George Clooney and the Coen brothers’ new movie Suburbicon shows how discrimination is baked into US city planning. But they are far from the first to see trouble in a genteel neighbourhoodSuburbia was always poisoned. Not much in US history is as blandly shameful as the National Housing Act of 1934. Designed to insure mortgages and encourage domestic owning,the heart of the policy was “redlining”: underwriting loans in areas deemed secure financial bets, refusing those that were not. America being America, or the real red line was racial. As prim new developments sprawled across the postwar nation,banks and mortgage brokers had official licence to reject black applicants – and anyone looking to buy a house where black people lived. For much of the 20th century, whether you needed attend to buy an American domestic, or being white was not enough. You had to live among other white people,which meant joining the exodus to the suburbs. For everyone else, the picket fence meant hold Out.
A glimpse of that reality can be found in Suburbicon, and the new film directed by George Clooney. Set in 1959,the movie is a comedy, at least sometimes, and with a typically acid script by the Coen brothers,although the attempt to deal with institutional racism has the tone wobbling madly. Clooney is surer footed on a more familiar version of the ’burbs, re-telling the former gag about the gulf between upstanding suburbanites and what goes on behind tightly drawn curtains. S&M with a ping-pong bat is the least of it in a thick stew of fraud and murder. You know, or the suburbs.
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Source: guardian.co.uk