The current generation is, in a way, reliving the nightmares of previous generations - on screen and off." The documentary traces the transformation of scary flicks - from the 1910 rendition of Frankenstein by Thomas Edison's movie studio to The Amityville Horror (1999) and other dream shredders.Īddressing the suggestion that the American horror movie has run out of ideas, Maddrey writes, "perhaps it has less to do with Hollywood's lack of creativity than with contemporary American culture. The premise of the 2009 documentary Nightmares in Red White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film - written and based on a book by Joseph Maddrey - is that many of our country's scariest movies are also derived from the notion of the American dream turning sour.Īccording to the documentary, the 2000 film American Psycho "proposed that the most horrifying monster we face is the corrupted American Dreamer." The movie is "dedicated to a warped concept of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The theme is explored in mainstream movies such as Citizen Kane (1941), Scarface (1983), American Beauty (1999) and The Pursuit of Happyness (2006). Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run (1941) and Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun. The lifelong tension between American dreams and nightmares is found on shelf after shelf of our national literature, from Horatio Alger's mid-19th-century novels to F. That we are trapped in a room, the walls closing in no windows, no doors, no exit. And in some ways that there is no more space for expansion.
There is a sense in contemporary America that we may have found some limits. But today's palsied economy puts many of these dreams out of reach - or at least on layaway. One Yahoo blogger lists six benchmarks of the middle-class version - homeownership, a nice car, college education, retirement security, health care assurance and vacation time. The American dream is rooted in limitless growth, expansion, possibility. This, then, is "A Brief Diary of the American Nightmare."
The Wall Street Journal has described itself as "the Daily Diary of the American Dream." We got scared of the world and obsessed with safety in a pathological way." "Now we dream of gated communities and media rooms that let us watch movies without going to theaters. "The notion of being able to belong to the church of your own choice or of participating in the town meeting was part the American dream," says Meyer, former executive editor of NPR who's now executive producer for the BBC's news services in the U.S.
For Dick Meyer, author of the 2008 book Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium, the idyllic vision of American life involved belonging, as well as individualism.
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