Hallelujah, I’m a Bum: The Glorification of Unemployment

Abstract

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.

I loaf and invite my soul

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself