Fortress Dystopia: Representations of Gated Communities in Comtemporary Fiction

Fortress Dystopia: Representations of Gated Communities in Comtemporary Fiction

Matthew Burke

Introduction Things are getting decidedly inhospitable in

parts of suburbia these days. The casual passerby in cities as diverse as Los Angeles, Chicago, Manila, and Sydney may readily find neighbourhoods enclosed in a series of protective security measures. In an urban world now so fearful of home inva- sions - a term almost unheard of two decades ago - these communities are designed to keep intruders at bay and reflect something of both the inhabitants inside and the greater society beyond the walls. Iron gates, invasive security cameras, the quasi-death-threats of security firms, two-metre high walls and armed security patrols are now no longer foreign to many suburbs across the globe.

The “gated community” phenomena, as it has come to be known, has not passed unnoticed by either Hollywood or the literary community of the West. This is hardly surprising-the suburbs surrounding Hollywood were one of the first places these fortress estates of the modern style were ever constructed. Writers, television producers, and film directors have turned their attention to this growing trend, finding much in the arising of suburban battlements that can be manipulated and adapted to both chronicle a tale and comment upon the greater world as we comprehend it.

This paper investigates the portrayal of gated communities in popular culture. Firstly, the way in which cities and suburbs are depicted in contemporary fictions is discussed. Second, a reason- ably straightforward definition of gated communities is given. Third, the various stereotypes and characteristics of these communities are assessed as they are represented in the imaginations of authors and screenwriters. The discussion is not a jeremiad - prophesying the doom and destruction of the city should it embrace further the gated form. Instead I wish to assess the perceptions and

attitudes expressed in popular culture about the nature of urban life and the impacts of this “new enclosure movement .”

The Imagined City Before we begin dissecting portrayals of forti-

fied suburbs, it is wise to consider how the City has been presented in late 20th century fictions. The “Imagined City” of contemporary fictions, especially that of science fiction, “is in part a consequence of the difficulty in explaining the nature of the city in a way that satisfies on an eco- nomic, political, social or cultural level” (Johnson). This has been the case throughout the last century. From films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis ( 1926), through Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) to Tom Grimes’ novel City of God (1995) and beyond, the Imagined City has been represented as “idea”-more than simply urban form and cultural milieu. And often this vision has been dystopic. Many depictions have tended towards illustrating a fragmentation of community, a rise of controlling technologies, and a tangible sense of loss from what once was. Blade Runner clearly depicts “a post-apocalyptic future city” wherein “all the cultures of the world appear to be packed together in a smoky urban core throbbing with impending violence” (Soja 3 19).

While all tends not to be well in the Imagined City, the entity of suburban form has also been subjected to such treatment. A litany of portraits, the “Imagined Suburb,” have come forth to paint the average Western suburban landscape as a conformist, soul-less, cultural desert where life behind the picket fences is undoubtedly dysfunctional. The most common depictions are of the vacuous- ness of suburban landscapes and life, and of the facades of the average suburbanite --novels like

115

1 I6 . Journal of American and Comparative Cultures

George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1967) and J.G. Ballard’s Crush (1973), and films such as Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Doll House (1996) and Happiness (1999), and Sam Mendes’s Amer- ican Beauty ( 1999) being good examples. Others show the “suburban dream” turned “post-suburban nightmare” replete with traffic, disinvestment and violence - see Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), or Alex Proyas’s The Crow ( 1994).

If the Imagined City is malignant and threat- ening, and the Imagined Suburb either vacuous, deadening, or spiralling into violent apocalypse, it could only be suggested that writers and film- makers would have a field day with gated communities. And indeed they have. But before we take that turn, we must first be certain as to what, exactly, constitutes a “gated community.”

Defining the entity The most prominent authors on gated com-

munities are Ed Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder whose research was published in Fortress America: gated communities in the United States (1997). They define gated communities as:

residential areas with restricted access in which normally public spaces are privatized. They are security developments with designated perimeters, usually walls or fences, and controlled entrances that are intended to prevent penetration by nonresidents. They include new developments and older areas retrofitted with gates and fences, and they are found from the inner cities to the exurbs and from the richest neighbourhoods to the poor- est. (Blakely 2)

Teresa Caldeira calls them “fortified enclaves ,” which she defines as “privatized, enclosed and monitored spaces for residence, consumption, leisure and work” (Caldeira 303).

The salient features of gated communities are simply these: Firstly, they are residential estates, rarely featuring much in the way of either com- mercial or retail functions. Second, they are clearly separated from the surrounding community by a barrier to human movement, usually in the form of a wall or fence, though moats are not unheard of. The entry and exit of residents and visitors alike, whether on foot or by vehicle, is only made possible through security-controlled access-points, usually a gatehouse, with numerous electronic

and surveillance devices used to ensure those without invitation are not allowed to enter. Third, they are private entities, with private streets, private parks, and private facilities. Management of these assets is usually undertaken either directly by the developer or, more commonly, through a homeowners’ or community association, which retains many restrictive legal controls over resident actions.

It is understandable that writers have found this new architecture and its controlling features so favourable as a setting for their work. And many, like J. G. Ballard in Cocaine Nights (1996), tend to see the establishment of this new form of development as a building block of some unstop- pable globalising urban trend.

Crawford pointed to the crenellated wall. “Look at it, Charles ... it’s a medieval city. This is Goldfinger’s defen- sible space raised to an almost planetary intensity- security guards, tele-surveillance, no entrance except through the main gates, the whole complex closed to outsiders. It’s a grim thought, but you’re looking at the future.’‘ (Ballard 1996)

Given that over eight million people were already thought to be living in such communities in the United States by 1997 (Blakely 85) Ballard’s state- ments are plainly not ridiculous.

The New Enclosure Movement- Gated Community as Response to Fear

There has been a clear and well-reported shift in urban environments towards security, privacy, fragmentation, surveillance and seclusion over the last thirty years. We are dealing with a fearful world, afterall, where products such as macho- looking anti-carjacking mannequins, designed to sit on a frightened urban driver’s passenger seat, are designed, marketed and sold. Urban schools enforce rules that prevent the wearing of expensive clothes, jewellery, and certain sports shoes so as not to encourage violence against affluent children in the playground. The fear of personal attack is becoming omnipresent.

Needless to say, gated communities are, at least in part, a response to this fear. Indeed, the formu- laic James Foley film, simply titled Fear (1996, Universal Pictures), starring Mark Wahl-berg and Rheese Witherspoon, featured a gated community. Its climax depicts a retreating fearful nuclear family led by a domineering patriarch, making its

Fortress Dystopia 117

last stand within the armed-security-guarded electronic safety of their suburban Seattle fortress against a gang of disturbed, deviant, and delinquent youth. But in Fear, the reasons the family decided to live within a gated estate are neither stated nor explored. We must look elsewhere to understand such motivations.

Distrust, angst and fear are strong motifs in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s 1995 novel, The Tortilla Curtain. In this clever satire of ex-urban inhabitants, the “new enclosure movement” is exam- ined in the context of suburban development in Southern California. The novel’s protagonists are a white couple, liberal writer Delany and his real estate agent wife, Kyra, who live in the initially non-gated “Arroyo Blanco Estates” on a canyon above LA. Unbeknownst to them, an illegal immigrant couple from Mexico is camped just below the estate, also finding the hills to be a satisfac- tory place of residence. But things don’t go well for Delany and Kyra. As if straight out of Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear a coyote scales their rear fence and consumes one of Kyra’s pet dogs for breakfast. There are thefts. A strange van is seen driving through the estate. There is graffiti and van- dalism. And in this world it is the omnipresent day-labourers from over the border- the people whose sweat allows the regional economy to function-who are perceived as the danger. The divi- sion between a civilised world of tofu kebabs and marinara pastas is contrasted with the Third World conditions suffered by the illegal migrants from the South.

Inevitably a vote is taken at the homeowners association about installing a gate to secure the community from the real “wild animals” of their imaginations -not the attacking coyotes, but people like the poor Mexican couple outside. After all, what is a gated community if it is not simply the commodification of security by real estate opera- tives for the upper classes? The author uses a self- professed liberal resident at the community’s homeowner association meeting to express the under- lying motivations:

I’d like to open my arms to everybody in the world, no matter how poor they are or what country they come from; I’d like to leave my back door open and the screen door unlatched, the way it was when I was a kid, but you know as well as I do that those days are past.” He shook his head sadly. “L.A. stinks. The world stinks. Why kid

ourselves? That’s why we’re here, that’s why we got out. You want to save the world, go to Calcutta and sign on with Mother Teresa. I say that gate is as necessary, as vital, essential and un-do-withoutable as the roofs over our heads and the dead bolts on our doors. Face up to it.. .” (Coraghessan Boyle 44)

The whole gating movement is therefore at least partly about attempting to create a bulwark against all that is wrong in society. Let us save ourselves and retain our own treasured existence. Let the world fend for itself. But the erection of gates is also as much about a fear of property-value reduc- tion as it is about anything else.

My Wall S Bigger Than Your Wall--Gated Community as Cultural Production

Back in The Tortilla Curtain, the security gate is eventually installed at Arroyo Blanco, by illegal immigrant labour of course, but i t fails to negate either the fear, or reality, of crime. A violent assault on a resident leads the men in charge of the homeowners association to seek to wall in the whole estate with a seven foot “stucco over cinder block” no-go barrier (Coraghessan Boyle 219). Delany is most unimpressed, but his wife makes a stand in favour of the wall. Kyra’s job after all is in property-knowing all the intima- cies of the relationship between security, residence, and monetary worth. And so the gate becomes a symbol of property value retention. Status, class, safety, prestige, value. All the things that make real estate happen.

Blakely and Snyder recognised this relationship in their own research, noting that for many “prestige communities” the gates are not so much about security but about “joining the ranks of a new separate-but never equal -elite” (Blakely 74). The gates of many such communities are a cultural production, signifying the social status and group membership of those abiding within.

Shielding the Sinister- Gated Cornrnunity as Involvement Shield

But not all portrayals of gated communities are about fear and social dysfunction. Other fictions have assessed how the gates and walls of a gated community may be used as an “involvement shield.” This concept, after Goffmann (39), is whereby individuals use a barrier to safely engage in activities that society generally punishes with negative sanctions. Involvement in a part of the

118 . Journal of American and Comparative Cultures

broader sphere is shielded by blocking the per- ception of either the signs of physical interaction, or by locating objects of involvement, or both. For instance, a screen is often used to provide the conditions to encourage certain individuals to feel safe to engage in situationally improper activities-such as intravenous drug users cowering within the walls of a toilet cubicle. An object of significance to an outsider within a given space may also be given an involvement shield-as when a school student cups a cigarette into the hand to avoid detection by teaching staff. In the same way, the residents of a gated community may feel enabled to engage in otherwise inappro- priate activity within their constructed realm, either through direct activity or by object placement. The concern here is that through the means of such a shield, the individual may be able to “main- tain the impression of proper involvement while he is actually delinquent in his situational obliga- tions” (Goffman 41).

Stuart Woods’s 1998 novel, Orchid Beach, makes great use of this scenario. Rather than the “insiders” of a gated community fearing threats from beyond their walls, it is paranoia of what is inside the screen provided by the gates that mat- ters. The faqade used is “Palmetto Gardens,” an ultra-expensive and exclusive gated resort community on the Treasure Coast of Florida. Holly Barker, in her first major case as the new chief of police in the area comes across the community on a survey of her precinct:

Now she came to a subdivision that was different from the others in several respects. It was larger, if the length of the twenty-foot-high hedge along the road was any indication; there was more than a mile of it before and after the main gate. Behind the guardhouse, she saw as she turned off the road, the interior of the development was shielded from the main road by an equally high hedge. The place was visually sealed off from the rest of Orchid Beach .... Ahead of her was an electrically oper- ated wrought-iron barrier, and a few feet beyond that, steel claws erupted from the pavement. Anybody attempting to crash the gate would quickly lose all his tires to that contraption. (Woods 107)

This passage replicates reality quite well. The interiors of many, if not most, gated communities

are unobservable from external spaces. And the lengths to which that privacy is protected, and to which the perimeter boundaries of such estates are solidified, appears unlimited. In the Southern Californian gated community Hidden Valley, an underground projectile device of a kind used to protect US nuclear facilities was installed to impale the chassis of any unwelcome vehicle with large metal cylinders. It has been used, too-by 1994 the tally stood at 25 skewered cars and four trucks (Dillon 8).

In Orchid Beach, the paranoia of the chief and her fellow crime-fighters turns out to be well founded. First they discover that there are enor- mous satellite substations on the property, then that one hundred people working on the estate are licensed to carry firearms. By the end of the novel the police and the FBI are storming what they know to be the centre of a globalized crime syn- dicate involved in the management of drug culti- vation, refinement, distribution and sales net- works across the world.

The decision of the author to locate such a malevolent and sinister land use behind the faCade of a gated community is only representa- tive of what else might fester within such excluded and isolated homogenous spaces. Critics of the enclosure movement have identified a much more likely scenario than the arrival of drug czars and high-technology organised crime. Evan McKenzie argues that this “secession of the successful’’ may well be leading to whole communities with no sense of citizenship to anything beyond their walls, and to the development of attitudes, perceptions and politics with no concern for the less fortunate or less privileged (McKenzie 196). Blakely and Snyder phrase the question this way:

when the community of responsibility stops at the subdivision gates, what happens to the function and the very idea of a social and political democracy? Can this nation [the US] fulfil its social contract in the absence of social contact? (Blakely 3 )

This is a serious question indeed. The gated community may be clearly understood as a deliberate involvement shield from greater society itself. But what could eventually happen to a city-region that chooses to travel down the road to where the

Fortress Dystopia . 119

affluent gate themselves in and the poor are left to fend for themselves?

Fragmented Metropolis - Gated Community as the Development of a Two-Tiered State

This is the question that is insightfully answered in the most frightening gated community fiction: the post-apocalyptic nightmare that is Octavia E. Butler’s futuristic novel Parable of the Sower (1993) and its sequel Parable of the Talents (1998). Los Angeles and most of the southern United States, in Butler’s vision, has become by the year 2024 little more than a disconnected balkanized dystopia (Flusty 3 1). Most of the cities are destroyed through neglect and are a morass of extreme violence, scavenging and pyromania. What is left of civili- sation are fragments of well-armed and barricaded neighbourhoods , populated by extremely frightened and anxious residents, living off the meagre salaries of those amongst them willing to risk travel to external workplaces, and the nutri- tion supplied by acorns ground and baked into bread, and a few remnant back-yard fruit trees. Northern states have barricaded themselves from the Californian poor and private corporations are buying up large land areas to build and operate privatised and militarised city-states attracting and exploiting what amounts to indebted labour.

In reality, gated communities are an obvious physical and metaphorical retreat from either pre- ventative crime-control measures, such as ame- liorating harsh social conditions like overcrowd- ing or poverty, and punitive measures such as the use of police, prisons and other elements of the justice system. With a privatised security force of rentacops and, at least in the US where such estates have chosen to incorporate and become their own local government authorities, there is a real danger of a two-tiered urban spatiality being created. For the barricaded elite the mini-State provides security, privacy and a prompt response to danger. For the rest there is an ill-equipped and under-funded public policing system that may be unable to cope with the situation they find themselves in.

Butler’s vision extrapolates this two-tiered vision to its logical conclusion. It is a clear warn- ing about the gated community trend and the cur- rent social polarisation of cities like Los Angeles. Mike Davis already believes that LA is not much more than “‘fortress cities’ brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ of affluent society and

‘places of terror’ where the police battle the crim- inalised poor” (Davis 224). The need to fix the social problems of the city and not retreat behind the bamcades is evidently clear.

“Don ’t Fence Me In ” - Gated Communities and the Vileness Within

Perhaps the most common contention in portrayals of gated communities is that the danger inside is potentially worse than that outside. As noted earlier, this is not at odds with the dominant representation of suburbia on screen today. The plethora of films attempting to show that all is not well beneath the faCade of suburbia in the boom years of the past decade [ie. Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and Sam Mendes’s American Beauty] are ample enough.

The 1997 John Duigan film Lawn Dogs (Vid- marWTrimark) takes up this theme. The narrative revolves around a ten year-old girl named Devon, played by Mischa Barton, who lives in a heavily manicured, rural-residential estate. She opens the film by reciting the Russian folk story of Baba Yaga. At the same time the set within which the play will be acted out, her home estate of “Camelot Gardens” near Louisville, Kentucky, is displayed on the screen in precise angles of suburban dream- ing and lawn-mowing activity. In her telling of the magical fairy tale, a young girl outsmarts a witch living in a forest beyond the gates. And the gates in Devon’s mind are clearly those of Camelot Gardens.

In Lawn Dogs all outsiders are clearly just that. They must leave the estate by Spm-a rule that is accepted in this sterile and facile world. And the residents inside do not reach out to include them. Young Devon, the misunderstood “insider” of the piece, breaks the mould by strik- ing up an unlikely relationship with a lawn- mowing contractor named Trent, the definitive “outsider.” Trouble is destined to arrive from the start as distrust of the man and his motives malevo- lently swells throughout the film. The portrayal of the community in Lawn Dogs is about exclu- sion and identity, and the dichotomy between the young girl’s imagination and freedom as opposed to her parent’s drive for conformity, status, and acceptance - their realisation of the suburban pro- ject.

Trent is continually concerned as to what may result should his friendship be discovered by

120 . Journal of American and Comparative Cultures

Devon’s parents and others of the wealthy elite in the estate. The two spend idyllic sunny days out in the woods and by the river. But tragic misun- derstandings lead to problems. A dog is killed. Their innocent relationship is uncovered. Para- noia sets in. “Did he touch you?” asks Devon’s father. Trent had done no such thing. But fear and mistrust take over and the descent into a Lord of the Flies-like hunt for the beast beyond the gates of the civilised world begins.

The film concludes with Devon again recall- ing the Baba Yaga myth, though this time rewrit- ing it to provide for the escape of Trent from the evils of the community’s henchmen who have closed upon him. The twist in her telling the tale is made clear-the world inside the gates is the one that should not to be trusted. She has come to learn that evil lurks not in the uncertainties and diversities of the uncivilised domain beyond the walls, but in the hearts of the bourgeois families inside.

Similar messages are delivered from other sources -Michael S teinburg ’s 1997 film Wicked (Sony), the 1995 John Ritter vehicle, The Colony, directed by Rob Heddon (Trimark), and a certain X-files episode. But the latter two show a slightly different evil within - the potential for fascist regimes to operate in such a segregated and enclosed world.

Storm-Trooping Home- Gated Community as Fascist Mini-state

The fascist elements of enforced conformity in contemporary gated communities are exam- ined in the X-files episode “Arcadia” ( 1999). The setting this time is “The Falls of Arcadia,” another prestige gated community in California. The Kleins, two residents of the upmarket estate, mysteriously disappear after violating the strict rules of the joint owner’s association. But then a bizarre thing happens. The neighbours seemingly turn a blind eye to the disappearance, covering their fear with bluster and denial. The police know not what became of them. No one does, or so it seems on the outside.

The show’s two leads, FBI agents Mulder and Scully, physically move into the estate to investi- gate. They become “insiders” and soon discover that things are very eerie in this little pocket of upmarket America. For a start, the neighbours have a real problem about people hanging up bas-

ketball hoops. They all come out of their homes to help them move their furniture inside before a 6pm deadline. And a helpful neighbour, Big Mike, tells the two agents they may only have pets that weigh a combined total of less than 16 pounds in weight. Very much put out by these infringements on his personal liberty, Mulder dis- covers that hanging up a basketball hoop would be to contravene the Contracts, Covenants, and Restrictions (CC&Rs) of the community- the mortal sin (a very applicable term in this case) of the community. He goes to take up his case with the head of the community’s homeowner association, Gene Gogolak, a man with a powerful pres- ence.

That night Big Mike is watching television. A documentary is playing showing what might be a Third World tribal community’s social relations. The narrator’s words drift casually into the lounge room.

Failure to conform within the tribal structure can often prove lethal. When group elders suspect such an outcast within their midst tribal members gather in a circle to perform a ritual chant in the belief this will expose the unwitting conduit of evil. The chanters eventually settle on the so-called misfit and he or she is punished severely, sometimes with death.

The link between this and the enforced conformity of “The Falls” could not be made clearer by the following sequence. Big Mike is dispatched by a gruesome subterranean hideousness - later named an “ubermenscher”-for an act that appears to be downright benign. He has a blown light bulb on his front porch, though not having replaced it contradicts the CC&Rs of the community. Things get typically squeamish from there as is usual for this series.

The role played by the dictatorial homeowners’ president, Gene Gogolak, is more than just a quasi-political one. A regular traveller to the East he had gone so far as to will into existence a Tibetan thought-form, the “ubermenscher,” in order to ensure the entire estate maintained the rules and regulations they had set for themselves, and so to ensure that paradise was kept, property values not lost. The ubermenscher symbolises the storm trooper, the violent outpourer of rage against the non-conformist. Gogolak is the fascist dictator, demanding submission and using others to assassinate potential threats to his comfortable

Fortress Dystopia 121

rule. The code of silence, the all-seeing omnipres- ence of the monstrous subterranean creature, and the conformity created within the walls all carica- ture the life that gated communities may indeed present for some of their residents. The trade-offs that must be made when entering such quasi-gov- ernmental estates can be many. It may be surprising but at least two of the infringements noted within this X-jiles episode - those involving the basketball hoop and the weight of pets -have featured in real-life court cases involving the residents of gated communities. In Boca Raton, US, one homeowners’ association forced a resident to present his dog for a court-supervised weigh-in. The pooch thankfully weighed in at 29 pounds, within the 30-pound limit set by the associations’ CC&Rs, and was allowed to remain with its owner (Kennedy 762).

But today many citizens are willing to give up certain freedoms to be encompassed by the protection of person and property offered by a gated community. Noted serial killer novelist, John Katzenbach, the author of State ofMind (1997) in which he depicts the creation of a State-sized gated community in the middle of the US, explored exactly these trade-offs in his work. He offered this comment on a talk-balk radio segment on US National Public Radio:

I think that most middle class Americans, or many, many middle class Americans, if given a choice between say, having a First Amendment right to free speech or the choice between that and their children being able to walk to school every day in utter safety, I think they’d take their children being able to walk to school, and their doors not being locked. (Harris 1997)

The trade-off of encroaching private governance versus quality of life and protection is one many people are now faced with in their residential housing choices. But the private oversight of residential dwellings has other sinister connotations.

“ I Can See You ” -Gated Community as Panopticon

The concentration on totalitarian forms in such films and television series is but an exten- sion of the work of other authors of a Marxist and, increasingly, Foucauldian position. In the late-twentieth-century period, new forms of social

surveillance and so-called “Defensive Space” had appeared in much of our urban design including shopping malls and public buildings, as well as residential areas. Gated communities have been linked by numerous authors to Bentham’s pro- posed panopticon as analysed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (Davis; Foucault; Hillier). The original panopticon was a circular architectural structure allowing the continual observation of inhabitants, or inmates, from one central point, without the observed having the knowledge of whether they were being surveyed or not. It has been decried as a dehumanising invention, born of evil, though the concept has been influential in the development of contemporary shopping malls, theme parks, television shows and even residential estates.

J. G. Ballard’s Running Wild (1998) focuses heavily on this theme. It revolves around an investigation into the murders of every adult resident in the exclusive gated enclave of “Pang- bourne Village estate,” near Reading on London’s northern outskirts, and the seeming abduction of their children. A conversation between the investigating police about the murders in the gated community resonates with this panopf ical nightmare:

I noticed the remote-control camera mounted on an art nouveau lamp standard in the centre of The Avenue. It turned towards us, the officer in the gatehouse keeping an eye on our comings and goings, and then swung away to scan the silent pathways between the houses.

I pointed to the camera. “I must get one of those for my cottage at Pagham. They’re useful things to have around.”

“Not useful enough.. . . As it happens.. .” “Of course, Sargeant. I only meant that they help to

keep out intruders. Though constantly living under those lenses must have been a little unnerving. The security is cleverly done, but the estate does seem designed like a fortress.”

“Or a prison .... The dogs and cameras keep people out, but they also keep them in, doctor.”

“A pretty comfortable prison, all the same,” I rejoined .... “Who on earth would want to escape?” (Ballard 19)

The children inhabiting Pangbourne were forever under the watchful eye of their parents and the

122 Journal of American and Comparative Cultures

estate’s security guards. The cameras were even placed within the homes themselves - “Upstairs and downstairs.” As the policeman remarked, “At least we know why there were no infidelities here” (Ballard 26).

In Ballad’s’ drama the narrative reaches climax with the investigating detective realising that the murders of the adult inhabitants were actually a highly-orchestrated, ruthlessly efficient act of the children. It is portrayed as “a desperate rebellion” against “the tyranny of love and care” that smoth- ered their being inside the walls of the community, and the culmination of a long process of with- drawal from the external world that had begun many months before (Ballard 37, 39, 55). The panopticon in upmarket residential formation deliv- ers to the parents not the civilised youngsters they sought-a group who would go on to replicate their elite parents - but instead calculating parri- cidal adolescent assassins. As with the X-files’ ubermenscher, the all-seeing panoptical oversight of the community leads to nothing but turmoil.

The Future of the Gated Community Motif I have little doubt that gated communities will

continue to be a prominent setting for fiction throughout the next twenty years. In particular, this built form now appears part of what might be considered a globalizing urban trend in the increasingly polarised metropolises of both the devel- oped and developing worlds. Such estates will also continue to be a dominant landscape feature around Hollywood for at least the foreseeable future. As before, the architectural, exclusionist, security and fascist elements of gated communities will be grist to the mill for writers and cinematographers both now and into the future. Expect more portrayals of the drawbridge being raised in the Ima- gined Suburb and of the blight that these secure safe-havens may indeed be inflicting on the rest of society.

Works Cited

Ballard, J. Cocaine Nights. London: Flamingo, 1996. -. Running Wild. London: Hutchinson, 1988. Blakely, E., and M. Snyder. Fortress America: Gated

Communities in the United States. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution P, 1997.

Butler, 0. Parable ofthe Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.

---, Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stones P, 1998.

Caldeira, T. “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Seg- regation.” Public Culture 8 (1996): 303-28.

Coraghessan Boyle, T. The Tortilla Curtain. London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

Davis, M. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Pimlico, 1998.

Davis, M. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Ima- gination of Disaster. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Dillon, D. “Fortress America.” Planning 60.6 (1 994): 8- 12.

Flusty, S. and M. Dear. “Invitation to a Postmodern Ur- banism .” The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City. eds. R. Beauregard and S . Body-Gendrot. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,

Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1977.

Goffman, E. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free P of Glencoe, 1963.

Harris, R. “Gated Communities.” Talk of the Nation. Washington DC: National Public Radio, 31 July 1997.

Hillier, J . & MacManus, P. “Pull Up the Drawbrige: Fortress Mentality in the Suburbs .” Metropolis Now: Planning and the Urban in Contemporary Australia. eds. K. Gibson and S . Watson. Leichhardt, NSW, Australia: Pluto P, 1994. 91-101.

Johnson, K. Virtual Cities: The Re-modelling of Urban Contexts. Unpublished Honours Thesis Dissertation, Leeds U, Leeds, UK. 1997. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ opted/students/ kieron .htm.

Katzenbach, J. State of Mind. Rockland, Massachusetts: Wheeler, 1997.

Kennedy, D. “Residential Associations as State Actors: Regulating the Impact of Gated Communities on Nonmembers .” Yale Law Journal 105.3 (1 995): 76 1 - 93.

McKenzie, E. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994.

Soja, E. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000.

Woods, S. Orchid Beach. New York: Harper Collins, 1988.

1999.25-50.

Matthew Burke is a research student in the Department of Geographical Sciences and Planning at the University of Queensland, Australia. His Ph.D. research involves a behavioural study of residents in gated communities in South-East Queensland.

Documents

Fortress Dystopia: Representations of Gated Communities in Comtemporary Fiction