It’s been 25 months now since we released The End of Suburbia on DVD. Reflecting on the past couple of years, I’m amazed at the success of our little documentary. We’ve sold 25,000 copies, mostly through our own website and a handful of distributors. The End has aired on five TV networks worldwide (none of them in the United States, however). It’s been in customer’s wait-cues at Netflix for weeks at a time. And it’s popped up on people’s top-10 lists, next to films like Fight Club and The Matrix. That’s an awful lot of weight for a little documentary to carry.

The film has become a tool for people in the Peak Oil "movement" to help them create awareness about what is arguably the most important issue of our time. There’s a screening of our documentary somewhere on the planet every day. People have been buying extra copies because they lend out their first DVD and it never comes back. Why is The End of Suburbia so popular on a grass-roots level?

Because reality is disappearing.

I became aware of this last summer. While weeding around the tomato plants in my garden, I became conscious of the fact that it would be very difficult to make a cheeseburger naturally. None of the ingredients come out of the ground at the same time. I could get lettuce in June, onions in July and tomatoes in August - and I’m not even going to begin to tackle how I might get a sesame seed bun and a slice of cheddar on my plate. I mentioned this to someone at an EOS screening and she pointed out that in many ways a cheeseburger is really an industrial artifact. It’s not real.

After thinking about this for a few days, I came to realize that many aspects of our lives are not "real". The most obvious example might be reality television. In case you haven’t figured it out for yourself by now, anyone who knows anything about the television industry will tell you that reality television is not real. The news media? Much of what we call news is sourced from press releases and government propaganda. The US dollar as an instrument of wealth is an illusion. Chat rooms are no substitute for live human interaction. Spirituality is packaged for consumption in the form of organized religion. Suburbia is neither country, nor city; it’s an artifact.

James Howard Kunstler summed this up quite succinctly in an interview that, ironically, inspired The End of Suburbia:

"...virtual reality isn't an adequate substitute for the authentic."

I think that this is the basis for the popularity of The End of Suburbia. Although the documentary expresses the creators’ (Greg and Barry) own personal view of the world, I think that it at least makes a rare attempt at being honest. A review in Permaculture Magazine expressed this sentiment very well:

"In the same way that only your true friend will tell you that your breath smells, this film takes you to one side and tells it like it really is."

Public screenings of documentaries like Outfoxed, Liberty Bound and The End of Suburbia have given people the opportunity to take back the message from the corporate-controlled mainstream media, scrape off the artificially-sweetened sugar coating, and deliver it steaming hot to other folks who live in their neighborhood. As much as the information in the doc shocks viewers, I think the idea that anyone would bother to come right out and say something honestly is just as shocking, and refreshing. There’s a tremendous thirst for any experience that is real.

The good news: Our world is about to get very real, very quickly.

The bad news: Our world is about to get very real, very quickly.

Barry