Running Out of Gas: The Energy Crisis in 1970s Suburban Narratives
2011; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3138/cras.41.3.342
ISSN1710-114X
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
ResumoAbstract: In Back to the Future 1 and Part II, The Ice Storm, and The Virgin Suicides the negative effects of suburbanization are written onto the nature it purports to provide its residents. The cultural and economic logic of sprawl generates a built environment that accelerates the energy-crisis apocalypse tasted during the 1973 energy crisis. The paradoxes of suburban ideology generate unsustainable—even fatal—built environments, figuring two apocalypses as competing for space in suburban narratives: the concrete-grey and the green. In the grey, all hell breaks loose when the built environment can no longer deliver on suburban ideology's promises. But suburban ideology so drives American culture that hell must be displaced onto terrorists, weather, and parenting to make the future safe by keeping it recognizably suburban, literally concrete. The potential green apocalypse—what a return to nature would actually entail—critically engages the concrete-grey apocalypse, but at the cost of (suburban) life as we know its obsolescence.
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