JackRiddler wrote:And I think the theme is the (white) hero-man's discovery (or delusion) that he is powerless, he doesn't matter any more, with a great sadness and nostalgia. Usually within the context of a hellish post-modernist corporate 1984 regime..
Cf. w/ Mad Men, where our white hero is savvy, wealthy & powerful but doesn't matter and is painfully aware of being dead on the inside and spends his entire life anesthetizing himself with booze and sex from inside a 1960s corporate fish bowl, only to go home and put the only thing that he really has to show for his colorful life, his money, inside a shoebox locked in a drawer no one knows about. Literally, it's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit 2K10, emphasis on "grey", because that's what his life looks like on the inside and he knows it. Hence, sleeping at the office. Also the white heroine (who is actually closer to the hero model than aging Oedipus), whose life revolves around office politics, a substantial part of which includes dodging the gender-role police-catfish both in the corporate world and the domestic eccentricity of Main Street (as depicted by 1960s Bay Ridge. Seriously?) nibbling at her fins in said 1960s fishbowl. Featuring occasional pseudo-OMG moments, like men and women in business attire smoking weed (duh).
Work: it's what America (and Mexico) does when it wants to avoid facing its problems.
Also the most critically acclaimed show on television. Which starts out its first season with all its characters, who sell ads, talking about how they hate TV. But cf. The Informant!, where Jason Bourne acts as a pathological liar and corporate multi-billion-dollar fraudster, listening to music and acting out tropes that would be popular on TV by the end of 1960s America, even though the story is set in the 1990s.
Not much later, wages start to stagnate. After 1968 or so, the only thing in America's dreaming is Taxi Driver (and the Warriors), followed by Mad Max, the Terminator, etc., etc. The future--it sucks, and we've known that for a while now.
Hence, the concern w/ these PKDickian not-quite-futures (like Wild Palms?) where everything looks the same, just with less color. Upper-middle-management types get caught in schemes they cannot fathom or control, to ends they cannot fathom or control. Compare with Syriana ("hero? well, uh, we have a fat, nihilistic white CIA contractor with a serious PTSD and homicidal tendencies whose home life sucks, and a high-powered black attorney (whose alcoholic father lives with him) who seems like a fraud investigator but is actually and wittingly crucial to the business end of an international assassination-for-oil attempt") and/or Magnolia (which, what with an ensemble cast, no one seemed to notice is an entire story set around child trafficking (with Freemasons!)! "If you do not let them go"?)
So, there you have it, to be a Real Man in 21st Century America you have to ruin your life for your occupation. No wonder all these guys have late-onset DID.
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