Introduction
The [American] dream is a vision of a better, deeper, richer life for every individual, regardless of the position in society which he or she may occupy by the accident of birth. It has been a dream of a chance to rise in the economic scale, but quite as much, or more than that, of a chance to develop our capacities to the full, unhampered by unjust restrictions of caste or custom. With this has gone the hope of bettering the physical conditions of living, of lessening the toil and anxieties of daily life. --John Truslow Adams
SHARKS AND SPONGES
Americans love success stories. Accordingly, American popular culture is filled with them—stirring tales of ordinary people achieving what is known as the American dream. With their rags-to-riches plots, Horatio Alger’s novels were bestsellers in the nineteenth century, and they have been recreated ever since in films and television shows. Over the years, Americans have been bombarded with stories that teach a simple lesson: if you work hard and remain true to your vision, you will be rewarded and get to live the American dream.[i]
One peculiar home of the success story in American popular culture is the game show and, more recently, Reality TV. The titles of game shows, from Queen for a Day to Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, make their aspirational nature clear. These shows compress achieving the American dream into a conveniently compact time frame. Through varying combinations of skill and luck, the contestants get to realize their dreams almost instantaneously and right before our eyes on the television screen, thus providing an uplifting spectacle. As for Reality TV, one of its most successful incarnations is ABC’s Shark Tank, a show in which ordinary Americans pursuing their dreams appear before a panel of already successful businessmen and businesswomen.[ii] These “wantrepreneurs,” as they are known, seek to get the savvy sharks to invest in their fledging ventures, asking for, say, $100,000 for a 10% stake in their businesses. Although a lot happens behind the scenes that we do not get to see on Shark Tank, the deals made are basically for real. The sharks are genuinely wealthy investors, who do put up their own money. Some of the business plans pitched have gone on to become big winners, most notably the Scrub Daddy sponge brought to market by shark Lori Greiner with help from the QVC channel, which quickly reached revenues of over $100 million per year. Shark Tank is living testimony to the reality of the American dream. For all the show biz hype involved, in the end the financial figures do not lie, and both the contestants and the sharks frequently refer with good cause to the way that they are living the American dream.
I confess to being a big fan of Shark Tank. So why am I writing about popular culture and the dark side of the American dream? Why don’t I act like a good American and look at the bright side of things? The answer is suggested by the famous opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Constance Garnett’s translation). Success stories can be edifying, but after a while they all begin to sound alike and they can become boring. If only for the sake of variety, one begins to long for a story of someone who failed to achieve the American dream. Such stories are more dramatic and, frankly, more interesting; they may reveal something about the American dream that an endless parade of success stories would conceal. From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby to Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane, some of the great American classics have told the stories of people who pursued the American dream, but with disastrous results. In the core of this book, Chapters Three and Four, I discuss perhaps the greatest achievement in American cinema—Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films—as well as perhaps the greatest achievement in American television—Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. One of the reasons these achievements are so great is that Coppola and Gilligan do not follow the crowd by simply buying into the American dream; rather they raise profound doubts about its validity and viability, and in the process reveal something important about America.
One can acknowledge the historical reality of the American dream—the United States has indeed proved to be a land of opportunity for millions of people—while still admitting that the American dream is not an unproblematic concept. It is in fact very much to the credit of American popular culture that, even in the face of general celebration of the American dream, it has at times been willing to raise doubts about this widely cherished ideal. One has to admire the artists who have had the courage to ask tough questions about the American dream, but we should also admire those segments of the American public who have embraced these dark visions. The contempt many intellectuals have expressed for the taste of the American public needs to be reconsidered in light of the way that narratives as dark and complex as the Godfather films and Breaking Bad have become commercial successes. This study explores the question of why portrayals of the dark side of the American dream have resonated with and appealed to broad segments of an American public normally thought to be naively optimistic in its vision of itself.
All the works I discuss—from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Walking Dead—expose the inner tensions in the American dream. It turns out that there is no single conception of the American dream, and the different versions can be at odds with one another. In one traditional version of the American dream, a man is supposed to work hard to earn enough money to support his family and to keep them supplied with all the amenities of life. But the man’s work inevitably takes him away from his family and it may ultimately threaten to subvert the very family values he set out to promote. As we will see, the conflict between “business” and “family” is at the heart of both the Godfather films and Breaking Bad, works that show that in his efforts to protect his family, a man may end up destroying it. Americans like to think that they can have it all—that all their values are fundamentally compatible. The Godfather films and Breaking Bad are deeply disturbing because they force us to think about the difficult choices that human beings sometimes have to make between one set of values and another, choices that in traditional literature are regarded as tragic.
AN OVERVIEW
I begin this study with Mark Twain and his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain provides a good starting point for someone who, like me, wants to claim that the line between elite culture and popular culture is often drawn arbitrarily, and keeps changing over time. Twain is today regarded as a classic American author, and Huckleberry Finn has become part of the canon of great works of American literature. But in his own day Twain was highly successful commercially, and regarded as a popular author, barely one step above a journalist. Huckleberry Finn was initially condemned by many cultural gatekeepers as a vulgar novel, especially for its broad humor and its use of American vernacular language. Huckleberry Finn is a perfect illustration of the way that the elite culture of today is often the popular culture of an earlier time period. I predict that a hundred years from now the Godfather films and Breaking Bad will still be remembered and taken seriously as American classics, and for many of the same reasons that elevated Huckleberry Finn into the literary canon. Indeed the canonization of the Godfather films is virtually complete, and that of Breaking Bad is already well underway.
Mark Twain also provides a good place to begin examining the American dream. Like several of the creative figures I discuss (including Coppola, Gilligan, and W. C. Fields), Twain himself is a living embodiment of the American dream, providing a classic American success story, as he rose from humble beginnings to fame and fortune. Moreover, like W. C. Fields, who began life as William Claude Dukenfield, Mark Twain renamed himself; born Samuel Clemens, he reinvented himself as a literary celebrity after not doing as well as he had hoped in earlier, non-artistic careers. Twain thus illustrates in his own life an important component of the American dream—the ability to refashion one’s identity to get ahead in the world. The fluidity of identity in democratic America turns out to be a central theme in Huckleberry Finn, and gives us our first glimpse of both the bright side and the dark side of the American dream. Released from the shackles of aristocratic society in Europe, with its fixed social hierarchy, Americans are free to become the best that they can be and to rise in social and economic position. Twain associates this social mobility with frontier existence—Huckleberry Finn deals with an era when the Mississippi was the beginning of the Wild West. Like many nineteenth-century writers, Twain celebrates the frontier for giving Americans a chance at a fresh start in life.
But the dark side of the American dream surfaces once one realizes that a fresh start may easily become a false start. The freedom to reinvent oneself that Americans cherish is also a license for imposture. In Huckleberry Finn the American ideal of the self-made man is shadowed by the specter of the con man. As a result, a book that celebrates democratic freedom also chronicles the many ways that freedom can be abused. In a pattern that we will find repeated in subsequent chapters, in Huckleberry Finn the entrepreneurial spirit of America, embodied in many a “get rich quick” scheme, shades over imperceptibly into various forms of criminality. In the misadventures of the charlatan king and duke, Twain identifies a problem in the new democracy—its need to find new forms of nobility and thus its nostalgia for the old European aristocratic poses—attitudes that have made Americans peculiarly susceptible to Old World impostors.
W. C. Fields is something new for me, almost a biographical essay. With my background as a literary critic, in my work on popular culture I generally choose to discuss a single film or television show, and analyze it with the care I would exercise in interpreting a work of literature. In my Fields chapter, I do discuss at some length what is probably his best film, The Bank Dick, but I also survey his whole show business career, which took him from vaudeville to the Broadway stage to Hollywood and stardom in both movies and radio. Fields’s greatest artistic creation was himself. The stage persona he painstakingly crafted over his long career is his most lasting achievement, and has allowed him to pass into the realm of show business legend. Like Twain, Fields lived the American dream, but he struggled enough to do so that he became acutely aware of its dark side. In an almost postmodern fashion, Fields was extremely self-conscious in his art, and delighted in exposing its artificiality. His favorite role in films was as a con man. Indeed he thought of himself as conning his audience with the cinematic power of illusion that Hollywood placed at his disposal. His films generally deal with men in uncomfortable domestic situations, who turn to “get rich quick” schemes in a desperate attempt to escape the suffocating atmosphere of their homes. In one of his best films, It’s a Gift, Fields takes up a specific variant of the American dream—“California Dreamin’”—the compulsion to go to the West Coast to make one’s fortune. As a comedian, Fields necessarily gives his films happy endings, but they usually occur as a result of improbable turns in the plots, thus raising doubts about how realistic the successful resolutions truly are. Fields offers the paradox of an artist who provides light-hearted portrayals of the dark side of the American dream.
With the Godfather films, I pivot from the comic works of Twain and Fields to Coppola’s more serious—and even darker—treatment of the American dream. Coppola created an American classic by dwelling on the classic American experience—immigration. The American dream has perennially drawn immigrants to the United States, and their fate has been its toughest test. Does America live up to its claim to be a land of opportunity for foreigners, or is it all an empty dream? 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, rooted in antiquated customs, to a modern America characterized by impersonal economic relations and corporate organization. For Coppola, the American dream even at its best extracts a cost by forcing people to abandon their traditional communal way of life. For immigrants, chasing the American dream becomes even more difficult. Because of various forms of prejudice and government restrictions, they are barred from many of the usual paths to making a fortune, and that may tempt them into a life of crime.
Twain and Fields treat comically the thin line between legitimate business and criminality in America. Coppola takes this issue very seriously; the identification between organized crime and capitalism is central to the Godfather films. The Corleones are criminals, but they exhibit many of the virtues that are celebrated in the annals of famous American entrepreneurs. In some ways, Vito Corleone does achieve the American dream by succeeding in business and providing for his family. But he never fully enjoys his status; he remains entangled with organized crime forces, and he lives to see the dashing of his hopes for his sons to become prominent members of legitimate social circles. In his son Michael’s efforts to complete his father’s dreams, he follows the familiar American pattern of moving west and hopes to reinvent the Corleone family in a setting right out of a Western, a frontier casino. Michael manages to triumph over all his enemies and even to stymie the federal government’s efforts to bring him down, but in the process he destroys the one thing he claimed to value more than anything else—his family. In the immigrant experience, Coppola sees the American dream as a source of tragedy, and I analyze both Vito and Michael Corleone as tragic heroes.
In my ongoing attempt to show that film and television should be taken seriously, one of the aims of this book is to introduce the concept of tragedy and the tragic hero into the study of popular culture, an effort that culminates in Chapter Four on Breaking Bad. Having devoted much of my career to studying Shakespeare, I have often used his plays as reference points in interpreting films and television shows. Chapter Four fulfills a long-held dream of mine—to offer a systematic comparison of a Shakespeare play with a work of popular culture. I use Macbeth to help us understand Breaking Bad. I expect that this will be the most controversial chapter of my book. Many will be horrified that I speak of the murderous drug lord Walter White as any kind of hero, let alone a Shakespearean hero. For many, including as we will see the creator of the show, Vince Gilligan, White is the villain of Breaking Bad. They view him as a moral monster, responsible for the deaths of women and children. That he is, but so is Macbeth, as witness the way he has Macduff’s wife and babes slaughtered. Many refer to Macbeth as a villain, but as the title of the play shows, he is the hero of the play, albeit a tragic hero.
Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are morally complex figures and not simply good guys or bad guys (Othello strangles his innocent wife to death, and yet we come to think of him as “one that loved not wisely but too well”). We have grown too accustomed to Shakespeare’s plays. Having become almost foundational documents of our culture, they are assumed to be conventional, morally and otherwise. In fact, Shakespeare’s tragedies are intellectually daring and raise disturbing questions about human existence. Are all forms of human excellence compatible? Can a man admirable in certain respects nevertheless commit terrible deeds under extreme circumstances? Because he was troubled by such perplexing questions, Shakespeare wrote tragedies. You do not write genuine tragedies if you are comfortable with the world, if you think that the world order is simple and unconflicted, and that all ethical issues can be easily and unequivocally resolved. Whatever else they do, Shakespeare’s tragedies should make us shudder at the way that the world order refuses to follow any simple moral calculus. I am not claiming that Vince Gilligan is the equal of Shakespeare—no one is—but I do believe that Breaking Bad comes as close as American popular culture can to the level of Shakespeare’s dramas (which we should remember were the popular culture of their day). And one reason for my judgment is that the show poses the same kind of difficult and unnerving ethical questions that are raised by Macbeth.
I realize how odd it must sound to speak of Shakespearean tragedy in relation to a mere television show, especially one dealing with a crystal meth manufacturer. We are not used to thinking of television shows as tragedies. Genuinely tragic narratives rarely appear in American popular culture because, generally speaking, Americans do not have a tragic view of life. As we have seen, Americans love success stories and that is another way of saying that they love happy endings. We speak of “Hollywood endings” because American popular culture has a way of making stories end happily, even when they may momentarily flirt with tragedy. American popular culture usually tells morally simplistic stories, with clear-cut distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys. This kind of melodrama is the opposite of tragedy. It is hardly surprising, then, that the concepts of “tragedy” and “tragic hero” do not often appear in discourse about American popular culture. I will argue that these concepts can in fact be very helpful in analyzing contemporary television, especially the kind of complex and dark protagonist that has emerged in American television since its quantum leap in sophistication as a result of the new opportunities created by the development of cable TV and streaming services. People just do not know what to call a character like Walter White. Hero? Villain? Antihero? I hope to show that a great deal falls into place once one begins to think of Walter White as a tragic hero (spoiler alert: I will ultimately concede in Chapter Four that White is a very peculiar kind of tragic hero).
Breaking Bad could be viewed as a kind of sequel to the Godfather films. The series contains several references to the films, showing that the characters themselves are aware of their precursors in popular culture. More to the point, Breaking Bad continues the history of organized crime in America that the Godfather films initiate. The War on Drugs replaces Prohibition; Mexican drug cartels replace the Mafia; organized crime, which does not reach the national level until well into The Godfather Part One and makes its first steps toward going international only in The Godfather Part Two, reaches the global level in Breaking Bad, infiltrating deep into the structures of multinational corporations. The penetration of organized crime into corporate America Michael Corleone can only dream of seems to be an accomplished fact in Breaking Bad.
Thus Breaking Bad builds on the themes we will see developed in the earlier works I discuss in Chapters One through Three. In the hallowed American tradition of the self-made man, the mild-mannered Walter White reinvents himself as the fearsome drug lord Heisenberg. The thin line between legitimate business and crime in Twain, Fields, and Coppola becomes even thinner in Breaking Bad, as the art of money laundering is carried to new heights, and drug profits spill over into such fixtures of our daily lives as a car wash, a laundry facility, and a fast-food chain named Los Pollos Hermanos. The tension between business and family highlighted in the Godfather films appears once again in Breaking Bad. Like Michael Corleone, Walter White ends up destroying the family he claimed to be protecting. And the westward movement in quest of the American dream in the works of Twain, Fields, and Coppola culminates in the New Mexico of Breaking Bad, a latter-day Wild West, perilously set on the borderland between civilization and barbarism. The show is filled with shoot-outs and even stages its own Great Train Robbery. Beginning with the tamest version of the American dream—a middle-class home in the suburbs—Breaking Bad veers off in a more exciting and dangerous direction, as Walter White goes on a bizarre and perverse journey of self-realization and self-fulfillment that goes tragically awry, and comes close to destroying all that he holds dearest in his life. Breaking Bad offers the most disturbing glimpse into the dark side of the American dream that we will see in this book.
Enter the zombies. As if Breaking Bad were not depressing enough, I have chosen to end this study by analyzing the “end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it” scenarios that have sprung up seemingly everywhere in the landscape of popular culture in the past decade or so. I concentrate on probably the best and certainly the most successful of these shows, The Walking Dead, but I also bring up Falling Skies, Revolution, and a few other examples of this genre. These shows presented me with a real challenge as an analyst of popular culture. Their popularity seems hard to explain. Why would audiences be attracted to such grim and gruesome narratives? Why would people enjoy stories of the utter destruction of everything that normally makes life worthwhile? My book on popular culture, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, was published in the fall of 2012, and I found myself searching for something new to analyze in television. I kept hearing about AMC’s new hit, The Walking Dead, and decided to give it a try to see if I could find something interesting in it. At that time, zombies were decidedly not my cup of tea. I had always liked Val Lewton’s classic 1943 horror movie I Walked with a Zombie, but I had never warmed up to George Romero’s modern reboot of the zombie genre in Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. Quite frankly, I was repulsed by the low opinion of humanity Romero’s films embody. So I can honestly say that I approached The Walking Dead with no preconceptions and no high expectations. By winter break 2012 when I decided to check out The Walking Dead, I had already missed two seasons of the show, but what are DVDs for if not such situations?
I would not place The Walking Dead on the artistic level of Breaking Bad or the Godfather films. It is a well-cast and well-written show, with a lot of solid production values, but I would never call it Shakespearean. I did, however, immediately like the show, precisely because it rejects Romero’s misanthropic view of humanity. There are many bad guys in The Walking Dead and some really choice villains like the Governor and Negan, but the core characters are by and large admirable, especially for the courageous and even heroic way that they respond to the crisis brought on by the zombie plague. The show is American in spirit because it celebrates the independence and self-reliance of ordinary people who are forced to fend for themselves in the absence of all the authorities and institutions that traditionally had protected and taken care of them. Like other post-apocalyptic narratives, The Walking Dead provides a kind of thought experiment: what would happen if some disaster brought civilization to its knees and people had to survive on their own? Would the result be complete anarchy and the utter destruction of humanity? Or would people be able to find ways of reorganizing themselves and restoring some limited form of order?
The Walking Dead is reassuring in the way that it shows ordinary people working together to fight the zombies and the fellow human beings who threaten them, and to rebuild their lives. In a variation of the traditional American dream, several of the good characters reinvent themselves, going from the weak and meek roles that they played in pre-apocalyptic times to strong and assertive characters, who know how to take care of themselves (this is especially true of a number of women in the series, including Andrea, Carol, and Maggie). The more I thought about The Walking Dead, the more I realized that it reflects widespread anxieties about social and political developments in the wake of the economic downturn that began in 2008 (as we will see, Breaking Bad embodies the same anxieties). Many Americans felt betrayed by the elites who had claimed to have the expertise to make the country run smoothly and to see to its citizens’ welfare. Some Americans lost their sense of their own agency as human beings. They no longer believed that they were in control of their lives, and felt buffeted around by unseen and alien forces. By the time The Walking Dead debuted in 2010, more and more Americans were feeling that the traditional American dream—especially of secure home ownership—was beyond their reach.
Amid the ruins of that version of the American dream, an older version re-emerged—a vision of the pioneer spirit that had built America in the first place. Instead of relying on remote and uncaring elites, Americans began to think that they had better re-learn how to rely on themselves. Maybe an apocalypse would give them the opportunity by returning them to a more basic existence. Like the other works I discuss in this book, The Walking Dead offers in its own way an almost nostalgic tribute to the American West and frontier existence. That explains why the show’s most iconic moment is an image of a deputy sheriff riding into Atlanta alone on a horse. As we will see, disillusionment with cultural, scientific, and political elites runs throughout The Walking Dead, and it returns to an older, more basic American conception of heroism. The show reflects a fear that, in their quest for middle-class security, Americans lost sight of the frontier virtues that they once identified as their core values, above all self-reliance and independence.
THE WESTERN AS THE FLAGSHIP AMERICAN GENRE
The way I reached the conclusion that The Walking Dead is a Western in disguise was facilitated by my work on The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture. There I began to understand that the Western is, as many have suggested, the archetypal genre in American popular culture, perhaps America’s most distinctive and important contribution to world culture. The Western is the prime example of American popular culture as thought experiment, a test of the nature and value of law and order. Whatever its reality may have been, the Wild West is imaged in popular culture as a lawless land, or at best a land in which law and order are just beginning to emerge. Some Westerns suggest that in the absence of the well-established law and order supplied by fully developed political institutions, chaos will ensue and result in a Hobbesian war of all against all. Other Westerns express a more optimistic vision of human nature and the possibility of spontaneous order. In the archetypal image of a town spontaneously coming together to rebuild a burned-down barn, some Westerns embody the spirit of Tocqueville rather than Hobbes.[iii]
In his classic book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville found a new spirit of cooperation in the United States, and he characterized Americans by their democratic propensity to form local associations on their own, so that they can deal with their problems by themselves and without government intervention. America’s great political debates have been played out again and again in its Westerns. Must order be imposed from above on otherwise unruly and ungovernable people by an all-powerful sovereign (Hobbes’s position)? Or can order spring up from below, as people organize themselves into various forms of local associations (Tocqueville’s position)? These are not easy questions to answer and it is tribute to the richness of the Western genre that its greatest practitioners, from John Ford to David Milch, have used the Western to contribute to our understanding of the issue of political order in the United States.[iv]
As I worked on The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, I began to see the way that the Western migrates to other genres and colonizes them. Science fiction also allows us to make thought experiments about political order, to imagine alien worlds in which the inhabitants are governed differently, or perhaps not governed at all. I realized that one of the most successful examples of science fiction, Star Trek, is actually a Western in disguise. Indeed its creator, Gene Roddenberry, famously pitched the series to NBC executives with the formula “Wagon Train to the stars.” What after all is the “final frontier” of Star Trek but the Old West frontier projected into outer space? I explored this thesis by examining the way that Roddenberry’s ideas for Star Trek evolved out of his work as the writer of twenty-four episodes of the classic TV Western, Have Gun--Will Travel.[v] In particular, I showed that Roddenberry’s experience writing episodes about Western towns dominated by corrupt local bosses or evil cattle barons translated into Star Trek episodes about Captain Kirk coming upon planets similarly exploited by despotic rulers.
I went on in the book to trace the migration of the Western to a major subgenre of science fiction, the alien invasion narrative (in movies such as Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! or television shows such as Falling Skies).[vi] Once again, alien invasion makes possible a thought experiment. By toppling governments around the world, the aliens restore human beings to what is known in political philosophy as the state of nature, thus reopening the question of law and order. Some alien invasion narratives portray human beings as helpless in the face of superior alien technology, and the earthlings must accept some form of totalitarian rule from their interplanetary overlords. More optimistic versions of this kind of story portray resilient and resourceful human beings banding together to resist the alien tyranny and regain control of the planet. It is the same issue we will encounter in The Walking Dead—how human beings respond to a crisis threatening civilization, and whether they have the resources and the internal fortitude to take back control of their lives.
The Western is thus the prototype of a kind of narrative that recurs in American popular culture, one that allows Americans to imagine alternatives to the settled middle-class existence that prevails in their country, a way of life that they ordinarily take for granted and generally leave unexamined. One danger with the American dream is that at times it threatens to devolve into a narrowly middle-class conception of the good life, one that values security above all else. In the 1950s, middle-class suburban existence became the most common image of the American dream, as witness countless domestic sitcoms on television. This thorough domestication of the American dream provoked a reaction. Just as the middle class came to dominate the United States, culturally as well as politically, it was charged with complacency and conformity. Its vision of the American dream—comfortable life in the suburbs—was accused of narrowing the range of human possibility and leaving out many traditional forms of human excellence—for example, the whole realm of heroic virtue, which is in some ways antithetical to middle-class virtue. The middle class, with its emphasis on prudence and not rocking the boat, has always been suspicious of heroes, at least the traditional kind who keep risking their lives out of pride and a compulsion to excel.
As we will see, the reign of the domestic sitcom on television was oddly paired with the heyday of the Western, epitomized by such shows as Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel, Wagon Train, and Maverick. American viewers craved a break from the tepid world of the sitcom, in which typically the most serious domestic crisis involved nothing more troubling than an irksome neighbor, a missed birthday, or an obnoxious relative making an unwanted visit. Life on the old frontier was a lot more elemental than this, and, as Westerners, the characters got a chance to show their true mettle. Far from being just a face in the crowd, the Western hero often is a loner, willing to resist community pressures and take a stance on his own. What existentialism was in philosophy in the 1950s, the Western was in popular culture—a call for genuine commitment to real causes.
The vogue of TV Westerns in the 1950s and 1960s grew out of the public’s desire to be served up something other than the placid world of the domestic sitcom and the suburban middle-class version of the American dream it reflected. When they grew tired of Ward Cleaver’s affability and unflappability, Americans could turn to Matt Dillon’s grim determination to stand up, alone if need be, for justice. The Western reminded people that there is more to human life than two cars in the garage, air conditioning, and a color TV. There is, for example, the courage to face down an opponent in a life-or-death situation. That kind of courage may be needed in times of crisis to protect ordinary civic life, even though this masculine aggressiveness may be at odds with the middle-class desire for peace at any price. John Ford’s Westerns—particularly The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—keep coming back to the tragic story of a hero who is able to protect a community only with a kind of disposition to violence that makes it difficult for him to fit peacefully into the community he saves.
As I worked on this study, I came to realize that the gangster story, or the crime narrative in general, performs the same function of offering an alternative to settled middle-class existence. Gangster stories take us imaginatively into a world beyond the control of political institutions, evidently governed by rules very different from those that prevail in ordinary middle-class existence (although sometimes the rules turn out to be surprisingly similar). In works like the Godfather films or Breaking Bad, we see the way that outlaws operate outside a conventional legal framework and without government regulation. The results can be frightening, and remind us of why we value our moral and political order in the first place—it protects us from crime and violence. But there can also be something intriguing and liberating about viewing the unconventional life of the criminal, who breaks all the rules and at least temporarily gets away with it. The criminal has a freedom we ordinarily lack, to pursue his dreams and desires without the fetters of ordinary morality, and, although we condemn him, we may also secretly envy him. Let’s face it—middle-class existence can get very boring and we take vicarious pleasure in watching the gangster break the taboos we normally have to respect. And it can be fun to see the gangster outwit the legally constituted authorities that we must dutifully obey in our daily lives. If we are honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge that we do not turn to popular culture only for edifying moral lessons. Sometimes we want to be thrilled by the daring of people who break the law or otherwise go beyond the normal limits of civic life.
OUTLAW HEROES
That is why Americans have been fascinated by real-life criminals like Al Capone, Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Lucky Luciano, and Bonnie and Clyde (sometimes colorful nicknames seem to help). America has made celebrities out of such criminals; they have passed into American popular culture—almost as folk heroes—and become the subjects of an endless sequence of films and television shows. These figures lead an existence that we can only fantasize about, and they take on larger-than-life stature. In a 2014 PBS documentary, Al Capone: Icon, Vince Gilligan showed that he understands this phenomenon, even though he finds it puzzling:
I think America is interested in antiheroes and criminals, gangsters. It’s an interesting cultural phenomenon that we celebrate outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Criminals that live a bigger than life kind of existence seem to live on in legend. . . . We all get this visceral thrill from stories about gangsters, be they fictional gangsters or real-life ones. . . . It’s a strange thing how we celebrate our outsize criminals.
We know that for the sake of law and order—for our own safety—these criminals must be punished, and for that reason we can applaud the police who track such criminals down and take them out of circulation. But still, for a moment these lawbreakers give us a glimpse of a freer world, quite different from the ordinary middle-class existence in which we docilely abide by the rules and repress whatever anti-social impulses we may harbor. Fictional figures like the Corleones and Walter White exert a fascination on us. The criminals and gangsters in popular culture serve a cathartic function in our society. A gangster story allows us to play at being a criminal and to blow off steam, to release in a safe situation anti-social impulses that we may not want to acknowledge even to ourselves. There must be some reason why audiences are so attracted to gangster stories. They do not want to commit real crimes, but they would like to learn what it feels like to commit a crime. Vince Gilligan remarked: “I don’t want to be a criminal, but I am fascinated by people who have the ability to do things I think are impossible.”[vii] To satisfy this kind of intellectual curiosity, fictional stories come to our aid. They allow us to experience safely in imaginary situations what would be too dangerous for us in real life.
Many commentators, including Vince Gilligan, were surprised—and some were appalled—by how many fans kept rooting for Walter White to the bitter end of Breaking Bad. As one of those fans, I can testify that, as powerfully realistic as the show was, I never thought for a moment that Walter White was a real human being, who had actually killed people. I knew all along that he was a fictional character. Thus I never was rooting for an actual criminal to get away with his nefarious deeds. I was responding purely as a fan of a fictional television show. I rooted for Walter White because that was the only way to root for his story to continue (this is the subliminal trick by which crime narratives always tempt us into sympathizing with and rooting for the criminals). After all, as soon as White got his “just deserts,” Breaking Bad would be over. Like many fans, I had become fascinated by the Walter White character. Week after week, he kept surprising me and revealing aspects of human nature I had never quite seen before, as all great fictional characters do. Some of what he revealed was deeply disturbing, but some of it suggested qualities in him that raised him above (as well as lowering him below) the ordinary level of humanity.
To read many commentators on Breaking Bad, one would think that the only way to respond to films and television—to works of art in general—is with moral judgment. Moral judgment is important, but it does not constitute the full range of response to human experience. There is also, for example, aesthetic judgment, and, however immoral Walter White became, there is a kind of aesthetic beauty to the clever schemes he came up with to keep one step ahead of his enemies and the law.[viii] I cannot believe that Gilligan and his team did not take a secret pleasure in dreaming up Walter White’s unpredictable and shocking criminal moves. I rooted for him because I knew he was going to continue to surprise me, and I wanted to see what he would come up with next. Just as with literature, we do not turn to film and television solely to learn morality (which is, after all, already inculcated in us by many other forces in our world). Like literature, film and television are sometimes at their best when they offer us alternatives to the ordinary world we live in, and thereby deepen and broaden our knowledge and understanding of human nature. Shakespeare’s tragedies do not provide us with simple lessons in morality, but instead give us glimpses into extraordinary human beings who go well beyond anything that most of us will ever encounter in our daily existence. I for one do not always turn to literature or film or television just to see mirrors of the ordinary reality with which I have to live every day. Sometimes I would like to see something different. And whatever else Walter White was, he was certainly different from any other fictional character I had ever seen. What most engages and energizes me in any form of art is a vision of something I cannot see in daily life. I already know the rules of middle-class existence; I have observed them all my life. What intrigues me is to see the extreme situations in which those rules are put on hold or pushed to their limits. Only then can we learn something new about their validity and applicability.
That is what attracts me to genre film and genre television shows. The Western, the alien invasion story, the gangster tale, the zombie narrative—what they all have in common is what I have been calling their potential to create thought experiments. In a variety of ways, each posits a kind of alternate or alien universe, in which the rules of ordinary middle-class existence are suspended, and we can observe what might result. The conclusion from these thought experiments might well be to return to our ordinary world with our original assumptions re-enforced. It is a case of “beware of what you wish for.”[ix] We see that for all the drama and excitement we might gain, we really would not want to live on the dangerous Western frontier, or during an alien invasion or a zombie plague, or with a mob of free-wheeling, gun-toting gangsters. Maybe one of the important functions of popular culture is to get our longing for an exciting but dangerous life out of our systems. Most of us are not born for the heroic life. But we also might learn something in the process of observing the alternative worlds of genre film and genre television. Perhaps the middle-class vision of happiness cannot fully satisfy all the longings of the human soul. Popular culture offers many stories of characters who feel trapped in the ordinary world of middle-class domesticity, and yearn for something that transcends its narrow boundaries. The obsession with security and law and order may frustrate the desire for freedom and independence, a longing that is at the foundation of the frontier vision of American life. Some versions of the American dream involve fitting in perfectly to society, and leading a peaceful and contented life. Other versions celebrate a more heroic path of standing out from the crowd, and not letting social conventions dictate one’s every action. In portraying the Westerner, the gangster, or the apocalypse survivor, popular culture reminds us that peaceful suburban life does not exhaust the whole range of human possibilities.
Here is perhaps the deepest fault line in the American dream. American literature has almost from the beginning been torn between visions of tranquil domestic life and visions of the Wild West in all its incarnations—home on the range, rather than home in the suburbs. The common, middle-class version of the American dream puts a premium on security and contentment, and thus ends up calling for conformism. In this version of the American dream, everyone ends up looking alike, but in the alternatives, everyone wants to look different. Those who feel alienated by the conformist vision, and who long for more freedom and independence, seek for ways to set off on their own as trailblazers and pioneers. They are not content with ordinary and moderate success; they want to do something extraordinary, maybe something that has never been done before. These are, for example, the heroic entrepreneurs who make the great breakthroughs in industry, commerce, and technology. But sometimes this kind of person goes too far and turns to what is known in the Star Wars universe as the dark side of the Force. As we will see again and again in this book, there is a thin line between exceeding normal limits and breaking with them entirely; that is how the entrepreneur shades over into the criminal, and therefore how the bright side of the American dream is linked with the dark side.
The freedom Americans prize can be misused and lead people to do not only what has never been done before but also what breaks the rules, even the law. Huckleberry Finn lays bare this problematic aspect of the American dream with relentless clarity. By doing so, Twain’s novel exemplifies American popular culture at its best. With its ability to see both sides of the American dream—and that they are in effect two sides of the same coin—popular culture shows that it can be genuinely thoughtful and perhaps even philosophic. And thus we come to the ultimate paradox of this book—by exploring the dark side of the American dream, we come upon something bright—the richness, vitality, and complexity of American popular culture. In reply to its many critics, we can say that films and television shows can at times achieve the level of sophistication we associate with great literature. Despite initial appearances, American popular culture does not simply offer an unending sequence of Horatio Alger stories, bland tales of middling success that cater to the public’s facile optimism. Rather, in works like the Godfather films and Breaking Bad, American popular culture recurs to some of the great tragic themes of classic literature and thereby serves up genuine food for thought.