Cheap The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (DVD) (Jim Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, Matthew Simmons, Colin Campbell, Julian Darley, Michael Ruppert, Peter Calthrope) (Gregory Greene) Price

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Customer Reviews of The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream

Very provocative, but unclear in its implications
I watched this movie at a friends house, not knowing exactly what to expect. I had an idea that this would be a Micheal Moore-ish piece of juvenile agitprop, so I was pleasantly surprised by its quality. I have heard Jim Kunstler speak before, so when he first appeared I knew that it would be a work of considerable political savvy. <
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>The documentary details how cheap oil and government planning led Americans away from residences in city factory districts and into the suburbs. This was the birth of the treacly "American Dream" of a nice house with a backyard grill, a dog and 2 1/2 kids. The end of cheap oil will lead to the death of the suburbs and the death of that dream. <
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>Although at times the documentary seems ambivalent about the worth of the suburbs, it is clear that the film-makers regard their passing as a bad thing. This is the main problem with the film. The suburbs are the result of heavy middle-class subsidies and intrusive government planning. The very nature of the suburbs ensures that their residents will be heavily dependent on oil comsumption, and the government has heavily subsidized that consumption through road-building projects and an imperialistic foreign policy to ensure access to cheap foreign oil. If these costs were fully internalized by consumers, there is no way the suburbs could exist the way they do. The documentary illustrates this all very clearly, but it nevertheless persists in pieties about the beauty of the suburban American dream. <
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>That beauty is called into question, however, when one sees flyover shots of the suburban landscape, with rows of identical houses and identical yards, or when the movie shows us some propogandistic newsreel footage from the fifties and sixties extolling the suburbs' virtues. The inorganic appearance of these scenes makes it clear that the suburbs were the result of pervasive central planning. It should be no wonder that alienation is so common in the suburbs, or that the sense of community has been almost completely lost. The whole landscape of our metropolises have been overseen by bureaucratic planners, and the human element is entirely absent. We traded a horribly exploitive, almost prison-like factory system for an alienating, mind-numbing bureaucratic society that is still quite exploitive. Although the documentarians can't help but make this clear, they seem so attached to the 20th century American dream that they cannot comprehend that the collapse of suburbia might be a good thing in the long run. The centralized metropolis with its heavily subsidized suburban satellites has been a wasteful, alienating venture. What people need is the opportunity to develop their communities organically. This documentary gives us glimpses of these problems, but unfortunately never really puts them into a coherent framework.

Peak oil primer
I had already read a great deal about "peak oil" before I saw this DVD but I liked it none the less. I showed it to friends to give them a general idea what might happen in the future. I even learned new things, like the fact the tire companies bought up the trolley lines in the early part of the 20th century, and tore them out just to bring themselves more business! Easy to watch and isn't as bleak as some of the books I have read on the subject. <
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