Career Movies: American Business and the Success Mystique

CONCLUSION

Today we have good cause to understand texts as one part of a far broader cultural enterprise. Only by shifting attention from reception practices alone to the broader—and conflicting—usage patterns of all users can we escape the residual tyranny of the text king. — , Film/Genre () CONCLUSION This study of success ideology in the American business career film from  to the present reveals several things. It demonstrates both how little the basic personal quality of individual initiative required for success has been altered over time, and how much the recently technologized business and work environment has changed. Career as a base for personal identity has, like the family, become less stable and more complex. Ubiquitous communications technology is tying the business office to commercialized workspace in the home, as well as merging domestic electronic entertainment, information, and consumer functions with the new social realm of e-mail, chat rooms, and so on. Looking back to a studio-era movie such as Executive Suite, therefore, corporate successorship is presented as a very different experience for characters than in the high-tech global environment of electronic industry apparent in Disclosure. And while this genre has continued to affirm the belief in vertical promotion as a sign of career attainment, it also reveals the continually rising expectations of the image necessary to represent public success. The myth of equal opportunity for all remains a strong assumption, even as the gap between rich and poor steadily widened in the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. Films in this genre also mimic the historical trend, where the actual working experience and longevity of the corporate employee begins to imitate the rapid obsolescence of electronic equipment, while the survival rate of small businesses continues to flounder (You’ve Got Mail, ).  239 Add to this the cartel tendencies of transnational corporations, and the cutthroat tactics encouraged by contemporary capitalism’s quick profit emphasis, and the individual success dream can quickly become lost in the compromises of dominant political economic mandates. This is shown to be the case in recent exposés of corporate corruption (The Insider), parodies of debilitating office tedium (Office Space, ), independent dramatic films of competitive sabotage (In the Company of Men, ), and satires of business and family life (American Beauty, ). These texts emphasize torturous career struggles, which can destroy the self-confidence of individuals and families, or turn workers into obsequious drudges for whom career success means little more than a small annual pay increment. In screenwriter Allen Ball and director Sam Mendez’s American Beauty, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) suddenly awakens for the first time to recognize that he can do something about his stale career as an ad clerk and his degraded self-image. His initial rebellion, however, becomes an exaggerated version of the same inappropriate consumerist mind-set he has so passively shown earlier. He exults in a form of countermanipulation at work by blackmailing his employers into giving him a lucrative retirement package. He also lustfully pursues his teenage daughter’s friend Angela (Mena Suvari), challenging his career- and commodity-obsessed wife and his body-obsessed daughter all the while. The family crisis that results forces him at last to see the consumer selfishness in his approach. It is the showers of red rose petals in his dream, and not explicitly Angela’s nubile naked body that signal his opportunity for liberation and self-renewal. In Lester’s fantasy, Angela is at first perceived as a reified image of erotic reawakening, which he knows only how to desire as a sexual conquest. But as he awakens, Angela too gives up her lies. He now recognizes her as a confused, insecure teenager already locked on the consumer image thinking of sexual self-objectification and competitiveness. This had also been the modus operandi for him and his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening), and the consequent undoing of their marriage and family. Business-themed cinema like American Beauty thus provides an extreme model of self-revelation and resistance to rosy consumer success mythology. It is true to Hollywood form, however, in its tendency to find hope primarily in brave individual efforts at personal and career rehabilitation rather than through institutional reform. Another businessrelated satire of the time is Panic (), in which the protagonist Alex (William H. Macy) explains to his psychiatrist that he has two jobs: [3.16.137.232] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 06:40...