Success Reassessed: Ambitious Women/Midlife Men

The preceding chapter’s examination of corporate workplace narratives exposes the underlying cultural unease with American axioms regarding work and success. Cultural myths traffic in widely shared, but largely unexamined, ideological assumptions about individual desires and social behaviors. From its beginnings, the success myth has conflated vocational ascendancy with success. But many of the movies previously discussed complicate, and sometimes even contest, the success myth’s promise of professional achievement as a guarantor of the good life. Across the decades, embedded in the formal and thematic codes of many Hollywood iterations of the success myth, is an undercurrent that dredges up the competing cultural ideologies at the heart of the success discourse. In challenging the equation of making a good living with living a good life, those films contribute to an ongoing polemic which exposes the contradictions and negotiations at the core of the American idea of success.