned with arcades acted locally to enact what were, in essence, moral codes for the use of public space by teenagers.

Yet, even against this backdrop of negative news reports and popular culture representations, bans proved an unwieldy solution. They were difficult to pass because they limited the spaces available to suburban teens and detracted from mall and arcade owners‘ profits. What actually was more important in regulating arcades were more general innovations in mall security. In most cases, arcades were subject to the new security practices of shopping centers that allowed teens in malls but focused on stopping them from congregating and being disruptions of mall commerce. These new policies helped push teens out of the main suburban public space and back into the home to socialize, play video games, and hang out.

The shopping center industry was concerned with the amateur criminal, particularly disruptive teens, because of profit loss from the petty crimes themselves and the negative

Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 1982; United Press International, ―Mass. Town Zaps Space Invaders,‖ June 17, 1982; and Barry Klein, ―Hialeah Plays for Keeps, Bans Video Games,‖ St. Petersburg Times, May 11, 1988. 97 Associated Press, ―Two Cities Ban Video Games for Youngsters.‖ 98 Barbara Wierzbicki, ―Video Arcades Meet Stiff Community Opposition,‖ InfoWorld, Dec. 6, 1983, 18; and Elsa Brenner, ―Arcade Ban Ends,‖ New York Times, April 26, 1998. 99 Paul Hodge, ―Video-Games Limit Proposed in Vienna,‖ Washington Post, Jan. 26, 1983. 163

perception of malls that came with the widely disseminated narratives of mall crime and disruption. In a November 1978 edition of leading shopping mall industry journal,

Shopping Center World, mall owners identified shoplifting, loitering/drinking, and vandalism as their top three security concerns; all crimes predominantly associated with teenagers.100 Similarly, in his column from March 1979, mall security expert Dr. Harold

Gluck alerted his readers to the supposed ―plague . . . called shoplifting.‖101 According to mall owners and security experts in their leading journal, teens proved a visible and disorderly presence in shopping centers that undermined the profit motive of the space.

However, the journal‘s security columns were also practical guides to maximizing profit. In the pages of Shopping Center World, authors emphasized ―loss prevention‖ through articles on insurance liability, and the costs of hiring and training staff, preventing theft, fire-proofing, and making walkways and parking lots more well-lit.102 Their security writers, such as Harold Gluck and retired professional thief Mike McCaffrey, had to combat the notion that the aimless, shoplifting teenager was the most dangerous threat to the bottom line. Though the teen mall patron was an easily identifiable threat, Gluck emphasized that professional thieves were more dangerous. These individuals, he argued, were looking to live off their booty rather than stealing for a cheap thrill or to get the latest fashion like a teen shoplifter.103 In trying to convince shopping center executives of

100 Shopping Center World, ―Shoplifting is Number One Problem,‖ November 1978, 39. 101 Dr. Harold Gluck, ―Beating the Shoplifter.‖ Shopping Center World, March 1979, 30. 102 Shopping Center World ,―Security…How to ‗Defend‘ Your Investment,‖, November 1977, Cover; Charles J. Hura, ―Fire Protection: ‗Vital to Uninterrupted Operations,‘‖ Shopping Center World, November 1977, 16; Shopping Center World, ―Security is Upgraded by Effective Use of Lighting,‖ November 1977, 18; and Anthony N. Potter, ―Mall Security Field Changing to Meet Needs of the Industry,‖ Shopping Center World, February 1983, 26. 103 Dr. Harold Gluck, ―Burglars Are Professionals Trying to Make a Living,‖ Shopping Center World, November 1977, 13. 164

numerous, less visible but high risk threats, Shopping Center World acknowledged the pervasiveness of the image of the disruptive teen and loitering mallrat in the shopping mall.

With both the nuisance of mallrats and the threats from professional thieves in mind, mall owners and operators shifted their security tactics and strategies to focus on providing an overwhelming response to problems at the mall that would handle less visible but costly threats from professional thieves as well as the more visible and publicly damaging hazards from teens in malls. The authors of Shopping Center World urged the forces of shopping center security to become larger, more professionalized, and technologically advanced. William R. Brown, in an article titled, ―Protecting Shoppers

Means Protecting Profits,‖ emphasized the use of closed circuit television (CCTV) monitoring to prevent crime, provide evidence for prosecution, and more effectively and efficiently monitor the shopping center.104 Beyond new technologies like CCTV, the security writers of Shopping Center World stressed the importance of maintaining a large number of highly trained, professional security workers who were very visible in mall space rather than the poorly trained and badly paid forces of the previous era.105 Seasoned thief turned columnist Mike McCaffrey pleaded for a new kind of security force by emphasizing the constant threat from thieves, ―Remember, at all times, that your store is under surveillance by someone who knows how to steal, perhaps even someone who is a professional and good at theft as I was.‖106 The journal‘s staff attempted to shift industry

104 William R. Brown, ―Protecting Shoppers Means Protecting Profits,‖ Shopping Center World, October 1984, 64. 105 Robert Bond, ―Feeling Safe Again,‖ Shopping Center World, November 1989, 181. 106 Mike McCaffrey with Larry Oxenham, ―Find the Shoplifter – If You Can,‖ Shopping Center World, May 1983, 160. 165

attitudes to facilitate practices and new tactics that would regulate mall space to prevent both teen misbehavior as well as the costlier damage being done by professional criminals.

In response to shifting perceptions of mall crime, the shopping center security industry grew. Security expert Anthony N. Potter wrote in 1983 of the shift in shopping center security, ―Today, the walls of my office are lined with bookcases containing over

1,200 volumes on private security, a knowledge explosion that is symbolic of the growth of the industry to the point where there are now two security officers for every law enforcement officer in the United States.‖107 By 1989, Robert Bond declared in Shopping

Center World that shoppers were feeling safe again.108 While making customers feel safe and protecting the bottom line were the intended consequences of new security measures, they also further marked suburban teens in the mall as nefarious characters and objects of scrutiny.

The implementation of new regulatory practices coincided with the decline of the video arcade market and the upswing in the sales of home video game systems helping to draw teens back into the home as they were being encouraged to leave public space.109 In part, the changing economic conditions of the video game industry influenced the waxing and waning popularity of home video systems and arcades. As it became cheaper and easier to make and market home video game systems and games, the arcade suffered as game companies were getting more return from making home video games. The home system also had other advantages. Gaming at home provided a theoretically limitless arcade and a smaller, more closely regulated venue that substantially satisfied many parents

107 Potter, ―Mall Security Field,‖ 26. 108 Robert Bond, ―Feeling Safe Again,‖ 181. 166

and teens. Parents, although occasionally troubled by the content of video games, were happy to welcome their children back into the home where they could be guided in their popular culture choices and segregated from large groups of teens who were thought to be bad influences.110 Teens could play a vast array of games and avoid both the possible hazards of public space from other teens or police harassment.

The home arcade also alleviated the social and moral dilemmas of the mall arcade by transferring the powers of oversight and regulation back to parents while allowing the arcade industry to reform itself. Many arcades became family-friendly choosing not to court a large teen audience.111 In 1989, an operator of a North Carolina mall said of the arcade in his shopping center, ―The emphasis isn‘t on teenage boys anymore. We have something for mom, we have something for dad, something for children. We have something for everyone.‖112 These venues also benefitted from new shopping center security practices that helped make arcades more safe. By the end of the 80s, video arcades, ―made a comeback in malls after having been dropped by many centers in the early 1980s because of the sometimes unruly behavior of teenage patrons.‖113 Yet, as many casual gaming venues such as bars and convenience stores had been replaced by the

109 N.R. Kleinfeld, ―Video Games Industry Comes Back to Earth.‖ 110 Teachers and psychologists were concerned with video game addictions and exposure to violent content which may spur adolescent players to transgressive behavior. Dr. Millman of New York Hospital predicted a slippery slope from addiction to video games to more dangerous addictions, ―The games present a seductive world. They offer a social structure, a system, a special language, something to relate around. There is the ritual of waiting on line, of being the predator in a violent game. From time immemorial kids have wanted to alter the way they felt - to be totally absorbed in an activity where they are out on an edge and can't think of anything else. That's why they try everything from gambling to glue sniffing.‖ Glenn Collins, ―Children‘s Video Games: Who Wins (or Loses)?‖ New York Times, August 31, 1981. 111 Joe Morris, ―Amusement Centers Are Winners Again,‖ Shopping Center World, September 1987, 60. Morris wrote of the late 1980s arcade, ―In addition to featuring new, improved games in a more attractive setting, the new and overhauled arcades are being targeted more toward the family than they were in the past according to retailers and operators.‖ 112 John McCloud, ―Fun & Games is Serious Business,‖ Shopping Center World, July 1989, 32. 167

arcade in the late 70s and early 80s, by the late 80s, the arcade as a venue where teens hung out was being eclipsed by the family-friendly version and has yet to return to its heights of teen popularity of the early 1980s.

Conclusion

The discursive formation of the out-of-control teen, the hardcore punk, the mallrat, and the arcade addict, and the attempts to regulate them contributed to the increasing sense of a hazardous suburban landscape. Specifically, teenagers‘ presence in suburban public spaces initiated and facilitated their continual redefinition as dangerous and redisciplining that attempted to erase teens from public space and reintegrate them back into the home.

Starting in the late 70s, out-of-control teens were figured in news media narratives and the film Over the Edge as hazardous even to the spaces designed to contain them. Actual incidents of violence and substance abuse and these narrativizations, in turn, made possible the closure or reorientation of actual teen recreational centers that foreclosed one venue for public congregation and marked the public teen as dangerous. Suburban hardcore punks, too, suffered a similar fate. In their music and public performances, punks themselves produced their scene as violent and anti-suburban. News media stories enhanced this image with tales of aggressive dancing and anti-social behavior. Their depiction in sympathetic films by director Penelope Spheeris sought to contextualize their behavior but largely reinforced the notion of the suburban hardcore punk scene as aimless and violent.

These images enabled police and municipalities to regulate the scene out of suburbia.

Continually harassed at live performances and pushed to sites on the margins of public life, many hardcore punks left the suburbs for more amenable scenes in major American cities.

113 Ibid. 168

The more mainstream public spaces of the mall and the arcade became less amenable to teens through the 1980s because of their actual transgressive behavior and its representations in news media and popular culture. In these discursive productions, parents, town officials, and mall owners found justification for regulating them and public space more closely. The result was that teens were marked as dangerous and endangered figures who, to protect them and other citizens, were largely erased from suburban public life.

As teens moved back into the home, however, they were not safeguarded. In the next chapter, I explore how the popular culture products that suburban teens preferred were feared to be endangering them while also undermining parental power and the sanctity of the home.

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Chapter 4: Parental Advisory—Explicit Lyrics: Popular Occulture and

(Re)Possessing the Suburban Home

The suburban horror film The Gate synthesized the fears and fantasies of 1980s suburban culture.1 Released in the spring of 1987, this quintessential bit of lowbrow horror fare was the ultimate fear/fantasy of what many parents and experts believed would happen to children left to their own devices—and to the occult-inspired dangers of supposedly

Satanic rock and heavy metal music. In the film, teenager Al and her younger brother Glen are left home alone for a weekend in their quiet, sunny suburban home. To celebrate their parent-free weekend, Glen invites his best friend Terry to stay over, and Al hosts a party.

During the party, the older teens engage in the occult-inspired party trick of attempting to

―levitate‖ their friends. As they attempt to loft one of the other teenagers, they ominously repeat the chant, ―Light as a feather. Stiff as a board.‖ When it doesn‘t work, they set their sights on Glen. They are stunned when their chant sends Glen easily floating to the ceiling.

That‘s when Terry and Glen explain that the night before, a storm uprooted a large tree and opened a sizable hole in the ground. They recount that, in the course of investigating the hole, they found a large piece of quartz with an incantation inscribed into it. The boys read the incantation out loud. Odd things have been happening ever since. Al and her friends dismiss the two pre-teens, but the next day even stranger things begin to happen. Terry gets a visit from the ghost of his dead mother, and Glen‘s dog is found dead in the backyard. At that point, Terry tells Glen that the key to understanding what is going

1 The Gate, directed by Tibor Takacs, Alliance Entertainment, 1987. 170

on may lie in the album The Dark Book by his favorite heavy metal band Sacrifice. When the boys play the record, a spoken-word introduction explains that the hole in the backyard is a gate demons use to return to earth. When, as instructed, the boys play the record backward, the band pronounces an incantation, similar to the one on the quartz, which opens the gate fully. Their gate now unlocked, demons flood out of the hole and besiege the house. They capture Terry and Al, drag them into the hole, and sacrifice them. Only

Glen manages to escape by shooting his model rockets into the demons to destroy them.

The next morning, everything has returned to normal; Al, Terry, and the dog are alive, and the house shows no signs of the previous night‘s events though the film ends with an ominous suggestion that the hole may not be closed forever, a notion explored in the sequel, The Gate II: Trespassers.2

The film dramatized what some critics of heavy metal believed by the late 1980s.

Through hidden messages, heavy metal music supposedly called its audience to worship

Satan and occult gods and yield control of their actions to them. The Gate reflected critics‘ views that heavy metal was occult propaganda masquerading as music and, by 1987, the seemingly natural association among heavy metal, the occult, and the violent behavior of teenage heavy metal devotees in suburban towns across America.

In the fall of 1987, United States surgeon general C. Everett Koop delivered the keynote address to the Parents‘ Music Resource Center (PMRC) Symposium that dealt with many of the fears about the consumption of popular culture dramatized in The Gate. 3

Koop‘s address, titled ―Raised on Rock ‗N Roll–The Sound and the Fury,‖ emphasized the

2 The Gate II: Trespassers, directed by Tibor Takacs, Alliance Entertainment, 1990. 171

social dangers of popular culture, particularly those posed by heavy metal music and pornography, highlighting fears about pre-marital sex, violent behavior, and worship of the occult, and Satan. Koop argued that hazardous products were no longer relegated to the periphery of the culture, but brought directly into the home without a filter to protect young consumers. He said, ―Now we have rock videos without control and frequently viewed without parents even being aware. Many that I have seen are senseless violence with senseless pornography to the beat of rock music.‖4 According to Surgeon General Koop, music and music videos encouraged deviant and dangerous sexual activity as well as anti- social and violent behavior made all the more dangerous because parents were unaware of and unable to cope with it.5 Further, Koop‘s professional prescriptions to remedy these new social problems seemed to legitimize the widespread movement of suburban parents to protect their homes and children from the many dangers of popular culture in the 1980s.

Though he was an agent of the federal government, he argued that parents, being experienced consumers familiar with the dangers of sex and violence, should be more active in guiding their children by regulating their media consumption. Koop told the

PMRC ―that each of us—in our homes or in our schools—has the moral responsibility to pass that information on to our children.‖6 The speech distilled the perceived victimization of suburban homes and families that marked them as under attack from supposedly toxic popular culture products that insidiously influenced children and caused aberrant social behavior. Koop‘s address also emphasized private solutions to the lures and dangers of

3 C. Everett Koop, ―Raised on Rock ‗N Roll – The Sound and the Fury‖ [lecture, Parents‘ Music Resource Center Symposium, October 26, 1987]. 4 Koop, 3. 5 Koop, 5. 172

popular culture products that located power and authority with parents in the home rather than centralized efforts to protect all consumers.

Both The Gate and Koop‘s address demonstrated the state of affairs in 1987 for suburban parents and young consumers of popular culture. The supposed threats from the occult influences of heavy metal and the consequences of failing to defend against them had been made quite clear. Starting in the early 1980s, narratives of real murders and suicides allegedly caused by Satanic and occult messages in heavy metal music and role- playing games emerged in the news media and popular culture. These initial cases all took place in suburban locales—the disappearance of a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) player who supposedly conflated his real and game lives in 1979; the ritual killing, in 1984, of a

Long Island teen by an acquaintance who was avowed worshipper of Satan; three suicides supposedly inspired by heavy metal artists in 1985 and 1986—and publicized the threat from heavy metal and the occult and established the stakes for intervention by suburbanites.7

Established in 1984, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) sought to bring to light the obscenity and violence in popular music and to help parents stem the tide and defend against the likely violent consequences of popular occulture. In so doing, they set an agenda and strategy for battling dangerous products that would become the dominant mode for suburbanites to think about these products and protect their families and homes from them. In media appearances and parenting aids such as videos and books produced

6 Koop, 12. 7 Associated Press, ―Missing Genius'' Apparently Tried Suicide, Police Say,‖ August 12, 1980; and Associated Press, ―Two Arraigned In 'Satanic' Slaying of 17-Year-Old,‖ July 6, 1984 and Associated Press, 173

by the group and its members, the PMRC portrayed a continuous threat to the suburban home and family from popular culture products their sons and daughters brought into the home. However, the group eschewed centralized solutions to solve the problem.

Government regulation through censorship or legal guidelines proved too unwieldy and politically dangerous to be effective, while court cases to censor content were

Constitutionally untenable. Rather, the PMRC, and other groups and individuals who followed in their wake, advocated for and enacted private solutions that empowered individual parents with information and specific tactics to protect their own children within their homes. That meant concerned parents and their families, mostly suburban and middle- class, were largely the only ones subject to new regimes of discipline with regard to popular culture and the family. By the late 1980s, news stories of suicide pacts by heavy metal fans and the increasing popularity of heavy metal in the suburbs further produced the threats from Satan and the occult. The PMRC and other self-identified occult experts focused on these hazards until the early 1990s, when threats from heavy metal were discursively eclipsed by those from rap and hip-hop.

In exploring the threats from popular occulture and the defenses against it, this chapter emphasizes how real tragedies with possible occult influences, through their narrativization and fictionalization in news media and popular culture, placed suburban families at the center of those representations and enabled the emergence of concerned parents and other ―experts‖ to identify popular culture threats and stop them. In their literature, concerned parents marked occult, sexual, and violent hazards as real and

―Parents of Teen Who Killed Self Sue Singer Ozzy Osbourne,‖ January 14, 1986; John Roll, ―Whether Music Instigated Youth Suicide Pact Apparently Headed for Trial,‖ Associated Press, December 4, 1986. 174

imminent, caused by popular culture, and linked conclusively to violence and transgressive behavior among suburban audiences. In their prescriptions for defense against these hazards, the PMRC and others emphasized parental empowerment rather than solutions achieved in legislation or through the courts. Their efforts helped not only imagine the suburban home as continuously under siege, but enabled suburbanites to fashion the home and the suburb as sanctified spaces. Through their productive victimization, suburban parents were encouraged and often did regulate their children‘s popular culture choices reasserting power over them and the family home in an increasingly mediated world.

The alarm over the violent and occult content in popular music in the 1980s was largely based on the idea that artists—alongside the culture industries that produced and distributed their work—were invading the home and destroying the family by inundating young consumers with dangerous messages of liberatory rebellion and graphic violence.

This was not an entirely new reaction to shifting mores and values carried in popular culture. The uproar over ―dangerous‖ media, propagated by concerned suburban parents, fits the outlines of moral panics as elaborated by Stanley Cohen.8 According to popular culture watchdogs of the 1980s, the dangers of sex, substance abuse, and the occult were apparent and required experts to educate the laymen about threats that were dangerous in and of themselves and hinted at deeper, more heinous hazards.9 Cohen argues that moral panics, such as those over occult influences, do not necessarily imply that fears about a particular ―thing‖ are not real or unfounded, but rather ―the ‗thing‘s‘ extent and

8 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers, 3rd Edition (New York: Routledge, 2002). 9 Cohen, viii. 175

significance has been exaggerated (a) in itself as compared with other more reliable, valid, and objective sources and/or (b) compared with other, more serious problems.‖10

Those two insights are particularly helpful in thinking about the fears of popular culture in the 1980s. Concerned parents‘ focus on popular culture texts as the font from which deviance spilled elided more complex explanations that implicated contentious cultural and social issues in much the same way Cohen and scholars suggest moral panics functioned. Jeffery Weeks, in particular, has argued that sex panics worked in this way with sexual ―deviants‖ as omnipresent scapegoats for social ills throughout history.11

Gayle Rubin, too, writes that sex panics, ―rarely alleviate any real problem, because they are aimed at chimeras and signifiers. They draw on the pre-existing discursive structures which invents victims in order to justify treating ‗vices‘ as crimes.‖12 Rather than emphasizing the myriad social factors contributing to a behavior or belief, moral crusaders located their causes in easily-identifiable places and in populations who were easy to attack. Concerned suburban parents followed just this pattern. Rather than examining the wide range of sociological evidence concerning teens and aberrant behavior, they located the causes of teen depression, suicide, pregnancy, and substance abuse in widely trafficked popular culture texts they believed were promoting dangerous beliefs and practices. By helping define the aims and scope of moral panics, this scholarship enables a fuller understanding of how the discursive production of threats from popular culture to suburban

10 Ibid. 11 Jeffery Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd Edition (London: Longman Group, 1989), 14. 12 Gayle S. Rubin, ―Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,‖ in Richard Guy Parker and Peter Aggleton, eds., Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader (London: University College London Press, 1999), 163. 176

consumers legitimated the empowerment of parents in the home to enact new practices to protect supposedly endangered audiences and spaces.13

The onslaught from the culture industries, and the corresponding attempts to defend audiences, would seem to affect all consumers. And this was true to some extent, as the movements to regulate these industries limited their ability to distribute the most socially objectionable material. Yet, by looking to popular culture and patterns of consumption as the cause of disturbing social trends, concerned parents identified their concerns as particularly suburban.14 Media historian Lynn Spigel argues that the postwar suburban home emphasized consumer technologies and family leisure of which television was a central part. Those consumer technologies only increased their presence in suburban homes disproportionately addressing that audience.15 Suburban culture critics and concerned parents ignored by a number of incidents that did not fit the paradigm of popular culture-inspired transgressions of youth audiences. Amy Fisher‘s attempted murder of

Mary Jo Buttafuoco, for example, received little attention from PMRC parents and other concerned suburbanites despite the fact that the incident occurred on suburban Long Island,

13 For the most part, scholars of moral panics and media have largely limited their concern to the impact of the moral panic on political debates, social identities, and theories of media production and reception. These texts include: Charles R. Acland, Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of “Youth in Crisis” (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); Laura Cook Kenna. "Exemplary Consumer-Citizens and Protective State-Stewards. . . ‖ Velvet Light Trap 63, Spring 2009; Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America‟s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s; Stuart Hall, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, and John Clarke, eds., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978); Heather Hendershot, Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation Before the V-Chip (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Leerom Medevoi, Rebel: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 14 Spigel, 20-27; and The focus on consumption, particularly on heavy metal, seems to make this a suburban issue as well. Robert Walser points out in a study of heavy metal fans that they commonly live in 177

New York. Incidents that did not involve suburban teens were even further off their radar, like the murder of Michael Griffith at Howard Beach in 1986 and the rape and beating of a

Central Park jogger in 1989.16 Instead, critics and parents focused only on the dubious links between coded Satanic messages and the suicides and murders in suburban locales.

Moral concerns about the content of media in the 1980s were precipitated by new popular culture products entering both the marketplace and the home more frequently and at a faster pace. MTV and cable television, more generally, were delivering a wider variety of largely unregulated content directly into the home.17 Bypassing parental censors and often delivering explicit content, these new outlets created a specific problem for a generation of parents raised with a more limited set of highly regulated media.18 Moreover, these increasing threats from popular culture emerged just as suburbanites were seeing themselves more and more as under siege from other hazards. As explored in the previous chapters of this dissertation, suburbanites increasingly saw their physical and moral safety as endangered and found a power in that victimization. In this case, their fears over explicit content in games and music facilitated parents redefinition of the suburban home as a safe harbor for their families and to enact new, local practices to protect that status while promoting their own authority in their individual homes and neighborhoods.

upscale suburbs. Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 16. 15 See note 25 of the introduction. 16 Tom Mathews with Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, ―‗The Long Island Lolita,‘‖ New York Times, June 15, 1992; Robert D. McFadden, ―3 Youths Are Held on Murder Counts in Queens Attack,‖ New York Times, December 23, 1986; and Craig Wolff, ―Youths Rape and Beat Central Park Jogger,‖ New York Times, April 21, 1989. 17 Putsis, Jr., ―Product Diffusion, Product Differentiation,‖; Thomas R. Eisenmann, ―The U.S. Cable Television Industry‖; and Goolsbee and Petrin, ―Consumer Gains.‖ 18 Patrick R. Parsons, Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 452-477. 178

Moreover, national politics shifted to enable moral critiques of the culture industries. Political culture‘s conservative turn in the late 1970s further inspired critiques of popular culture for causing moral harm. By the late seventies, the conservative groups that had emerged in the wake of Barry Goldwater‘s blowout loss in the 1964 presidential election had begun to focus more heavily on divisive cultural issues. These groups promoted a Judeo-Christian ideology to ameliorate moral crises such as abortion, divorce, and pornography, which they believed arose from the excesses of the civil rights and feminist movements, and which they believed were promoted by liberal culture industries.19 Christian groups such as James Dobson‘s ―Focus on the Family,‖ Pat

Robertson‘s ―Christian Coalition,‖ Randall Terry‘s ―Operation Rescue,‖ and Jerry

Falwell‘s ―Moral Majority‖ worked through direct-mail and televised preaching (on expanding satellite and cable networks) to reach audiences and spur local action on behalf of their causes.20

Liberal groups also emerged, though less powerfully, often in reaction to the rising conservative tide in the national political culture and created room for non-ideological mobilization of cultural victimization. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and

19 William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (Broadway Books: New York, 1996), 232. Martin shows that conservatives in the early 80s ranked opposition to abortion and homosexuality as well as restoration of devotional prayer in schools as their top three issues. and Sara Diamond, Not By Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right (New York: Guilford Press, 1998, 63-66. Diamond argues, as do other historians of the Christian right, that three events mobilized the Christian Right in the 1970s: Roe v. Wade decision, Jimmy Carter‘s threatened revocation of tax-exempt status for religious schools not trying hard enough to racially integrate, and the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment. 20 Charles W. Phillips, ―Focus on the Family,‖ Saturday Evening Post, April 1982, 34-37, 121; Richard N. Ostling, ―Jerry Falwell‘s Crusade,‖ Time, September 2, 1985; Robert Ajemian, ―Jerry Falwell Spreads the Word,‖ Time, September 2, 1985; Richard N. Ostling, ―A Jerry-Built Coalition Regroups,‖ Time, November 16, 1987; ―Falwell‘s Farewell,‖ National Review, July 14, 1989, 19; and Diamond,.18-41 In ―Chapter 2: Staying Tuned,‖ Diamond discusses the media strategies of Dobson and Robertson in growing the Christian right movement including their reliance on direct mail and radio. 179

People for the American Way sought to curtail the power of the government to override first amendment rights, and the power of corporations to endanger the public. The stretching of ideological poles in the run-up to Pat Buchanan‘s declaration of a culture war at the 1992 Republican National Convention gave concerned suburban parents a unique opportunity to find a political middle ground untainted by entrenched political battles.21

Through concerned parents‘ focus on pragmatic, local solutions in defense of an unassailable place—the suburban home—they were able to craft a powerful, conservative cultural critique, while positioning themselves as being outside traditional politics.

The solutions advocated by groups like the PMRC—publicizing the threat, public moral shaming, and empowering parents—emphasized private and local solutions while enabling suburban citizens to enact those solutions by closely monitoring the products being brought in the home and consumed by their children. These solutions eschewed centralized responses from government and corporations and focused instead on protecting individual suburban homes and children. Much like suburbanites‘ strategies in fighting crime and environmental hazard during this same period, this approach to emerging threats was central to suburban identity and values. By positing the home and its inhabitants as under siege from dangerous popular culture products, and emphasizing increased parental knowledge and involvement, these movements and the parents they inculcated, valorized and buttressed parental power. The claims of victimization—in this case, the breaching of

21 Pat Buchanan, ―Speech to the Republican National Convention,‖ August 17, 1992, Houston, Texas, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patrick_Buchanan%27s_Speech_to_1992_GOP_Convention (accessed 9-4-09). Buchanan declared, ―My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, we have to come home, and stand beside him.‖ 180

the home with dangerous products and immoral influences—and the authority derived from that victimization were part and parcel of the idea of the suburban.

Satan in the Suburbs

In 1984, newspapers reported that two teenagers had murdered an acquaintance in a satanic ritual in Northport, a town on the North shore of Long Island. Ricky Kasso and

James Troiano had allegedly murdered Gary Lauwers and mutilated his body as part of a satanic sacrifice. Police accounts asserted that under the pretense of a botched drug deal,

Kasso tortured Lauwers and forced him to repeatedly say, ―I love Satan.‖22 Just a day after the murder, lead detective Lt. Robert Dunn was quoted as saying, ―This was a sacrificial killing. . . . They built a roaring fire in a field near the woods. They cut the sleeves out of his shirt and burned them and they took his socks off and burned them. I don‘t know what this is supposed to mean, but this is what they did. It‘s pure Satanism.‖23 News media portrayed the murder as shocking the population of the serene, middle class community of

Northport.24 One resident said, ―There are exotic things that happen in Manhattan, but they don‘t happen in Northport,‖ while another claimed, ―We‘ve never seen any bad disturbances, nothing like this. It‘s shocking–the three boys are from the town itself.‖25

Bad things happened—just not in Northport.

22 Margaret Hornblower, ―Youths' Deaths Tied to Satanic Rite,‖ Washington Post, July 9, 1984. 23 Associated Press, ―Two Arraigned In 'Satanic' Slaying of 17-Year-Old.‖ 24 Robert D. McFadden, ―Youth Found Hanged in L.I. Cell After Arrest in Ritual Killing,‖ New York Times, July 8, 1984. 25 Sara Rimer, ―Northport Residents Express Disbelief at News of Slaying,‖ New York Times, July 8, 1984. Residents of Northport expressed shock and disbelief that such an incident could happen in their quiet, middle class community. One resident said, ―There are exotic things that happen in Manhattan, but they don't happen in Northport,‖ while another resident said, ―We've never seen any bad disturbances, nothing like this. It's shocking - the three boys are from the town itself.‖ 181

To explain how a safe community of tree-lined streets could be home to such a horrific crime, police contended that a satanic cult called ―Knights of the Black Circle‖ had been using and selling drugs while listening to the supposedly dark influences of heavy metal in the park‘s woods for nearly three years.26 News reports described the town as affluent and middle class.27 The boys involved in the murder were from good homes and had significant advantages in life.28 However, the same reports also indicated that the members of the alleged cult had fallen into lives of drug abuse and ―hanging out‖ around town. The news media suggested that the existence of the group and its love of heavy metal were the crucial factors, too, helping to explain some Northport teens‘ aberrant behavior, especially Gary Lauwers‘ murder. It was their love of heavy metal that had set them apart from their college-bound peers, presumably putting them on a course for drug abuse and Satan worship that led to Lauwers‘ murder. Later, as the legal case against

James Troiano concluded with a not-guilty verdict, police and news media acknowledged that the murder had been about nothing more than drug deals and drug abuse.29 Yet, the associations of the murder with heavy metal and Satanism persisted. Heavy metal, with its supposed promotion of Satan worship and endorsement of violent rituals, was just too elegant of an explanation for the crime, and the downward spiral of boys from good, suburban homes.

26 McFadden, ―Youth Found Hanged.‖ 27 Hornblower, ―Youths‘ Deaths‖; and Lindsay Gruson, ―‗Satanic Ritual‘ Is Now Ruled Out in June Slaying of Youth in L.I. Woods,‖ New York Times, December 27, 1987. 28 Associated Press, ―Youth Charged In 'Satanic' Slaying Found Dead In Jail Cell,‖ July 7, 1984. A neighbor to the Kasso family described them as ―a beautiful family . . . We're talking about two intelligent, educated parents who are good parents. This is so out of context for the family.‖ Northport was described as affluent and middle class in the news media. 29 Ibid. and Associated Press, ―Teen Found Innocent in Killing,‖ April 25, 1985. 182

Satanism was a believable and even likely cause of the murder for police, parents, and the news media because the larger discursive environment linked heavy metal music to a rise in Satanic and occult worship; and the teens in Northport who listened to heavy metal behaved strangely. In the months preceding the crime, Ricky Kasso was cited for stealing a skull and hand from a Northport cemetery crypt as part of a Satanic ritual.30 Police also recalled numerous calls about missing pets, possibly stolen for use in Satanic rituals.31 In the woods, where these rituals would purportedly take place, reporters and police found graffiti honoring the teens‘ favorite heavy metal artists—Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC.32 After expressing disbelief at the depravity of the crime, lead detective Dunn insisted that rock videos glorifying satanic rituals were an important influence on the killers, especially Kasso, who had already been caught perpetrating acts thought to be

Satanic.33 Further supporting the police‘s belief that heavy metal played a role in promoting Satanism was the name of the alleged cult. Knights of the Black Circle was a reference to being a disciple of vinyl records—black circles—presumably the heavy metal albums that were a favored genre among the teens who hung out in the woods. To police and the news media, the combination of the behavior of a group of teens (supposedly part of a Satanic cult) in the years before the murder, the depravity of the murder itself (in which Gary Lauwers‘ body was mutilated and partially burned), and their love of heavy metal fit together to create a narrative of satanic influence on good suburban kids.

30 Associated Press, ―Youth Charged.‖ 31 McFadden, ―Youth Found Hanged.‖ 32 Hornblower, ―Youths‘ Deaths.‖ 33 Ibid. 183

By the time of the murder, Satanism and the occult had already emerged as a threat on the postwar American landscape. It had been a national news topic following the high- profile Charles Manson family murders in the late 1960s and the flowering of various other pagan and/or Satanist cults like Jim Jones‘ People‘s Temple. Beginning in the late 1970s, politically active evangelical Christians identified these Satanic and occult activities as part of a broader shift of American values. Historian of religion Lynn Schofield Clark argues that evangelicals of the seventies and eighties were engaged in spiritual warfare against these forces of evil.34 As part of this war, early Christian televangelists fueled a fear of the plague of cults and Satanism. By the early 1980s, occult fears had been stoked to such an extent that even national companies found themselves accused of hiding satanic imagery in their logos. Consumer goods manufacturer Procter & Gamble found itself defending their trademark—a man in the moon surrounded by 13 stars—against rumors charging that it was a secret symbol of Satanism; a rumor that was reported to be heard mostly at church services.35 By the spring of 1982, Procter and Gamble was getting 12,000 queries monthly about its relationship to the devil. 36 Virginia televangelist Jerry Falwell eventually consulted with the company and assured consumers that the company was not associated with the devil.37 As it turned out, most of the rumors had been spread by persons affiliated with competing companies. Yet, the allusion to devil worship had great cultural currency.

It was so powerful and devious that it seemed not only possible but likely that even a

34 Lynn Schofield Clark, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 27-28. 35 Stephanie Mansfield, ―The Man in the Moon,‖ Washington Post, January 23, 1982. 36 Sandra Salmans, ―Fighting that Old Devil Rumor,‖ Saturday Evening Post, October 1982. 37 New York Times, ―P & G Drops Satanism Suit,‖ August 13, 1982. Because of the persistent rumors, the company eventually sued some individuals who had been known to spread the rumor at their 184

mainstream brand like Procter and Gamble—which made deodorant, diapers, and food— could be run by Satanists.

Yet, the average suburbanite was not necessarily concerned with this broad war between good and evil that was being framed in religious terms. Rather, they were concerned with practical solutions to the household problems and hazards that came from supposedly occult sources. In his study of postwar religion and spirituality, Robert

Wuthnow has argued the 70s and 80s saw an emphasis on moral practices by a majority of

Americans as a means to a specific, local end rather than part of a holy war.38 Still, evangelicals‘ promotion of threats from Satanism and the occult helped introduce them to a wider audience, alerting suburbanites to a nascent threat to which they would apply their local, apolitical solutions.39

“There Is No Doubt In My Mind That the Game Dungeons & Dragons Is

Causing Young Men to Kill Themselves and Others”

—Dr. Thomas Radecki, 1985, “Dungeons & Dragons Controversy,” United

Press International, January 15, 1985.

Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, sold mostly to teenagers, dealt explicitly with fantasy adventures and the occult and served as the first front in

church services. The suit was eventually dropped after those individuals apologized for spreading false information. 38 Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 108. 39 Though they continue to propagate the culture wars against secularism and relativism to the present day, many evangelicals sheltered themselves from mainstream culture, choosing to create and consume music, movies, and television made specifically for them, and leaving other suburbanites to engage with popular culture. For an exploration of how evangelical Christians created their own version of heavy metal to promote Christian morality in popular music forms, see Eileen Luhr, ―Metal Missionaries to the Nation: Christian Heavy Metal Music, ‗Family Values,‘ and Youth Culture, 1984-1994,‖ American Quarterly (March 2005), 103-128. 185

suburbanites‘ war on dangerous popular culture products.40 D&D is a fantasy role-playing game (RPG) invented in 1974 by Gary Gygax for Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), Inc., in which players choose characters and are led on adventures by a dungeon master who creates a narrative and various tasks for the players to complete.41 Dungeons & Dragons, used as a catchall term for a larger genre of fantasy role-playing games that involve wizards, spells, and quests, became a target for concerned suburban parents as sales increased through the early eighties.42 With their focus on fantasy worlds and occult imagery, the game and its imitators became targets for protesters who feared children would not be able to leave their fantasy lives behind. Spurred by two supposed incidents of players ―becoming‖ their game characters in real life, and their narratives in news and popular culture, protesters insisted that the games‘ occult influences compelled players to act out the game in their everyday lives by completing violent tasks outlined by an all- powerful dungeon master. In 1979, James Dallas Egbert III, a child prodigy and avid D&D player, disappeared, presumably to complete a quest begun in a role-playing game. In

1982, Virginia teenager L. ―Bink‖ Pulling III committed suicide allegedly at the behest of his dungeon master. Role-playing games were thought to enter the home covertly and subvert parental control, giving further impetus for suburbanites to re-establish the boundaries and moral sanctity of the home and see Satanic and occult influences more widely in popular culture.

40 Janet Neiman, ―Dangers of Fantasy World Transported From Playing Tables to Corporate Lair,‖ Adweek, November 18, 1985. Neiman claimed that D&D‘s audience was mostly 11-17 year old boys. 41 Mary Austin, ―The Assignment: Find Out About Dungeons and Dragons,‖ Christian Science Monitor, February 9, 1981; Anne H. Oman, ―Dungeons & Dragons: It‘s Not Just a Game, It‘s an Adventure,‖ Washington Post, February 20, 1981. 42 Laurinda Keys, Associated Press, February 26, 1982; Kenneth Stoffels, ―TSR Sees Profits in Its Future Following Austerity Measures,‖ Business Journal-Milwaukee, January 27, 1986. 186

In 1979, James Dallas Egbert vanished while attending Michigan State University.

Because he was known to be an avid player of Dungeons & Dragons, his parents and university authorities feared that he had attempted to live out his fantasy life in a network of dangerous steam tunnels below the campus. Egbert, a child prodigy from suburban Ohio who entered college at the age of 15, disappeared just before his 17th birthday. He had indeed ventured into the steam tunnels, but not at the behest of any dungeon master.

Pressure to succeed and difficulty fitting in with his older colleagues had led him into a period of depression. He ventured into the tunnels under the university to commit suicide, not as part of a role-playing game.43 After the unsuccessful suicide attempt, he fled to

Louisiana and got a job. His disappearance prompted his parents to hire private investigator William Dear to find their son. When Egbert‘s mother told Dear that her son had often played D&D, Dear proposed the theory that Egbert had entered the tunnels as part of a role-playing game.44

The theory was picked up by the Michigan State University campus newspaper,

The State News, and eventually by the national news media. These news outlets manufactured logical leaps to connect Egbert‘s disappearance with its prefabricated cause—Dungeons & Dragons. Even after doubts began to emerge about the D&D theory, newspapers continued to suggest it as the likely cause of his disappearance in lieu of a better explanation.45 Following Egbert‘s suicide in 1980, the Associated Press highlighted

43 Associated Press, ―Missing ‗Genius‘ Apparently Tried Suicide, Police Say,‖ August 12, 1980. 44 Ibid. 45 Though many news accounts attributed his disappearance to playing Dungeons & Dragons, private investigator William Dear, based on his investigation of the case, argued Egbert suffered from depression and killed himself because of it. Paul LaFarge also argued that D&D had not been conclusively linked to Satanism or Egbert‘s case specifically. William C. Dear, The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance 187

the possible influence of D&D even while suggesting that the causes of his disappearance remained unknown, ―James Dallas Egbert III, the youth once feared trapped in a real-life enactment of a ‗Dungeons and Dragons‘ fantasy game, will be buried along with the secret of his month-long disappearance last year.‖46 The article leaves the impression that

Egbert‘s vanishing and eventual suicide was most likely related to D&D. Even three years after his suicide, the Washington Post was still connecting his disappearance to his involvement in role-playing games. ―Although D&D has been in existence for a decade, it was not until 1979 that the game caught the attention of the nation in a spectacular way: a

Michigan State University student disappeared for almost a month in a 10-mile network of steam tunnels under the campus where he and some friends would act out rounds of the game in an atypical fashion (it is normally played indoors with paper and pencils). This rather bizarre example of fantasy role-playing seemed all the more weird a year later when the student, James Egbert, committed suicide.‖47 Though not asserting direct causation, news stories like these framed suburban kids in basements playing RPGs through the disappearance and suicide of an avid gamer. So, despite efforts to demystify the dangers of

D&D, even in that same Washington Post article, suburban RPG players were consistently linked to narratives of suicide and danger.

A novelization and movie based on his ―story‖ buttressed the account of Egbert‘s running away and suicide and demonstrated the wide penetration of the dangerous D&D narrative. Rona Jaffe‘s Mazes and Monsters, a television movie adapted from her novel of

of James Dallas Egbert III, Houghton Mifflin, 1985; and Paul LaFarge, ―Destroy All Monsters,‖ The Believer, September 2006. 46 Associated Press, ―Investigator Says He Will Never Tell The Story,‖ August 18, 1980. 188

the same name, detailed the dangers of a thinly veiled version of D&D to otherwise normal teens.48 Aired on CBS in 1982, the movie, following the novel exactly, tracked Robbie

Wheeling as he transferred to Grant College and got involved in the role-playing game

Mazes and Monsters, to which he had once been addicted.49 By all appearances, Robbie is a normal college student. He attends classes and has a girlfriend. But as Robbie begins to play the game, he develops an obsession. Playing day and night with the game‘s dark forces, Robbie can no longer distinguish the game from his real life. He hallucinates that he has become his game character, a cleric, and has slain a dragon. To achieve the character‘s final goal of getting to the ―great hall,‖ Robbie believes he must jump from the

World Trade Center. Even though his friends are able to stop him, the film‘s end shows

Robbie living out the rest of his life in an institution, foreclosing what would have been the promising middle-class life envisioned for him by his parents.

Robbie‘s/Egbert‘s story served as a cautionary tale about role-playing games and occult worship. It also provided an important reference point for concerned parents that vividly and explicitly linked self-destructive behavior to role-playing games. In the first chapter of the novel, Jaffe addresses her book directly to concerned parents. ―Perhaps what was most disturbing about this case was something that was on every parent‘s mind. These players, the ones who had gone too far and the one who had disappeared, could be

47 Tom Zito, ―Dungeons and Dragons: In This Fantasy Land Of Power and Treasure, You Don‘t Play Around,‖ Washington Post, September 7, 1983. 48 Rona Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters (New York: Dell, 1981) and Mazes and Monsters, directed by Steven Hilliard Stern, McDermott Productions, CBS, 1982. 49 William C. Dear, The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III (Houghton Mifflin, 1985). Private investigator Dear tells the story of what he believes really happened to Egbert. Though many news accounts attributed his disappearance to playing Dungeons & Dragons, Dear, based on his investigation of the case, argues Egbert suffered from depression and killed himself because of it; Paul LaFarge, ―Destroy All Monsters,‖ The Believer, September 2006. 189

anybody‘s kids; bright young college students . . . given the American Dream and rejecting it to live in a fantasy world of invented terrors.‖50 Both the book and the film advance the argument that games based on occult fantasies will cause players to lose touch with reality and hurt themselves or others. As the quote from chapter one of the book demonstrates,

Jaffe believed that basing her novel on a supposedly true story lent her cautionary retelling a greater patina of credence. It was not simply the creation of an author‘s imagination, but a story about a real young man seduced by the occult to act dangerously. Within that frame, the claims made by the film and the book about the everyday hazards of playing

Dungeons & Dragons appear more real and likely than they would if they were advanced by a work of fiction. The implication was that the games were designed to be all- consuming adventures that shut out ―real‖ life for their players. Mazes and Monsters brought the fears of the occult and role-playing games straight into suburban households, casting doubt on the games many teens loved, and justifying parents‘ fears and desires to make their homes safe.

Just after the airing of Mazes and Monsters, another ―true‖ story attested to the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons and the occult while initiating a grassroots effort to protest role-playing games. L. (Bink) Pulling III, a Norfolk, Virginia teenager, committed suicide supposedly at the command of his dungeon master. Though his story got some news coverage, it was the organization created by his parents in the wake of his death that was important to the suburban movement against the occult. Bothered Against Dungeons

& Dragons (BADD) was an organization committed to raising consciousness about the

50 Jaffe, 13. 190

dangers of D&D so that other parents could protect their children from such influences.51

In their introductory letter to the public, Pat Pulling and her husband wrote, ―We are concerned with violent forms of entertainment such as: violent-occult related rock music, role-playing games that utilize occult mythology and the worship of occult gods in role playing situations like Dungeons & Dragons, teen Satanism involving murder and suicide.‖52 They clearly located the danger to teens as the occult influence in popular music and games and saw their mission as being ―influential in the restoration of respect for human life,‖ as well as ―a referral system for people who need help regarding entertainment violence issues.‖53 Clearly modeled on established parent organization

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), BADD was more limited in its ambition.

Rather than a lobbying group, it was an information clearinghouse that offered various publications which highlighted the scourge of the occult, including booklets on witchcraft and Satanism, as well as an educational video on the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons.54

By focusing her organization in this way, Pulling and her husband exemplified a particularly suburban approach that would later be adopted by the PMRC in the movement against explicit music. BADD emphasized parental knowledge and involvement, hoping to restore traditional values in the home rather than promote broader efforts aimed at the culture industries themselves.

With the deaths of two teen suburbanites and the reactions to them, role-playing games and their supposed occult associations were thrust into the spotlight. In the

51 Pat Pulling with Kathy Cawton, The Devil‟s Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children for Satan? (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1989), 11-12. 52 Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD), ―Introductory Letter to Supporters,‖ 1984, http://www.holysmoke.org/wb/wb0017.htm (accessed August 20, 2007). 191

introduction to a 1985 60 Minutes piece on Dungeons & Dragons, Ed Bradley signaled its apparent danger by connecting the game to dangerous activities among its suburban audiences. ―D&D. It‘s popular with kids from grammar school on up. Not so with adults who think it‘s been connected to a number of suicides and murders.‖55 The scene cuts to teenagers hunched over a table in a basement as Bradley, in voice-over, suggests that the game is filled with goblins, thieves, and spirits. The implicit connection is made between the game, occult symbolism, and a vulnerable, suburban, teenaged audience. Given the opportunity to defend themselves, Gygax and TSR, Inc. head of public relations Dieter

Stern suggested that aberrant behavior could be caused by any number of factors.

However, the last word went to Pat Pulling, who recounted the suicide of her son and the ways in which the game endangers its players leaving the viewer with the sense that Satan and the occult were waiting in the basement to kill your children.

That same year, concerned parents formed the Parents Music Resource Center

(PMRC) that worked to empower parents to combat explicit and dangerous messages in popular music, focusing especially on those that promoted Satanic and occult worship.

“Nobody Likes a Censor, but Everybody Admires a Concerned Parent.”

—Nat Hentoff, Washington Post, August 23, 1985

Starting in 1984, both the National Parent Teacher Association and, one year later, the Parents Music Resource Council, sought to protect teenaged consumers from an increase in what these groups believed was explicit and dangerous content in popular

53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 192

music.56 They sought redress not through legal regulation of the music industry, but by prevailing upon record companies through public criticism and direct lobbying to provide more information to consumers. This way, parents, and ostensibly their children, could make informed decisions about their purchases. However, these efforts proved only mildly successful. Some members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) agreed to put stickers on albums they agreed had explicit content.57 The victory of branding albums with explicit content labels proved empty, as the industry was essentially regulating itself, leaving the definition of explicit loose and stickering of albums voluntary.

So, instead of continuing their lobbying efforts or prevailing upon state and federal government to regulate the culture industries, the PMRC and its allies emphasized the importance of disseminating information about popular culture to enable parents to make good decisions for their children, restore their autonomy in the home, and make the suburban home a venue for products with wholesome values. They were trying to be the defense Charles Krauthammer argued children needed in an 1985 Washington Post op-ed,

―And what they need protection from most is the culture, a culture so insistent, and harnessed to a technology so pervasive, that it insinuates itself into a child‘s world no matter how much the parent tries to intervene.‖58 According to these critics, dangerous

55 Ed Bradley, 60 Minutes, ―Dungeons & Dragons,‖ 1985, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbcWKWp2UE4 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lN0nrrynb8 (accessed 9-2-09). 56 This, of course, was not the first time parents, teachers, and experts identified popular music as the cause of suburban teens‘ misbehavior. For an exploration of the furor over fifties‘ rock and roll see Medevoi, Rebel: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity and Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). 57 Richard Harrington, ―Accord on Lyrics Labeling, Firms; Parents Agree to 2 Warning Options,‖ Washington Post, November 2, 1985. 58 Charles Krauthammer, ―X Ratings for Rock,‖ Washington Post, September 20, 1985. 193

content was coming directly into the home, endangering young consumers, and someone needed to do something about it.

The Parents Music Resource Center in 1985 was formed by friends and political acquaintances in Washington, DC, many of them wives of prominent politicians and citizens.59 As noted above, the group began by lobbying the record industry to regulate itself. However, after getting the record industry to voluntarily label explicit content, the

PMRC shifted gears to become an information clearinghouse. As a clearinghouse, the

PMRC identified dangerous products and warned parents about the hazards in everyday products. The group‘s main task was, in the words of its president Susan Baker, ―to educate and inform parents about this alarming trend as well as to ask the industry to exercise self-restraint.‖60 To raise consciousness about their cause and highlight the dangerous messages in popular music, the PMRC kicked off their media offensive with a news conference to release a list of the most offensive single songs available in 1985, the so-called ―Filthy Fifteen.‖61 Exemplifying the themes that they found most offensive, nine of these artists were heavy metal or hard rock groups that, according to the PMRC, promoted violence, substance abuse, and occult worship. Through these efforts, the PMRC assisted parents in re-asserting the borders of the home by helping them understand and control the products that came into it.62

59 The founding members of the PMRC were Tipper Gore, wife of then Senator Al Gore D-TN, Susan Baker, wife of then Treasury Secretary James Baker, Pam Howar, wife of Washington realtor Raymond Howar, and Sally Nevius, wife of Washington City Council Chairman John Nevius. 60 United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, ―First Session on Contents of Music and the Lyrics of Records September 19, 1985,‖ Washington, DC: U.S Government Printing Office, 1985, 11. S. Hrg. 99-529, 11. 61 Jon Pareles, ―Should Rock Lyrics Be Sanitized?‖ New York Times, October 13, 1985. 62 In 1984, the national Parent Teacher Association (PTA) had actually launched the first salvo against explicit content in popular music. The group sent a letter to record companies demanding something 194

In the fall of 1985, soon after the group‘s formation, the issue of explicit content in music was taken up by the Senate subcommittee on Commerce, Science, and

Transportation of which Tipper‘s husband, Senator Al Gore (D-TN), was a member. Rather than advocate for government censorship, the PMRC used the hearings to promote their cause and bolster their organization with the ultimate goal of employing less divisive grassroots tactics to empower parents.63 Despite their initial focus on lobbying the record industry and bringing the issue to Congress, the PMRC was vitally interested in finding non-governmental solutions to assist parents and restore their autonomy over the boundaries of their homes.64

At the hearings, parents, artists, record labels, and politicians competed to frame the debate, which led to numerous media appearances by the central figures of the PMRC, recording artists like Frank Zappa and Dee Snider, and Recording Industry Association of

America (RIAA) president Stanley Gortikov. The hearings became a grudge match, with artists and labels arguing that the PMRC was essentially advocating censorship of First

Amendment rights through government regulation, and the PMRC and the subcommittee arguing that children and families were in danger from explicit content that had to be

be done about explicit lyrical content so parents could properly judge the appropriateness of music for their children. Yet, not much came of the PTA‘s request. It was only under the auspices of the nationally prominent PMRC and allied local parent and consumer groups that the movement to raise the consciousness of parents and pressure record companies and artists to sanitize music emerged on the national scene. 63 Stephen Holden, ―Recordings Will Carry Advisory About Lyrics,‖ New York Times, August 9, 1985; and Richard Harrington, ―Discord on Record Warning,‖ Washington Post, August 29, 1985. The PMRC was fearful of advocating strict obscenity laws lest they be accused of censorship. 64 Tipper Gore, ―Not a Lobbying Group,‖ New York Times, Feb. 25, 1988. Tipper Gore claimed that the PMRC was legally a non-profit group in part because a lobbyist works to change federal legislation and the PMRC was not interested in federal legislation regulating the music industry. However, the group did have expansive proposals for the record to regulate itself including the rating of records based on their lyrical content, printing of lyric sheets either on record covers or made available at record stores and explicit covers be kept under the counter at stores. These proposals were aimed at empowering consumers and not necessarily at censoring popular music. 195

regulated somehow without government intervention.65 The subcommittee and the PMRC wanted to make the culture industries the root cause of the social and moral maladies they felt were plaguing the nation, rather than take into account the more complex causes that contributed to teen violence and suicide. In his opening statement, Senator Paul S. Trible

(R-VA) said of the danger of rock music, ―Rather, the emotional damage is more subtle.

The effect on a troubled child, however, can be disastrous, pushing that child over the emotional precipace [sic], and to the extent that individual attitudes are influenced, this becomes a very real social problem.‖66 Teen violence and suicide were real social problems, but concerned parents attempted to explain them away by blaming dangerous popular culture. PMRC President Susan Baker echoed this sentiment in her opening statement, ―Some say there is no cause for concern. We believe there is. Teen pregnancies and teenage suicide rates are at epidemic proportions today. . . . There certainly are many causes for these ills in our society, but it is our contention that the pervasive messages aimed at children which promote and glorify suicide, rape, sadomasochism, and so on, have to be numbered among the contributing factors.‖67

Appearing as a witness, Senator Paula Hawkins (R-FLA), showed numerous

(mostly heavy metal) album covers and music videos as evidence that popular culture, available twenty four hours a day on radio and television, was subverting parental control and dangerously impacting young consumers. She chose to show Twisted Sister‘s ―We‘re

65 Senate, 1. The Senators and the PMRC went to great lengths to emphasize that no one was interested in passing any laws abridging artistic freedom. In his opening statement, chairman of the committee John C. Danforth, R-IND, laid out the express purpose of the hearing, ―And so, the reason for this hearing is not to promote any legislation. Indeed, I do not know of any suggestion that any legislation be passed. But to simply provide a forum for airing the issue itself, for ventilating the issue, for bringing it out into the public domain.‖ 66 Senate. 3. 196

Not Going to Take It‖ video first, which she believed visually dramatized the assault on suburban America by heavy metal-inspired rebellion.68 According to Senator Hawkins, the videos demonstrated the scope and nature of the threat—that popular musicians were inspiring transgressive behavior amongst their teen audience. She said, ―Mr. Chairman, I think a picture is worth a thousand words. This issue is too hot not to cool down. Parents are asking for assistance, and I hope we always remember that no success in life would compensate for failure in the home.‖69 By showing this video as part of her testimony,

Senator Hawkins was locating the threat from heavy metal videos in the suburban home.

The video for ―We‘re Not Gonna Take It‖ is set in a typical one-family house on a quiet street. A family has just sat down to dinner. The father hears music coming from his son‘s bedroom and goes upstairs to investigate. When he barges in on his son playing air guitar to Twisted Sister‘s music, he launches into the most famous tirade in music video history:

Alright mister. What do you think you‘re doing. You call this a room? This a pig sty. I want you to straighten up this area now! You are a disgusting slob. Stand up straight. Tuck in that shirt. Adjust that belt buckle. Tie those shoes. Twisted Sister—What is that? Wipe that smile off your face. Do you understand? What is that? A Twisted Sister pin on your uniform? What kind of a man are you? You are worthless and weak. You are nothing. You do nothing. You sit in here all day and play that sick, repulsive electric twanger. I carried an M-16. And, you carry that, that, that…guitar. Who are you? Where do you come from? Are you listening to me? What do you want to do with your life?70

The son responds that he ―wants to rock.‖

67 Senate, 11. 68 Senate, 10. 69 Ibid. 70 Twisted Sister, ―We‘re Not Gonna Take It,‖ Stay Hungry, 1984. 197

The subsequent plot of the video reveals that the other sons in the family turn into the members of Twisted Sister. They humiliate and torture the father, upending the social order in the house. The video makes clear that the father is out of touch and, with his rigid rules, no longer presents a relevant role model for his sons. Further, the video dismisses conformity to typical masculine gestures and roles—the band members wear makeup, but they still rock. Indeed, in the world of the video, even parents themselves seem obsolete except insofar as they serve their children‘s interests. To critics, the video‘s simple narrative was evidence that the song and video were not just about some vague sense of rebellion, but about teens throwing off the yoke of parental rule in the suburban home. The video actually dramatized cultural critics‘ deepest fears of the effects popular music being beamed onto the family television. And Twisted Sister lead singer Dee Snider only confirmed those fears when he said of his band‘s videos, ―It‘s every parent‘s nightmare that their kids may grow up to look and act like Twisted Sister, and we play that up to the maximum. The stories for the videos are loosely based on my own childhood so I know what the kids out there are going through.‖71 Even though Snider argued that the videos were merely depicting typical teen rebellion, and maintained that the videos were intended to be more funny than dangerous, concerned parents, like those running the PMRC, saw the videos as symptomatic of a larger problem.72 They objected to the suggestion that rules and discipline were not necessary in suburban homes.

Following the testimony of the representatives of the PMRC and the statements by the mostly pro-PMRC senators, musician Frank Zappa attempted to represent the view of

71 Hit Parader, ―Twisted Sister,‖ January 1985, 65. 72 Ibid. 198

recording artists. He tried to refocus the debate on government interference in artistic expression and the logistical difficulties that prevented the easy application of classifications and ratings to music because of the huge amount of music released each year. Yet, he admitted that, as a parent, he was also disgusted by much of popular music, and that it was ultimately up to the individual parent—not to the government or the record industry under government pressure—to properly vet music. He said, ―The parent can ask or guide the child in another direction, away from Sheena Easton, Prince, or whoever else you have been complaining about. There is always that possibility.‖73 By the end of his testimony, Zappa had essentially agreed to the PMRC‘s proposal and the opinion of

Senator Gore that lyrics be made available to the consumer so they can make an informed choice.74 He agreed to the premise that popular culture was dangerous and supported the idea that helping the individual parent make an informed choice will hopefully revolutionize culture by changing consumer demand and creating a more wholesome family environment free from toxic popular culture products.75

By the end of the hearings, it was clear that the artists and labels had lost the argument about the supposed danger of some popular music. From the senators on the committee to PMRC critic Frank Zappa, there was agreement that popular music, particularly hard rock and heavy metal, posed a danger to young consumers. Eliding more complicated explanations for increases in teen social problems, suburban critics instead

73 Senate, 58. 74 Senate, 56. 75 Claude Chastanger, ―Parents Music Resource Center: From Information to Censorship,‖ Popular Music Volume 18/2 (May 1999): 179-192. Chastanger emphasizes that the PMRC‘s campaign was encouraging regulation of free speech while not calling for formal restrictions. Rather, he argues, the group triggered de facto censorship where albums labeled as explicit were not sold and record companies felt pressured to not produce explicit records thereby limiting free speech. 199

found fault with the culture industries and subsequently used that notion to increase their authority and regulatory power over the suburban home.

Suburbanites V. Heavy Metal

In the midst of the PMRC‘s campaigns and increasing visibility of heavy metal as a dangerous and possibly occult phenomenon, two new tragedies hit the news. On October

27, 1984, nineteen-year-old John McCollum shot himself in the head while allegedly listening to Ozzy Osbourne‘s album Blizzard of Oz.76 A little over a year later, on

December 23, 1985, James Vance, 20, and Raymond Belknap, 18, went to a church playground and shot themselves in the head with a shotgun, supposedly at the urging of their favorite band Judas Priest.77 Amid a climate of increasing suspicion of the explicit and latent content of heavy metal, the parents of McCollum, Vance, and Belknap filed wrongful death suits against these artists and their record labels. By holding the artists and their record companies legally culpable in the deaths of their sons, the boys‘ families were agreeing that heavy metal artists Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne helped and even encouraged their sons to shoot themselves. These lawsuits and their portrayal in the news media gave evidence to the widespread fears of popular occulture and cemented the sense of danger surrounding the music and its purported ability to unduly influence its largely suburban teen audience. Further, these cases helped demonstrate why groups like the

PMRC helped suburban parents turn inward for solutions to the scourge of heavy metal rather than seek redress through government or the courts.

76 Associated Press, ―Parents of Teen Who Killed Self Sue Singer Ozzy Osbourne.‖ 77 Roll, ―Whether Music Instigated Youth Suicide Pact Apparently Headed for Trial.‖ 200

Jack McCollum sued CBS Records and Ozzy Osbourne, alleging that his son‘s suicide was encouraged by Osbourne‘s song, ―Suicide Solution,‖ from his 1980 album

Blizzard of Oz.78 Osbourne claimed that the song was anti-suicide, as he had written it about the alcohol-related death of his friend, AC/DC singer Bon Scott. James McKenna, the lawyer retained by the parents of James Vance and Raymond Belknap to sue Judas

Priest, argued that, ―The suggestive lyrics combined with the continuous beat and rhythmic nonchanging [sic] intonation of the music combined to induce . . . the plaintiff into believing the answer to life was death.‖79 In both cases, the parents saw the music of heavy metal artists as Trojan horses, sneaking into their homes under the guise of innocent and legitimate entertainment but, instead, tricking their sons into killing themselves to fulfill the wishes of their favorite, demonically- inspired artists. In the Osbourne case, the plaintiffs alleged that masked lyrics on ―Suicide Solution‖ encouraged listener to get a gun and shoot themselves, while lawyers in the Judas Priest case claimed that the band attempted to control the minds of their audience through similarly hidden messages.80 In the ruling opinion of the Osbourne case, Judge H. Walter Croskey did not specifically address the masking issue but found that Osbourne‘s song did not contain the requisite ―call to action‖ to be held liable.81 However, Judge Croskey seemed to imply in his ruling what had been suggested about heavy metal by the PMRC and other critics: ―An alarming number of

78 Jack McCollum et al., Plaintiffs and Appellants v. CBS, Inc., et al., Court of Appeal of California, Second Appellate District, Division Three, No. B025565, July, 1988. The overview of the case read, ―Parents of a teenager that committed suicide sued the composer, performer, producer and distributor of the music for negligence, intentional tort, and encouraging suicide through their music in violation of California Penal Code 401.‖ 79 Roll, ―Whether Music Instigated.‖ 80 McCollum v. CBS, 8; and Sandra Chereb, ―Lawyer: Judas Priest Album Sent ‗Boys Over the Edge to Eternity,‘‖ Associated Press, July 16, 1990. 81 McCollum v. CBS, Croskey, note 22, 12. 201

(primarily) heavy metal and mainstream stars sing about suicide as one way to deal with problems; some almost seem to promote it.‖82

Ultimately, both cases were won by the bands.83 However, they signaled two important shifts in suburbanites‘ relationship to popular culture in the 1980s. News coverage and even Judge Croskey‘s opinion echoed and extended the discursive production of heavy metal as intimately linked to the promotion of suicide, especially through secret, possibly Satanic means. In each case, the artists were accused of hiding their true intent from parents and the larger public by allegedly putting coded messages into music that could only be decoded by true fans through multiple periods of close listening that would finally reveal masked words not included on the lyric sheet.84 As the case against Judas

Priest was being decided, numerous articles trumpeted the possible links between their music and secret messages to commit suicide.85 Hidden messages in the music were made

82 Gore, 104. 83 Sandra Chereb, ―British Rock Singer Expresses Relief, Concern Over Ruling,‖ Associated Press, August 24, 1990; and McCollum v. CBS, 2-6. The case was thrown out on first amendment grounds and was a direct rebuke to the accusations made about rock music and the power of popular culture. The court found that although they are limitations to freedom of speech under the First Amendment such as obscenity and libel/slander among others, artists‘ speech was protected. the court found with regard to negligence, ―Nor was a close connection shown between the teenager‘s death and the musician‘s composition, performance, production, and distribution years earlier; no moral blame attached to defendants, since the suicide was an irrational response to the music.‖ 84 Dionne Searcey, ―Behind the Music: Sleuths Seek Messages in Lyrical Backspin,‖ Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2006. A related technique, backward masking, was alleged to have been a way for artist to include subliminal messages on records which could be decoded only by playing the record backwards. While this technique was used, mostly in the era of the LP, there is no evidence of any messages urging the listener to commit a crime. Usually, the messages were intended to be funny or indecipherable. In fact, in 1984, ―Weird‖ Al Yankovic parodied the idea of secret Satanic messages on records by backwards masking the message, ―Satan eats Cheez Whiz‖ on the album In 3-D. 85 Associated Press, ―Man Who Sued Rock Group After Suicide Attempt Slips Into Coma,‖ November 27, 1988; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ―‗Heavy Metal‘ Suicide Pact Goes to Trial,‖ August 25, 1989; Sandra Chereb, ―Lawyer: Judas Priest Album Sent ‗Boys Over the Edge to Eternity,‘‖ Associated Press, July 16, 1990; Sandra Chereb,‖ Rock Band's Alleged 'Subliminal' Lyrics Questioned in Suicide Case,‖ Associated Press, July 16, 1990; Cy Ryan, ―Judas Priest band denies responsible for youths suicide,‖ United Press International, July 16, 1990; Judy Keen, ―Heavy Metal on Trial,‖ USA Today, July 16, 1990; Larry Rohter, ―2 Families Sue Heavy-Metal Band As Having Driven Sons to Suicide,‖ New York Times, July 17, 1990; St. Petersburg Times, ―Was Music to Blame in Suicide Pact?‖ July 18, 1990; Judy Keen, ―Band: No Subliminal 202

to seem a plausible method for artists to send hazardous messages to their audience, even if they were not legally liable for their impact. Rock critic Jon Pareles argued this was seen as dangerous because ―it reaches teen-agers [sic] and seems to exclude parents—it‘s a great noisy unknown.‖86 His argument spoke to parents‘ need for printed lyric sheets and legitimated their fear of dangerous coded messages entering the home without parents‘ knowledge. According to these parents, nothing less was at stake in stopping the influence of Satanic and occult artists than the lives of their suburban teenaged children.87

Moreover, these cases reinforced the futility of centralized solutions to the problems of heavy metal and occult. Had the victims‘ families won their lawsuits, perhaps the outcome would have led to more court cases or legislation as the primary way for parents to deal with dangerous pop music.88 Perhaps, record companies and artists would have felt compelled to censor themselves preemptively. However, along with the PMRC hearings, these cases demonstrated that the law was not a fruitful avenue for those concerned about popular culture content. Establishing durable links between ―dangerous‖ content and criminal behavior was difficult, if not impossible, leaving lyrics protected by the

Constitution. Rather, this failure to find heavy metal artists legally culpable for their fans‘ suicides left parents with no other recourse than to turn to their own private solution—

Messages in Songs,‖ USA Today, July 19, 1990; Cy Ryan, ―Expert: Subliminal Messages Cannot Prompt Suicide,‖ United Press International, July 23, 1990; Cy Ryan, ―Subliminal rock messages triggered suicides, expert says,‖ United Press International, July 25, 1990; Cy Ryan, ―Judas Priest Vocalist Denies Hidden Messages on Album Linked to Suicide,‖ United Press International, July 31, 1990; and Judy Keen, ―Last Word yet Unheard on Subliminal Messages,‖ USA Today, August 27, 1990. 86 Jon Pareles, ―Speed-Metal: Extreme, Yes; Evil, No,‖ New York Times, Sep. 25, 1988. 87 Richard Deatley, ―Heavy Metal Singer Denies His Song Caused Suicide,‖ Associated Press, January 21, 1986. According to Deatley, the parents ―did not state in the lawsuit how much money they wanted, saying their real goal was to attack music lyrics about sex, death, suicide and drugs.‖ 88 Deatley, ―Heavy Metal Singer.‖ Osbourne‘s attorney feared that successful prosecution of artists would lead to censorship and made that an explicit part of the defense of his client. ―The logical extension of 203

policing popular culture within the home. As Judge Croskey‘s opinion pointed out, though they may not be legally responsible, if it was even possible that heavy metal artists could be harming their audience, parents should rightfully cleanse their homes of it. Coded or not, culture critics argued that the messages in heavy metal music had to be monitored by suburban parents in the home if they were to be effectively monitored at all.

After its formation and initial protest of the music industry, the PMRC had highlighted the problems of some popular music, got some members of the RIAA to voluntarily agree to label music with supposedly explicit content, and put pressure on artists to tone down their music and imagery. 89 However, those were mild successes. The heavy metal genre continued to grow in popularity while the record industry‘s refusal to do more voluntarily robbed the group of much of its mission.90 So, the PMRC regrouped and changed their fundamental purpose. Members of the group continued appearing frequently in the news media on programs such as 20/20, 60 Minutes, and Nightmatch with Charlie

Rose as well as in print news articles.91 However, this media strategy was not at the core of their strategy moving forward. The group focused on being a clearinghouse dedicated to

this suit is censorship, of a type which is strictly prohibited by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.‖ 89 Gore, Raising PG Kids, 32-33. Gore claims that, ―the September 19 hearing certainly brought the issue out for public debate. It turned out to be the most widely publicized media event in congressional history. A seat in the hearing room was the hottest ticket in town all year.‖ 90 According to most observers, the RIAA was unlikely to do any more regulating of their business voluntarily and the PMRC was unlikely to call for federal censorship. This left the PMRC with little choice but to focus on parents and the suburban home. 91 Nightmatch with Charlie Rose, ―Frank Zappa vs. Candy Stroud,‖ August 25, 1985, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTdTvK_d9lQ (accessed November 9, 2009); George Varga, ―Blackie of the W.A.S.P. Is a Bit Stung by All the Band's Critics,‖ San Diego Union-Tribune, February 10, 1986; Lisa Leavitt Ryckman, ―Violent Teens Often Obsessed With Heavy Metal Rock,‖ Associated Press, February 13, 1988; Brian G. Bourke, ―Anti-Rock Beat Goes on for Campaigning Tipper,‖ Post-Standard, April 8, 1988; Roxie Smith, ―Group Helps Parents and Children Decide Value of Music,‖ St. Petersburg Times, February 17, 1990; and Karen Haywood, ―Parents Group in Middle of Debate Over Warning Labels,‖ Associated Press, July 10, 1990. 204

empowering parents to protect their children and the sanctity of their homes. To do that, the PMRC attempted to spread its message without a filter. Without the limits of an interview or segment on a television show, PMRC representatives could explore multiple facets of the problem and what parents could, perhaps even needed, to do about the dangers of popular culture products coming right into their homes. Almost all of the output of the

PMRC was aimed at individual parents rather than a more generalized consumer audience or even young consumers themselves. In this way, the group continued to advance the narrative of the suburban home under attack and endorsed traditional family structures and the authority of parents to protect it.

These women also prescribed solutions that relied on nostalgic notions of the suburban household as headed by stable, two-parent families. Their solutions assumed an intact family unit where parents, especially mothers, had time to intervene in their offspring‘s popular culture choices. Further, the PMRC always asked parents to be more involved, to be gatekeepers, lest their child be swayed by the lascivious and violent messages of popular music. The critique of these images and the proposed ways to defend suburban children against them harked back to earlier visions of suburban life from postwar sitcoms and magazines that featured nuclear families with distinct gender roles and reverence for the authority of parents.92 So, even though many non-suburban families had traditional two-parent homes or family dinners and many suburban families had single parents, the reliance on a nearly unstated domestic ideal, as it was thought to have existed,

92 Spigel, 178-180. Spigel argues that, by the late 1950s, sitcoms ―worked to ‗naturalize‘ family life, to make it appear as if this living arrangement were in fact the only one possible.‖ These shows, according to Spigel, de-emphasized domestic gender conflicts instead featuring narratives of generational conflict where youth culture was made safe inside the walls of the home. 205

was a specifically suburban reference in the postwar world. The women who headed the

PMRC managed to critique popular culture from a feminist perspective while advocating solutions that resonated with conservative social views and attempted to re-instantiate suburban values they believed existed in a bygone era.93

Suburbia’s Dead End Kids

More spotlight on the supposedly dangerous influence of heavy metal came when on March 11th, 1987, four Bergenfield teenagers committed suicide by locking themselves in a closed garage with the car‘s engine running. The suicide pact was consummated by

New Jersey teen metalheads, ―suburbia‘s dead end kids,‖ according to sociologist Donna

Gaines. In her book length study, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia‟s Dead End Kids, released in 1991, she described the Bergenfield teens as ―suburban rockers whose lives revolved around their favorite bands and their friends. Youths who barely got by in school and at home and who did not impress authority figures in any remarkable way. Except as fuck-ups.‖94 As a participant-observer, Gaines tried to find out why Bergenfield‘s burnouts stayed around town to hang out in the 7-11 parking lot and why some of their friends turned to suicide. She found no causal link between suicide and the music. But her nuanced and empathetic portrayal placed suburbia‘s ―dead-end kids‖ in their social and cultural milieu, tracing their failures and alienation to a lack of career and educational opportunities, as well as to a crumbling family and school support system.95 However, the news media represented the Bergenfield suicides and suburban metalheads as dangerously

93 At the same moment, feminists and social conservatives were working together to oppose pornography though their agendas on other issues diverged. 94 Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia‟s Dead End Kids (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3. 206

inspired by the dark messages in heavy metal, and the Bergenfield suicide pact as the inspiration for subsequent copycat pacts across the country.96 These narratives further heightened the sense of danger from the music, located the threat in the suburbs, raised the stakes for suburban parents to police their children‘s popular culture choices, and helped justify new regimes of discipline in the home.

The news media narratives claimed that the four dead teens self-identified as

―burnouts‖ or, more generally, teens with little ambition, drawn together by their hopelessness and love of heavy metal music.97 Then, that love of metal lead them to embrace their hopelessness and commit suicide. Newsweek framed their story of ―deeply troubled young people‖ and their many problems through their love of heavy metal.98 The

New York Times contrasted a ―a quiet town, boring even,‖ with teens who embraced the sentiment of an AC/DC live album found at the scene of the suicides—If You Want Blood,

You‟ve Got It.99 Though the news media showed them to be troubled, the Bergenfield teens‘ love of heavy metal and their burnout lifestyle set them apart, presumably leading to their suicides.

In turn, news media narratives suggested that suicides committed by heavy metal fans inspired others, even those who were not fans, to kill themselves. Within a week of

95 Gaines, 237-261. 96 Gordon Witkin, ―Groping to Cope with Teen Suicide,‖ U.S. News & World Report, March 30, 1987. Witkin reported that nearly a dozen copycats were inspired by the Bergenfield pact. 97 James S. Newton, ―Suicides Put ‗Burnouts‘ in Spotlight,‖ New York Times, March 13, 1987; Jane Gross, ―Bergenfield Adults View Youths Who Lack Hope,‖ New York Times, March 18, 1987; and Larry Martz with Peter McKillop, Andy Murr, and Ray Anello, ―The Copycat Suicides,‖ Newsweek, March 23, 1987, 28. 98 Martz, ―The Copycat Suicides‖; AC/DC was promoted in the press as Satanic because of their song titles such as ―Highway to Hell‖ and ―Night Prowler‖ supposedly about the serial killer, Richard Ramirez, the ―night stalker.‖ Further, rumors persisted that the band‘s name was some sort of abbreviation or satanic code such as ―antichrist devil‘s crusade.‖ Richard Harrington, ―Bedeviling Rumors,‖ Washington Post, November 20, 1985. 207

the Bergenfield suicides, two young women in Alsip, Illinois, both fans of Metallica, killed themselves by inhaling carbon monoxide fumes in a closed garage. The Associated Press contended that the Alsip suicides were not coincidental. The girls had been thinking about killing themselves for some time but decided to do it when they heard about the

Bergenfield teens.100 Newsweek argued, ―Worse, it [the Bergenfield suicide pact] triggered fears of a new and virulent form of the clusters of copycat teenage suicides that have plagued communities from Putnam County, N.Y., to Plano, Texas, in recent years.‖101

Other presumed copycats included a fourteen-year-old boy who posted news clippings about the six other suicides on his bedroom wall, a teen couple in Bergenfield who attempted to use the same garage as the others had a week earlier, and an Illinois girl found dead in her car.102 With so many incidents occurring, news organizations sought to explain the complex causes of teen suicides suggesting lack of family and school support, and drug and alcohol abuse, among other causes.103 Yet, at its root, the suburban suicide ―epidemic‖ of the late eighties was represented as inspired by the deaths of suburban New Jersey metalheads whose alienation and depression were exacerbated by the occult influences music of heavy metal.

99 Gross, ―Bergenfield Adults View Youths Who Lack Hope.‖ 100 Lindsay Tanner, ―Police Link Two Young Suicides with New Jersey Deaths,‖ Associated Press, March 13, 1987. 101 Martz, ―The Copycat Suicides.‖ 102 Associated Press, ―Teen's Suicide Linked To Six Others, Police Say,‖ March 16, 1987; and Michael Fleeman, ―Young Couple Attempts Suicide In Same Garage Four Teen-Agers Used,‖ Associated Press, March 17, 1987. 103 Julia Dolan, ―Community Tries To Understand Teen-Agers' Suicides,‖ Associated Press, March 12, 1987; Jane Gross, ―Amid Grief, Classmates Fault Earlier Response,‖ New York Times, March 12, 1987; Jane E. Brody, ―Youth Suicide: A Common Pattern,‖ New York Times, March 12, 1987; Malcolm Ritter, ―Studies Suggest Suicide News Can Trigger More Elsewhere, But Questions Remain,‖ Associated Press, March 13, 1987; Michael Dobbs, ―After Suicides, Town Ponders How It Failed 4 Teen-Agers,‖ Washington Post, March 13, 1987; Martz, ―The Copycat Suicides‖; Charles S. Taylor, ―CDC Says Youth Suicides Still 208

ABC‘s newsmagazine 20/20 fueled the controversy over heavy metal and the occult by also suggesting causal links between suicide and metal fandom. Following the 1987 rash of teen suicides—some of them heavy metal fans—20/20 ran a special edition of the show on the growing popularity of heavy metal among suburban high school kids.104 The show consisted of multiple segments that tried to cover the perspectives of fans, heavy metal artists, and critics. Despite the attempt at balance, the episode traded in hyperbolic, provocative language and imagery that further underscored the dire threats from heavy metal and the occult as promoted by the PMRC, ―experts,‖ and other news outlets. In her introduction to the show, host Barbara Walters claimed heavy metal was a form of music associated with ―ghoulish images, violent theatrics, and even suicide‖ that deserved attention. She asked, ―Is there a message that may be too loud for us to hear?‖ suggesting that part of the danger of heavy metal was its inaccessibility for parents to hear dangerous decoded messages intended for true fans. Correspondent Stone Phillips‘ voice-over suggested what teens were really hearing were ―Lyrics obsessed with sex, Satanism, and even suicide. This is not mainstream rock and roll.‖ As he spoke, images of explicit heavy metal album covers and performances were shown, and Philips wondered if this music

―may even be killing its audience.‖ By juxtaposing musings about heavy metal lyrics with seemingly offensive visual content and by citing an apparent connection between heavy metal fandom and the suicide pacts of the Bergenfield teens, avid listeners of AC/DC, and

Alsip, Illinois teens, fans of Metallica, Walters and Phillips strongly implied there were

Increasing,‖ United Press International, March 10, 1988; and Robert Byrd, ―CDC Recommends 10 Steps for Handling 'Cluster' Suicides,‖ Associated Press, August 25, 1988. 104 20/20, ―Heavy Metal,‖ ABC News, 1987, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orrgV_piHPA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ4PTiL1RDs (accessed 10-1-09). 209

messages embedded in the music—intended only for the hard core teenage audience—that were mortally dangerous to them.

In spreading the word about the dangers of heavy metal, 20/20 rooted the threat from heavy metal in the suburban community by specifically naming the Bergenfield suicides and visiting other suburban New Jersey teens to attempt to capture what heavy metal meant to this particular audience and the hazards it posed to them. In a set of interviews with self-proclaimed metalheads, students at Teaneck High School in Teaneck,

New Jersey, most of them showed modest ambition and expressed little care about anything other than their favorite music.105 In their interviews, the students voiced a love of the music which provided for some needs such as companionship and community.

Music journalist Charles Young seconded this idea by arguing heavy metal gave its audience a healthy outlet for despair. Yet, Stone Phillips appeared skeptical of the music and its culture. In the next segment, despite some of the hopeful sentiments about heavy metal, it provided a step-by-step instruction on how to ―de-metal‖ kids to protect them from its dangerous messages.106 This was a poignant moment as seemingly normal, if sullen, teens were shown to need a program of de-metalfication without which there would be dire consequences. The show ended with the countervailing but moderate views of Tipper Gore and Iron Maiden lead singer Bruce Dickinson. Gore advocated for a system where everyone can make their own assessment while Dickinson suggests that metal may not be the worst or even most prominent influence in teen lives.

105 Phillips said that Teaneck High School was known for excellence but, like most high schools across America, it also had a group of metalheads. The implication was that Teaneck High was the average suburban high school with its requisite metalhead population. One of the kids says ―not everyone has to go to college—I think I‘ve had enough years of school.‖ 210

The ending exemplified the process of creating and dealing with the problem of heavy metal and the occult. The show went to great lengths to explain and promote the many perils to young consumers, but, ultimately, recommended what Tipper Gore, the

PMRC, and other experts had been advocating all along; it was up to parents to be more informed and more in control. The show promoted the danger of heavy metal and advocated parental involvement to protect suburban teens like those in Bergenfield and

Teaneck. It is not difficult to imagine suburban parents, after watching the show, feeling empowered to police their children‘s popular culture choices even de-metaling of their child‘s music collection and wardrobe fearing they may kill themselves or join a cult.

“Parents, Take Note”

—Tipper Gore, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, 124

One of the experts helping parents de-metal their kids‘ lives on 20/20 was Darlyne

Pettinicchio. With her partner Gregory Bodenhamer, Pettinicchio founded the Back in

Control Training Center in Orange County California in the 1976. They worked with kids on probation and those addicted to drugs and alcohol.107 In the mid-eighties, parents brought punk and heavy metal to their attention. By 1985, United Press International claimed that ―for center directors Greg Bodenhamer and Darlyne Pettinicchio, punk and heavy metal—particularly metal—are public enemy No. 1.‖108 To deal with public enemy number one, they developed their demetaling system. They found that recommending parents deprive their children of those genres as well as the accompanying clothing styles

106 On the show, de-metalification consisted mostly of tearing down posters, cleansing music collections, and changing teenagers‘ wardrobes. 107 Pat H. Broeske, ―Deprivation and the Power of Punk,‖ Washington Post, November 29, 1985. 211

and social groups was the most effective way of defeating the perilous messages of punk and eventually heavy metal. Bodenhamer said, ―What we do is train the parents to train the kids to obey the parents.‖109 If parents don‘t take action, Bodenhamer warned, their children may become violent and even dabble in Satanism. Bodenhamer published his parenting prescriptions at the height of the hysteria over the influence of heavy metal. Back in Control: How to Get Your Children to Behave asserted that the exercise of parental power was the only thing stopping children from misbehaving and protecting them from dangerous influences that filled the void of parental authority.110 The Back in Control system signaled the direction of suburban parenting in the eighties. Recognizing and further producing the threats from popular culture, particularly heavy metal and Dungeons

& Dragons which supposedly promoted occult beliefs and violent behavior, Bodenhamer and Pettinicchio focused on empowering individual parents to eliminate undue influence from popular culture products.

To help suburban parents, the PMRC also offered ways to empower those who felt victimized by popular culture. They created a hotline for parents to receive information about what products were dangerous to children and produced a home video, Rising to the

Challenge, to explain the threats from popular culture and how to combat them.111 Group members also began publishing their own parenting guides including most-prominently,

Tipper Gore‘s Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. In all of their efforts, they stressed the immediate threats of popular culture and the importance of parents defending their

108 Ellis E. Conklin, ―Punk and Heavy Metal: Teen Rebellion or Something Darker?‖ United Press International, May 25, 1985. 109 Ibid. 212

homes because, as Tipper Gore argued, ―In the hands of a few warped artists, their brand of rock music has become a Trojan horse, rolling explicit sex and violence into our homes.‖112

The Trojan horse metaphor was key to understanding concerned parents‘ perspectives on popular culture and their reactions to it. The remedy, promoted by experts like

Bodenhamer, the PMRC, and Tipper Gore, focused on individual, local action with parents actively vetting the popular culture choices their children made. By eschewing legislative strategies, concerned parents were able to highlight a suburban problem—pop culture products endangering the moral life of the home and the security of its borders—and suggest a suburban solution—local, private action that empowered parents in the home.113

Published in 1987, Tipper Gore‘s Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society was the culmination of the PMRC movement as it outlined not only the problems in American culture but strategies for parents in dealing with a growing epidemic of explicit words and images. As a missive from the PMRC campaign and as part of the larger discursive production of the suburb under siege, the book did four key things. First, Gore continued to emphasize the urgency of the problem and its epidemic proportion—―Children are now bombarded with explicit messages on a scale unlike anything our culture has ever seen.‖— suggesting the need for immediate action.114 She attempted to make the cultural conditions

110 Gregory Bodenhamer, Back in Control: How to Get Your Children to Behave (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1988), xii. 111 Rising to the Challenge, Parents Music Resource Council, Video Visions, 1988, 2nd edition. 112 Gore, 28. 113 Some legislative initiatives were considered that would have regulated who could buy records or go to concerts. The two best examples were in the Maryland House of Representatives and the San Antonio City Council. Maryland Delegate Pauline Toth lost a vote to have her bill made into law while the ordinance in San Antonio to restrict underage concert goers was passed, but proved largely irrelevant at curbing heavy metal concerts in the city. Richard Harrington, ―X-Rated Lyrics Bill on Maryland Slate,‖ Washington Post, February 8, 1986; Richard Harrington, ―Porno Wars, Part XXX,‖ Washington Post, February 12, 1986; and Jon Pareles, ―A Case Against Censoring Rock Lyrics,‖ New York Times, May 3, 1987. 114 Gore, 43. 213

of the 1980s seem unprecedented and, in doing so, compel her readers to act. Second, there was a focus on localism indicating that the most important, effective actions were those by parents in the home and local consumer actions to safeguard it. Each chapter addressed one problem and ended with a prescription for parents to deal with that problem through solutions Gore called ―practical means for restoring individual choice and control.‖115

Third, the book was aimed at parents to the exclusion of other audiences, including artists and corporations, suggesting they were the only ones who could do anything about the undue influence of explicit popular culture. She said, ―More than anything else, I want this book to be a call to arms for American parents. I want to offer them the very real hope that we can reassert some control over the cultural environment in which our children are raised.‖116 Last, Gore highlighted not only the violent and sexual imagery in popular music, but specifically pointed out threats, such as suicide and murder, from heavy metal

Satanism, ―the cult of the eighties.‖117

Gore did not blame the culture industries entirely for what had befallen middle class, suburban children like hers. Finding a middle road, Gore chided both the culture industries and parents while emphasizing the primacy of parental action to protect children.

Gore confessed, ―From The Exorcist to the Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy role-playing game, Americans chased one occult fad after another,‖ but stressed that parents needed to guide children‘s choices because, ―not everyone can see through the show-biz Satanism

115 Gore, 12. 116 Gore, 13. 117 Gore, 117, 118. The focus on heavy metal and Satanism spun off a group of ―experts‖ who went into great detail about Satanic cult activities. To a large degree, they impart similar advice as the PMRC although theirs‘ is from an overtly Christian perspective. Two examples of this genre emerging in the late 80s were Thomas W. Wedge with Robert L. Powers, The Satan Hunter (Canton, OH: Daring Books, 1988) and Bob Larson, Satanism: The Seduction of America‟s Youth (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989). 214

purveyed by more and more bands.‖118 According to her and the PMRC, only so much help can be provided from those outside the suburban home. Though dangerous products existed, they need not be brought into the home, Gore explained in a section titled,

―Prevention Begins at Home.‖ ―Parents, churches, synagogues, and schools can start by pointing out the dangers of negative media messages and by encouraging young people to adopt discriminating listening and viewing habits. Most important, parents should spend time with their children.‖119 Her assessments of the hazards to children and the prescriptions for action all revolved around monitoring and safeguarding the home suggesting the suburban house was in danger from a constant stream of threats and should be restored to a zone of safety, purity, and parental autonomy.120 And to do so, vigilance was required, ―because parenting involves the home, children, and twenty-four-hour relationships.‖121

In 1987, on the heels of Gore‘s book and in the midst of two court cases accusing heavy metal bands of causing fans to kill themselves, the PMRC released a 31 minute educational video for parents, Rising to the Challenge. The challenge, according to the video, was protecting children from dangerous messages in rock n‘ roll. The video detailed the different threats to children—drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, graphic violence, fascination with the occult, and graphic and explicit sexuality—and, much like Raising PG

Kids in an X-Rated Society, prioritized suicide and the occult over the hazards from

118 Gore, 119. 119 Gore, 114. 120 Gore, 160-64. She provided 12 actions for parents in the community—most of which follow the program of the PMRC. These approaches valorized the home, local action, individual freedom and responsibility, as well as the exercise of consumer rights including local boycotts letter writing, sharing concerns with fellow parents, organizing community groups, and monitoring radio, television, movie theaters and video rental stores. 215

violence and sex. Ironically, to educate parents, the PMRC was actually sending explicit material into homes where it could possibly be viewed by children. In fact, the video was more thorough in detailing the threats from popular music than anything else the PMRC ever produced. It was not only more visceral in depicting the things the PMRC deplored, but it spent much more time presenting scientific data and evidence from experts to create apparent links between the seemingly vulgar products of the culture industry and teen violence, sadomasochistic sex, suicide, and Satan worship.

The video was rife with explicit imagery like album covers, photos from concerts, and various promotional materials and graphic song lyrics mostly from heavy metal bands like W.A.S.P. For example, the video quotes lyrics from W.A.S.P.‘s ―Animal (Fuck Like a

Beast)‖ to demonstrate not only the inappropriateness of the lyrics for children but to embarrass parents with the song‘s graphic descriptions of sado-masochistic sex that their children would presumably be listening to and that they certainly did not do at home. The lyrics, spoken in a voice-over, accompanied various images from the band‘s videos, in which they simulated placing a woman in a meat grinder and the lead singer strutted around wearing a codpiece with a saw blade in it. These images were not merely intended to make the case for album stickering, but to make clear the threat posed by popular music, specifically heavy metal, to the moral environment of the home. Images and lyrics that were seemingly so perverse required not just passive participation of parents in supporting

PMRC initiatives like stickering, but active interest in their children‘s lives, and the knowledge about popular culture coming into their homes giving them moral authority to act.

121 Gore, 157. 216

To further instill fear, the video detailed how the rise in popularity of explicit music was concomitant with rises in social ills like teen suicide and pregnancy. No actual scientific evidence explained a clear causal relationship, but the narrators of the video proposed that there almost had to be a relationship between the rise in teen suicide and the popularity of metal because heavy metal bands sang about dark themes at the same time more teens were killing themselves. Experts bolstered the PMRC‘s case by citing statistics about the number of hours spent listening to music and watching MTV suggested the prominence of popular culture in kids‘ lives. Each section included expert testimony on the topic under review as well as more germane ―facts.‖ For example, during the segment on alcohol and drug abuse, the narrators say that the Beastie Boys‘ album License to Ill contains 95 references to drugs and alcohol that went unnoticed without a printed lyric sheet.122 Indeed, this near-fetishization of numbers and statistics helped evade proving actual causation. This technique of suggesting causal links promoted a more surreal and dangerous aura around popular music in the home and suggested the limitless ability of albums to do harm. To combat these threats, the video called for vigilance on all fronts. In the final segment, parents were given recommendations for countering ―good‖ actions by replacing ―bad‖ ones—such as writing to the FCC or, more generally, teaching children to think critically about the products they consumed.

Pat Pulling, who believed her son committed suicide at the behest of his dungeonmaster while playing Dungeons & Dragons, reemerged in 1989. Her book, The

Devil‟s Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children for Satan? was another parenting manual that

122 They also noted that a hydraulic penis, reported to be 20 feet in length, was seen at their concerts. This fact is recited in such a way that it seems a ten or fifteen foot hydraulic penis would have been more 217

sought to bring to light not just the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons but the larger menace of Satanism and Occultism of which she argued role-playing games were a significant part.123 Pulling echoed the PMRC‘s fears. She claimed that, ―Young people, still struggling through their formative years, are prime targets of sophisticated cult recruiters and are also vulnerable to the superficial lures of Satanism.‖124 It was not necessarily heavy metal concerts or the games directly doing harm, but rather they warmed teens to ideas about the occult as well as drug and alcohol abuse which would then lead to an actual initiation and violent acts. ―The games themselves did not cause the molestation, but they were the vehicle by which the molestation was carried out.‖125 Adding to a growing chorus, Pulling was warning parents that popular culture products in the home like heavy metal or role-playing games could lure innocent kids out of the home into cults obsessed with violence, sex, and anarchy. Her organization and her book helped maintain the visibility of the dangers from popular occulture through the end of the eighties helping to establish a rationale for parents to be more active in defending their homes and children from ―the ever-growing web of occultism that threatens to entrap America‘s children.‖126

Conclusion

To some degree, the recommendations from parenting experts and the PMRC did not seem appropriate to the job of combating something the group has promoted as ruining lives and destroying families. A nationwide scourge was supposedly endangering young consumers and experts were recommending individual action by parents, an essentially

appropriate. 123 Pat Pulling with Kathy Cawthon, The Devil‟s Web: Who is Stalking Your Children for Satan? (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1989). 124 Pulling, X. 218

piecemeal solution. This limited, family- and community-centered approach reflected a particularly suburban perspective. Threats from popular culture were constant and nearly invisible until they presumably caused violent behavior. And when they did occur, the incidents took place predominantly in middle class, suburban places. The most effective and least politically polarizing action was private discipline made possible by publicizing the occult and Satanic threats in heavy metal and role-playing games. However, given the failures and political pitfalls of record industry self-regulation, government intervention, and remediation through the courts, suburbanites recognized limited, local action was the only way to combat the threats from popular culture effectively. This approach had an ancillary benefit to concerned parents. It helped suburban parents re-assert authority over their homes and restore a sense of sanctity in the home that would not have been possible without their families‘ alleged victimization by hazardous popular culture products coming right in the front door. With nothing less than their children‘s lives at stake, suburban parents were empowered to re-order the home according to their own prerogatives; a stance with regard to the broader culture and a pattern of behavior that was part and parcel of being suburban in the 1980s

125 Pulling, 27. 126 Pulling, 12. 219

Conclusion

By the early 1990s, the shifting discourses producing American suburbs had changed the tenor of suburban life. News media, popular culture representations, and lived experiences moved from producing a postwar land of family-friendly utopian promise to a fraught, contested landscape rife with moral and physical hazards—hazards that were part of everyday suburban life. Their emergence and reproduction, however, did not simply endanger or provide a sense of hazard. Through productive victimization, they actually worked to empower individual suburbanites and facilitate the consolidation of their authority over their families, homes, and neighborhoods. In each instance, the realistic endangerment of home and family produced by actual incidents of moral and physical hazard and news media narratives and popular culture representations, gave suburbanites a reasonable justification for defending their homes and expanding their local regulatory power.

However, these were not isolated hazards. They not only emerged contemporaneously, but suburbanites‘ reactions to them formed a suburban outlook, a way of life marked by victimization, threat, and empowerment. Still, by the mid-nineties, the environmental, moral, and physical threats to suburban life were successfully eliminated, defused, and marginalized. Suburbanites still enjoyed much of the increased power and privilege gained through their productive victimization in the 1980s. Yet, parochial influence became harder to exercise and harder to expand as some of the old threats

220

receded while suburbanites were continually drawn into civic and cultural engagement as legitimate stakeholders subject to compromise and limitations on their power.

Nimbyism, though successful through the end of the eighties did not survive the nineties as a particularly forceful or legitimate political stance. Nimby became an epithet branding suburbanites not as justified home defenders but as privileged localists uninterested in the public good. Nimbyism was forcefully opposed by opponents on both ends of the political spectrum. Branded as anti-growth by pro-business conservatives and exclusionary and elitist by environmental justice groups of the left, Nimby protection of middle class suburban neighborhoods to the detriment of other parties carried little cultural heft.1 Moreover, Nimbys had succeeded at slowing, stopping, and moving projects from suburban towns suggesting to government and industry that suburban opposition was not worth the risk. They only engaged these communities when it was absolutely necessary often engaging them as legitimate stakeholders and bringing them into the process rather than leaving suburbanites to be staunch obstructionists.2 Nimbys, then were victims of their success as more communities mobilized Nimby protests they brought greater scrutiny on their practices and the premises underlying them. With this greater scrutiny and

1 Rae Tyson, ―USA‘s Backyard Backlash: Communities Want Projects Put Elsewhere,‖ USA Today, July 19, 1990; and The environmental justice movement emerged as a potent force within the environmental movement. By adopting the language and tactics of civil rights organizations, they battled the privatism of Nimby on the grounds of equal exposure to public projects. They did so through the establishment of organizations such as The Center for Health, Environment, and Justice and their journal Everybody‘s Backyard to specifically oppose the Nimby ethic which pushed projects into communities with less political power to stop them. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 3. 2 Angela Logomasini, ―Trashing the NIMBY Syndrome,‖ Journal of Commerce, July 6, 1992. 221

subsequent political opposition, Nimbys were associated with a privatism and localism that was increasingly framed as detrimental to society at large.3

The carceral suburb evolved through the 1990s as well. Though the threats from kidnapping and home invasion, the epidemics of the 1980s, receded from view, the suburban security ethic strengthened as evidenced by the growth of gated communities and high tech security systems. Gated communities were typically made up of people who, as

Time magazine reported, ―have taken refuge from crime inside enclaves that, live medieval towns, are surrounded by walls . . . generally protected by alarms as well.‖4 These communities commonly had their own security force to supplement seemingly incompetent municipal police which was usually linked to individual home security systems and monitored gates at each entry point to the community. The use of new surveillance technology and paid police forces mirrored the innovations of mall owners to better regulate commercial space in the 1980s.5 In some ways, the gated community was a search for a way to make the carceral suburb livable and more community-oriented.6 They were the embodiment of a new vision of upper-class suburban life with private amenities from pools to tennis courts that sought to prevent even the most minimal of threats while

3 Post Standard, editorial, ―NIMBY? Trash Woes Are Ours to Cure,‖ February 21, 1989; Robert A. Hamilton, ―The View From Preston: The Town that Won‘t Give Up Its Fight Against an Incinerator,‖ New York Times, April 16, 1989; Donna Schaper, ―Yes in My Back Yard,‖ New York Times, June 18, 1989; Seattle Times, editorial, ―Beating Back Nimby – Creativity Important in Siting Interim Jail,‖ March 11, 1990; James Fink, ―Nimbys Seen as Amherst‘s Grinch,‖ Business First-Buffalo, March 25, 1991; Steven A. Holmes, ―When Grass Looks Greener on Our Side of the Fence,‖ New York Times, April 21, 1991; Kathryn Balint, ―Nuclear Waste Piles Up while Dump Debated,‖ San Diego Union-Tribune, July 26, 1991; Angela Logamasini, ―Trashing the Nimby Syndrome,‖ Journal of Commerce, July 6, 1992; Andrew L. Yarrow, ―‗Not in My Back Yard‘ and Repercussions,‖ New York Times, October 4, 1992; Jeff Webb, ―NIMBYs Will Pressure New Commissioners,‖ St. Petersburg Times, November 22, 1992. 4 John Greenwald, ―The New Fortress America.‖ Time, September 12, 1983. 5 Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 2. 222

providing free movement to those fortunate enough to live inside community walls.7 Still, the presence of walls, gates, and private police conjured the vision of the more circumscribed carceral suburb of the 1980s exaggerating the security threat to justify the protective measures and luxuries of gated communities.

The suburban security ethic facilitated a political culture where it was essential for politicians to ―get tough on crime‖ to be successful. While urban crises of the 1960s were likely at the root of political and rhetorical impulses to appear tough on crime, beginning nationally with the Nixon/Agnew 1968 presidential campaign, the continuous reproduction of criminal threats to the key voting bloc of suburbanites in the 1980s was crucial to making a ―tough on crime‖ stance a prerequisite for political success. This was no more evident than in the failed 1988 presidential campaign by Michael Dukakis. During the campaign, then Vice-President Bush in his public remarks and advertising continually repeated that Governor Dukakis favored the rights of criminals over victims which turned out to be an effective critique in vote-rich suburban areas.8 With suburbanites ever more concerned about crime, these soft-on-crime attacks resonated strongly. Particularly, the

Willie Horton furlough attack ads—which showed a prison‘s revolving door letting violent criminals go free for the weekend—argued with spartan imagery and strong language that a

Dukakis presidency would fulfill their fears of a landscape filled with rapists and murderers. W. John Moore, writing in the National Journal in 1991, highlighted the crime

6 Setha Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 10. 7 Laura Myers, ―Million-Dollar Babies: A Neighborhood-by-Neighborhood Open House of What a Million Bucks Will Buy You -- '90s Style,‖ Los Angeles Magazine, April 1990, 132-138. 8 William Schneider, ―The Suburban Century Begins,‖ The Atlantic, July 1992, 33-44. George Bush won by a wide margin in the popular and electoral votes due in no small part to his strong performance in suburban areas including wins in six states with majority suburban populations. 223

issue as key to Dukakis‘s loss: ―The party that was mugged by Republican campaign spots three years ago is still viewed by many as soft on crime: opposed to the death penalty, defending criminal rights and too focused on such root causes of crime as poverty and unemployment.‖9 The discursive conditions that made being tough on crime not only legitimate but integral to political life through the 1980s were founded in the interplay of cultural texts, real events and everyday practices that strongly suggested a failed criminal justice system and a newly hazardous suburban landscape in need of policing.

As broad criminal threats from kidnappers and burglars receded, new, more insidious threats emerged to undermine suburban security measures. The domestic dramas, especially of women and families in crisis epitomized by the original productions of

Lifetime, the network for women, suggested threats from within a close network of family and friends. Abusive and adulterous husbands and duplicitous friends marked these television movies producing a sense that danger was endemic to the close relationships fostered by suburban life. The message of these movies often was to endure and survive was to triumph. Further, the domestic hazards of television movies implied new forms of defense were needed as these were not straightforward criminal threats.

New criminal threats threatened children once again. School shootings, such as the massacre at Colorado‘s Columbine High School in 1999, happened more frequently suggesting a new but circumscribed threat.10 These were not teens roaming the streets killing at random but incidents done in particular places and targeting specific groups and

9 W. John Moore, ―Crime Plays,‖ National Journal, May 25, 1991. 10 Stephen John Morewitz, Death Threats and Violence: New Research and Clinical Perspectives (New York: Springer, 2008), 74. According to Morewitz, between 1999 and 2007 there were 33 school shootings. 224

individuals.11 Yet, the school shootings inspired more criticism of popular culture texts that were supposedly spurring suburbanites kids to act violently. Politicians, concerned parents and experts alike claimed everything from violent video games to the music of

Marilyn Manson was causing violent outbursts like the Columbine massacre.

By the time of Columbine, the threats from heavy metal and the occult seemed to subside. In the early 1990s, rap music and hip-hop culture emerged as the primary threats coming from popular music as evidenced by controversies over Ice T‘s song ―Cop Killer‖

(1992) and N.W.A.‘s album Straight Outta Compton (1989).12 Simultaneously, occult- themed products went from demonized to acceptable, even lauded entertainment. Heavy metal bands like Metallica topped the Billboard charts and occult-themed, suburban-set entertainments like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) became critical and ratings successes.13 Concerned parents, like those of the 1980s, looked to new popular culture bogeymen to explain social deviance and violent behavior rather than the more complex causes of these behaviors.14 Even Tipper Gore, on the eve of her husband‘s presidential campaign, remerged to argue that entertainment media bear some responsibility for

Columbine.15 There was also another round of Congressional hearings on violent content

11 Joan Walsh, ―What You Never Knew About Columbine: Interview with Dave Cullen, author of Columbine,‖ Salon, http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/04/06/cullen (accessed 3-22-10). Cullen says that police emphasize specificity in taking school shooting threats seriously as they are a better indicator of the likelihood of an attack. 12Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard, Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 401–402; and Jon Pareles, ―More Skirmishes on the Censorship Front,‖ New York Times, December 10, 1989. 13 Billboard; ―Hot 200 Album Chart,‖ http://www.billboard.com/charts/billboard- 200#/charts/billboard-200?chartDate=1991-08-31 (accessed 11-1-09); and Steve Vineberg, ―Yes, She‘s a Vampire Slayer. No, Her Show Isn‘t Kids‘ Stuff,‖ New York Times, October 1, 2000. 14 Jon Leo, ―Gunning for Hollywood?‖ U.S. News & World Report, May 10, 1999. 15 Ibid. 225

in film, music, and video games chaired by Orrin Hatch and Joe Lieberman.16 Some critics even blamed suburbia itself. Echoing the sentiments of Over the Edge and hardcore suburban punk rockers, Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard argued, ―The problem in affluent ‗McMansion‘ suburbs like Littleton is that children grow up in almost hermetic seclusion-a newer and more soul-destroying condition, with dismal implications for democracy.‖17 When it came to teens, media, and violent behavior, little if anything had changed for suburban parents and kids. Politicians and culture critics looked easy answers called on media producers to show restraint while parents were encouraged to better police their children‘s choices.18

By the late 1980s, the threats from more marginal popular culture like hardcore punk had disappeared as what held the genre and culture of hardcore suburban punk together was dwarfed by the social and musical differences of the members of its scene. To some degree, hardcore was incorporated into the dominant culture of the day.19 Some of its musical forms had been absorbed into conventional genres with bands such as Corrosion of

Conformity splitting off into heavy metal by playing faster and less tunefully while others, such as late period Black Flag, slowed down and emphasized harmonies moving toward power pop and traditional rock and roll. Still, other bands like the Dead Kennedys became more explicitly political while some, like Gang Green, embraced the surf boarding and

16 Bill Holland, ―Entertainment Violence is Topic of Hill Hearing,‖ Billboard, May 15, 1999. 17 Christopher Caldwell, ―Levittown to Littleton: How the Suburbs Have Changed,‖ Weekly Standard, May 31, 1999. 18 Jon Romano, ―It‘s a Job for Parents, Not Government,‖ Newsweek, August 9, 1999. 19 Dick Hebdige writes that incorporation into traditional modes of understanding, for exploitation and ideological concerns, rob subcultures of their meaning and power. Spectacular subcultural acts can be legitimized and dismissed as products of a heterogeneous society categorized not as threats but as recognizable types within the culture that can be sold back to the masses as harmless and tamed. Hebdige, 90- 99. 226

skateboarding subcultures that emerged in 1980s California and proved to be the lifeblood of West coast punk through the 1990s that eventually went mainstream with bands such as

The Offspring and Green Day. And, as often happens in music, life intervened. Many hardcore punks died, went to jail, or just moved on to other endeavors. As the number of bands and styles multiplied, the label hardcore and its social scene could not contain them all. Mike Atta of hardcore pioneers Middle Class said of the progression of the movement,

―The whole thing kind of fell apart. The roots of punk just splintered off.‖20 Yet, in its formative period through its zenith in the early 1980s, hardcore expressed, even distilled, a suburban teen alienation that resonated with other representations and experiences of suburban life and was brought into mainstream music selling millions of albums suggesting an enduring legacy of the music and its message beyond the violence the scene was known for.

The last twenty years also saw a rediscovery of the seedy, less-than-perfect suburb in American popular culture. Though it had been well trod territory since the advent of the postwar American suburb, Americans continually rediscovered the failure of suburban life to live up to its utopian intentions. In the 1990s and 2000s, those critiques emerged in critically acclaimed popular culture texts. Both released in the late 1990s, Home Box

Office‘s suburban gangster drama The Sopranos (1999-2007) and director Sam Mendes‘

American Beauty (1999) sought to expose the sexual and criminal peccadilloes and consumer excess of modern suburbanites.21 Despite applause from critics and audiences, the central tropes of these texts can be found in critiques throughout the postwar era. From

20 Matt Coker, ―Suddenly in Vogue,‖ OC Weekly, December 12, 2002. 227

the academic studies of suburban life of the 50s and 60s to earnest television and film dramas such as Ordinary People (1980) and Thirtysomething (1987-1991) of the 80s, artists and intellectuals were constantly ―discovering‖ suburban life was not utopian.22

While this trope was active before, during, and after the period under review in this dissertation, it was not predominant. Instead, it emerged and remerged as the check on the unrealistic expectations created by the promotion of home ownership and suburban life by the federal government and private corporations like real estate firms and department stores that benefited from suburbia‘s growth.

In contrast to the expose of the seedy side of suburban life, some representations marked a wariness with suburban nostalgia for the sitcom suburb of the 1950s and 1960s.

The film Pleasantville (1998) and television show The Wonder Years (1988-1993) cast doubts on the fantasy of Cold War consensus while embracing the sense that the manufactured vision of suburban life was still somehow desirable.23 These representations visualized a past beset by conflict and danger—both systemic and individual—but also well-intentioned. Pleasantville follows teenaged siblings as they travel through their magical television into a 1950s sitcom. They do not return home safely until they expose discrimination against women and African-Americans shattering the mediated memories of suburban life while recognizing it could be a place that accommodated difference. The

Wonder Years was less caustic in its critique of suburban nostalgia and childhood more broadly. The show operated under the premise that innocence was lost when a person was

21 The Sopranos, HBO, 1999-2007; and American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes, Dreamworks SKG, 1999. 22 Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford, Paramount Pictures, 1980; and Thirtysomething, ABC, 1987-1991. 228

young not during some storied time rooted in a particular historical moment though it did take jabs at late 1960s suburbia. Texts like these pieced together representations of the two earlier eras of the discursive history of American suburbs. They imagined a suburban world with some problems but also somehow as an idealized, even progressive space of self-determination and social fulfillment.

Still, idyllic images seemed far off in the discourses producing the suburbs of the

1980s. The events, images, narratives, and practices examined in this dissertation exposed an overlooked history of suburban America that upset traditional notions of what constituted suburban life. With these new narratives and periodization, hopefully other studies will examine even more closely the tactics and politics of productive victimization that may yield new ideas about American life at the end of the 20th century.

23 Pleasantville, directed by Gary Ross, New Line Cinema, 1998; and The Wonder Years, ABC, 1988-1993. 229

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———. ―Pour Me Another Tequila. Make it a Killer. Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic.‖ Washington Post, April 8, 1980.

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———. ―Zooming in on Punk Movies.‖ Washington Post, November 10, 1981.

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———. ―Long Island Goes Nuclear or Bust.‖ February 27, 1983.

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———. ―Shelters and Streets Drawing More ‗Throwaway‘ Kids.‘‖ June 3, 1983. ———. ―Sizing Up the Counties.‖ December 26, 1982.

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