The Hollywood Novel: American Dream, Apocalyptic Vision
1995; Salisbury University; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
Resumo(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes text stops here in original.) From its very beginning, America has been described as the land of opportunity, where prosperity is assured to anyone willing to extend a bit of effort. In the early seventeenth century, Captain John Smith was one of the first writers to articulate the promise of the New Eden: So freely hath God and his Majesty bestowed those blessings [of abundance] on them that will attempt Io obtain them, as here every man may be master and owner of his labor and land, or the greatest part, in a small time. he have nothing but his hands, he may set up this trade and by industry quickly grow rich, spending but half that time well which in England we abuse in idleness, worse or as ill. (Smith 28) More than a century and a half later, Jean Crevecoeur echoes Smith's sentiments, emphasizing progress and future gains relative to the moral character of the individual: If he is a good man, he forms schemes of future prosperity. . . . Go thou and work and till; thou shalt prosper, provided thou be just, grateful, and industrious (409). In a system where wealth and status are viewed as earned rather than inherited, achievement, understandably, takes on a moral quality, because success or failure is regarded as the result of individual effort or lack thereof, not of social conditions or cultural advantages or disadvantages. This association between morality and success has been reinforced by our Puritan heritage. The Puritan belief in predestination precluded that one could earn admittance to heaven; however, one could earn status and wealth in one's earthly life, and because the Puritans reasoned that God smiled on the chosen few, worldly success was regarded as a sign of salvation while failure indicated damnation; failure could never be the result of bad luck, for there was no luck in the Puritan view of a totally rational universe. Pursuit of the dream is a dominant theme in both American literature and film. Hollywood itself quickly became associated with the dream. Obviously, the location of the film industry in California contributed to this association since, historically, pursuit of the dream was related to westward expansion. In fact, the establishment of the industry in Hollywood coincided with the closing of the historical frontier,1 and its rapid growth from a handful of independent filmmakers to the sixth largest industry in the United States by the mid-1920s seemed to reaffirm the Protestant work ethic.2 The industry can be regarded as a democratic one that-unlike the European cinema, which evolved as an art form-was geared from the start toward mass entertainment; the stars themselves were often ordinary Americans whose success was attributed to their natural virtue and effort simply magnified by the magic of the camera: anyone could be a star. The films, in turn, often celebrated the success of the ordinary individual rewarded for his (usually) or her persistence, determination, and innate goodness.3 But in contrast to such films, literature about Hollywood has focused on the nightmarish aspects of a highly competitive culture in which career success determines one's sense of self and self worth, and pursuit of the dream becomes self-destructive for both individual and society. In the four novels under discussion-F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon, Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, and Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays-characters become so enmeshed in pursuit of career success that they lose any sense of their own identities; the dream proves unachievable even for the successful; and moral disarray prevails, anticipating the fall of America. All four novels present characters who seem not to exist outside of their professional roles. As White, a screenwriter in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, describes his first day in Hollywood, Nobody spoke to me. …
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