As a location scout, one of the most dramatic shifts I’ve seen in how a movie location is portrayed on screen in recent years is for The Neighborhood Where All The Houses Look The Same.
From the 1980s through 2010s, tract neighborhoods have been consistently depicted in movies and TV shows as a sort of residential purgatory, where homeowners are cursed to live out a terminally bland existence of repetition and conformity.
My first experience scouting for this was on the movie Revolutionary Road, where the two main characters live in a Levittown-like neighborhood. In fact, my first assignment was to scout the very first Levittown on Long Island, built in the late 1940s as the first mass-produced suburban community.
With a whopping 17,447 cookie-cutter homes built for the original development, everyone was sure I was going to find rows and rows of houses that were exactly the same…but in fact, that turned out not to be the case at all.
I found a few pockets of three or four houses in a row that looked similar…
But in fact, for the vast majority of streets, the houses in Levittown simply looked….totally normal, like your average anywhere USA suburb; similar styles, but highly individualized through renovations and decor changes.
It was my first hint at what I would later realize is a fundamental truth of humanity: we are defined as much by our conformity as our desire to individualize. Yes, we often want the zeitgeist of the moment, but we also seek to make it our own. For example, two homes with the same base unit in Levitton:
In fact, as I’d learn over subsequent years of scouting, there really aren’t neighborhoods where the houses are all literally the same. Typically there are a few main designs that are then inverted and given unique paint jobs and ornamental styling; but from the very start, there is always an understanding that people reject total uniformity.
For decades, the repetitious tract home neighborhood was winkingly used in movies for one of two instant visual cues: either to signify that the homeowner was a vapid conformist with an innate fear of change; or, to imply the homeowner had made all the wrong choices in life to wind up in this suburban hell.
What began to frustrate me though is that the people I’d meet who lived in such homes were neither of these stereotypes. In fact, in nearly every case, they were completely ordinary people who simply wanted the best home they could afford for their family, in a safe neighborhood. And this is what society had available.
And then, at some point over the last few years, it quietly stopped appearing in movies. The last major instances that come to mind are Vivarium (2019) and Don’t Worry Darling (2022), both sci-fi mysteries in which the superficial uniformity hides a more insidious truth.
But I think the days of depicting the owner of such a home in a smarmily negative light has gone away for one simple reason: owning ANY sort of house in 2026 is a literal impossibility for a majority of younger Americans.
It was always a cheap, condescending stereotype; but moreso than ever, it simply doesn’t land. I mean, how can you show a modern audience a neighborhood they can’t afford, and then say, “See? Don’t the people who choose live here suck?”
Filmmaking will always be in part reliant on instant visual signifiers, but this is one I’m glad to see go away. At the end of the day, successful movies need to feel “true” by the audience. And whatever truth exists in residential conformity evidencing a lack of individual spirit, a greater truth overshadows it, one that is more difficult than ever: the fundamental need to put a roof over your head. Who could look down on that?
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