Existential Crisis: 4 Movies about the Disillusionment of the American Dream
The cliche is that every parent wants their children to have a better life than they had. But I’m not sure that’s possible any more. Not with climate change, late-stage capitalism, political parties becoming cult-like, tax dollars being spent on bombs for other countries, pandemic, deeper and deeper isolation and lack of connection and disappearance of social safety nets and on and on and on.
Depressing, no?
But am I wrong?
The historical context and apparent trajectory has been there for twenty years or so.
Lucky for us, art reflects that reality, and we can go back to films (and books) of the ‘90s and see the beginning of this disillusionment. The start of the collapse.
Sometime between the early 1990s and the economic collapse of 2008, white American baby-boomers and GenX decided they were bored with their lives. The excess of the 1980s had not fulfilled them, and after being raised in post-war decades that promised them everything they could want if they got their 2.5 kids and white picket fences, they were starting to realize that not only was that not true but they weren’t sure they wanted it anyway.
User hombregato on Reddit pointed out that 9/11 made authority more popular and 2008 made financial security more popular, but in the years leading up to that bored, unfulfilled Americans were looking for other options.
And in some cases, those options were chaos and blood. Destruction.
The quintessential American Dream was not theirs, but neither did they have any other model to replace it with.
That ennui informs some of the best films of that stretch of time.
Here are four of the best (in no particular order and with limited spoilers):
American Beauty* : I think this movie came out when I was exactly the right age to be impacted a surprising amount. We recently got this book* and I was genuinely shocked that American Beauty is not included. All that to say that if I am more affected by this movie than you were, I’m sure that’s a me thing.
The events of American Beauty are kicked off when Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) decides that he’s tired of his life as it is. He works at a 9-5 job where he is not respected and has no power, and comes home to his nice, though somewhat sterile, house where both his wife and his teenage daughter also disregard and do not respect him.
His solution to this is quitting his job, blackmailing, throwing things at the dinner table, attempting to seduce his daughter’s friend, and other general blowing up of his life as he knew it.
The movie ends with Lester’s murder, after his self-destruction rampage made enemies.
Based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho is a satiric horror novel, that examines how extreme a man (Patrick Bateman played by Christian Bale) gets in his private life as a balance to the strict, shiny, perfect facade of his working life. He has long, detailed conversations about the exact dimensions and make-up of a (very simple) business card, and then goes home and violently murders someone in his living room. He’s an investment banker who resents his fiancee but keeps up his public appearances nevertheless, until his escalating violence makes that balance untenable.
The movie ends with Patrick Bateman’s confession, after a final destructive, murderous rampage, that is completely disregarded. He gets away with the murders, yes, but he doesn’t successfully escape the prison of work and cultivated appearance that is his life.
Fight Club* :
Based on a Chuck Palahniuk novel, Fight Club follows an unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton) who is so unsatisfied by his life, it is causing insomnia. Efforts to find solace are ineffective, to the point that he manifests an alter ego, a split personality (Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt) who helps him break out of that staid prison. Blows up his apartment. Starts a literal club where men can physically fight each other, blackmail, vandalism, increasing mayhem.
The last scened of the film involves the Narrator realizing that all the chaos and destruction is his own responsibility and shoots himself in the head to stop more from happening. Death, however, eludes him and the film ends with his watching that same destruction occur.
Fargo* :
Our main character Jerry Lundegaard is a car salesman, working for his father-in-law’s company and desperate for money. There are hints that he’s spent (embezzled) thousands in an effort to finance the life his wife expects, though the story begins with all of that already in motion. In his effort to raise the funds necessary to pay back his mountains of debt, Jerry dips his toe into more violent crimes—hiring men to kidnap his wife in a staged ransom—that quickly escalates into multiple murders with law enforcement on his trail.
The movie ends with Jerry running from his choices and being arrested. (It’s worth noting that this movie was the basis for a limited television series, with a very similar plot, and the TV show ends with the main character dying in his attempt to escape the law)
Are we sensing a theme?
The American Dream—suburban house, steady 9-5 job, wife and 2.5 kids—becomes a trap and the only real escape is death. Possibly arrest. Blowing up your whole life with self-destructive choices, crimes, murder, explosions, will only do so much and really there’s no escaping the capitalism prison that America has become.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that all of these movies are centered on male characters. Men’s stories. Traditional gender roles and societal expectations of the masculine that these characters are now straining against. A similar story from this same general time period about women straining against societal expectations would be something like Thelma and Louise* or Stepford Wives*. But that’s an essay for another day.
I don’t know that I have a positive spin on any of this, unless it’s that if art can reflect reality, it can also reflect possibility. There is an emerging speculative fiction genre called Hopepunk that is intended to offer the opposite of grim, dystopian, amoral art. If people can imagine a way out of this mess we’re in (and put it in books), in theory that way out should be possible. I’m with Hank Green in thinking that humans can be amazing.
We just have to live up to that potential.
P.S. More similar film recommendations in this Reddit thread
P.P.S. We’ve been watching a lot of classic (and modern classic) movies lately and I am loving it
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What an insightful take on things. The only hope I can give is that things were quite bleak in the 60s too: Vietnam War, police brutality [Kent State], racism, rampant unchecked pollution, etc. and things turned around in some ways with the help of the younger generation. Seems like when generations get older they often screw things up. The us vs them in political parties and gross misinformation is probably more extreme now, but let's hope we can turn things around.