Surviving Suburbia

Daly City, California

Malvina Reynold’s song “Little Boxes” is the soundtrack to a cynical shot of suburbia, used in the beginning credits of Weeds, highlighting the monotonous routine of its residents. The quest to fulfill their own American Dream leads them to a dead end. Establishing a home and trying to fit themselves into to the kind of life they’ve been taught will make them happy has become the primary goal of their lives, rather than pursuing the kind of life that is shaped by individual emotion and passions. 
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison explores the journey of attempting to conform and find happiness by fitting into the “little boxes” that societal expectations have created. Boxes built of expectations of beauty, of the most "superior" color of skin, of economic status and self-deprecation that leads to unhappiness and a dehumanized sense of self. The characters of The Bluest Eye are constantly struggling with their identity and pressures to conform to the kind of life that was defined by media exposure to things like "Dick and Jane" and to reject their “funk” and African-American identity in exchange for a “whiter” one.

Ticky-Tacky

Housing development in Daly City, CA

The song was inspired when Malvina Reynolds was driving through Daly City, California, and saw rows and rows of homogenous houses lined up one after the other(image on the right). Later, after the song gained popularity, Malvina Reynolds was interviewed by a magazine, and when they wanted to take a picture of her pointing to the exact location of her inspiration, she couldn’t locate the spot because so many more had been built up around them.  She also coined the term “ticky-tacky”, referring to cheap material used in housing developments, now recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary. “Ticky-tacky”, the same kind of material that would’ve likely made up the houses that Pecola, Claudia, and Freida would’ve lived in as they grew up, because of it's low cost and accessibility.

Little Boxes, All The Same

Malvina Reynolds’ song Little Boxes explores the hopelessness of living the kind of life that confines your individuality and freedom. A path of life where everyone comes out all the same, following the same track as their parents, and building a life for their children that will lead them down a safe path of conformity. Malvina sings about all the people in the world who have built their lives around a predetermined identity that they’ve been taught to accept as the “right” way to live their lives in her song:

“And the people in the houses

All went to the university,

Where they were put in boxesa

And they came out all the same,

And there's doctors and lawyers,

And business executives,

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.”

Malvina sings about people who have gone to school to be educated as “doctors and lawyers and business executives,” all very respectable careers, but they haven’t just been educated in their professions. They’ve been taught to confine themselves, instead of developing a unique sense of identity. They’ve been “put in boxes” and become uniform archetypes of the ideal member of society. 
The introduction to Weeds complements her message in it’s cinematogaphy, with the repetition and uniformity of everything that makes up the suburban town of Agrestic, California. Each Land Rover, suburban housewife, and house as clean, pretty, and painfully same as the last. Monotonous repetition and synchronicity are major focuses of the filming, which makes a point about the lack of imagination and uniqueness that this community shows when looking in from the outside.

Too Funky For Dick and Jane

Excerpt from a Dick and Jane reader

The Bluest Eye introduces itself with a paragraph from the Dick and Jane reader, which taught children how to read during the time that Toni Morrison sets her novel. It describes the typical white suburban Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane, who all live in a pretty house and laugh and smile and play with their pets and the neighborhood children. As their story is repeated for the second and third time, it is slowly deconstructed by robbing it of it’s punctuation and correct grammar. It's an ironic fate for something that is meant to teach children to read, but the deterioration of Dick and Jane’s story is making a point about the expectations of what makes a family unit and the role of Dick, Jane, Mother, and Father in society. By boiling it down to just the letters, no spaces, no punctuation, Morrison is pointing out the superficial mess that their story is reduced to. Dick and Jane are a clean illustration in light pastel colors and reflecting white supremacy, the opposite of the "funk" that is an integral part of the cultural fingerprint of African-Americans. Accepting and embracing the dirt and sweat and smells, the funkiness of life and movement, is not something communicated in the picture-perfect illustration of a Dick and Jane standards of living. 
Much like Malvina Reynolds’ criticism of suburbia, Toni Morrison is a sending the message that the status-quo is not always meant to be accepted. The books starred two blonde-haired, blue eyed children, who lived in a pretty white house with a yard and pets, cared for by their strong father and a mother who stayed home to watch over them. 1965 was the first year that any African-American characters, and by then, the standards had already been established. In the impressionable mind of millions of children, blue eyes, blonde hair, stay-at-home mother, working father, and a clean house with a yard, all constrained within a white picket fence, had become the ideal family unit.