America, we are often told, is the obesity capital of the world. To judge by the weight of criticism it now attracts, the part of America that appears to be getting most obese is “the dark underbelly of suburbia”. Knocking the American dream has become a staple of the West’s cultural diet. And nowhere does this vision of an anti-American nightmare seem stronger than among America’s own liberal elite.
The latest example is at the Old Vic in London where Kevin Spacey, Hollywood actor and the theatre’s artistic director, is starring in a revival of Dennis MacIntyre’s National Anthems, a play described as “a searing critique of suburban values and a hard-hitting parable about the American dream”. The direction and acting are fresh and fast, and Spacey especially is as good as ever. But even before the curtain goes up, the giant Stars and Stripes draped across the stage signals that this is to be another caricature of America’s shortcomings and self-delusions.
Arthur and Leslie Reed (Steven Webber and Mary Stuart Masterson) are a yuppie couple who have joined the “white flight” from inner-city Detroit to the affluent suburbs. As the play begins, they get an uninvited visit from Ben Cook (Spacey), an apparently eccentric neighbour who turns out to be a fireman fresh from an heroic rescue. He spends the first half wittily mocking their lifestyle pretensions, designer home and designer friends, Spacey playing the “working stiff ” for all he’s worth like a middleweight Gene Hackman. In the second half things get out of control and the verbal sparring turns violent. The Reeds’ consumerist existence is exposed as an empty sham, and Arthur tells Leslie: “All I’ve ever done is work for this house! And if this isn’t it, then you tell me, what is? What?” But we find that Ben’s working class heroism also hides a dark and bitter side. By the end, it is hard to tell which is in the bigger mess — the wrecked house or the characters’ lives.
Although it dates from the 1980s, the message of National Anthems is presented as very much of the moment. The difference is that what might have been considered a “searing critique” of the American dream in the Reagan era now seems rather mainstream and mundane. You can hear it almost everywhere in American culture: in Michael Moore’s million-selling book Stupid White Men and Oscar-winning film Bowling for Columbine, in Hollywood movies such as Spacey’s American Beauty, in contemporary plays like Jumpers or Tim Robbins’s Embedded, in hit pop songs from Madonna’s appalling American Life to Green Day’s American Idiot.
Of course there have always been cultural criticisms of the American dream. The point in National Anthems where Arthur and Ben reveal that their adult lives have never hit the heights of playing high-school football, when you went out to “Bring home the dream!”, echoes the post-football disappointments of both Biff in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Brick in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
But it is no longer simply a case of critics objecting that the American Dream does not deliver on its promises. Instead, the very aspirations for self-improvement embodied in the dream are now being dumped on. And the depictions of the “dark underbelly” grow more obese.
This cynical (rather than critical) mood is not primarily, as some claim, a response to President Bush’s war in Iraq. It seems to be more about America’s culture war against itself. Just listen to Michael Moore’s response to Tony Blair’s support for Bush over Iraq: “Your people read! They think! They discuss politics! They know where Iraq is! Did you think you were leading a nation of Americans?” The same sort of fashionable self-loathing is evident when a department chairman at a US university praises the “gallant sacrifices” of the “combat teams” who attacked New York and Washington on 9/11, or when a serious commentator writes a book suggesting that “African rhythms” of life are preferable to the “frenzied” American way.
It is worth recalling that “the American Dream” first appeared in print in 1931, in a book by the historian James Truslow Adams called The Epic of America. In the depths of the Great Depression, Adams called for a new national doctrine, the American Dream, that could give America a fresh moral sense of itself. In the postwar era, Americans found that sense of purpose in economic prosperity and the Cold War. Even in 1963, Martin Luther King’s most famous speech began by acknowledging that his dream of freedom and equality was “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream”.
By contrast, America’s cultural elite has now lost faith in itself and its own society’s achievements, and turned its back on any notion of an American dream. Far from forging a new sense of mission as many hoped, the traumatised response to 9/11 seems only to have increased this sense of angst and insecurity in Bush’s America. Spacey might once have called National Anthems “a very biting examination of American values”. But the question today would surely be: what exactly are those values, anyway?
It seems that all the cultural cynics can offer in place of the emptied-out American dream is a vacuous anti-American nightmare. And that seems just as useless as the one-eyed patriotism of the “stupid white men”. Indeed arguably it is worse than useless, since at least the old version offered the prospect of standing up for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, however those goals might be compromised in practice.
Turning up in London to live and work, figures such as Spacey and Madonna now behave like self-styled refugees from the ruins of the American dream. They find a ready audience over here. Spacey certainly appeared to be preaching to the choir at the Old Vic this week, as the audience went straight for the play’s message about the ills of US-style consumerism. “Everything that’s so awful about America, wasn’t it?” one woman announced in the foyer afterwards. That sort of anti-materialism might come easy these days, but at £40 for the best seats, it certainly doesn’t come cheap.
National Anthems is at the Old Vic, London SE1, until April 23 (0870 0606628)
