By chance, I happened to have rented The Pursuit of Happyness and Little Miss Sunshine the same weekend. I'd had no clue, beforehand, that both movies are about essentially the same thing.
Boy, was I disgusted with The Pursuit of Happyness, which two of my black coworkers had recommended highly. Of course they did. But just ugh ugh ugh. I was so disgusted at how apolitical it was. Just ugh. Anyway, in that story, Will Smith's character is all about having an "american dream" -- the desire to make it -- and by dint of talent, hard work, sacrifice, struggle, determination, and the occasional bout of good fortune thereby attaining that dream. He wins at life!
And yet, there was Little Miss Sonshine which is about a rather dysfuncationl American family, determined to get their daughter to a beauty pageant. You might assume that this is a family obsessed with their daughter's participation in such competitions, to the extent that they squash her childhood, dress her up to look like a 25 year old, etc., but it's not the case. Their motivations for wanting to ensure they get to that competition is more complicated and subtle than that. More out of guilt for being such mediocre parents than anything else.
The father in the film is the same kind of believer in ther pursuit of the american dream that will smith's character is. Except he's portrayed as a fool who loves competition and winning and success more than he loves his family. You don't like him much and neither does his entire family.
This is a well-known trope in the american dream, too: that people who are unrelenting in their pursuit of their dream, people who believe in it a little too much, to the point of fanatic willingness to buy anything, do anything, say anything, be anything to get whatever they define as their american dream, then they are the real failures. Even if they win, they failed in this mythic narrative.
and interestingly enough, what appears to be the anti-american dream trope, the story that mocks and makes fun of the father in Little Miss Sunshine, supports the mythic american dream narrative just as nicely as the truly obvious one enshrined in the "inspired by a true story" flick, The Pursuit of Happyness, where the same one-sided, driven, fanatical pursuit of the american dream is not mocked at all but is, rather, offered up as the antidote necessary to what's ailing us/u.s.
I happened to catch one of those competition shows Joanna mentions. I think it was America's next top model or something. I see the same thing in those shows, which are very contrived. There are tons of talented people in the pool they choose from. The producers always pick a mix of people from that pool who will ensure the kind of drama they need. Hence, you'll get the truly nice one, the one who will say things like, "I think we are all so talented and beautiful. We're all winners." For those in the population who don't like meritocracy, who think competition is bad, etc., there's always that archetypal character there to reassure them that goodness prevails. She might not win, but she made it to the top 5!
You also get the archetypal Snobby One who thinks she's all that and a bag of fritos. And yet, she almost always gets knocked down a peg or two, and not by accident, since it's so obviously contrived. She may even still win, but what was important that she had to be knocked down a peg or two -- just like the father in Little Miss Sunshine.
And then there is the whole moral narrative about why people are the also-rans: they *deserved* to be the also rans. Not because they weren't talented or beautiful, but because they weren't nice, because they were liars, because they were mean, or because they had bad attitudes.
It almost always impossible to not agree that these people, who fail not because they lack skill, talent, looks, but fail because they have personality flaws, and deserve to fail.
This tension -- between merit as the sole determinant of who should win and merit as talent *and* the right attitude and moral being -- came out rather blatantly in another top model show, name of which I can't recall, but it featured women from all over the world, not just the US. One of the women was rather surly about the way the little mini-competitive games they were asked to play were not about the modeling talent, looks, etc., but were about their attitude, personality, and correct moral being. As I recall, she said something directly about what a joke it was to be expected to not just be beautiful, model well, and have the model walk. She wanted to be judged on that, not whether she had the right attitude. What's up with you people is what she basically asked. You're supposed to focus on my merits, not whether or not I'm a good person. In that particular show, her concerns, which are very typical of so much US thinking about merit and what should really matter, were wiped away with an appeal to something else USers also believe in: that it also matters whether you "fit" in, whether you get along with people, etc. etc.
At any rate, these are all recycling Horatio Alger stories in a way. Hard work and talent matter, but what matters most of all is the right attitude, good moral standing, getting along, and following the norms and customs appropriate to upstanding middle class citizenship.
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