“Disneyland With the Death Penalty.” While watching the Duffer Brothers’ newest Netflix series The Boroughs, the title of William Gibson’s infamous article kept coming to my mind. Gibson was writing critically about Singapore in the early 1990s. The idyllic New Mexico retirement community the Duffers imagined in The Boroughs might seem to have little connection with neither Singapore nor Disneyland. But on this show, the devil’s in the architectural details – literally.
In The Boroughs, Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina) moves to the titular retirement village after his wife’s sudden death. The Boroughs is the ultimate lifestyle enclave for seniors, a desert suburbia offering residents plenty of sunshine, Pilates, and easy living. Although Sam starts off determined to hate everything, he quickly bonds with his neighbours.
And then Sam discovers the residents are being preyed upon each night in their sleep by alien creatures.
The reason this reminded me so much of Gibson’s article “Disneyland With the Death Penalty” is the Boroughs itself. Gibson wrote that when he visited Singapore in 1993, he was horrified by how perfectly ordered and pristine the place was. He found the city-state soulless, a nation without originality or any real substance beyond capitalism – essentially, a world built as artificially as a theme park like Disneyland, except without the fun.
Similarly, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard claimed that Disneyland is the perfect example of a hyper-real place. Disneyland’s Main Street offers a picture-perfect, small-town Americana, condensing the nostalgia of childhood fantasy. The retirement community in The Boroughs does the same. It’s an idealised place engineered for seniors – a playland with swimming, afternoon drinks, and Dog Day Afternoon screenings. The homes are single-storey and the lawns manicured. The streets are wide and human-scale. There’s no traffic except for the golf carts. It’s a place without stress or crowds. But also without children or families.
The Boroughs is as hyper-real as Disneyland’s Mainstreet and as soulless as Gibson’s dystopian Singapore. It’s a town without history, without soul, willed into existence from the desert through sheer capitalism and crafted as a perfect replica of southwestern USA suburbia. Heck, even Gibson’s comment that Singapore is “…like an entire country run by Jeffrey Katzenberg…under the motto ‘Be happy or I’ll kill you,’” applies to this place. The Borough’s founder, Blaine Shaw, pretty much tells Sam and his friends to be happy…or else.
And the hyper-real goes even deeper. Residents of the Boroughs tend to develop severe dementia after living in the community over time. Those residents are then sent to live at The Manor. There, the residents (or inmates) are kept in an indoor neighbourhood of fake front porches, artificial streets, and a painted sky. These memory-triggering streetscapes, suburban décor, and faux coffee are part of The Manor’s dementia therapeutics, and based on the principals of compassionate care.
But as Sam discovers when he gets forcibly trapped there, The Manor is an even more insidious level of the hyper-real. If the Boroughs is a hyper-real copy of small-town America, then The Manor is a hyper-real copy of the Boroughs. What’s troubling is that the residents can sense, but never fully understand, why everything around them lacks reality. How can they, when The Manor is an emptier copy of an already empty copy of reality?
The horrors of this series are multiple. There’s the obvious body horror of the alien creatures feeding on the residents. But there’s also the horror of aging – not aging itself, but what comes with it – the powerlessness, infantilising, and gaslighting that Sam and his friends experience every day. At the Boroughs, seniors are removed from public life, sequestered in a perfectly curated ‘lifestyle’ town. At The Manor, the elderly are removed and kept apart from even the other elderly, their decline and eventual deaths disguised behind the promise of care.
But it isn’t all doom and gloom. In this youth-obsessed media world where teenagers are always the chosen ones saving the world, it’s nice to have a series that celebrates senior power. As Sam and his friends struggle to free themselves and their neighbours from the Boroughs, they prove that seniors can be as smart, badass, sexy, and morally grey as any action hero – all while smoking weed, eating good camembert, and comparing their latest surgeries and medication. Give me more of this Grey Rebellion.
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