The cumulative effect of so many outdated items is a feeling of slow suburban putrefaction - their suburb a limbo, trapped between prosperity and poverty. The fact that they have surrounded themselves with products that mainly date back mid-century Detroit,
when the flourishing auto-industry nurtured a burgeoning middle class, at once invokes an unwillingness to renounce a dying view of the suburbs as safe and prosperous, and an inability to stay afloat in socio-economic terms.
Mitchell subtly invokes Jay’s once-middle-class suburb as a space no longer capable of buttressing the gap between the poverty-stricken inner city and its wealthier, more peripheral suburbs.
Revealing that her dreams as a child were all about ‘driv[ing] around with friends in their cars […] along some pretty road, up north maybe,’ Jay stresses that ‘it was never about going anywhere really, it was about having some sort of freedom. Now that we’re old enough, where the hell do we go?’
Her words not only imply resentment about having been shielded from more worldly experiences through artificial suburban boundaries, but also suggest that the meagre social and economic ‘freedoms’ of lower-middle-class adulthood do not yield satisfaction or the promise of betterment.
What is beyond simply cannot be rendered visible. And in this small space, the characters have to keep moving to stay alive, even though there’s no real scope to move up or improve.
At the same time, where Jay and her friends can ‘buy’ access to mobility and, subsequently, to a longer life, the lack of public transportation for their inner-city counterparts is likely to put them face-to-face with the threat that stalks them. 這點也 啊太準了
Yet they cannot escape, and as the creature pursues them, they must accept the falsity of imagined urban-suburban boundaries that had given meaning to their lives.
這點也
和上面兩篇有不同但可見種族和性別交織性的解讀差異（從女性角度解讀stk還是白人女性角度解讀stk可以差天距地耶……