The American Film

There is a dialogue exchange in The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946) in which Fred (Dana Andrews) reminisces about his pre-war career as a soda jerk. He brags that he can throw a scoop of ice cream into the air and have it land perfectly into the cone every time, he jokes that this is the training that allowed him to successfully drop bombs on all of his intended targets. There is a real melancholy to Wyler’s film. In reality, it’s a film about trauma bubbling under the surface of a picturesque America. We as viewers are confronted about how we approach war, and if it is worth it. In another scene, Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) is told by a Nazi sympathizer that he lost his hands for nothing, his sacrifice had no meaning, thus leading to the powerful image of an American flag lapel pin juxtaposed against Russell’s prosthetic hooks. Wyler is directly contrasting the American dream against the harsh realities of what it takes to protect it. By the end of the film, it seems that the thesis reached, as per Wyler’s vision, is that military service is a patriotic sacrifice you make for the sake of your friends, family, and neighbors. This is not necessarily incorrect, but it showcases a sometimes problematic trend in American pop culture. We as Americans like to think we are immune to criticism, and that we somehow have a moral high ground on the rest of the world. This hypocrisy has affected American media for decades, and only recently have we started to examine that. There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007) is a film that picks at the two biggest paragons of American culture. That being capitalism and religion, represented by Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) respectively. The film is ultimately a farce, in that it shows that these two main building blocks of American culture cannot coexist. One cannot be a true capitalist while being truly religious and vice versa. So, we are faced with the fact that our foundational governing principles are based on a contradictory lie. The tragedy of the film comes when greed beats virtue to death, and ultimately our darkest angels triumph more often than our better ones. Accompanied by Jonny Greenwood's score, the prospectors arrive and steal the lifeblood from America’s natural beauty and Californian landscape, dooming generations of Americans to live off of their blood money and malicious industry for the next century. There is something transcendental in the way Anderson shoots tornadoes of fire and raining black oil. Visually it is a representation of the rape of the natural world. The color of the natural landscape is drowned in deep black muck. The greed of the characters is represented within the landscape as their morals grow as black as the oil. Honest religion is defeated by capitalism as Eli is tricked into admitting he is a false, atheistic, prophet and is murdered by Daniel for it. The American dream is dead and we are doomed. Anderson explores similar themes in The Master (Anderson, 2012) as good religion and conspiracy theory blur together beyond recognition. Set against the busting, up-tempo world of 1950s America, we watch as traumatized Americans crawl to fearful deities. We are scared of the world we live in, and the jazzy swing of the 50s is a facade. Our lives are destroyed by our societal evils. There is hope to be found in the works of Anderson and in The Best Years of Our Lives, however. We can escape through our virtues and the virtues of others. We can find relief lying in bed after being cared for by a loved one. The shot of the tear trickling down Homer Parrish's face, maybe that’s the American dream.