suburbia
The movie Better Luck Tomorrow reminded me of my own adolescence growing up in the suburbs. Minus the crime syndicate and murder. Mostly. It reminded me of how much of a bubble it is to live in suburbia, especially as a satellite to a larger city. It’s too small to have its own distinct identity, but generally there’s one common thread between all of suburbia: boredom. I saw Better Luck Tomorrow as taking this idea of suburban boredom and ennui and showcasing how apathetic it can make some people, obviously to an exaggerated extent. The town I grew up created this same sense of apathy in a lot of people as well, leaving them to their own devices. Living in such a bubble, especially one that was voted the #1 safest place to live according to some in-flight magazine, makes it hard to truly consider the gravity of your decisions. It always felt as if this atmosphere invited people to behave in cruel ways simply for entertainment value. Since I’ve been four years removed from living in that suburb, it’s given me a lot of time to think about how a place like suburbia functions, and why it is that way. I still hold the opinion that suburbia is one of the strangest living communities to be in, just based on what’s on the surface vs. what bubbles underneath it. One girl I knew put it as living in a place that was “physically safe, but mentally and emotionally unsafe.” I thought the film played on the idea of apathetic boredom in a really great way, with the ending sort of creating this open ended scene where you don’t actually know if it has resonated with the main character that he has killed the boyfriend of the girl he is now seeing. It made me think of something that happened right before I moved away where two guys that lived in my town got into a fight over a girl, and one of them stabbed the other in the heart, which killed him. The ending of this movie made me think of that and wonder, “Because of this bubble that we lived in, did the gravity of that situation ever really dawn on him?” I think that’s a really terrifying thought.