Hollywood, Killer of the Dream

The American Dream enjoins limitless social mobility. Class barriers don’t exist for it, or if they do they are so fluid as to be virtually without meaning. “From each according to his abilities … ” could really stand as its motto, with the corollary that in America only the shiftless go unrewarded.

Subscribed to by nearly all Americans, the American Dream represents a constant threat to the realities of the American class structure. It must therefore be exorcised, and the job of exorcism is performed by the organs of mass media, particularly the movies. Almost every Hollywood production is an attempt to annihilate mobility as an ideal. In opposition to the dynamism of the American Dream, Hollywood preaches an ideal of passivity. If “God helps those who help themselves” is the slogan of the American Dream, the rival slogan of Hollywood is “All things come to those who wait.” While in the American Dream lack of ambition is the only sin, in Hollywood it is the only real virtue, just as mobility, social climbing is the only real crime. The villain of Hollywood is the man who takes the American Dream seriously. Let us take a recent Hollywood film as an example, a bad film, because it is primarily in bad films that the message is most explicit. The film is “It’s a Woman’s World.” It is about an automobile magnate, Clifton Webb, who is planning to promote an executive from within his organization to the rank of general manager at a salary of $125,000 a year. To find the right man for the job, he invites three regional sales managers and their wives to New York. These are: Fred MacMurray – Lauren Bacall, Cornel Wilde – June Allyson, Van Heflin – Arlene Dahl.

MacMurray introduces one of the main themes of the film. “I used to be at the bottom,” he says, “and I was happy then.” Now he is miserable, his marriage on the verge of collapse. He alone has risen from the ranks, from factory worker to salesman to manager, and his rise is portrayed as a tragedy: he has picked up an ulcer along the way, not an ordinary ulcer, it is soon clear, but one that will probably kill him unless he stops wanting to succeed, trying to climb. He has risen too fast, too hungrily, one gathers, with an excessive determination to succeed; of the three men, he wants the job the most and consequently he is out of the running almost from the start. His wife, Lauren Bacall, carries the moral burden of the film. Her virtue consists in scorning his ambition and in emphasizing, rather menacingly, the identity of ambition and death. In her most dramatic scene with MacMurray, when she assures him that even if he is chosen as general manager she will “stick,” she adds, “I’ll look good in black”: punishment for daring to reach the top will be death.

Cornel Wilde, who also wants the job, though not as badly as...