"The Frontier of Progress and Repression: 1950s American Suburbia in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven"

This paper focuses on Todd Haynes’s film Far From Heaven (2004) in order to question the myth that saw the suburbanization of American lifestyle and culture as a symbolic expansion of the national frontier in the United States of 1950s. While advertised as a laboratory for American democratic freedom and progress, suburbia grew as a highly policed and restricted space, where social and cultural exchange became impossible. By playing with the cinematic conventions featured by classic suburban melodramas of the 1950s, Haynes’s film offers itself as a rewriting aimed at confronting social barriers (sexism, racism, homophobia) that were only indirectly tackled in those classic productions.