Self-fashioning and the American Dream

“10 Items or Less”:  Learning how to enact the American Dream through role play, and self-fashioning

The film begins with that, by now, common- place of post-modernism, namely, by calling attention to itself as a film. The well-known actor Morgan Freeman is trying to decide to “commit” to an independent film project, low budget, to be sure, which will rely on his name to sell itself. Thus, we are put in the position of watching a movie about a movie, even though the film we see, as it unfolds, is not of course the same movie that Jonah Hill was trying to get Freeman to commit to. In that movie Freeman will play a supermarket manager (and not “himself” as in the one we actually view). It will however be a film featuring the actor, whose presence in both, we understand, is a way of getting this low-budget, indie made.

Playing himself in a movie about a movie means that we are offered two Morgan Freemans, the actor’s representation of himself (has “no friends”) vs. the real personage of Morgan Freeman (probably has lots of friends). However, for the most part, we do see the character of Morgan Freeman as self-identical. After all, he is an actor with an actor’s skills playing an actor with an actor’s skills (mimicry of the old manager, of the prissy Sheldon character (from “The Big Bang Theory”). Thus, we see the ability to play a role, different from himself, through an actor’s work of study and imitation, the ability to put himself into the position of others (empathy), the skills of close observation and its resulting knowledge of other people, skills which he puts in the service of very frustrated young woman who is a checkout clerk. He sees her talent (intelligence), youth and beauty, and he schemes to help her overcome the deadendedness of her present situation (both job and boyfriend, who is a stock creep, and her lack of confidence in herself) and he teaches her how to act, how to simulate self-confidence, despite feeling like throwing up, which is “good,” because it means one is serious about getting a better job, the necessity of self-presentation with the right kind of clothes and make-up and car (although we note that the clothes, etc are inexpensive, from Target, and her old car just needs washing). Like an actor in a role, success is achieved through self-fashioning – all very postmodern.

This is the progressive content of the film: If we are all actors playing roles; then, it might be possible to play things a little differently for a change. In other words, by calling our attention to the constructedness  (artificiality) of our subject positions, we gain insight into the constructedness of social reality and therefore the possibility of changing it.

By the end of the film, the young woman has transformed herself with his help, and she declares, despite not getting the job she interviewed for, that she will never go back to that market. She has been transformed (and, by the way, he too. He now claims that he has overcome his vacillation and has indeed committed to the indie film).

As to the reactionary side, Don is quite right in his class analysis. He claims that the filmmakers seem unaware of the real toil and trouble of the working day for those in dead-end jobs and fails to see the real difficulties of such individuals trying to “better themselves” by rising socially and economically. Or, it underplays it.

To say more, along the same lines -- call it ideology critique -- we find in the film the monomyth of the American Dream. Yes, you too can achieve your dreams, all you have to do is use your natural god-given talents, combined with determination, and you too can achieve all you want. I call this the American monomyth, because it proposes an individual solution (self-improvement and social mobility) for what is essentially a structural problem, namely, the class and hierarchical structure of capitalist society. Seen this way, the story of individual success does not mean that we live in a society open to talent, where if she can do it, anyone can.  No, if the structure remains the same, as it has over the last several decades, where you have roughly the same percentages of the population comprising various economic levels, then, it follows, that any one individual who does manage to rise from a dead-end job to that of a manager, he or she makes it that much harder for other individuals to do the same, on the one hand, or, alternatively, it forces a manager somewhere out of a job, out of the middle-class, down to the working class. (I would claim that belief in the American Dream is required for the whole capitalist system to function. If, instead, people started seeing that they are not responsible as individuals, that, instead, we are all victims, the whole system would come crashing down).

Thus to the extent that this film preaches the validity of the American Dream, albeit with a little help from some Horatio Alger type benefactor, usually an older very successful male, to that extent it is complicit in the desire of the capitalist class to keep things the way they are (structural), while bamboozling workers into thinking that their class position is their responsibility alone. As Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman) tells the students of Patterson High School in Lean on Me (c 1979): “If you fail, don’t blame the white man; don’t blame your parents; don’t blame [class] society. The responsibil- ity is yours!”