In the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a man mows his front lawn. It’s a quintessentially American sight: freshly-hewn grass, blue skies, vibrant flowers, a white picket fence. Then, the man collapses. The camera follows him to the ground, where, just beneath the earth, a grotesque scene emerges—the grass is teeming with insects. Underlying this manicured suburban idyll is a sinister, chaotic underworld.
Just as Lynch exposed the underbelly of suburbia in middle America, Michael Pollan reveals the irony of its most prominent institution: the front lawn. In a short documentary from RadioWest, executive produced by Doug Fabrizio, Pollan explains how lawns are endemic to America—and emblematic of the country’s hypocrisies.
“The conceit of the American suburb is that we’re all in a great park together,” Pollan says in the film. “The lawn symbolizes that continuity.” And yet, Pollan explains, despite the fact that lawns are the largest irrigated crop in the country, Americans tend to avoid spending time on them.
“Pollan raises this question in the film about what our relationship with our front lawn says about our relationship with our neighbors,” Fabrizio told The Atlantic. “I find that really interesting. We don’t go out on our front lawn; we hunker down in the back where no one can see us. I wonder what that says about us and how we all get along these days.”
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2CmqyrD
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