A different kind of movie

We’re (the American audience) is used to lots of movies about moving on up. The categories are about as varied as the American economy itself. You can have low level mob guys that become one of the big dogs. There’s small time indie drug dealers or jewel thieves that make their big score. There’s some mom and pop hedge fund guy who manages the big short. There’s the college nerd who becomes the Silicon Valley bigwig. It just goes on like that.

This is “THE AMERICAN DREAM” we’re told affirmatively over and over and over and over.

But what is a dream? This is something we aren’t told and my inclination is to believe most of us never really ask.

In the opening to Zizek’s “Perverts Guide to Ideology”, (a movie in each every repeat viewing feels like a fresh watch for me) he opens with this idea of dreaming itself. Are these really even OUR dreams or instead a mirror reflection of the values of the society we live in. When we are dreaming our secret simple dream that moves us forward through the hard times is it not in this precise moment we are most mired in the sublime subject of ideology?

Well I think so.

Whose ideology are we blinded by and whose dream have we transfixed upon ourselves? My guess is capital (yeah big surprise).

Can we dream a better dream?
What would it look like?

Here’s another guess.

A critically acclaimed movie has been released to sold out theaters across the country. For once thank God in heaven the subject matter isn’t of superheroes. Instead its a story of cultural exchange in the same vein as “Dances with Wolves”. But it isn’t about some faraway culture instead its the story of some young person who is fantastically wealthy and loses it all. They have to slum it up and get a service job. They never get their money back, they continue living this way, in the beginning its pretty hard, everyone is hostile, they get conned because they don’t know how to deal with fraudsters, they get mugged because that’s what happens in those neighborhoods, they deal with bored cops who don’t want to help them and abusive bosses that they can’t stand and do work that comes with no status and taxes their body. And by the end everything is good again, because they’ve learned to live in this new world as this new person and they’ve grown to like it.

If people manage to see the beauty in exactly this kind of movie assuming it gets made, where the hero doesn’t ever get their riches back then I suppose the spell is finally broken. I doubt this is gonna happen.