Abstract
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
But in democracies the love of physical gratification, the notion of bettering one’s condition, the excitement of competition, the charm of anticipated success, are so many spurs to urge men onwards in the active professions they have embraced, without allowing them to deviate for an instant from the track.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
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Notes
For a sociological/economic overview of the American cult of work, see Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 3rd edition (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 261.
Until recently, conventional success myth heroes were always male. Although in the late 1980s there began to be films about women in the corporate world, including Baby Boom (1987), Broadcast News (1987), and Working Girl (1988), their essential storyline and their view of the corporate workplace hews closely to classic success myth narratives. For a discussion of the relation between gender and success in 1980s movies, see Elizabeth Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992),.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 4.
Chuck Kleinhans claims that Hollywood movies rarely examine working-class life except in the context of the success myth, which purports to offer its protagonists a rise in class status. This suggests that there is a universal, vocationally, and materially determined definition of success. Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Contemporary Working Class Film Heroes,’ Jump Cut: Hollywood, Politics and Counter Cinema, Peter Steven, ed. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985), 64.
Vidor, who went on to have a long career in sound films, once explained, ‘In silent films, where we didn’t have all the words to explain everything, we thought in terms of symbols, graphic arrangements, or possibilities. We were trained in these terms. When you had to explain something, you didn’t think “What’s the exact word for this? The exact phrase of sentence?” You just thought, “What’s the picture, the symbol?” ’ Quoted in Eric Sherman, Directing the Film: Directors on Their Art (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1976), 201.
Loren Baritz, The Culture of the Twenties (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 231.
Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925).
The number of corporate critiques published in the late 1990s and early 2000s, for example, seems to bear this out. Among them are White Collage Blues (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Daniel S. Levine, Disgruntled: The Darker Side of the World of Work (New York: Putnam, 1998);
Joanne B. Ciulla, The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work (New York: Times Books, 2000);
Jill Andresky Fraser, White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001);
Charles Heckscher, White Collar (New York: Basic Books, 1995); and
Robert Reich, The Future of Success (New York: Knopf, 2001).
The post-war decades were marked by economic growth, job security, and corporate prosperity. Between 1945 and 1960, the gross national product rose by 52 percent. Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr, ‘The Company in the Postwar World,’ in History of the U.S. Economy Since World War II, Harold G. Vatter and John F. Walker, eds. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 129.
Adolf A. Berle, Jr., and Gardiner C. Means’ The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1933) is considered the classic early work dealing with the incursion of corporations into the American business landscape. The authors discuss the growing presence and influence of public corporations as well as the significance of the corporate separation of management and ownership. C. Wright Mills’ chapter, ‘The Chief Executives,’ in The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 (1956)) is likewise a useful introduction to the corporation at mid-century and to the men at the top.
C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956);
David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950);
William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).
In Vance Packard’s popular sociology tract The Status Seekers, published one year before the release of The Apartment, he details the intricate semiotics of mid-century corporate success in a chapter titled ‘Pecking Orders in the Corporate Barnyards.’ Among the signifiers of executive status (many of which serve their symbolic purpose in films of the era) are the corner office with view, mahogany desks (which outrank walnut and oak), wall-to-wall carpeting, access to the private washroom and the executive dining room. Vance Packard, The Status Seekers (New York: David McKay, 1959), 114–27.
In Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983), Peter Biskind talks about what he calls ‘antisuccess’ films, several of which appeared in the late 1940s. He says that ‘In these films, men who were ambitious, attractive, and talented turned out to be heels. When they succeeded in clawing, kicking, and gouging their way up the ladder of success, they were likely to find that winning wasn’t much different from losing. They found success, but lost themselves,’ 254. Bud, conversely, loses his shot at success but finds himself.
For instance, see Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 64–6.
Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 355.
The corporate executive and his travails are dealt with directly in such films as How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967) and Save the Tiger (1973) and indirectly in, for example, The Graduate (1967), where ‘plastics’ became a code word for the late 1960s perspective on the corporation. But these films lack the concentrated verve of the 1950s corporate-based movies. In the 1970s, the critique of over-organized apparatuses of power seemed to shift from corporate workplace movies to such government exposes as Chinatown (1974), All the President’s Men (1976), and The China Syndrome (1979). The Godfather (1972) is arguably the most trenchant 1970s movie about American corporate work structures, even though it comments on them obliquely. As the Godfather trilogy charts the watering down of the generations, it sets the entrepreneurial enterprise of the paterfamilias Don Corleone against the increasingly bureaucratized business apparatus of his descendents. The patriarchal boss is viewed with acute nostalgia when compared to the soulless businessmen that succeed him. For a discussion of The Godfather as a critique of corporate institutions, see Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 66.
Many film scholars have made note of the commodity fetishism of American movies. For example, in his book Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and
the American Cinema, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), Dana Polan talks about the ‘visual richness’ and ‘the promise of the product’ (294) that are part of the discourse of many American films. In Wall Street, what Polan calls ‘display for the sake of display’ (294) overwhelms the moralistic message of the narrative. See also David Desser and Garth S. Jowett, eds. Hollywood Goes Shopping (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
A discussion of classic comic form and comic endings is found in Northrup Frye, ‘The Mythos of Spring: Comedy,’ Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 158–86.
The term, referring to corporate, multinational, consumer capitalism (as opposed to the putatively more benign mom-and-pop variety) derives from Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1978). Fredric Jameson takes it up in his seminal article, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ New Left Review 146 (July–August 1984), 53–92.
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Levinson, J. (2012). Work and Its Discontents: The Corporate Workplace Film. In: The American Success Myth on Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016676_3
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