The American Success Myth on Film

It is an old story but, in all of its guises, a perennially appealing one. A poor boy makes good. A secretary marries her boss, thereby launching herself from the steno pool to the penthouse. A lowborn young man with a burning ambition and an idea that everyone tells him is crazy becomes a successful entrepreneur. A fresh-off-the-boat immigrant seizes the promise of the new world and reinvents himself as a dyed-in-the-wool American tycoon. These classic — if clichéd — success stories were already deeply etched in the popular consciousness by the time Hollywood put its stamp on them. Scores of self-help manuals, popular novels, religious tracts, and biographies have played their part in the ritual re-enactment of one of our most enduring cultural doctrines: that trading rags for riches is not only possible but is part of our national entitlement. The movies’ particular contribution to the American idea of success has been to codify, perpetuate, amplify, and sometimes challenge that idea in notably complex ways.

At the heart of the American dream and at the center of classic success myth stories lies the promise of mobility and self-making. Americans, these stories tell us, are endowed with the inalienable right to create an adult self out of whole cloth, rather than simply making do with the identity in which we find ourselves clad. We are active subjects rather than compliant objects of our personal destinies. Accidents of birth, rather than being implacable impediments to advancement, are merely challenges to be overcome through hard work. From log cabin to White House, from scruffy music club to arena rock superstardom, from the mailroom to the executive suite, the biographical and fictional heroes of success myth tales accomplish their rise through their single-minded application of the work ethic and their adherence to the individualist credo of competitive advantage. And if they can do it, these stories tell us, anyone and everyone can too if they want to badly enough.

If social mobility is the cornerstone of the edifice of success, work is the basic building block. At its simplest, the American idea of success conflates the attainment of success with vocational achievement. Lacking an aristocracy, American culture exalts the notion of a meritocracy, entry into which is gained by hard work and professional prowess. In our most beloved popular culture narratives, successful characters aren’t born at the top of the world; they climb to the pinnacle, rung by professional rung. Work is the primary measure of self-worth, in the contemporary American mind, and the material goods that are the signifiers of success are the just rewards for one’s labor and the visible evidence of one’s diligence and superiority.¹

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.

The standard ingredients of the American success myth — the promise of social mobility, the irrelevance of accidents of birth, the cult of individual enterprise, the dividends paid by hard work, the cornucopia of consumer goods that are the reward for toil — are so much a part of our daily fare that to question them seems subversive. Ideology, by definition, is normative, and the norms of the success myth are among the most intrinsic of American ideologies. But the recursive loop between myth and ideology is stretched to its limits by Hollywood movies that manage to foreground the myth’s ideological inconsistencies. Such films put the cultural contradictions regarding work, success, and fulfillment in their crosshairs, setting their sights on the ways in which the American idea of success is conflated with vocational achievement, material attainment, and individual will. In counterposing contentment with conventional notions of success, they suggest that one needs to be sacrificed in order to achieve the other. The prior two chapters have shown that this marked ambivalence is consistently evident in stories revolving around professional success as an indicator of self-worth. On the one hand, work is equated with masculinity, adulthood, and deep-seated American ideas about individual initiative and mobility. Alternatively — and sometimes simultaneously — work is seen as demeaning and spiritually deadening, and only an escape from the workaday world allows one to regain his individuality and integrity.

In 2008, journalist Malcolm Gladwell published another in his string of bestselling books that purport to explain diverse phenomena by identifying an overarching, one-size-fits-all analytical frame. Like his previous books, Outliers: The Story of Success had a simple, single, and, claimed Gladwell, broadly applicable aperçu: that success stems not solely from ambition and talent. He tried to demonstrate in his case histories that individual success is, instead, heavily reliant on chance: a convergence of fortuitously optimal circumstances that allow those with ambition and talent to thrive. He further claimed that biographical accounts of self-made success are a bit of a sham since they tend to ignore the substantial contributions of other people — parents, wives, teachers, mentors, colleagues, communities — that lie behind our stories of individuals who make good. As Gladwell explained, ‘[Highly successful people] are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky — but all critical to making them who they are.’¹