Chapter Two

Neighborhood of Fear

Toxic Suburbia, Affective Practice, and the Invisible Prison

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter called Love Canal a tragedy. Since the 1950s, toxic waste had silently poisoned the town’s water supply, causing chromosome damage, birth defects, miscarriages, and multiple kinds of cancers.¹ As home to the tragic fallout of industrial suburbia, Love Canal became the symbol of corporate malfeasance, failed government oversight, and suburban environmental danger. As argued in the previous chapter, dangers like these caused a continuing sense of environmental threat among suburban residents and facilitated the productive victimization of the Nimby ethic. The disaster at Love Canal also initiated a view of the suburban environment as home not just to visible public hazards like a nuclear power plant but also to lurking, silent killers in the soil and water left behind during the deindustrialization of postwar suburbia. It served as an example of the real and potent danger of toxins threatening the very survival of middle-class, suburban families that had taken for granted their bucolic surroundings and seen the home as a refuge in an unsafe world.² In a Time article entitled “The Neighborhood of Fear,” one Love Canal resident expressed the new fear that suburban life itself might be killing the family it was created to protect: “We’ve lived in fear for a long time. Now we’ll wonder what we’ve passed on to the children.”³

By making manifest the consequences of cheap but haphazard corporate and industrial waste practices as well as the failure by government to prevent them, Love Canal helped imbue civically oriented projects with the taint of environmental disaster while casting new doubt on assumed spaces of safety like homes, parks, and schools. The federal government soon confirmed these fears as the news media consistently reported them.⁴ In 1978, Newsweek declared: “There is no doubt that chemical time bombs are ticking away in the environment—and that locating all of them, let alone disarming them, will prove all but impossible.”⁵ According to Time in 1980, “Love Canal is only the tip of a tremendous toxic iceberg. A 1978 Environmental Protection Agency study identified 32,254 toxic waste dumps around the U.S., some 800 of which posed ‘significant imminent hazards’ to public health.”⁶ Although Love Canal spurred the creation of Superfund and local antidumping laws, its legacy highlights the dangers that heavy industry posed to space heretofore presumed safe and clean. Lying dormant for decades and emerging without warning, these toxic hazards appeared alongside those from seemingly dangerous public projects. Together, they marked the era of toxic suburbia.

At the same time that suburbanites became aware of toxic industrial dangers, a spate of popular culture representations broadcast narratives of other hazards, in the form of new allergies, disorders, and maladies that seemed to directly affect middle-class suburbanites. These portrayals showed suburbanites exposed to toxins that usually could not be seen, smelled, or touched until their damage was apparent, suggesting a new vector of environmental danger that might not be preventable and might have to be accepted as the price of other suburban privileges. Two popular examples of such narratives were the 1981 film The Incredible Shrinking Woman and Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Though very different in artistic aspiration, the movie and the book both portray a suburban realm populated by products designed to make everyday life easier and more fulfilling but that also have dire physical and psychological effects.

For Lily Tomlin’s character in The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the repercussions are obvious. The cleaners and sprays she uses to ease her household workload, and the makeup, perfume, hairspray, and other beauty products she uses to be attractive to her breadwinning husband, cause her to shrink and make her unable to fulfill her domestic roles. Instead, she becomes a curiosity for daytime television audiences while on a quest to cure her condition and return her household to normalcy—a nostalgic vision of the home and its inhabitants that contrasted with the dramatic changes in sex, gender, and work in that era that exposed the myth of the “traditional” household.⁷

Although DeLillo’s characters in White Noise are less sure about what everyday products and environmental hazards specifically do to their bodies, they also consistently articulate an existential fear of lethal contamination that cannot be prevented. Ultimately, such fears shatter the notion of the suburb as safe, and the characters take a drug to quell their ongoing fear of toxic death and restore the privilege of not seeing danger or feeling endangered. In the era of hundreds of Superfund sites and a steady drumbeat from the news media about “Toxic America,” texts such as White Noise amplified public consciousness of chemical dangers. Their portrayals reinforced the sense that nostalgic visions of the home as sanctuary were untenable without psychological intervention and that suburban privilege was fragile, even if it was endangered by suburban practices themselves.

Similarly, environmental illness (EI) and multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) appeared as “diseases” of affluence in the 1980s, emerging directly from the circumstances of modern consumer culture, inextricably enmeshed in suburban living. Like Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman, sufferers were mostly women who located the cause of their distress in the many things intended to make life easier, domestic work more efficient, and the space of the home more comfortable: sprays, cleaners, beauty products, fabric protectors such as Scotchgard, air conditioning, and so on. Rather than enhance comfort, security, and domestic tranquility, sufferers contended, these products contained chemicals and toxins that bombarded, overwhelmed, and damaged their bodies. Such complaints demonstrated another way in which “traditional” domestic roles were damaging to suburban women, and suggested the continuing instability of such arrangements, now further undermined by toxic exposure.⁸

To find relief, sufferers consulted their physicians. Faced with the real pain of patients and the contemporary depiction of their lives as inescapably polluted, some doctors attempted to treat patients with these symptoms, while others dismissed their maladies as psychosomatic. Ultimately, though, the medical establishment did not recognize EI or MCS as diagnosable diseases given the difficulty of establishing a direct causal relationship in a world of multiple, possibly dangerous environmental stimuli.⁹ As Jerry Hook of the Michigan State University Center for Environmental Toxicology explained already in 1980: “We know that ingesting these things is probably not good for you. At the same time, we should not go shooting our mouths off and scaring everyone.”¹⁰ Researchers and doctors could say little with certainty about the connection between diseases and exposure to toxins in everyday life. This scientific conundrum and the common dismissal of women’s suffering by many mainstream medical practitioners often drove patients to alternative treatments. In the midst of an evolving culture of self-diagnosis, rehabilitative self-care, and “medicalization,” they managed their own health, hoping for a cure but often accepting the assurance of palliative treatments.¹¹ One common approach was visiting a scientifically trained clinical ecologist, who, while not a physician, attempted to programmatically pinpoint the particular toxins that were causing pain. Others relied on less empirically inclined pseudo-scientific healers who prescribed natural remedies and daily prophylactic practices—affective solutions that might make a patient feel better by doing them but would not actually remedy their disorder, presaging the era of mainstream consumer wellness culture that is as much about feeling well as it is about physical health.¹²

Whether recognized as a diagnosable disorder by the medical establishment or a manifestation of a psychological condition, MCS and other manifestations of modern toxic culture demonstrated both the power and the failure of productive victimization in addressing less visibly material threats, particularly for women. Unlike Nimby protests that could stop or relocate a dangerous project, the threats from everyday products were ubiquitous, invisible, and unstoppable unless one simply dropped out of modern society and gave up the hard-won privilege of suburban living. The medical profession’s categorization of MCS or EI as a form of affluenza suggested that these maladies were manifestations of privilege.¹³ Journalist Lisa Jones Townsel quoted a family doctor as saying, “If you’re poor, you simply can’t afford to have Multiple Chemical Sensitivity syndrome.” He added, “Typically, they’re well off enough that they can afford to drop out, if they’re allergic to their entire environment.”¹⁴ Despite their otherwise comfortable lives, many privileged people with access to health care and various palliatives lived in the invisible prison described by MCS victim Evelyn Todd as “symbolic of life with MCS—inside a drab room but with attractive, enticing possibilities outside because there are bars.”¹⁵

This was the situation that Carol Johnson (played by Julianne Moore) faced in Todd Haynes’s critically acclaimed 1995 film, Safe. Carol is a suburban housewife struggling with environmental illness, shown in the film to be a suburban disease of modern origin. Carol’s condition cannot be cured or remediated through collective action to eliminate the toxins that surround and destroy her body. She tries to survive everyday life as the very things that make her domestic duties easier and give her self-esteem erode her health. Deodorant sprays, dry-cleaning chemicals, car exhaust, and hair salon treatments bombard her body, causing bloody noses, lack of appetite, and overall lethargy. Carol eventually comes to believe she has a malady in which “certain people’s natural tolerance to everyday substances is breaking down due to chemical exposure.” This revelation causes her to reconsider her comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle and eventually to consult lay experts who recommend a desert oasis where she can live nearly toxin-free. Like many real sufferers, Carol is a woman victimized by the very home constructed to be a refuge. For her, what causes pain and distress is not domestic abuse or the “second shift” of domestic labor but her home, a venue for ongoing toxic exposure that she must use her class and race privilege to escape—an option not available to many others exposed to noxious chemicals in their homes.

The news stories, popular culture representations, and medical and lay literature on MCS and EI normalized the idea of multiple environmental threats as expected parts of suburban living, the toll paid to gain other kinds of cultural and spatial power. Beyond reproducing the notion of silent, deadly suburban hazards, these texts presented methods of amelioration that provided hope of survival in a toxic suburban world. Although these hidden toxins were largely beyond the reach of material power, suburbanites discovered and cultivated the affective solutions they found in popular culture narratives and the experiences of victims of contamination and toxicity available in print and on television and film. These narratives showed suburban characters developing tactics to evade, belittle, or make peace with invisible toxic threats, tactics in service of “being” suburban through the embrace of a consumer culture of comfort and convenience. The “incredible shrinking woman,” Pat Kramer, actually grows back to normal size because of exposure to cleaners, while in White Noise, DeLillo creates a nihilistic world where everyone has a vague malady of indeterminate origin mitigated only by the continuous rehearsal of response to a catastrophic disaster—essentially getting used to being endangered. Alternatively, the main character of Safe, Carol Johnson, uses her privilege to escape to the quarantined environs of the Wrenwood Center.

The emergence of MCS and EI stood as an eerie parallel to the immediate postwar period, when the “traditionally” gendered suburban home was supposed to contain social change and produce healthy citizens largely through the labor of wives and mothers, even as it was often a space of physical danger and emotional distress for them.¹⁶ By the 1980s, the home was also endangering the women tasked with managing it through the products and devices invented to ease their household workload, much as earlier domestic technologies had ironically made that work harder.¹⁷ Although MCS and EI did not afflict only women, it was mostly suburban women who emerged as victims of these conditions, and as heroes, in narratives of survival. Just as Lois Gibbs started her activism as a mom who advocated for change in response to Love Canal, victims of toxic America like Susan Abod and Bonnye L. Mathews, as well as their fictional counterparts Pat Kramer and Carol Johnson, gave voice to the gendered peril of suburban chemical exposure.

These characters and real-world sufferers of MCS and EI understood “that modernity could no longer automatically be associated with health; in fact, many felt the opposite was true.”¹⁸ Given that reality, suburbanites managed these threats through personal behavior and consumer choices, sometimes eschewing institutional or mainstream medical solutions to toxic threats, while at other times finding themselves rejected by doctors and psychologists. Ultimately, these tactics, like Nimbyism, highlighted and reinforced the inequalities of environmental hazard in twentieth-century America, where suburban privilege meant access to help, be it in the form of doctors, healers, or new products to mitigate toxic exposure.

Nightmare in Niagara

By the 1970s, Love Canal, New York, was a typical working-class suburban community of homeowners and families. Mother-turned–environmental activist Lois Gibbs said of living in Love Canal in that era, “With lots of trees and children playing outside, I thought it would be a peaceful, safe place to raise my family.”¹⁹ Yet, beginning in 1976, residents of this development near Niagara Falls experienced an usually high rate of illnesses, some of them very unusual.²⁰ Leukemia, birth defects, miscarriages, and mental impairment plagued the town. Responding to pressure from residents, New York State health commissioner Robert Whalen initiated an investigation that found “an extremely serious threat and danger to the health and safety of those living near [the town].”²¹ As the investigation continued, the cause of the crisis was found: the town was constructed on an industrial dumpsite once owned by the Hooker Chemical Corporation. The company had haphazardly buried its toxic waste and paved over it. Hooker subsequently sold the land for one dollar to the town, which then constructed a school on the site. For the following twenty years, the waste leeched dozens of chemicals into the water supply, including the school’s drinking water.²² Time described the unfolding disaster as a series of “harrowing tales of noxious odors leaking into homes, of sinister-colored sludge seeping into basements, of children playing in potholes of pollutants and, worst of all, of abnormally high rates of miscarriages and birth defects, of nerve, respiratory, liver and kidney disorders and of assorted cancers among people of Love Canal.”²³ Ultimately, Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal Homeowners Association, the news media, and cultural representations of the tragedy made “Love Canal” synonymous with residential toxic waste and initiated a broader investigation into the thousands of chemical waste sites across the United States.

Between the discovery of the waste in 1978 and President Jimmy Carter’s signing of the Superfund bill into law in 1980, visceral imagery and heartbreaking stories of loss in the news coverage of Love Canal quickly raised suburbanites’ consciousness as to the dangers from chemical toxins in their local environment. On August 21, 1978, Newsweek described the disturbing scene of daily life in Love Canal: “Everything seemed fine until the mid-1970s, when heavy rains began flushing out the chemicals. Suddenly a stench was everywhere. Trees turned black. Children would throw rocks against the pavement and watch them ignite and flash bright colors. Dogs sniffing in the landfill developed nose lesions that never healed. And when children ran across the site, the oozing slime burned holes in their sneakers.”²⁴ Ominously, unlike the danger posed by a new public project whose possible hazards seemed clear, whatever lay buried beneath Love Canal was nearly undetectable. Love Canal resident Walter Mikula noted, “You try to forget what’s in the ground, in the air, in your home. But you can’t. You can’t put it out of your mind for a minute.”²⁵ Lying dormant and leaking slowly into the ground and water, “today’s toxins act more insidiously. They are invisible and often scarcely detectable.”²⁶ The school, homes, and the canal itself all showed dangerous levels of more than eighty chemicals that could lead to abnormally high rates of disease. Exposure to buried toxic waste turned a quaint suburban community into a postapocalyptic hellscape, undermining a key tenet of suburban privilege: to live without fear of environmental danger.

Aired in 1982, the CBS made-for-TV movie Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal portrayed everyday threats posed by toxic waste and the actions taken by a committed, local citizenry to protect themselves.²⁷ Advertised as a film about the “American Dream, undone by modern technology,” it focused on the Gibbs family as they discover the cause of son Michael’s many maladies.²⁸ His mother, Lois, reluctantly becomes an activist working to organize her neighbors to protest the do-nothing attitude of school and town administrators. In the film, she says that she is not a radical. Rather, “all I want is to be safe and healthy. All I want is for my kids to be safe and healthy. I don’t want to be dumb anymore.” In trying to protect herself and her family by tirelessly lobbying the federal government to get involved, she motivates her neighbors—who wonder, “Where am I supposed to sleep when my own house is killing me? Where am I supposed to go?” The film fused multiple and overlapping news media narratives into a single, two-hour movie that dramatized both the actual damage done to local residents and the sense not only of real fear of being exposed to dangerous, invisible chemicals but of losing power over one’s local community.²⁹

Figure 2.1. A house on 99th Street in Love Canal, New York, on August 4, 1978, built over a toxic waste dump. The sign heralds the emergence of toxic suburbia. AP Photo / TK

Yet, Love Canal was only the tip of a toxic iceberg that became a growing problem of suburban development.30 As an Environmental Protection Agency administrator noted in 1980, “We just don’t know how many potential Love Canals there are.”³¹ That same year, Julius Richmond, the US surgeon general, predicted that “throughout the 1980s the nation will confront a series of environmental emergencies” posed by toxic chemicals that “are adding to the disease burden in a significant, although as yet not precisely defined, way.”³² The two federal officials proved correct as thousands of sites were identified and further environmental and human devastation emerged. Also in 1980, journalist Ed Magnuson identified three communities confronting serious problems resulting from toxic time bombs: Elizabeth, New Jersey; Seymour, Indiana; and Montague, Michigan. A toxic fire raged in Elizabeth following a chemical explosion, and Montague residents suffered a fate similar to that in Love Canal as 20 billion gallons of groundwater was contaminated with waste, also from the Hooker Company. In “Hazards of a Toxic Wasteland,” reporter Natalie Angler chronicled industrial dangers around the world though her article focused on the United States.³³ Environmental threats need not entail a huge accident, she explained; secondary disasters that evolve slowly could also contaminate air and drinking water, often without notice until people became sick. One cause of such hazards was that nearly 90 percent of waste in 1984 was dumped into the most conveniently located “rivers, inadequate landfills, abandoned mine shafts, old missile silos, swamps, and fields.” As Angler explained, “The full effects of these gradual seepages may not be felt for ten to fifteen years, the time it takes for some cancers to be recognized.”³⁴ Dumping sites like these, once located in urban outskirts and often believed to safely store toxic waste, became suburban problems as populations grew and development sprawled, leading to “liquid wastes flooding yards, living rooms and the elementary school grounds.”³⁵

Although the Superfund legislation was designed to fund the cleanup of these sites, its passage and implementation magnified fear of toxins. The fault lay in part with the failure of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use the funds to quickly begin cleaning up designated toxic sites. One resident of Love Canal argued that the “EPA was as a dependable as a wet noodle” while he waited for the cleanup of his community so he could return home.³⁶ By early 1983, three years after the fund’s creation, the EPA had cleaned up only 5 of the 418 sites it saw as most dangerous, designated “ticking time bombs.”³⁷ In cases like Love Canal, residents packed up and abandoned their town or neighborhood rather than risking their health by returning, or relying on the government to clean up the chemical mess.³⁸ The advent of Superfund also meant that the location and severity of toxic exposure was public information, vetted government data that further spurred homeowners’ environmental fears. In 1979, as the EPA came to grips with the crisis, it was not sure just how many sites there were or how dangerous they might be.³⁹ By 1982, however, the agency had detailed lists of sites, toxins, and a rating of their dangers all made accessible to the public. Still, even though the EPA reported in 1989 that Superfund sites were not nearly as dangerous as believed, the sheer number of the sites affirmed that toxic-chemical danger was apparent in thousands of communities and might be invisibly lurking in many others, giving credence to fears of invisible exposure and contamination.⁴⁰

Death Made in a Laboratory

Like the tragedy at Love Canal and narratives about it in the news and popular culture, other toxic discourses in literature and film vividly portrayed the dangers that man-made chemicals posed to what was believed to be a pristine suburban environment.⁴¹ Don DeLillo’s provocative work of high-minded literature White Noise is an award-winning novel, and The Incredible Shrinking Woman starring Lily Tomlin is a mainstream popcorn movie. Despite differences in purpose and audience, both the novel and the movie tackled toxic aspects of modern suburban life and signified the cultural power and familiarity of these threats in post–Love Canal America. Their very existence and popularity made clear that setting stories of toxic exposure in middle-class suburbs was not unusual or unexpected. Further, in telling their stories, they both demonstrated the boundaries and conundrums of suburban privilege in this new age of environmental endangerment. Though constantly exposed to dangerous chemicals in everyday consumer products, their characters do not leave their comfortable environs nor combat these threats in the Nimby manner analyzed in the previous chapter. Instead, they make peace with their chemical exposure while trying not to relinquish other suburban privileges.

White Noise is the story of “Hitler Studies” professor Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and their children in the suburban town of Glassboro. They live “at the end of a quiet street in what was once a wooded area with deep ravines,” suggesting a familiar and seemingly bucolic setting slowly encroached upon by postwar suburban development.⁴² In that setting, the book chronicles the events leading up to, during, and following an “airborne toxic event,” the result of an accident involving a train carrying Nyodene D, a noxious chemical with unknown effects on humans. Throughout the novel, the characters contemplate the hazards of contact with Nyodene D, and these thoughts raise questions about other, more mundane chemicals like those in sugar-free gum and all-weather plastic lawn chairs. In this way, the characters consider their tenuous existence in a seemingly safe suburb as they sense and see danger nearly everywhere as the continuous white noise of their otherwise comfortable lives.⁴³ Through the depiction of hazards hidden in quotidian products like toothpaste and hairspray and of a toxic industrial accident, DeLillo portrayed a suburban environment under siege.⁴⁴

The source of enduring fear was not only actual contamination from toxic chemicals but the possibility, the near certainty, of such contamination, the likelihood that everyday objects were a threat to health, a thousand lurking environmental threats becoming the noxious white noise in the background of suburban life vaguely seen or heard but assuredly experienced and felt. Jack and Babette constantly talk about how death is all around them, yet they can never pinpoint just what will cause it or when they will actually die:

“What if death is nothing but sound?”

“Electrical noise.”

“You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.”

“Uniform, white.”

“Sometimes it sweeps over me,” she said. “Sometimes it insinuates itself into my mind, little by little. I try to talk to it. ‘Not now, Death.’ ”⁴⁵

While acknowledging the futility of seeking out the source of their endangerment, Jack and Babette try to become comfortable with the pervasive hazards in their lives. Babette is attempting to quit smoking by chewing sugarless gum. When she learns that the sugar substitute in the gum causes cancer in lab rats, Babette realizes that without the gum she will either not be able to quit smoking or gain more weight, but that continuing to chew the gum may kill her.⁴⁶ Similarly, Jack’s son matter-of-factly informs him that “when plastic furniture burns, you get cyanide poisoning,” and also that there is going to be plane crash footage on the news.⁴⁷ From spectacular to mundane hazards, each character senses and articulates an ongoing sense of dread and futility in the face of inevitable toxic exposure.

In response to the white noise of death surrounding them, DeLillo’s characters are presented with limited choices that stave off immediate demise but ultimately create more anxiety. One of those options is a drug called Dylar made by a pharmaceutical company capitalizing on this persistent sense of dread. Rather than cleansing the body or the environment of dangerous chemicals, it works psychotropically to remove the fear of death and essentially return its users to a prior mode of existence, before catastrophes like Love Canal and Three Mile Island and the pervasive sense of environmental danger that came with them. In the context of the neighborhood of fear, then, DeLillo imagines an affective salve for its victims by creating a way to access the peaceful state of mind of the postwar suburbs. Dylar is deemed too dangerous and is not made commercially available, yet it can be procured, for a price. To the extent that class privilege provides access to this affective solution unreachable for others, Dylar is reminiscent of palliatives for afflictions like environmental illness. DeLillo’s deployment of Dylar as a curative to everyday toxic exposure serves to further the idea that the suburban home and family were in constant danger and were left to leverage what suburban privilege remained in order to cope. He shows how diet soda additives or a chemical spill in the middle of town compromise the same expectation to be free of environmental worry. In doing so, he positions Dylar as a kind of ingestible nostalgia tablet that tricks users into believing they are safe. Just as nostalgia sugarcoats the past, Dylar masks the real threats endangering someone who takes it.

DeLillo imagines coping with the ever-present sense of danger and death in another way, as well: through something called Simuvac, short for “simulated evacuation.” A Simuvac official explains that “the more we rehearse disaster, the safer we’ll feel from the real thing.”⁴⁸ This constant rehearsal reinforces the sense of imminent local disaster, making catastrophe seem a likely, even perfunctory part of suburban living. In 1980s North America, suburban towns and municipal authorities initiated drills like Simuvac to prepare for disaster and, to some degree, make peace with its inevitability. In 1983, Rockville, Maryland, simulated an accident incredibly similar to the one in White Noise.⁴⁹ In their rehearsal, a train hit a school bus, releasing toxic acid from a railroad tank car. At the conclusion of the drill, it was clear to officials they were not sufficiently prepared and would need to practice more. Mimicking Cold War–era duck-and-cover and civil defense drills, White Noise’s Simuvac and its real-world counterparts highlighted the encroaching sense that suburbs required a sense of order and discipline so residents could at least feel safe, a confidence achievable through predictable drills that would increase residents’ comfort with existential danger though they might do little to protect them.

Yet, in DeLillo’s novel, despite their “expertise” and continuing simulation practice, Simuvac coordinators and town officials are basically incompetent. “Remarks existed in a state of permanent flotation,” Jack says. “No one thing was either more or less plausible than any other thing.”⁵⁰ Echoing the confusion and poor communications following the accident at Three Mile Island, Simuvac’s decisions are tainted by a sense that no one really knows what to do but that something must be done to quell panic. DeLillo identifies both the failure of Simuvac and the airborne toxic event as man-made disasters. He writes of the black cloud of Nyodene D, “This was death made in a laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a simple primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to our control. Our helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of a man-made event.” The toxins in the air are made by corporations, presumably for some consumer benefit, but ultimately endanger them. Similarly, the government’s Simuvac rehearsal and its incompetent response to an actual accident escalate the danger. Together, this combination creates a toxic natural and cultural environment that can kill people directly through chemical exposure while also eroding their sense of safety. Ultimately, White Noise contributed to the growing sense that man-made disasters were becoming a naturalized, expected risk of middle-class suburban life for which there might be no defense except ignorance or acceptance.

At the heart of White Noise is a fundamental lack of trust in the federal government and corporations to protect citizens and safely transport volatile toxins or to produce consumer goods that pose no harm. This distrust and the evidence of failure to prevent toxic exposure were also central to a class of exploitation films that took poisonous America for granted as the country continued to grapple with transportation and storage of noxious waste.⁵¹ Among them were those made by the independent studio Troma Entertainment. The studio produced two quintessential examples of this genre in Class of Nuke ’Em High and The Toxic Avenger, which were lurid, didactic treatments of the toxic suburb in the mid-1980s.⁵² Set in Tromaville, known as the toxic waste capital of the world, both films are what Vincent Canby called “satiric comic-horror films of stomach-turning grossness and exhilarating tackiness” that detail what happens when radioactive nuclear waste contaminates the local population.⁵³ Viewers are treated to rotting and burned flesh, green sludge pulsating from school water fountains, and characters with human features grotesquely misshaped by exposure to industrial waste.

In Nuke ’Em High, Tromaville High School stands in the shadow of the town’s nuclear plant as arrogant and greedy plant operators, not unlike those in The China Syndrome, allow waste to seep into the school’s water supply. The polluted water transforms average student Warren into a muscle-bound freak, like the Incredible Hulk. In his new form, Warren battles a demon in the school’s boiler room, saving his girlfriend, Chrissy, from the monster and the Cretins, honor students transformed by the waste into a vicious gang. The Toxic Avenger tells a similar story about Melvin, a pipsqueak from central casting, who tries to kill himself by jumping out a window. Instead, he lands in a truck full of nuclear waste carelessly left outside the school. The waste transforms him into a hideous mutant, the Toxic Avenger, who uses his superhuman strength to fight crime on the streets of Tromaville.

White Noise and these two films take as their primary setting an everyday American suburb where toxic waste, hazmat suits, and chemical exposure were seemingly appropriate parts of a suburban landscape under siege from dangerous pollutants. At the time these fictional works appeared, homeowners and local governments were battling the federal government over the transport and storage of nuclear and other kinds of waste. As a result of the expanding knowledge about toxic America, the US Energy Department encountered “a wall of opposition from state governments and citizens groups all saying basically the same thing: ‘Not in my back yard,’ ” as the government looked to create the first high-level radioactive dump.⁵⁴ To state officials and residents, a nuclear waste dump provoked “twentieth century anxiety” about a “killing ground” where 90 percent of toxic waste was disposed of improperly in 1984.⁵⁵ By 1987, none of the lower forty-eight states were willing to host the waste site.⁵⁶ Two years later, the federal government selected Yucca Mountain, in a remote area of Nevada, as the site given the small nearby populations and lack of local opposition.⁵⁷ Illegal dumping formed an even more pernicious problem as economic considerations proved more powerful than environmental ones.⁵⁸ In a documentary aired, as it happened, on the second day of the TMI accident in 1979, ABC News found more than two hundred contaminated water wells in New Jersey that were the result of illegal dumping practices across the state.⁵⁹ By the 1990s, citizens not only believed they would be endangered but saw that, as cultural representations, news media reports, and government actions strongly suggested, “it can happen here.”⁶⁰

As with White Noise’s “death made in a laboratory” and the toxic foundation of Tromaville, The Incredible Shrinking Woman portrays the effects of the toxicity of everyday suburban life on the household itself. As Patricia “Pat” Kramer (Lily Tomlin) walks out of her local grocery store with her two unruly children in tow, she is accosted by a film crew. They are making a commercial for Cheese Tease, cheddar cheese in a spray can. They ask her to honestly assess the product while their camera is rolling. Like everyone else, she hates the synthetic cheese “product.” Then, as they drive home, one of her kids accidentally unleashes an aerosol spray, nearly choking everyone in the car. Not long after her chemical exposure in the car, Pat and her advertising executive husband, Vance Kramer (Charles Grodin), go to bed and begin to make love as the camera pans away from them and across the room, revealing some fifty aerosol cans—hair spray, air freshener, spray starch, and the like. Tomlin’s voiceover follows this sequence, “There I was, safe in the belief that nothing unusual ever happens in Tasty Meadows,” thus signaling the broader shift from understanding suburban living as safe and boring to a dangerous undertaking.

The next morning, Pat begins to shrink, eventually becoming the size of a Barbie doll. She and Vance immediately go to doctors who cannot figure out what is wrong. Like the sufferers of MCS and EI, Pat ends up visiting “experts” outside the mainstream medical establishment, including the Kleinman Institute for the Study of Unexplained Phenomena, whose motto is “Science is Truth Found Out.” The audience learns that the institute’s benefactors are corporate CEOs who plan to shrink the world while developing a monopoly on the only antidote, which they will make from an extract of Pat’s blood. The Kleinman Institute’s researchers tell Pat that her shrinkage is the result of a combination of “flu shot, tap water, the glue, the perfume, talcum powder, bubble bath, hair conditioner, setting lotion, mouth wash, hair spray, breath spray, feminine hygiene spray, deodorant, toothpaste, detergent, eye drops, nose drops, hair coloring, diet soda, birth control pills, and smog, set off by an imbalance already present in your system.” That explanation reinforces the compromise at the heart of suburban living. To enjoy its conveniences, the family, particularly homemakers like Pat, are exposed to an increasing number of chemicals and toxins. Pat’s diagnosis also suggests the ways in which EI and MCS make sense of the causes of suburban women’s pain as coming from toxic overload, especially when mainstream medicine can’t or won’t help.⁶¹

In this iteration of the danger posed by chemicals, they render Pat unable to perform any of her daily duties for her family. In a disturbing sequence, Pat dons a sexy outfit and climbs into bed with her full-sized husband. Luckily for the audience, Vance moves and manages to eject Pat onto the floor, thereby sparing the audience the vision of a six-inch woman attempting to have sex with a regular-sized man. Once she becomes tiny, Pat is also unable to control her children or manage her household as she can no longer effectively cook or clean or keep her children from misbehaving. Whereas the chemicals at fault were promoted as assisting overburdened suburban housewives who want to do domestic labor more efficiently and maintain their sex appeal for breadwinner husbands, the film argues they actually endanger the “traditional” family; or, as one Love Canal resident put it, “It’s as if we’re all mutants now.”⁶² Beyond promoting a continuing sense of toxic fear, the film sounded the alarm that suburban family culture was also under siege from a toxic environment.

Still, even though the movie’s ubiquitous sprays and cleaners are dangerous tools that undermine family relationships and demean women’s work in the home, exposure to them also returns Pat to regular size. Like the characters in White Noise, Pat does not leave her comfortable suburban home or eliminate chemicals from her life. Instead, she finds a way to make toxins work for her, and in this way, the film offers another articulation of technological utopianism, in which the home is imagined as rehabilitative in response to and then because of technological progress. As analyzed further in chapter 4, however, the crisis of the family and fears about proper parenting continued to be part of the neighborhood of fear as debates raged about the suburban home’s moral environment in response to the toxic threats from popular culture.

Together, the news coverage of Love Canal and toxic America raised environmental consciousness as narratives of vulnerability reverberated in US culture. White Noise, the Troma films, and The Incredible Shrinking Woman made clear the existence and consequences of invisible toxic chemicals in what were otherwise considered safe suburban spaces. Like public projects such as nuclear power plants, these less visible threats called into question the expected privilege of suburban communities to live without fear of contamination from toxic chemicals. These narratives also suggested ways for coping with those dangers while retaining other benefits of suburban living. They posited affective solutions to the material issue of toxic exposure by providing a way to make peace with that danger through rehearsal, ignorance, or even embrace of the toxins, as when Pat Kramer uses the same chemicals that shrunk her to return to her nostalgic vision of domestic normalcy. The narratives created the context for the emergence of new afflictions later in the twentieth century—multiple chemical sensitivity and environmental illness—and middle-class methods for coping with their effects.

Home Unsafe Home

As a product of the rising awareness of “toxic America” and the “chemicals all around us,” a general fear emerged of products, sprays, and even “sick buildings,” a sense of dread organized and understood through the labels “multiple chemical sensitivity” and “environmental illness.” Victims of these maladies, and the lay experts who studied them, promoted a sense of broad-based environmental hazard that could be explained only by chemical or toxic overload brought on by modern life. These articulations of new afflictions helped privileged people make sense of their illnesses at a time when mainstream medicine and the law found they suffered from no diagnosable disease. It was not that the headaches, fatigue, or joint pain did not exist for the sufferer, but rather that the medical establishment did not recognize these symptoms as a disease with clear causes, effects, and treatments. Instead, unlicensed experts and sufferers themselves dealt with painful symptoms by leveraging class and race privilege to access alternative treatments in ways that challenged the medical establishment while producing “scientific” frameworks through self-help manuals and other guides to EI and MCS.⁶³

Nearly every account of MCS and EI found in news media accounts, self-help guides, and memoirs of sufferers detailed the ways in which innocuous, everyday things in the home were actually toxic, leading to what one sufferer called a new “housing crisis.”⁶⁴ In a 1990 New York Times report on these sicknesses, journalist Robert Reinhold described one such sufferer: “Sitting on her floor, she seemed normal. But nearly everything in modern life can almost instantly disable the forty-one-year-old Oregonian. A whiff of kerosene fumes, formaldehyde on a new garment, perfume, roach spray, even a dose of electromagnetic waves from overhead power lines or an elevator, can cause a massive allergiclike reaction.”⁶⁵ Earlier that year, columnist Jean Marbella of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch lamented all of the things that make a home dangerous: “Old cans of paint. Air fresheners. Paneling. Clothes fresh from the dry cleaners. Even hot showers. Ah, home unsafe home.”⁶⁶ The Philadelphia Inquirer article “Inside Pollutants May Be Riskier than Outside Ones” explained: “When the environmental movement started more than two decades ago, most people associated toxic chemicals with soot-chugging smokestacks or sludge-filled dump sites. No one gave carpets a second thought. Well, things have changed. A growing body of evidence suggests that dozens of seemingly benign products found in and around the home, the living room rug included, are daily churning out their own stream of toxic fumes and chemicals.”⁶⁷ Whether skeptical or supportive, mainstream news reports revealed that more and more people felt sick and found the causes to be common things that were supposed to provide comfort, convenience, and safety, particularly in the consumerist haven of the middle-class suburban home.

In addition to the news reporting on MCS and EI, the memoirs and personal stories of struggle gave evidence of the hidden dangers of the consumerism of suburban privilege. As sociologists of medicine Steve Kroll-Smith and H. Hugh Floyd observed in their study of MCS, “If built environments and the products typically found in them are sources of pleasure, comfort, and symbols of success for most of us, for the chemically reactive they are often perilous worlds of debilitating health risks.”⁶⁸ MCS sufferer Bonnye L. Matthews illustrates this position of imperilment and privilege in the guide she authored, Chemical Sensitivity, intended to provide fellow sufferers tips from a real patient struggling with toxic overload and feeling left alone to fend for herself.⁶⁹ Matthews explains how sustained exposure to low levels of chemicals, including many of those seen in White Noise and The Incredible Shrinking Woman, destroyed her life.⁷⁰ She lost her job and was dismissed by doctors and insurance companies when she sought treatment.⁷¹ Matthews’s book is a self-help guide masquerading as a medical text, with long discussions of chemicals and medical terms and designations, intended to demonstrate her scientific rigor in approaching a “disease” dismissed by the medical establishment. More important, Matthews offers a number of ways to cope with rather than cure EI, suggesting a middle path between ignoring the symptoms or leaving society altogether.⁷² She emphasizes a balanced approach because “there are times when the value of doing some particular thing outweighs the result of three to ten days of rough recuperation.” Matthews’s book, like others in this genre, articulated the privilege underlying MCS and EI. More often than not, sufferers chose to sustain exposure to toxins so as to enjoy the spoils of middle-class life, while leveraging their class status to spend money on a battery of alternative treatments. Her prescriptions for coping amounted to actions and behaviors that attempted to mitigate exposure while seeking help from healers, lawyers, support groups, and other individualized services that largely function affectively, services that reflected the broader contemporary shift toward marketplace solutions for social ills, including medical problems.⁷³

The Invisible Prison

Evelyn Todd, a sufferer of multiple chemical sensitivity from the United Kingdom, claims that her 2015 handbook on living with the condition, The Invisible Prison, “is not a medical text,” even though her excessive detail and explanations of her condition intimate that making this a medical text would not actually be useful for discussing this particular malady.⁷⁴ In this guide to coping with MCS, Todd gives advice about how to explain it to friends, families, and doctors, as well as various strategies for surviving in a toxic world.

In detailing her situation, Todd shows how exposure to new products and chemicals as part of her middle-class lifestyle ipso facto must be causing her symptoms. “It is quite obvious chemicals are all around us,” she observes.⁷⁵ In talking about how to deal with MCS, she demonstrates her privilege by explaining costly solutions found outside the health care system, including cleaning one’s home, creating containment zones, and purchasing “natural” remedies and even desert safe havens. Stories like hers demonstrated the power and pitfalls of middle-class suburban status: the causes of sickness come from the trappings of middle-class life, as do the tactics for coping with the sickness.

Like coping guides and memoirs of affliction, Funny, You Don’t Look Sick, a 1995 documentary film shows the contradictions of suburban middle-class privilege for victims of MCS.⁷⁶ The film follows Susan Abod as she struggles with multiple chemical sensitivity. Speaking to an off-screen interviewer, Abod explains that since 1984 she has gotten sick—with fatigue, muscle pain, headaches—every six weeks. After feeling dismissed by her doctor, Abod took the advice of a friend with MCS (who traced the cause of her illness to oven fumes) and visited a clinical ecologist. Feeling validated about her suspicions that dangerous chemicals are attacking her, Abod spends nearly every day visiting doctors, herbalists, chiropractors, clinical ecologists, and other healers, trying things across the spectrum of traditional and alternative medicine. The film shows a written list detailing the things she has tried: “Acupuncture, homeopathy, cranial sacral, chiropractic, Alexander technique, bioenergetics, physical therapy, Chinese herbs, Exercise, resting/pushing through fatigue, Swedish bitters, kinesiology, anti-depressants, antigen shots, visualizations/affirmations, Enzyme Potentiation Desensitization shots.” This list captures the victimization and privilege bound up in EI and MCS. Abod feels marginalized by doctors who do not see her condition as real or diagnosable—a common occurrence for women in the American medical system, and often the case with maladies that present similarly, such as chronic fatigue syndrome.⁷⁷ However, she and other middle-class women ignored or marginalized by their doctors had sufficient time and money to consult other people, who validated their pain and saw them as a patient and not as someone with a psychiatric disorder.

As part of her therapy, Susan Abod adapts her house to be environmentally safer. She has a detox room, where she changes clothes so as not to track dangerous toxins into her living space. Often, she immediately takes a shower after taking off her “contaminated” clothes (those worn outside the house) in order to minimize the spread of chemicals. She also has an “outgas” room, which serves to gradually decrease the amount of volatile chemicals found in new products. New shoes and clothes remain in this room until they are safe, and it is the permanent home of her refrigerator and its toxic emissions. Abod also uses a reading box for reading books and newspapers because, she contends, they carry so many chemical toxins. What is clear by the end of the film is that all of these efforts do not cure her condition or even prevent Abod from feeling sick. Indeed, it seems very little science undergirds her practices, as she constantly exposes herself to the chemicals that make her sick and, despite her efforts, cross-contaminates rooms like a cook who chops vegetables and raw chicken on the same cutting board. In perhaps the ultimate expression of her privilege, Abod is on both Medicaid and food stamps even as she pays for services from multiple healers and lives in her own home, thus eliding the stigma of federal assistance and accessing experts who see her as a legitimate patient who should be rehabilitated.

Still, despite these advantages, Susan Abod cannot move to a new home, not because of the cost but because of the lengthy number of accommodations she requires. Any new home needs to meet all the following conditions: “oil or electric heat, radiators or baseboards (no forced hot air heat), washer and electric dryer in ap[artmen]t, no smokers in building, no carpets, not near highway due to exhaust, no pets.” Though physically disabled and therefore unable to work, Abod still operates with a number of expectations of privilege and safety and pursues them vigorously.

Whether or not Susan Abod’s affliction constituted a diagnosable disease, she was able to suffer from it. She had the modern conveniences that supposedly poisoned her, the consciousness to detect the disease of MCS, and the ability to seek solutions outside traditional medicine offered by practitioners who addressed her, a middle-class suburban white woman, as a legitimate patient. These remedies were not available for many less privileged urban people of color exposed to verified toxins in, say, lead paint or drinking water.⁷⁸

As evidenced by sufferers’ experiences, doctors have largely dismissed MCS and EI as undiagnosable and thereby marked them as psychological or cultural phenomena, or both. For clinicians, it was nearly impossible to draw definitive lines of cause and effect between environmental toxins and weakness, fatigue, or headaches, and thus difficult to classify these conditions as diseases. They also called into question the treatment of chronic illness by those outside the medical establishment, fearing that some patients would miss much-needed treatment for diagnosable illnesses or see traditional medicine and unscientific treatments as equally valid.⁷⁹ In a 1994 report on MCS, the American Council on Science and Health wrote “that false claims related to ‘multiple chemical sensitivity’ and its associated pseudoscientific practices constitute a serious problem in our society.”⁸⁰ Yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, despite long-standing skepticism of women’s experiences of their own bodies, many doctors still viewed MCS and EI sufferers as legitimately in pain and requiring some kind of treatment. As psychiatrist and EI expert Harold Staudenmayer put it, the ethic of doing no harm requires doctors to treat these patients because they “are easy prey for charlatans, manipulators, and social parasites who offer diagnostic tests which have never been scientifically validated and phantom treatment couched in pseudo-scientific rhetoric.”⁸¹ This stance meant, then, that many doctors, in treating these disorders as psychosomatic or psychiatric, drove patients to seek alternative solutions most of which were available only to the privileged and that exploited both the sufferer’s desire to feel well and their ability to pay for treatment.⁸²

Are you allergic to the 20th century?

Embedded in the 1990s suburban landscape of gated communities and big-screen televisions, the movie Safe (1995) tells the story of housewife Carol Johnson’s struggle with MCS. Over the film’s first fifteen minutes, she moves effortlessly from home to strip mall to school and the gym while the music and camera give the audience a sense of unease as they wait for something to happen. What follows is not an event or action but a series of implications. We see Carol listen to a millennialist Christian radio DJ preach about the end times as the camera focuses on truck exhaust blowing directly at her car, leading her to cough and become woozy. As Carol starts to feel more and more ill, she also begins noticing the unavoidable prevalence of toxins in her world, such as those in her salon’s hair treatment or her husband’s deodorant. With her consciousness raised about chemical exposure, she spies a sign at the gym as she leaves her aerobics class:

Do you smell FUMES?

• Are you allergic to the 20th century?
• Do you have trouble breathing?
• Is your drinking water pure?
• Do you suffer from skin irritations?
• Are you always tired?

The ad seems to articulate her problems exactly, and, in contrast to the way her doctor visits end, she feels validated about her symptoms and their triggers in everyday life.

The Wrenwood Center representative who posted the sign tells Carol that her malady is real, not psychosomatic. According to the center’s experts, she is suffering from environmental illness and needs to live in a “toxic free zone” in order to avoid crossing her “total load” for chemicals. The center, of course, houses just this kind of space. Cars are not even allowed to drop off new residents at the main office. At group meetings, patients repeat, “We are one with the power that created us. We are safe. And all is well in our world,” reaffirming the connection between emotional status, mental outlook, and physical health seen in other contemporary texts about toxic exposure. The center’s leader, Peter Dunning, argues that receding from the material world of suburban comfort will cleanse the body and restore the immune system; hence the necessity of living in the Wrenwood Center. For Peter and Carol, solutions are individual, not systemic, even if the causes are. She says, “It is up to the individual and it takes time.” Her belief that “I made myself sick” leads her to retreat into a bunker at Wrenwood, further signaling the cultural and political shift toward an ethic of individualism, particularly for privileged suburbanites, that locates power to combat social ills in market solutions enacted by consumers.⁸³

Safe represents the ascendant environmental fears of suburbanites in the 1990s. They had already seen environmental damage to the natural landscape and those who inhabited it, and had come to believe toxins lurked everywhere, even in the products used to make their lives easier and better. Like Carol Johnson, they were not able to make Nimby protests or deploy other forms of provincial power to materially eliminate a potential hazard. Instead, they relied on affective salves that provided a measure of emotional resolution—a sense of safety or an acquiescence to constant hazard through prophylactic practices. In this way, many suburbanites, unlike Carol but like the real sufferers of MCS and EI, chose to remain in their homes as part of a trade-off. They sought to mitigate open-ended exposure to dangerous chemicals and toxins because to avoid them would have meant rejecting the consumerism and convenience at the center of suburban life at the end of the twentieth century.

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The emergence of toxic America with the discovery at Love Canal in the late 1970s was part of a new era of suburban environmental endangerment in which invisible toxins silently lurked beneath the surface of things, becoming visible only in the diseases and maladies of local residents exposed to these dangerous chemicals. After Love Canal, the news media and the EPA provided a near constant stream of identifications of new toxic sites in what ABC News called “The Killing Ground” in 1979. At the same time, popular culture narratives extended and expanded the sense of fear; at the same time, they provided modes of amelioration that helped possible victims and real sufferers cope with their toxic exposure while attempting to maintain suburban privilege and a nostalgic vision of domestic life.⁸⁴

As in the reactions to threats from public projects, suburbanites leveraged race and class positions to fashion material and affective responses to chemical exposure. Sufferers of multiple chemical sensitivity and environmental illness posited themselves as victims requiring specialized, individual attention, as opposed to the treatment of toxic exposure in so-called “sacrifice zones” where entire communities could not escape toxic exposure.⁸⁵ In the cases of MCS and EI, the medical establishment’s dismissal and marginalization of sufferers led them to seek out nonscientific, usually affective solutions to their illnesses available only to people of means. For one chemical refugee, Richard Pressinger, “Life is a beach,” the Washington Post reported. “A clean, chemical-free beach. Pressinger, 33, retreats periodically to the shoreline sands of this Atlantic Coast community in a life-preserving effort to protect his health from airborne pesticides and synthetic chemicals.”⁸⁶ In other cases, like that of Susan Abod, sufferers remained in their homes while seeking numerous kinds of alternative medicines and therapies to cope with their pain, an option that allowed them to maintain the other privileges of suburban status.

The emergence of the culture of affective defense against toxic endangerment was a particularly privileged reaction to hazard and expressed the cognitive dissonance of suburban environmentalism. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw an uninterrupted rise in consumption of material goods that often endangered users and polluted the natural environment, even as recycling became central to “being green” within consumer capitalism. Further, this cultural phenomenon helped normalize nonscientific afflictions as real and in need of treatment while encouraging individuals to seek their own answers using this same market-oriented mindset. Sufferer Bonnye L. Matthews demonstrates this in her handbook for dealing with environmental illnesses. She places medical journal articles alongside speculative, pseudo-scientific texts in order to probe the causes of MCS and detail the threats from all manner of allergens. Such manuals enabled the middle-class obsession with hidden hazards posed by food, water, vaccinations, and many other things in the twenty-first century.

In the late twentieth century, the sense of hidden, lurking, and ubiquitous danger was being woven into the fabric of suburban culture, and fears were not limited to environmental threats. At this same moment, local criminal hazards from burglars and kidnappers emerged as other seemingly invisible but potent threats to suburban privilege, leading suburbanites to see the home not as an invisible prison but as a literal one of their own design.