Watching Woody Allen´s film, Midnight in Paris, I found myself longing for going back to the America of 1930s. I would do it just for the pleasure of encountering the brilliant minds who decided to use the story of the American Dream as a power´s lure to impose the feeling of nationality in a country composed of countless ethnics and races.
Having seen that language and religion, the two historical pillars of unification among people, were no longer sufficient to consolidate a nation1, the agents of power undertook an alternative path to preserve the roots of America in the depths of people´s hearts. Backed by the efficient practice of propaganda2, which in this case found its expression in the Hollywood industry, they began to spread the story of the American Dream to depict in people´s minds the image of the American nation: a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man3. Rather than speaking about an American culture, that message seemed to underline the idea of a human culture. A culture not based on religion or language, but simply a culture of humanity, which embodies the utopic society unrepressed by frontiers and social orders.
Following the fundamental reasoning of nation as “a soul, a spiritual principle”4, the American government and Hollywood set up a tandem in which the story became their ally. Not only did they success in imposing the idea of nationality in a wide heterogeneous society, but they also created a sensation in non-American people, who fled their home countries hoping to live their own American Dream in the new Promised Land.
From my point of view, the triumph of the American Dream lies on the skill of the people who told the story and the way in which they shaped it up, as it were an enchantment. Years later, taking advantage of the “prodigious effects”5 of the story, the agents of power developed a more sophisticated form of propaganda, the so-called storytelling6: an infallible weapon of persuasion and manipulation that facilitate them to achieve their goals. Nowadays, the usage of the storytelling has reached mostly all the imaginable scenarios, from politics to social sciences, from psychology to media, from the company to law, favoring the fictionalization of the reality. People do no longer live the reality but a story, a sort of anesthetic dream7, whose sense is continuously being built up and “fenced”8 by the power, not by the people. In the same way that the American Dream has raptured people´s mind over its promises about the dream society, that modernity lives intoxicated by the stories that flood our daily existence. Based on the framework of the American society, the aim of this essay is to analyze the use of the story as ideology-maker, cultural transfer and “responsible of the emblematic institution of reality”9.
Without entering to describe the complex theoretical lineage of the narratology, a task that would take us back to Aristotle and his ‘Poetics’, I will settle the beginning of the analysis in the modern narratology, with the Russian Formalists and specially with Vladimir Propp and his ‘Morphology of the folktale’. Although he focused only on the structure of the plot, his method inspired the path of Greimas, Todorov and Barthes, whose studies implement the context in the textual analysis. In his Mythologies, Roland Barthes makes already allusion of stories which “try to manage and guide the ideas and behavior”10. Speaking of ideology, he introduces the term of mythas something that points out, notifies, makes us understand and imposes [an idea] on us”11. The story of the American Dream is anything but a myth and the practice of the storytelling is the direct disciple of the Barthes´s concept of mythmaking: a way of turning ideas, culture and ideology into “learned ignorance”12 that goes without saying.
As I see it, this witty use of the story has had the most too-much-talked consequences in journalism and broadcast television. Taking them as the main spread streams of knowledge and public opinion, both media have submerged into a “melodramatic aesthetic”13 of fake stories. This aesthetic serves as “a sense-making system”14 in which “something more real than ‘reality’ [is] found and exposed underneath its surface”15. In the history of the American mass media, the television channel Fox News seems to have acquired the use of melodrama as its motto. Based on people´s “vulnerability”16 and “predisposition to assimilate stories”17, Fox News has developed a new narrative use which consists of “selecting a certain amount of stories and attaching to them the news”18; never the other way around. So, the television offers to the audience a fake story, a lie, that they will believe in and, equally important fact, they will propagate as learned ignorance.
For instance, the American invasion of Irak in 2003 owes quite a lot to the power of the story. As Christian Salmon says in his book Storytelling, during that time the Pentagon subcontracted one group of fake journalists, a public relations society called Lincoln Group, with the purpose of creating fake stories oriented to the Iraqi newspapers. These fakes were presented as “impartial stories written by independent journalists”19. However, the purpose was simply to offer a lecture of entertainment and to use the story as a “weapon of mass distraction”20 which diverts people´s attention from the real situation. At the end, all that is seen as counter ideology, as a threat to the power´s aims or outside interests, everything is ignored, marginalized or disguised by the technique of fictionalization. The result leads to a “culture and public opinion founded in the affirmation instead of the reality, in the opinions and not the facts”21.
Nowadays, the American society lives in a “faith-based reality”22 under the tutelage of the White House, Hollywood and media. Except for the techniques of marketing and propaganda which justify the running of the “free competence”22 that characterizes capitalism, the voracity with which this triad of power uses its storytelling is starting to asphyxiate the people and, hence, the idea of the American Dream. That utopic culture of humanity, that promising message of the individual as the sole owner of his destiny, independent of religion, race or social position, the whole story has fallen into pieces, showing the perturbing truth: that there´s no freedom in the dream, no coincidence in the story because, against to what they might have thought, the dream that they are living is the dream of the other, of the power. And that they are stranded in the reality underneath the reality, without will, feeling what the other wants them to feel, either “love, hate, grief, joy, lust or disgust”23.