How 'Suburbicon' Reveals Dual Cultural Fissures in France and the USA

Only a figure like George Clooney could inadvertently trigger a deluge of the comparative crises France and the United States are currently undergoing. Clooney’s most recent film, Suburbicon, just premiered in Paris and led to a confounding series of audience reactions that were not only illustrative of the crises in both countries, but also revelatory of the ways in which France is verging closer and closer to America—perhaps at its own peril.

The crisis many American citizens feel they are undergoing is not as monolithic as it is obvious. For expats, any sober testimony reveals the grave extent to which Trump has damaged America’s standing in the world. On the home front, there are more fissures stemming from the same source: Robert Mueller’s investigation and a potential Constitutional crisis; Trump’s attacks on the press that not only undermine the Fourth Estate, but also allow despotic leaders across the globe to coopt our president’s language for their own ends, as Jason Schwartz of Politico recently reported; the national discourse has eroded into tribalism and even explicit hatred and racism many Americans thought was well behind us.

Suburbicon, for its part, lies with its tummy exposed as a Coen brothers script turned into a kind of Frankenstein by Clooney that shows textbook 50s racism and insurance fraud. It doesn't go much further than that—no intersectionality or re-negotiated narratives, just insurance fraud, some dark violence, and some nice cinematography for four euros as a viewer under the age of 26.

France’s crisis is less pronounced. There’s a lingering anxiety here that there are no more economic opportunities left in France, yet simultaneously there is an entrenched concern among the left regarding labor reforms proposed by centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

Similar to the anxieties under former President Nicholas Sarkozy, French intellectuals and progessives worry that the country is becoming “Americanized.” What the reaction to Suburbicon in the Mk2 Bibliotèque theater revealed is how France’s simultaneous obsession with a repulsion to America are no longer parallel, but rather on a collision course set in motion by the election of Macron.

What exactly the average French person means by “c’est très Américain” is still a mystery, but once unbreakable cultural traditions in Paris have begun to be eroded. The principal case study is the boom in food delivery apps, currently being led by Uber Eats—a remarkable feat given the litigation the company faced in France less than a year ago—which has sent traditional meal times and hours long sit down meals for a whirl. Breakfast In America owner Craig Carlson addressed this in our interview earlier in the fall, noting that the uptick in delivery and take-out requests hit his franchise most acutely after the November 13th attacks.

Along those lines, France has become far more of a police state than some are willing to admit. Frankly, there is a distinctly greater security presence visible here in Paris than in any major American city, even New York and Washington. While that’s not to say that America has less security, it’s simply to say that the demonstration of force is more hidden there while it is intentionally visible here. Security checkpoints have become a reality of daily life here, and many have simply stopped complaining.

Complaining is a French national pastime, especially in Paris, but attitudes towards the security state are coarser and more engaged than those of Americans. While a vigorous debate around what conditions should trigger a state of emergency and how much privacy should be valued, there is an acceptance by the French of a new reality that Americans simply compartmentalize until a flash event happens that makes everyone freak out (enrollment in study abroad programs and other prolonged stays in France by Americans have dropped even while tourism from the rest of the world community has rebounded).

In the theater, the fascination with Suburbicon was with just how racist these white Americans in the 50s appeared, a laughing stock for a French audience that gets a little more touchy when their colonial history in North Africa or race-blind ideology comes into discussion. They jab at capitalism run amuck while wearing New York Yankees caps and worrying about becoming a fossil-state like Italy.

The scapegoat or épouvantail of Donald Trump makes it easy for the French to deflect their contradictory relationship with America, and, thanks to Trump, makes it easier to dismiss our culture as a regressive monolith. Yet they still form a disorderly queue for American movies while ignoring high-browed domestic films—none of my friends or colleagues have seen Le Brio, while plenty have seen Bladerunner and Thor.

Just the chatter exiting the theater alone—“they were so racist,” “are they saying the country is still like this today?” “le White Picket Fence et tout!”—comes from a place of anxiety regarding the states, and, frankly, a fundamental misunderstanding of our culture as a unified entity.

What I stress to my students is that it is extremely hard to get more than two thirds of Americans to agree about almost anything, and that studying our country more closely resembles that of a continent than a nation-state. In the meantime, what the French have to decide is just how much of America they want to embrace and how much to reject, but beyond that, how much a false assumption of universality can do damage to their own national spirit when comparing themselves to a teenage nation with 50 states and no coherent culture.