Olvia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling hasn’t even opened in theatres, and it’s already being accused of employing some pretty tired cinematic tropes. The most central of these is the ‘suburbia as simulation’ model, in which a picture-perfect 1950s American suburb turns out to be a manufactured hyperreality. It’s there in The Stepford Wives, The Truman Show and many others. Still, the question remains: why are so many directors convinced that America’s suburban idylls are disguising something more sinister?

It’s worth remembering that there was a time when the American government was actually in the business of manufacturing fake suburbs. Built on the Nevada atomic test site, the so-called Doom Towns of the 1950s included all the hallmarks of the classic ’50s suburb, including luxury cars, two-story homes (complete with interior furnishings and stocked pantries) and a selection of fully-dressed mannequins.

The inhabitants of Annie, Nevada, didn’t fare so well when the bomb was dropped. "Dummies lay dead and dying in basements, living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms," one newspaper wrote. "Mannequin tot…was blown out of bed and showered with needle-sharp glass fragments."

The idea of all those lifeless suburban families – their prim outfits covered in dust – is unnerving because it goes against the view of suburbia as some safe haven. Since the 1950s, the suburbs have been a byword for safety, security, wealth, and prosperity. For a time, they were symbolic of America’s stability – the perfect encapsulation of contemporary culture.

But suburbia isn’t simply a place people live; it’s a cultural term that, as John Berger argued, connotes a way of life. Cinema and TV (having something of a golden age when the suburbanisation of America began) have been instrumental in shaping our understanding of what this lifestyle entails: the T-shaped houses, the white picket fences, the smiling neighbours.

The suburbs suggest an ideal vision of community where homogeneity reigns supreme. Every man has a good job, and a car; every woman has a husband, a family and a kitchen fitted with a refrigerator. It doesn’t take much to see why critics like Amy Kenyon have called suburbia the "spatialisation of the American Dream." The two have always been inseparable.

Perhaps this is why filmmakers have used suburbia as a space to vent their criticisms of America as a nation. Take The Stepford Wives, for example. Released in 1975 amid an explosion of Second Wave feminism, the film takes place in the fictional town of Stepford, where married men are accompanied by submissive and impossibly beautiful wives, who all wear the same glazed expression.

Like the female inhabitants of the picture-perfect town of Victory in Don’t Worry Darling, the Stepford wives are reminiscent of the valium-addicted housewives of the 1950s. ("Delusions. Memory problems. Hysteria." is how town patriarch Frank brushes off Alice’s suggestion that things aren’t quite as they seem). To an outsider like Joanna Eberhart, their vapid subservience and unflinching devotion to their husbands – something she has been taught to aspire to – is deeply disturbing.

Of course, when she learns that robot replicas have actually replaced these women, she realises she was right to be worried. Here, suburbia (and, by extension, the American dream) conceal a much darker reality. Far from being an Edenic promised land, Stepford is a fabrication, a false reality that depends on the nullification of those who would oppose its social hierarchies.

All simulations – no matter how seamless – are prone to rupture. There are often warning signs: in Don’t Worry Darling, these are earthquakes that the inhabitants of Victory have learnt to ignore. In The Truman Show, it’s a satellite camera that nearly lands on the titular character’s head, planting a seed of curiosity he simply can’t shake.

In both cases, the directors seem to be drawing attention to the fragility of things, or at least pointing out that another world is possible. Importantly, there is always a sense that it would be easier for the protagonist to stay within their simulated reality. Truman’s life is perfectly fine before his revelation. The same is true of Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh), who has everything she needs in Victory.

And yet we would rather they leave it all behind. Why? Because accepting that world would mean accepting its injustices, politics, and power structures. In this way, the suburban idyll represents a sort of voluntary ignorance. Time and time again, cinema has reminded us to open our eyes and see things for what they really are.

Follow Far Out Magazine across our social channels, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.