Education, mobility and the zone defense in suburban American narratives

Slums of Beverly Hills and The Breakfast Club show that the key to class mobility is affordable housing in an otherwise high-dollar school district. This residential basis to the interconnection of romance, education and class mobility in suburban high school movies reveals zoning as the essential foundation to the suburban way of life. The logic of zoning is the imagination and ideology of American suburbia, promising universal mobility only to circumscribe it spatially. Zoning’s ‘rational’ delineation of allowable building is of paramount concern to mobility or economic inequality. Actually, existing zoning is the key ideological component to suburban life, which makes its invisibility in literary and film studies troubling. Slums of Beverly Hills and The Breakfast Club solve the problems of suburban inequality discursively; Brian and Vivian only change their thinking about the organization of their families, educations and social interactions, not the spatial organization of their home town. Suburban high school films continue to believe in the promise of class mobility that zoning-enabled and facilitated education holds out, the very definition of an ideological solution to the problem rather than a concrete change to the built environment.