Desperately Seeking Susan: Comparison of the representation of the City and the Suburbs - Essay Example

The motion picture Desperately Seeking Susan serves well as a case study of contrasts and oppositions between suburban and urban life. Nuances are heightened by the filmmaker’s use of lighting, décor, music, and fashion. The holograph of the social history of the eighties in America finds its complex, multidimensional embodiment in both realistic and metaphoric terms in the films of the decade. Twenty years ago in 1970, Ian Jarvie described how there was something else that was vigorous and exciting about the American cinema, something deeply entwined in the relation it bore to its society: its ability to portray every aspect of American society with almost clinical accuracy: from the urban, rural and negro slums, through suburbia, to its highest social and political realms: American film men knew their society and put it on their screens.

41 (Palmer, 1995, p. 15) Oppositions are demonstrated through dramatically contrasting scene changes, as well as through the film’s music selection. These can best be demonstrated through the film’s depiction of its characters and their spaces, dress and behaviour, as well as music selection. First, a plot synopsis will set the context for an investigation into the way in which characters and their lifestyles are represented. Desperately Seeking Susan was released in 1985. At this time its star, pop singer Madonna, was enjoying the first of what would be many peaks in popularity.

The “Material Girl” – and the lifestyle she embodied – was both envied and idolized, and it is safe to say that the biggest attraction of the film was Madonna herself. Desperately Seeking Susan is a story about mistaken identity that plays off the contrasting lifestyles of its two central characters: Roberta (Rosanna Arquette), a bored middle-class suburban housewife, and Susan (Madonna), an adventurous free-spirited wild child with no visible