Abstract
It is an old story but, in all of its guises, a perennially appealing one. A poor boy makes good. A secretary marries her boss, thereby launching herself from the steno pool to the penthouse. A lowborn young man with a burning ambition and an idea that everyone tells him is crazy becomes a successful entrepreneur. A fresh-off-the-boat immigrant seizes the promise of the new world and reinvents himself as a dyed-in-the-wool American tycoon. These classic — if clichéd — success stories were already deeply etched in the popular consciousness by the time Hollywood put its stamp on them. Scores of self-help manuals, popular novels, religious tracts, and biographies have played their part in the ritual re-enactment of one of our most enduring cultural doctrines: that trading rags for riches is not only possible but is part of our national entitlement. The movies’ particular contribution to the American idea of success has been to codify, perpetuate, amplify, and sometimes challenge that idea in notably complex ways.
The invention of a myth is the founding act of a community’s self-image.
— Manfred Beller, Imagology
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Notes
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1925), 2.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 205.
See, for example, Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990);
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983);
David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); and
Arash Abizadeh, ‘Historical Truth, National Myths and Liberal Democracy: On the Coherence of Liberal Nationalism,’ Journal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 3 (2004): 291–313.
Bruce Lincoln, ‘Mythic Narrative and Cultural Diversity in American Society,’ in Myth and Method, Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger, eds. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 168.
The term was coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America: ‘The American Dream is a gay dream that dreams of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.’ James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (New York: Simon Publications, 2001), 32. In spite of the hopefulness of the coinage, the book was a critique of industrial capitalism that cast doubt on simplistic formulas for success. For an extended discussion of Adams’ idea, see
Jeffrey Louis, Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Robert A. Segal, Myth: A Very Short Introduction (London: Oxford, 2004), 6.
Bronislaw Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology (New York: Greenwood Publishing, 1979), 101.
Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger, eds. Myth and Method (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 13.
Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 296.
This point was made by David Bidney, ‘Myth, Symbolism, and Truth,’ in Myth: A Symposium, Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1972), 12.
Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 22.
Christopher G. Flood, Political Myth (London: Routledge, 2002), 42–3.
Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Ray was not the first to apply Lévi-Strauss’ ideas to film. In an article appearing in 1973, Charles W. Eckert demonstrated how Lévi-Strauss’ structural analysis of mythic oppositions could be used to illuminate the 1930s melodrama Marked Woman (1937). In Eckert’s analysis, Marked Woman is structured around a central dilemma (having to do with class distinctions), and then extrapolates from that dilemma to focus on layered pairs of oppositions that radiate out from the primary pair. In writing about the proliferation and evolution of mythic oppositions, Eckert says, ‘Two of Lévi-Strauss’ insights are especially provocative: that a dilemma (or contradiction) stands at the heart of every living myth, and that this dilemma is expressed through layered pairs of opposites which are transformations of a primary pair. The impulse to construct the myth arises from the desire to resolve the dilemma; but the impossibility of resolving it leads to the crystal-like growth of the myth through which the dilemma is repeated, or conceived in new terms, or inverted — in short subjected to intellectual operations that might resolve it or attenuate its force.’
Charles W. Eckert, ‘The Anatomy of a Proletarian Film: Warner’s “Marked Woman,” ’ Film Quarterly 27, no. 2 (Winter, 1973/4), 18. Other film theorists of the period whose work was informed by Lévi-Strauss include
Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1969),
and Jim Kitses, Horizons West (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1970).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208.
For a provocative historical overview of American exceptionalism, see Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Also see
Seymour Martin Lipsett, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
Slotkin’s third volume on the frontier myth in the twentieth century explicitly engages film as he analyzes several movie versions of the frontier myth. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992).
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 23.
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 19.
This brief summary of success in American thought and culture relies on a number of detailed histories of success. For more thorough accounts of the evolution of the success myth, see Jeffrey Louis Decker, Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New York: The Free Press, 1954);
Rex Burns, Success in America: The Yeoman Dream and the Industrial Revolution (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976);
Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (New York: Basic Books, 1969);
John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965);
Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
Richard M. Huber, The American Idea of Success (New York: Pushcart, 1987);
Loren Baritz, The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class (New York: Harper and Row, 1982);
Martha Banta, Failure and Success in America: A Literary Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Further,
Moses Rischin, ed. The American Gospel of Success: Individualism and Beyond (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), anthologizes several primary source documents pertinent to the history of the American success myth.
For an excellent discussion of failure in America, see Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
The term itself was first used by Henry Clay on the floor of the Senate in 1832. In a defense of business enterprise, Clay declared: ‘In Kentucky, almost every manufactory known to me is in the hands of enterprising and self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.’ Calvin Colton, ed. The Works of Henry Clay (New York: VA.S. Barnes and Burr, 1857), V, 464.
The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, Lester J. Cappon, ed. (Chapel Hill: NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 387.
Ruth Miller Elson, ‘American Schoolbooks and Culture in the Nineteenth Century,’ in The National Temper: Readings in American Culture and Society, 2nd edition, Lawrence W. Levine and Robert Middlekauff, eds. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 113–131.
William Holmes McGuffey, McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Third Reader (Cincinnati, OH: Winthrop B. Smith, 1843), 175.
The most influential and widely cited discussion of this idea was economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s notion of conspicuous consumption: people consume to signal their wealth and incite social envy. The Theory of the Leisure Class (London: Oxford University Press, 2008). For a consideration of how Hollywood movies see consumer culture and the accumulation of commodities as the markers of success, see David Desser and Garth S. Jowett, eds. Hollywood Goes Shopping (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
Although the precise attributes and parameters of Hollywood’s classical era have been a matter of ongoing debate among film scholars, one of the most lucid explanations of the term appears in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth,’ in Myth: A Symposium, Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Unversity Press, 1968), 105.
Not incidentally, it also coincided with rapid urbanization and immigration. A number of film historians have written about the role of movies in acculturating new Americans and instilling them with an understanding of what it means to be American. See, for example, Steven J. Ross, Working Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
For extended discussions of the strategies of Hollywood endings and narrative closure, see Richard Neupert, The End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995). For a basic taxonomy of types of closure, see, for example,
David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Also in his classic work Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell discusses the inadequacy and implausibility of many Hollywood endings, which he calls ‘a more or less arbitrary readjustment of that world knocked awry in the previous eighty minutes.’ Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 53.
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Levinson, J. (2012). Top of the World: Cultural Narratives, Myths, and Movies. In: The American Success Myth on Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016676_1
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