The Corrupt Bourgeois: Oh, Please Make The Archetype Go Away

It is not uncommon for Hollywood and New York Times Bestseller lists to promote, as Updike does with Gertrude & Claudius, books in which a suburban family life is seething with drugs and promiscuity underneath seeming respectability. 

In fairness to Updike, that could have been his point regarding his retelling of Hamlet. Not great drama! Just two somewhat pathetic people living out a typical intellectual trope. 

Unfortunately, the idea that suburbia is riddled with ghastly secrets and all kinds of repression is the main reason most current products with Miss Marple entirely misunderstand Christie's point. 

Christie wasn't preaching the dark underbelly of seemingly refined middle class mainstream life. She fully supported middle class mainstream life! She was pointing out that the dark underbelly of human nature on a resort wasn't too different from the dark underbelly of human nature in a village. People are much the same everywhere. 

Again, in fairness, Updike may have been making the same point. But this not-entirely-normal obsession with suburbia makes one wonder if the writers--and Hollywood--are indulging mostly in a kind of wishful thinking, in both directions: what they wish they had and what they wish would happen to all those people in those neighborhoods.

When Bones did its evil suburbia episode, the writers deliberately filled it with every supposed suburban underbelly trope. They topped all the cliches with ordinary neighbors and, ultimately, as the excuse for the murder, the utterly mundane. 

Still, Blue Bloods generally did better with Danny's neighbors: community is community. No point in dismissing it until one learns its value. 

Sandlot truly is closest to the truth.