Abstracts of Papers
Claudia Schwarz,
Mira Blumhagen:
"Requiem for a Dream" -
Deconstruction of the American Dream in Recent American Cinema Productions.
Following the conference's aspiration to confront the American dream by its opposites, in order to "sever surfaces from substances" by ways of reflection and deconstruction, this paper aims to dissect a number of this dream's central constituents - community, success/ wealth, the individual, and last but not least, freedom, democracy, and the pursuit of happiness - as represented in recent American movie productions.
Focussing on three not obviously linked movies (neither thematically, nor formally), Solondz' "Happiness" (1998), Fincher's "Fight Club" (1999), and Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream" (2000) offer a wide range of different interpretations of the dysfunction that lies beneath the American life which has been continously defined by refering to the early myth of building/ having build a new nation.
Both, reversing and underpinning, the socio-psychological (horror) genre theory of Wood, Carroll and others, we will argue that the abnormal, the monstrous threat to social order no longer ascends from a non-human hell, but actually reveals itself either from within (as shown in the first sympathetic portrayal of a pedophile in "Happiness") or in the sense that the system or its symptoms themselves (i.e. media power, neoliberalism, and consumerism) destroy the individual ("Fight Club" and in part "Requiem for a Dream".)
While the problematic idea of escapism might serve as an explanation for the success of recent horror-fantasy productions (both TV and cinema) as well as for the depicted thematic cores of "our films", such as drug (ab)use, media addiction, search for alternative (anarchic) community and (archetypical) definition of self, it will become obvious that the outlook of both forms is quite differently: Whereas in horror/ fantasy in general the eradication of the monster/ the monstrous in the end will help restore the social order and 'normality'; consequently eliminating the deviant in productions like "Happiness" would ultimately entail the re-definition of a society that has produced such abnormal behaviour; vice versa if the threat is the social order itself, eradicating the threat would jeopardize the foundation and the principles (western) modern life has been based on (i.e. in "Fight Club" restoring the status quo by eliminnating financial records,) thus making a rebirth or cathartic regeneration (as often shown in horror productions) impossible.
By chosing directors who have been labeled "the Woody Allen of the generation X (Solondz"), and the new Kubrick (as in the case of Fincher), or who will after two Arthouse movie successes now step into the world of Hollywood (Aronofsky with his latest project "Batman") and films who have been the most controversial in their respective years and in general, we hope to exemplify what might be a trend in (semi-) Indiependent American cinema: that is a critical inventory of the American dream by revealing its regulating, standardizing inhuman structures.
It will be interesting to discuss possible productions to be shot and released in the next few years, especially in respect to post-9/11 theme choices and the incorporated resuscitated and redefined patriotism and national self-understanding, and their implications for the reviving, repositioning and or defense and of the American dream.
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