does anybody else get a sense of purgatorial anguish mixed with stagnated comfort while watching sketch cartoons set in suburban locations? this is something I first experienced when I was very young and had a bad flu. this meant I was allowed to stay up late and watch adult swim. what I remember about it was being horrified and intrigued by whichever episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force was on. I've experienced the same sensation on a few occasions since then, and although it's affected my creative process in a few ways, it's always been hard to articulate, so please bear with me.
 
the easiest way I can describe it is a dreadful lack of opportunity associated with characters who have a "home" setting, never leave that home in their narrative due to a lack of need or desire to, and end the narrative with no hope or intention of doing so. absurdity also lies in the creator never implying this message, meaning that there really is "new opportunities" in either the characters, or the plot that binds them.  ATHF is the main show I've gotten this sense from; often the only characters with speaking roles are the three main characters and Carl, and they're responsible for most of the show's dialogue. where it get's odd for me is the setting; they live in what seems to be a community on the outskirts of a major city, but are the only living things ever encountered, aside from the occasional passing plot point. the idea of a community, the fact that these characters are part of a living world, is contrasted with the lack of any other consistent influences, and produces some of this dread. they rarely have a need to leave this place, and seem content in their home.
 
when I watch this show, I get the sense that they're going to be in the same house, bumping heads with each other and sometimes Carl, forever. I associate it with concepts of purgatory now, and used to cast it under the broader idea of eternity. I feel it further reflected in the static of the characters. their unchanging personalities convey an unawareness/acceptance of their circumstances.
 
a show I've also experienced this in, although to a lesser degree, is Beavis and Butthead. they're are more vivacious communal aspects there, meaning that not every episode take place in the same local. but it has the same sense of "small town american dread" for me. there is little going on in any of the characters lives aside from their own interests and motives, interactions arise only out of circumstance and rarely go anywhere. like in any suburbs, there's nothing to do, so the characters do nothing. we're they not comedic shows, I feel the sense would be lost, as more ambitious plot structures may arise. the humor is derived from the characters stupidity, which in turn, I feel, is derived from the same lack of anything resembling stimulation.
 
there are a few movies I can think of that capture this well, and I feel they we're more intentional at it too. Napoleon Dynamite, with it's grey depictions of the American Heartlands, captured it well. much of the humor, I felt, was derived from characters living their lives, only to be interrupted by cultural imports from more lively portions of America (Napoleon's thrift store tapes, Chip's girlfriend.) And although the movie began in the same vaccum as the previously mentioned works, there was a conflict that was eventually resolved, which managed to subdue some of it under a heartwarming coming-of-age-sort-of tale.
 
then there was What's Eating Gilbert Grape, in which Gilbert had no prospects thanks to his family and the quiet nature of the surrounding community. to leave it all behind was one of his motivations, and was accomplished throughout the course of the movie. once again, the dread of living in the middle of nowhere subsides when you have somewhere to go.
 
anyway, there are several other movies I can think of, but I want to have you guys talk at me. is there some thematic concept that I'm describing a specific example of here? does anyone else have any other examples they can think of?
 
sorry for the wall of text

good post, i don't feel the effect the way you describe it but i know what you mean... i wish i could think of some good examples to contribute...

this is part of what makes the concept of a suburban limbo really compelling to me.  it's just like this listless malaise as you wait for something to happen while knowing it won't.  i grew up in the suburbs and they just... went on and on for miles.  literally miles in any direction before you hit something that wasn't a residential neighborhood, even a grocery store.  as a kid, with limited autonomy and no personal transportation, this was insurmountable.  i distinctly remember the feeling that i couldn't get out.  i didn't always want to, but i knew i couldn't.  high walls and such.

i'm trying to think of other examples.  i think daria did something similar to beavis and butthead, but i think it probably focused too heavily on openly satirizing suburban life to be as effective.  a few years back i had the tv on in the background and some movie called dreamland was on.  it wasn't good at all really, but thematically it related to escape in a vacuum of opportunity and evoked a sort of similar sense of isolation as what's eating gilbert grape did.  everything about the environment was familiar, but it also seemed qualitatively different to the extent that it felt like a world apart.  like at the end of the silent hill movie (and maybe games too?) where they try to cross the bridge out of the town and it's just fog.  everything about it is as it should be, but there's some disquieting emptiness that makes it seem disconnected from everything around it.

the original tremors felt the same way.  i haven't seen it in years, but they show up in town at the beginning and you're just kind of wondering where the fuck they are, because there seem to be approx. 10 people living in the town yet businesses still exist and there's a kid there so presumably there are schools.  it was just a bunch of people living in a ditch.  it felt like this strange, insulated limbo world.

more broadly i think i just find the presence of existential ennui in such a familiar context interesting.  there's this sense of fatalism in being so deeply dissatisfied but not bothering to leave because everywhere is the same.  this is probably also where american geography becomes significant; idk where you're from or where you live but america is pretty fucking huge and i think some type of road trip is required to drive this point home, because you can literally drive at high speeds for hours in any direction without perceiving any significant differentiation in your environments.

i also thought your word choice was interesting.  small town america is a particular thing, but it also holds significant symbolic value and as such sort of transcends its definition and becomes a conceptual framework within which people understand the scope and parameters of their own lives.  this, i think, is what makes it so oppressive and difficult to escape.  it's a prison of the mind. . . . . .

I think I have sense of what you are referring to, though I think it is different in suburbia than in small town.  If small-town type is part of what interests you,  may I recommend film Badlands, directed in 1973 by Terrence Malick?   It is movie loosely based on murder spree of Charles Starkweather,  one of the first sensationalized youth killing sprees.  I could say lots about him and that, but you want to know about movie, so let's talk that.
 
Everything about portrayal of small town mid-century Middle America in that movie is underwritten with palpable sense of desperation.  It is not hard to see protagonist's eventual breakout into spree of looting and murdering as violent rejection of the existential despair that naturally saturates 1950's rural Americana when it is stripped bare of the artificial hokeyness typical in media portrayals of that era.  That movie resonated deeply with me, because that aspect of its portrayal of that place felt so true to the life of my experiences of modern midwest small towns, which in many ways have been suspended in time for the decades since the era that movie is meant to portray.
 
This feeling is also present in a few episodes of Twilight Zone, I think, sometimes nearly as intensely. 

watching badlands after writing this
 
though it's the term I've come to associate this particular texture with, small town america seems a bit specific, as the concept, I feel, could be applied to any established mass homestead. the idea of the acid western comes to mind the more I try to analyze this; the west was initially a beacon of hope  for those looking to begin a life for themselves, but when viewed under the modern lens, became a caustic amalgamation of the warped american dream, something to escape from that would kill you over time. when suburban housing tracts began exploding after world war 2, it was a realization of the same dream; a place to live and start a family, all necessities covered. thus, works in this grain encapsulate the boredom and lack of purpose felt by characters at the end of the conflict as well.
 
as a child, I lived in the Cass Corridor of Detroit. my parents we're very protective so I rarely left the house. this probably contributed to my later fascination with isolation and urban decay. I've spent my teens in the surrounding suburbs of Grosse Pointe (which I'm currently trying to make my great escape from thankyouverymuch) and can relate to what thosepeople was getting at. though the Pointes are comparably small, and exist as a pocket snuggled against the frenetic activity of the surrounding Detroit area, I'd call it a "prison of the mind." the aforementioned lack of activity or drive is abundant. my experiences we're painted by the high school that literally everyone says they went to when telling a story like this, community events neutered in all respects that seemed to exist only to keep white fires burning amid the tide of Detroit immigrants, and let's get high lol. without a car I walked around often, and would wind through the confusingly built courts and places, which we're all filled with similarly built houses consisting of quaint features. /rant
 
I've thought of two works that contain this phenomena though in a more specific sense. There's an increpare game which I linked below that allows you to play as a housewife, who does nothing but housewife stuff. this touches on the issue of isolation, only as an effect of gender/social role rather than communal climate (though a housewife in his sense could be a product of the same suburban nothing.) although I feel that what we're discussing is mostly an American product, there are likely similar examples in other cultures. however, what distinguishes this from the broader implications of an isolationists is it's origins through American development, so I'd like some examples (not necessarily through media; cultural phenomena would work too) of a non-American sort, if anyone has the time.
 
the other is Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, which is the most "small town" i can think of. Rant, at the beginning, seems to be a product of the "going nowhere" outlook, and escapes from this town through his own ingenuity. there's an interesting passage towards the beginning about how rural towns are often filled with beautiful people, as the most attractive members of each generation get pregnant early, plunk their family down where they were born, and pool the most desirable genes in one area. as it goes on, the novel veers away from it's focus on the isolation of a community to escapism through technology, which is a trend I think is occluding the suburban absurd. we've established that there's nothing to physically do there, and in an age of digital connection, are trying to examine what happens when those kids instead live their lives in the digital (wink wink.) so, what are some works that reflect this in a digital age/meld the two ideas together?
 
sorry for the wall of text
 
http://www.increpare.com/2010/04/the-terrible-whiteness-of-appalachian-nights/

dubiously relevant but a few years back i went to the screening of a documentary about the evolution of soviet culture through the introduction of western forms of entertainment, and specifically the disco movement during the late 70s/early 80s.  most of it focused on the ground-level movement away from the foundational assumptions of contemporary russian society, but the early part of it seemed to establish the environment as being repressively isolated and bleak.  it was a different, dirtier kind of bleak, and it didn't have have the juxtaposition of hopelessness against (relative) prosperity that you find in a lot of small american towns -- these places looked pretty hopeless.
 
i think there are some strong parallels, though, because their response to the introduction of disco music seemed driven almost entirely by their desperation.  in this sense i think the... thoroughness of soviet culture and the geographic vastness of russia contribute in similar ways as they do here.  these static, grimy urban environments weren't just living spaces; i think eventually their oppressiveness is internalized and afterwards a quiet despair begins to set in.  i remember footage i'm assuming they obtained from old video cameras of people in their homes and some of it read as people just sitting on their couches waiting to die.

one of the short Russian films I got from one of the general threads around here had a similar thread. the cold war era had developmental implications for both countries. I'd like to compare and contrast similar media from both at the time.

i feel you pajamashaw, have always gotten the same feelings and thought i was the only one
 
always reminds me of riding my bike around the neighborhood around sunset, after knocking on all my friends' doors only to find that no one's home. nothing to do and no one to even do nothing with
 
lonely latchkey kid feelings. etc

mellytan i remember that.  i hadn't really considered this in the context of my own neighborhood, because despite what i said about the very real barriers that existed for young children, it wasn't all that bad a place at the time.  there were some woods that were pretty cool and some places you could hide and it was an alright environment. a couple years back tho my girlfriend and i were in town for the holidays and she was kinda curious about where i grew up so we went there and i think it read a lot more like what you mentioned.  it was right around dusk on a brisk day in late november and there was literally nobody in sight in the entire area.  no kids, no adults, no pets.  it was windy and quiet and everything sort of seemed to be dead or dying.  we sat in a playground for a while and then went to see my old house and then went to check out a nearby school that i went to and as we walked around the place, every gate we opened and went through creaked loudly from disuse and, knowing this was absurd even at the time, i mentioned to her it felt like the entire place had just been abandoned since i left.  it felt kind of like those levels in videogames that are set in places like pripyat.

the thing is, it really wasn't like that when i was a kid!  but i had a p. unhappy childhood there, so i remembered it being like that.  i understood this was just me projecting, though, so i thought i was funny that the very day i happened to take her to see what it was like, it somehow seemed to magically transform itself into precisely the desolate setting it was in my memories.

perception is reality as we say in the nayvy
 
is this the real life, is this just fantasy
 
etc

I feel this way RIGHT FUCKING NOW only in my case none of my neighbors want to communicate and I don't really want to interact with them either for the most part. I want to go live in a city or something. Living out here in the middle of fucking nowhere is very much sapping my will and sanity.
 
Video games and internet conversations are waning as a effective measure of mental fitness.
 
One day I might just flip out and just start breaking shit.