“I Believe in America”

In his Godfather films, Francis Ford Coppola created American classics by dwelling on a classic American experience—immigration. In the story of the Corleone family, Coppola portrays Sicilian immigrants struggling to create a new and better life in the United States. They must navigate the difficult transition from the Old World to the New, and also from the past to the present, from a quasi-feudal way of life in Sicily to a modern America characterized by impersonal economic relations and corporate organization. Vito Corleone achieves the American dream by succeeding in business and providing for his family, but his hopes for his sons are dashed. Carrying on Vito’s struggle, Michael Corleone defeats all his enemies, and yet in the process he destroys his family. Coppola sees the American dream as a source of tragedy, and this chapter analyzes both Vito and Michael as tragic heroes.

The Apocalyptic Strain in Popular Culture

This chapter seeks to explain the popularity of grim shows like the zombie narrative The Walking Dead, which seem to delight in portraying the destruction of the world as we know it. The Walking Dead offers a variant of the American dream, because it celebrates the independence of the ordinary people who are forced to fend for themselves in the absence of the authorities and institutions that traditionally had protected and taken care of them. Several of the characters reinvent themselves, going from the meek roles they played in pre-apocalyptic times to strong people. The show reflects widespread anxieties about social and political developments after the 2008 economic downturn. Many Americans felt betrayed by the elites who had claimed to have the expertise to run the country smoothly, and the show generally casts elites in a bad light. The Walking Dead recaptures the pioneer spirit that built America in the first place—a sense of self-reliance that harks back to the American West and frontier existence.

Introduction

While acknowledging that the American dream does have a bright side, the introduction explains why we can learn more by examining the portrayal of its dark side in popular culture. Works like the Godfather films and Breaking Bad reveal the inner contradictions and tragic tensions in the American dream. The introduction offers an overview of the book and sketches the ways the chapters build on each other, developing a set of common themes, such as self-invention and imposture. All the works point to the western frontier as the mythical space for American self-fulfillment. The chapter discusses the Western as the archetypal American genre and traces the ways it migrates to other genres, such as science fiction and the gangster story. All these genres offer alternatives to the everyday middle-class world that popular culture normally mirrors, and thereby they raise questions about a narrowly middle-class conception of the American dream.