Classic Movie Review : The 'Burbs (1989)

I’ve loved the Addams Family for as long as I can remember, partly because they represent one of pop culture’s great bait-and-switches. They look like nightmare people. They love death, torture, graveyards and whatever Morticia is feeding that plant. Yet they are also consistently the most loving and emotionally functional family in the neighborhood. The joke is never that the Addamses are monsters. The joke is that everyone normal is considerably worse.

Still, I understand the apprehension. Imagine a family of pale, nocturnal, vaguely Eastern European weirdos moving into your peaceful suburban neighborhood and refusing to explain themselves. This is essentially the premise of Joe Dante’s 1989 cult classic The ’Burbs, except Dante removes the Addamses’ charm and replaces it with Tom Hanks slowly losing his mind. The new neighbors are strange. The neighborhood is bored. In suburbia, this is more than enough to begin an investigation.

The ’Burbs tells the story of Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks), an aggressively ordinary man spending a week-long staycation in his aggressively ordinary suburb. His only plan is to relax, which is already suspicious behavior in a neighborhood where nobody appears capable of minding their own business. When the reclusive Klopeks begin making strange noises at night, Ray’s less emotionally regulated neighbors decide something sinister must be happening next door. They recruit him into their investigation largely because he is available, curious and standing close enough to be implicated.

Naturally, they become convinced the Klopeks are murderers. And naturally, they are not entirely wrong. Just wrong enough to make everything much worse.

A Film About (Almost) Nothing

The ’Burbs is a movie about having annoying neighbors. It is also about becoming so comfortable inside your own life that you begin looking elsewhere for danger, meaning and something resembling a plot.

This is a distinctly middle-aged male problem. A bored man needs to believe something important is happening, preferably something that requires equipment. In most movies, this restlessness leads to an affair, a sports car or an ill-advised attempt to reconnect with youth. The men in The ’Burbs are too domesticated, too nerdy and possibly too frightened of women for any of that. Instead, they turn their neighbors into a criminal conspiracy as a means to make Ray's vacation interesting.

Ray and his friends build an elaborate narrative out of basement lights, strange noises, suspicious garbage and the general Eastern European quality of the Klopeks. They are essentially the late-eighties equivalent of Reddit detectives: men staring at incomplete evidence until it begins confirming whatever they already wanted to believe.

What makes them charming is that they are every bit as constructed as the people they are investigating. The Klopeks resemble horror-movie villains, but Ray’s suburban posse is also a collection of recognizable American types: the paranoid veteran, the overeager teenager, the middle-aged man desperate for stimulation. Everyone in The ’Burbs has disappeared behind the role they’re performing. The only disagreement is over which genre they are living in.

There's Something About The Klopeks

What makes The ’Burbs so much fun (outside of Corey Feldman still being semi-functional) is that there is clearly something wrong with the Klopeks.

They are reclusive, but they do not seem frightened. They have no interest in meeting the neighbors, but not because they regard suburban America with aristocratic contempt. The Klopeks are simply too busy doing something else. They operate on a different feedback loop, obeying rules no one else on the block can understand and for a long stretch of The 'Burbs, it makes you weirdly root for them.

Joe Dante uses this uncertainty to make us complicit with Ray and his nosy little militia. Their assumptions are invasive, hysterical and probably xenophobic, but the Klopeks are doing something weird. The furnace is roaring in the middle of the night. Strange noises come from the basement. Human bones occasionally enter the conversation. The neighbors may be inventing the story, but Dante keeps placing ominous punctuation around it.

You know Ray has lost perspective. You also know you would be watching the Klopeks’ house through the blinds.

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The ’Burbs is a classic celebration of the illusion of normalcy. Everyone believes their own life is boring until they stop staring at it and begin projecting meaning onto somebody else’s.

I have probably watched this movie more times on late-night television than any other film and it is not close. Part of its comfort comes from how little heroism it requires. The stakes are technically good versus evil, but only at the neighborhood-association level. Nobody is trying to save the world. Ray Peterson would simply like to survive his vacation, drink a beer in peace and avoid being murdered by the people next door. This is an extremely reasonable ambition.

The ’Burbs understands that most people do not dream of becoming heroes. They dream of discovering that their boring life is secretly important without having to change anything about it. Ray gets the adventure, confirms his paranoia and still ends up wanting exactly what he wanted at the beginning: a quiet week at home. And honestly, you are at least as strange as the Klopeks if you cannot relate.

8.3/10

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