American Psychoburbia

By: Ellie Marcotte

Originally published on Medium

Image Credit: Ellie Marcotte.

“The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.” ― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

A soldier wanders through a dense wood. Their weapon is poised and loaded in their grip. Their hands are sweating. There could be enemies around every corner.

With every passing moment, the unseen threat makes the natural stillness of the forest grow more tense. The soldier doesn’t remember how long they’ve been wandering through the woods. All of those moments of silence culminate into a chill on the back of the soldier’s neck and an uneasy twitch in the finger resting on the trigger.

A small pile of leaves moves to the soldier’s right. And like a trebuchet wound back too far and for too long, the soldier fires — tearing through the lone rabbit scavenging for food on the forest floor like an ICBM through printer paper.

Little does the soldier know, the war ended long ago. They have been left behind in this tense, fight-or-flight state while the world around them moved to a different and much more peaceful rhythm.

This is the human brain: a wild animal, an apex predator, poised for an attack that may never come. The domesticated lifestyle we recently created for ourselves quelled our bodies to physical threats and extended our biological lifespans — but our minds still see sabertooth tigers and rivaling tribes around every corner.

Nature is the warzone our brains evolved to survive in. And our brains have not left that warzone — even if our feet have.

Our feet have taken us far. From Sub-Saharan grasslands to mountainside caves; from uneven cobblestones to black velvet asphalt roads; from muddy trenches in no-mans’-land to atrocities seen by no-man before. Borne from resourceless rural farms and overcrowded urban centers in the aftermath of World War Two was a hybrid — a paradise known as: Suburbia.

Let’s picture it:

A big house. Country-style. Two stories, on a plot of land well-manicured and teeming with bees and butterflies pollinating to the gentle trickling of a water fixture. A wrap-around porch. A front yard and back; rose bushes lining a white picket fence. A tastefully rusted tin gray mailbox with a red flag sits on a thick post at the end of a driveway. A two car garage. Two identical two-year-old Golden Retrievers make no show of aggression, rendering the “Beware of Dog” sign on the fence purely comical.

A large longhaired cat gets up from its late-afternoon lounge on the edge of an open windowsill as a heavily pregnant housewife places a steaming apple pie in its place. Two children play soccer outside in the uniformly-cut green grass. A husband — sometimes a father — awaits a home-cooked meal on the couch with a beer in his hand, exhausted from another grueling day of celebrating his own ambition through professional pursuit. A cross hangs on the wall; when the family gathers for dinner, they hold hands and thank God for their bounty.

A final amen is said, hands break apart, and the fantasy begins to fade.

Dinner has ended. Dishes litter the dining room table and the kitchen sink. Two antsy Golden Retrievers attempt to siphon their share from the abandoned tablescraps. The children retreat upstairs in mild irritation. The Man Of The House sits again in his Recliner Of The House and narrates his thoughts aloud about another state’s football game in a near-shout. The housewife, her feet so swollen she’s rendered barefoot, once again ties an apron around her bulging waist. Her sigh is lonely and internal: The work has just begun.

Upstairs, a fourteen year-old boy isn’t doing homework — despite what he would have his parents believe. Affixed to a three-screen digital panorama by noise-cancelling headphones and a color-changing microphone, he broadcasts his personal reaction to another person’s reaction to a third person’s performance playing a video game.

The ninth-grader’s audience is large. Larger than the entire student body of his new high school. The dopamine hits his developing brain like a hard drug. The haters and trolls in his comment section bother him so little that he almost always addresses them in his streams — to reiterate his apathy, of course. Away from his audience, the boy seeks mentors — ones that answer boyhood’s single most pivotal question in this single most pivotal of biological moments: girls.

Wrapped up in this one-word subject is the complex relationship between genuine human connection and the desire for physical intimacy. Questions about empathy, consent, preference, and power combine into this one notoriously touchy subject. But instead of mentors, the boy finds agitators — misogynists, homophobes, and sexual abusers concealed beneath smooth tongues, big muscles, and masculine bravado.

It wouldn’t be fair to ask a fourteen year-old boy to tell the difference between a genuine yet passionate mentor and a high-level radicalization strategist — so nobody does, and he doesn’t. And he doesn’t need to — because the algorithm of his Youtube channel decided who he was going to be a long time ago: A man in a state of chronic physiological hyperarousal quivering behind a white picket fence.

The next room over, a twelve year-old girl is laying on her bed and scrolling through TikTok. Her homework is long-since done. A professionally-written report about a book she didn’t read, couldn’t summarize, and struggled to remember the name of. Her teachers lauded her frequent use of words like “delve”, “dynamic”, and “embark”. Gun to the head, she couldn’t define any of them.

Now, she found herself delving into a rabbit hole of her own. Video clips flash before her eyes with every upward twitch of her trigger finger. Flat stomachs, skinny arms, and narrow thighs dance to explicit sexualizing music; the smooth-skinned and fully made-up faces of twentysomething-aged women pine about their nonexistent acne and promote their retinol-based skincare routines.

The young girl looks at the slight protrusion in her lower stomach — the location of her intestines and reproductive organs. She pinches the skin and soft developing muscle around her thighs. She finds herself glaring at her arms, her hands, her nails. In the mirror on her bedroom wall, she sees the acne on her face and the braces on her teeth. She sees the baby fat in her cheeks and eyebrows whose placement on her premature face appear oddly shaped.

The search history on her computer’s browser includes oddly pointed questions about the definition of “botox” and whether or not a thing called “anorexia” is really that bad for you.

With another twitch of her finger across the screen of her cellphone, she pulls up an internet tab and searches for the meaning of something called “BMI”, and what hers should be. In time, the little girl becomes a beautiful woman waging war with other beautiful women who were once little girls — over, of all things, beauty.

Downstairs, a mother of two-point-one cleans for a family of eight. She scrapes a clump of tuna from a tin can onto a small plate as the family’s large cat bats two never-satisfied dogs in defense of its food. The smell is revolting. Pungent and fishy, it melded with the leftover meatloaf and asparagus like the aftertaste of a bad hangover. The dogs have already been fed, despite their performative malnourishment. But a steady stream of under-the-table handoffs have altered their training in an annoyingly negative direction.

The housewife shuts them both outside and continues on, working her way through a Kilimanjaro of dishes both dirty and clean. Hidden among them is a single glass of red wine. An offense akin to capital murder in the eyes of her husband, children, parents, in-laws, PTA and HOA friends, and church — but approved by her doctors, obstetricians, ultrasounds, test results, and not to mention numerous studies. On the Friday night of the final week of her eighth month — and her first glass since seeing that little pink “+”— the mother felt like a criminal.

To the soft background music of a true crime podcast playing through her earbuds, the glass of wine served as a motivation to summit the peak in front of her. Even better, it gave the housewife the burst of mellow energy needed to begin climbing the next — this one, in the laundry room.

There were several hands in the house, yes. But the housewife’s M.R.S. Degree made her the only one qualified to do these highly complex and technical chores. Sitting heavily at a round kitchen table surrounded by windows colored in setting sun, the trad-wife listens to a grizzly killer’s court case quietly as she wistfully swipes through photos of her jet-setting high school friends on Instagram.

Photos of the European countryside, golden-hour sunbeams casting violet-colored shadows across an Italian vineyard, sushi served in neat rows, coffee — anywhere, really. Cigarettes. Steaming bathtubs with candles, bubbles, vibrantly colored dissolving bath bombs, and yes, wine. The implication of soft music and serenity. Peace.

The large family cat sits on the table next to her. It rubs its face against her hand and arm affectionately. It nuzzles her belly. By herself in a house full of people, the Woman felt seen.

The Man Of The House has an edge. A product of overwork and overwhelm compromising his ability to quiet his mind. Football helped. Alcohol helped more. Sex was great, but he found himself in a reluctant and sometimes frustrating state of voluntary celibacy. His phone sits nearby — the Man Of The House has no off hours.

He actually liked it that way.

Focusing on his career took his mind off of other things: his son’s spate of detentions and his daughter’s steadily falling grades; the ill-behaved and hyperactive dogs his kids so desperately wanted and promised to train, and the long-overdue apology to his wife for his lack of forethought in adopting two Golden Retriever puppies at once. He could take his mind off the rising prices of gas and groceries, his rising property taxes, and the dread in the pit of his stomach whenever he thought about the Stock Market.

At work, when the man tossed vulgar and demeaning comments around with his colleagues, he didn’t have to think about the terrifying notion of not only raising one little girl into a world so blasé about her safety and autonomy — but soon bringing another little girl into it. At work, he didn’t have to think about his son’s questionable internet history and he didn’t have time to monitor the kid’s harmless videogame livestreams. To the father’s knowledge, his son admired a kickboxer who was himself the son of a chess champion. The Man Of The House liked both kickboxing and chess. Surely his son’s admiration of such a person negated the need to spend money on lessons in either subject.

With his cellphone close and a “be quiet” finger at the ready, an iPad open and glowing with a bombardment of incoming emails, the man doesn’t have to listen to his wife’s complaints about being able to go back to sleep after dropping off the kids at school. How she bitched about her too-small clothes and the one or two spices he forgot at the grocery store. Trapped in a castle created by his own hands, the man’s mind could venture nowhere else: Work.

A large metal safe sits like a giant anvil in the back of the main bedroom closet. Inside are guns and gold bars. The gold bars are for emergencies.

The guns, however — they linger in the back of the family’s mind like an intrusive thought. Gory details of murder, mutilation, and violation pump through the house like oxygen in a casino, slowly driving the occupants to gamble more — they find themselves stewing in the face of a prescribed happiness. A trebuchet wound back too far and for too long.

Between the white noise of touchdown cheers, dramatic true-crime documentaries, and haters in the comment sections — the sudden, sharp clatter of fallen silverware on a cold tile floor, and the housewife’s pained groan upon bending down to retrieve it, becomes a lone rabbit in a quiet wood.