The American Dream and American Cinema in the Age of Trump: From Object Relations to Social Relations
Part of The Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture series - more in this series
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : July 2022
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 252
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 96854
- ISBN 13 : 9781032072661
- ISBN 10 : 9781032072
Also by Graham S. Clarke
Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition
Price £59.99
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The American Dream and American Cinema in the Age of Trump uses both film theory and insights from object relations theory in order to examine how recent films address and reflect the state of the ‘American Dream’. This fascinating book looks at how the American Dream is one of the organising ideas of American cinema, and one of the most influential cultural outputs of the twenty-first century, at a time of internal crisis.
In an era characterised by populism, climate change and economic uncertainty, the book considers nine auteur films in how they illustrate the challenges of contemporary America. Graham S. Clarke and Ross Clarke present a bifocal perspective on some of the most well-received American films of recent years and how they relate to the American Dream in the context of the Trump presidency. For each of the nine films discussed, two different accounts are presented side by side so that each film is considered from an object relations psychoanalytic point of view (internal world) as well as a film and cultural theory perspective (external world). This unique approach is complemented by discussion of political and critical theory, providing a thorough and engaging analysis.
Challenging and insightful, The American Dream and American Cinema in the Age of Trump will be of great interest to scholars of cinema, popular culture, American studies and psychoanalytic studies.
About the Author(s)
Graham S. Clarke was born in Colchester, Essex, UK in 1942. He went with his family to Australia as “ten pound poms” in 1949, returning via the Suez Canal just before it was closed in 1956. He did a year at Sydney Technical High School (Australia) before going to Clacton County High School (UK) until 1961. Graham took a BSc (Hons) Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (1961–1964). It was here that he attended a series of lectures by Richard Buckminster Fuller whose idea of comprehensive anticipatory design science prompted him to seek a career in computing. In 1967 he did an MSc in applications of computing at what was then the North London Polytechnic. He worked as a computing advisor at City University before starting a PhD in experimental psychology at Hatfield Polytechnic which he never completed. After working on a computer-based authoring system, he went to Chelmer Institute (now part of Anglia Ruskin University) before going to Essex University, Computer Science Department, as a Computer Officer in 1986. He was a founder member of the Intelligent Inhabited Building Group there until his retirement in 2007.
Having had a long-term interest in the “anti-psychiatry” movement headed by R. D. Laing and David Cooper and having attended the Dialectics of Liberation conference at the Round House in Chalk Farm in 1967, while at Essex he took a part-time master’s in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Tavistock (1995) and later a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex University (2002). He published his first paper on psychoanalysis and film in Free Associations journal in 1994 and since then has published many more papers and articles, as well as five books.
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