Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream

Con Men, Gangsters, Drug Lords, and Zombies

Paul A. Cantor

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813177335
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

The many con men, gangsters, and drug lords portrayed in popular culture are examples of the dark side of the American dream. Viewers are fascinated by these twisted versions of heroic American archetypes, like the self-made man and the entrepreneur. Applying the critical skills he developed as a Shakespeare scholar, Paul A. Cantor finds new depth in familiar landmarks of popular culture. He invokes Shakespearean models to show that the concept of the tragic hero can help us understand why we are both repelled by and drawn to figures such as Vito and Michael Corleone or Walter White.

Beginning with Huckleberry Finn and ending with The Walking Dead, Cantor also uncovers the link between the American dream and frontier life. In imaginative variants of a Wild West setting, popular culture has served up disturbing—and yet strangely compelling—images of what happens when people move beyond the borders of law and order. Cantor demonstrates that, at its best, popular culture raises thoughtful questions about the validity and viability of the American dream, thus deepening our understanding of America itself.

1

ARISTOCRACY IN AMERICA

HUCKLEBERRY FINN AND THE DEMOCRATIC ART OF IMPOSTURE

It is a saddening thought but we cannot change our nature—we are all alike, we human beings; and in our blood and bone, and ineradicably, we carry the seeds out of which monarchies and aristocracies are grown: worship of gauds, titles, distinctions, power.

Mark Twain

Land of the Free, Home of the Fake

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an American classic. It is at once a comic masterpiece and a serious exploration of what distinguishes the American character, above all, its love of freedom and independence. With its focus on children, it seems to celebrate the innocence of America, the land of perpetual youth and renewal. Although still widely read in its original book form, Huckleberry Finn has passed into the broader realm of American popular culture. It has been endlessly recycled in film and television adaptations, often in Disneyfied versions that turn it into musical comedy. It has become the sort of book that is commonly described as “beloved.” Even though its racist language often keeps it from being taught to young people in schools, it is often classified as a children’s book.

Yet Huckleberry Finn is a dark and deeply unnerving work. It is filled with a seemingly endless parade of con artists, impostors, vigilantes, lynch mobs, and other practitioners of fraud and deception or cruelty and inhumanity. Wherever one turns in the book, one finds murder or the threat of murder. At its most disturbing, Huckleberry Finn confronts the darkest blot on America as the land of the free—the crime of slavery in the South. The book seems misanthropic, anticipating Twain’s cynical vision in his later work, especially the Mysterious Stranger fragments. To varying degrees, Twain seems to be questioning conventional morality and religious faith in Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, he must call these pieties into question because in Huck’s world, they support slavery. In its corrosive skepticism, Huckleberry Finn seems to be the very opposite of a children’s book as commonly understood.

All this leaves us with a paradox. In popular culture, Huckleberry Finn conjures up images of the fresh-faced All-American boy, to be played by cute child stars like Mickey Rooney, Ron Howard, or Elijah Wood. Yet in terms of the events and characters it portrays, the book has all the warmth and sweetness of a film noir. It seems like a cross between Johnny Appleseed and Dial M for Murder. For years I was puzzled by Huckleberry Finn—how could such a classic story of America be so dark and misanthropic?

I began to put the two, seemingly contradictory sides of the book together when I came across this passage from the critic V. S. Pritchett:

As Huck Finn and old Jim drift down the Mississippi from one horrifying little town to the next and hear the voices of men quietly swearing at each other across the waters; as they pass the time of day with scroungers, rogues, murderers, the lonely women, the frothing revivalists, the maundering boatmen and fantastic drunks of the river towns, we see the human wastage that is left in the wake of a great effort of the human will, the hopes frustrated, the idealism which has been whittled down to eccentricity and craft. These people are the price paid for building a new country.¹

Pritchett grasps how the bright and dark sides of Huckleberry Finn fit together. If you are going to give people freedom, you are going to have to live with the ways they may misuse and abuse it. If a nation is to be dedicated to giving people a fresh start, a lot of them will make false starts. A country based on political idealism will end up with a lot of people cynically taking advantage of gullible idealists. Huckleberry Finn portrays both the American dream and its nightmarish dark side. Even as it offers an enduring tribute to the American longing for freedom, it reveals, as Pritchett suggests, that we may pay a great price for liberating the desires and ambitions of ordinary human beings.

Huckleberry Finn is thus a Tocquevillian meditation on the advantages and disadvantages of aristocracy and democracy as alternative ways of life. To oversimplify the differences: As opposed to democracy, aristocracy offers a fixed social hierarchy in which people are largely born into their stations in life. The different social ranks are readily identifiable by clear and fixed markers, such as clothing, speech patterns, and manners. The price the majority of people pay for living in an aristocracy is that they lack freedom and social mobility. But the very rigidity of an aristocratic society brings with it a kind of psychological comfort: a lack of anxiety about social status. “Once a serf, always a serf” is the basic principle of aristocracy. Since individuals cannot do anything about their place in an aristocracy, they need not torment themselves over their lack of status. Your social rank is not your fault, and you know your place; what is more, everybody else does, too.

Democracy, by contrast, tears down aristocratic hierarchies, introducing freedom and social mobility and thereby liberating human energies. The American dream is that anyone can become president of the United States; people do not have to be born into positions of power. Americans are taught as their birthright that they are free to rise in the world by their own efforts. That is a wonderful prospect, but it also means that it is now your own fault if you remain in a low station in life. Democracy’s motto is, “You can always do better; you can always make a fresh start.” Compared to aristocracy, then, democracy gives the vast majority of people reason to be dissatisfied with their current lot in life because they now have genuine hopes of improving on it. Democratic individuals always tend to crave more—more money, more status, more power. That is what is good about democracy—it energizes human efforts. Freedom, especially in the marketplace, can be a powerful force for human betterment.

But there is a dark side to the liberation of human desire and ambition that democracy brings about. Set free from aristocratic restraints, people in a democracy are beset by new fears, uncertainties, and anxieties. They can no longer be sure of their status in life. The prospect of rising in status is inevitably accompanied by the possibility of falling. Moreover, the clear aristocratic markers of social status dissolve, leaving people to sort out where they stand in relation to each other. It becomes difficult to distinguish the genuinely self-made man from the con man. The respected entrepreneur you meet at a party may be Bill Gates, but he may just as well be Bernie Madoff (Twain portrays a primitive Ponzi scheme at the end of chapter 8 of Huckleberry Finn). The freedom and openness of democratic society paradoxically make social identity less transparent, and a lot of confusion and deception results. The democratic world Twain portrays in Huckleberry Finn is filled with impostors.

Confusion of identity is the keynote of Huckleberry Finn. Huck is always carrying on one masquerade or another. At one point he even tries to pass as a girl, but he cannot quite bring off that deception. He adopts so many false names in the course of his travels that he has a hard time remembering who he is claiming to be at any given moment. Amid the Grangerford family, he suddenly finds himself at a loss for the alias he has been using: “I went to bed with Buck, and when I waked up in the morning, drat it all, I had forgot what my name was.”² When he comes to the Phelps farm, he realizes that he has been mistaken for a family relative, but he does not know which one. His problem becomes to “find out who I was” (200). This is democratic America for Twain—you are not told who you are; you have to discover it.

Soon Huck learns that in the eyes of the Phelps family, he is none other than his old friend Tom Sawyer. Huck describes this discovery as “like being born again” (201), and indeed “born again,” with all its religious connotations, is a phrase we associate with America and its fresh-start spirit. Huckleberry Finn is all about “born again” Americans, a democratic people who are constantly inventing and reinventing themselves. A Mississippi riverboat pilot named Samuel Clemens reconfigured himself as a writer named Mark Twain, and the rest is literary history. Samuel Clemens was in fact one of the first to understand that in a democratic society a man can use the modern media to invent himself as a celebrity. In Twain’s presentation, America is a land of disguises. As a runaway slave, Jim in particular must continually be kept under wraps. In a bizarre development—of whose irony Twain must have been aware—in chapter 24 Jim ends up dressed in the theatrical costume of King Lear. One of the central motifs of Huckleberry Finn is the theatricality of democratic America. People are constantly playing roles in public, and changing their identities seems no more difficult than changing their costumes.

A Sucker Born Again Every Minute

How is all this deception possible? In the case of Aunt Sally’s mistaking Huck’s identity, the answer is simple: although Tom is her nephew, because she lives apart from him, she does not know what he looks like. The America of Huckleberry Finn is a land of widely dispersed families, often families that have been forcibly broken up. This issue is central to Jim’s story—he is worried about his family being divided up among several different owners, as happened with depressing regularity to slaves in the antebellum South. Huck’s family is broken up, and so is Tom’s. The social mobility of democratic America goes along with geographic and sheer physical mobility. As Pritchett writes, “Movement, a sense of continual migration, is the history of America.”³ Epitomized by Horace Greeley’s famous injunction, “Go West, young man,” America has set its population in perpetual motion. Huckleberry Finn is accordingly a picaresque tale, with its characters always on the go in their journey down the Mississippi. It is not just Jim who must keep moving to preserve his freedom. Many of the characters are seeking some kind of a fresh start, and that requires framing a new identity on the fly. Twain understood the role that a wide-open frontier played in shaping the American character. With its con men, hucksters, gamblers, thieves, and murderers, the world of Huckleberry Finn is an early example of what came to be known as the Wild West. Throughout American history, the frontier—the line between civilization and barbarism—kept shifting (generally westward). At the end of Twain’s novel, Huck, feeling engulfed by civilization, is ready to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (262). That is another way of saying that Huck, like the infamous criminals of the Old West, wants to stay one step ahead of the law, and, like those desperados, he is always willing to disguise himself to do so.

That is why nobody knows for sure anymore who anybody is in Huckleberry Finn. In the aristocratic world of the old regime in Europe, most people were immobile, tied to the land. That is what it meant to be a serf. When people live in small villages, everybody knows who everybody else is, and imposture becomes impossible. The simple answer to the village impostor is, “You’re not a duke; I know you—you’re John the blacksmith.” But Twain’s America is a land of wide-open spaces, and that makes it much easier to become an impostor, a stranger in a strange land. This is perhaps the best example of how all the criminality in Huckleberry Finn is linked to the new democratic freedom and mobility. This explains why the con man has been such a central theme in American culture. Before Twain, Herman Melville had chosen to name a novel about America The Confidence-Man. And con men have been a mainstay of American popular culture, especially its comedies, as the films of W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers attest. Fields’s taglines—“Never give a sucker an even break” and “You can’t cheat an honest man”—have a distinctively American ring to them. The country of George Washington—who could not tell a lie—is also the country of P. T. Barnum, who made a fortune doing just the opposite.

The most irrepressible impostors in Huckleberry Finn are the king and the duke. They succeed in their fraudulent behavior by always staying one step ahead of the lynch mob. As long as they keep moving from town to town, they can use the same old con game by finding new—and therefore still gullible—victims. In their shameless impostures, they represent the dark side of all that is best in America, its spirit of enterprise. When they first team up to defraud the public, they assess their range as impostors:

“What’s your line—mainly?”

“Jour printer, by trade; do a little in the patent medicines; theatre-actor—tragedy, you know; take a turn at mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing-geography school for a change; sling a lecture, sometimes—oh, I do lots of things—most anything that comes handy, so it ain’t work. What’s your lay?”

“I’ve done considerable in the doctoring way in my time. Laying on o’ hands is my best holt—for cancer, and paralysis, and sich things; an I k’n tell a future pretty good, when I’ve got somebody along to find out the facts for me. Preachin’s my line, too; and workin’ camp-meetin’s, and missionaryin around.” (111–12)

The range of this false expertise is remarkable; the king and the duke can “master” science, technology, and medicine. We are struck by their commitment to pseudosciences, such as mesmerism and phrenology, but their careers are a good reminder that it has always been difficult to separate real science from pseudoscience in freewheeling, democratic America. Americans are perennial optimists, believing firmly that with freedom comes opportunity, and with opportunity comes progress and improvement. With enough effort, any problem can be solved, and, in particular, any disease can be cured. That is why Americans are so susceptible to the siren song of the medicine man. Democratic America has led the world in the development of modern medicine, but for that very reason it has also produced more than its share of medical quacks. Free markets allow for a wide range of experiments in technology and medicine, but for every true cure discovered, many false cures may be tried out. The hope of course is that the market will, over time, sort out the true products from the false. The comeuppance eventually suffered by the king and the duke is proof that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. But still, their initial success as con men is a troubling consequence of the freedom America allows its citizens.

An element of theatricality runs through all these impostures; indeed the theater itself is one of their con games. The king and the duke know how to put on a show. They have been printers, actors, and public lecturers. Like their creator, Mark Twain, they know how to exploit the modern media to gain an audience and milk it for all it is worth. Twain hints that authors may be con men, too, putting on an act for their readers. Most audaciously, Twain allows his con artists’ deceptive performances to culminate in preaching, thus presenting a sermon as no better than a medicine show. Another area in which the king and the duke can exploit the gullibility of the American public is religion. They have a temperance scam in which they play upon the moral fervor of their spellbound audience in order to extract donations for the noble cause of teetotalism.⁴ Americans, as part of their democratic character, like to think the best of people. This is no doubt an admirable trait, but again, it makes Americans especially susceptible to con games. They love to hear stories of religious conversion, of criminals who discover the evil of their ways, confess their sins, and claim to have reformed their conduct. That is why the king and the duke include preaching among their con games. Their ability to exploit religion for financial gain is the dark side of the genuine power of evangelical movements in the United States.

Religious con games epitomize the paradox of democracy that Twain explores in Huckleberry Finn. With no established church in America, anybody can set himself up as a preacher. In the absence of any official form of validation, preaching must become self-validating and therefore rely on the charisma of the preacher. Unable to count on a captive audience, American preachers must create their own congregations. This makes for powerful preaching. It is no accident that democratic America has produced such peculiar religious phenomena as televangelism and the megachurch. What amounts to a free market in religion in the United States has energized American churches.⁵ Europeans, with their state churches, have long marveled at the vitality of religion in America, above all, the periodic mass religious awakenings and the emergence of whole new sects, such as the Mormons. America has produced a remarkable number of religious leaders in its history, but according to the logic of democracy that works throughout Huckleberry Finn, the United States has turned out many false prophets as well (and of course one person’s religious leader is another’s false prophet). The very religious vitality on which Americans pride themselves is inextricably linked to their vulnerability to fraudulent piety.

King for a Day

Twain’s central insight is that the con man is the evil twin of the American hero—the entrepreneur, the self-made man, the rags-to-riches genius.⁶ Yet there is som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Aristocracy in America: Huckleberry Finn and the Democratic Art of Imposture
• 2. The Talented Mr. Dukenfield: W. C. Fields and the American Dream
• 3. “I Believe in America”: The Godfather Films and the Immigrant’s Tragedy
• 4. The Macbeth of Meth: Breaking Bad and the Tragedy of Walter White
• 5. The Apocalyptic Strain in Popular Culture: The American Nightmare Becomes the American Dream
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index