By Brian Gilmartin, Staff Writer

The panel “Representing and Contesting the Homogeneous Suburb In Film, Media and Poetry,” on Friday, October 23, contained three intellectuals who had each written about a particular way in which the media has commented on, reinforced and challenged the view of the suburb in either movies or poetry.

The panel covered many ideas about the diverse suburb not only in the media, but in its relation to reality through that media. Each presenter called upon different images of suburbia to create a diverse view of how landscape, race and attitude all affect the perception of suburbia in the media and our minds.

The first speaker, Dutch-born Tim Vermeulen of the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, started by veering from his programmed paper an instead discussed a different paper entitled “The Diverse Cineburb: Impossible and Inevitable,” which focused on the movies “Happiness” and “Pleasantville,”as highlighting the ways in which the Suburb is represented in media.

His discussion focused on “Happiness” as contradicting the usual view of the suburb by portraying a suburb with high-rise apartment buildings as well as using a cinematic “language” that is more conducive to what we see in “city shots”: quick moving shots, as opposed to long open shots of single family houses.

Vermeulen then referenced “Pleasantville’s” portrayal of the iconic Suburb of 1950s America. He stated that the way that Pleasantville mocks this idea undercuts the image it sets up; showing a pristine suburb and then mocking it in the fashion that “Pleasantville” does demonstrates that diversity is implied, and is highlighted because it is left out according to Vermeulen’s explanation.

The second presenter Benjamin Wiggins, of the university of Minnesota, focused on the depiction of the suburbs of South Central Los Angeles in the movies “Boyz n the Hood” and “Menace II Society,” in his paper “Re-placing Black Suburbia: Culture Industry Geographies of South Central Los Angeles.”

He opened his discussion with information about the area of South Central Los Angeles as a suburb of Los Angeles, and the fact that the movies each use the clearly suburban area’s to portray a “Suburban Ghetto” as not only black andsuburban, but also violent. Wiggins then highlighted the stigma of the media by pointing out that both of these movies were referred to as, “inner-city dramas” by critics, despite taking place in suburbs.

The final presenter, Jo Gill, from the University of Exeter, used the poetry of the once popular Phyllis McGinley.

Gill handed out select poetry of McGinley and directed the audience through the ways that McGinley’s work supported some of the more stereotypical attitudes about suburbia while also relating it to McGinley’s assertion that all Suburbs differ from one another. Gill also pointed out that McGinley’s experience was a positive feeling, despite the suburbs being a place of “privacy” as well a place of “public scrutiny” according to Gill’s interpretation.