The Books of My Life: The Dream Life

J. Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: New Press, 2003) takes readers on an Alice in Wonderland like journey through the old and new myths of the American sixties from the late fities to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kraucauer, Marshall McLuhan, Benedict Anderson, and Jean Baudrillard, Hoberman explores how American myths or American dreams fed into American films including those of Hollywood, and how those films in turn created and recreated American myths.

Starring in Hoberman's sixties film dream life and filmic waking life cosmic manichean American melodrama are a number of celebrity star-pols. There is John F. Kennedy, America's own James Bond, secret agent man whose mission it is to help save the third world from evil tyranny in his own version of The Magnificent Seven (1960). There is Barry Goldwater the Cowboy from Arizona, a waking life version of the paternalistic John Wayne in McLintock (1963). There is Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Cowboy from Texas who fancies himself in the John Wayne roles in The Alamo (1960) and The Green Berets (1968). There is Richard Milhous Nixon, the waking life's own General Patton of Patton (1970). And there are those scores of left wing, liberals turned conservatives, and right wing righteous outlaws and vigilantes who imagine themselves as Bonnie and Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the two drug selling bikers in Easy Rider (1969), Joe in Joe (1970), and Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974), and Harry in Dirty Harry (1971) and the Stranger in High Plains Drifter (1973).

Hoberman's historical, sociological, and cultural anthropological approach to the American dream life and its moving mythic dreams is a welcome remedy to an academic film criticism obsessed with the Freudian dream life. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in American culture, the sixties, cinema, and nationalistic religion. Needless to say the dream life and the dreams that inhabit America's waking life are still with us today. President Donald Trump, for instance, seems to fancy himself a righteous cowboy wearing a white hat (pun intended), a righteous outlaw, and a righteous vigilante of the John Wayne persuasion, all at the same time. When you scratch beneath the ideological dream and find the reality, however, it is clear that Trump is actually Marion Morrison, the man who was lucky enough not to have to serve in any war other than a Hollywood war and the man who came to believe that he embodied the dream life myth Hollywood and America had him play in his waking life. We have truly gone down the rabbit hole.