This thesis examines the American dream's deteriorating facade to reveal the failed promises of mid-century American neoliberalism as promoted through the ideology and consumer behaviours of the suburban milieu. Motivated by recent global events and the ongoing influence of the US on Australia's own suburban fantasy, this research interrogates the origins of the contradictory American dream. Central to this are the commodity objects and images that nostalgically perpetuate its permanency and the defining political, economic and cultural shifts of the early 1980s and 1990s. Rather than situate this investigation within the present extremities of global politics and accelerated hyper commodification, I argue that there is much to learn from revisiting the foundations of American neoliberalism if there are to be meaningful ideological shifts now and in the future. This study begins by outlining its methodological framework, establishing an historical overview of the gothic and American gothic as a means to scrutinise the recurring anxieties of a given period. I propose that the suburban gothic serves as a mode of critical injury into the incongruities of the suburban milieu in the late twentieth century. I maintain that by drawing upon the unique devices, tone and expression of the early 1980s and 1990s suburban gothic, a more profound interrogation of the contemporary neoliberal condition is revealed, leading to potentials for transformation in the present. This thesis traces political and philosophical debates that argue that the prolonged global spread of the American dream and the maintenance of its neoliberal ideals relies on the manufacturing of our desire for the "good life," and is constructed by consumer imagery. These propositions are contextualised through social psychology and the defining characteristics of our unconscious manipulation.