American Dream

AN OSCAR-WINNING DOCUMENTARY about the life in Austin, Minnesota. The town's biggest employer drastically cuts the wages for its employees. The union calls for strike, but many hesitate. Like most American workers they believed that solidarity with the company would be rewarded. Without mercy, the film reveals the hollowness of the American dream.
Comment:
ON ONE HAND, THERE IS NOTHING REVEALING about thc striking meatpackers of the 80s America. They wear T -shirts and baseball caps, and have a habit of going food shopping in their spare time. They carry their merchandise from the store to the car in brown paper bags, easy to drop. A great deal of the American film industry focus on this, the ever-present potential lack of food - man and woman can help each other pick up everything from the parking lot, that in itself is a synopsis.
A great amount of the unwritten rules and regulations in American society are based on a potential lack: ''We're well off now, but in the 20s, and if not the communists, if only the Black, and if God wants ... ''
This is what Barbara Kopplc's documentary American Dream is about. It's intelligent and perceptive, uncontrolled and subdued. A wage cut - humiliating, since the meat still is just as cold and hard - lead to a personal tragedy and gives a performance arena for greater human contexts. Like the family, power, loyalty, community, emotional illiteracy.
A cut in the wages is a slap on the hands by the authorities, When your wages aren't steadily increasing, how then will you be able to bear aging at the steaming conveyor-belt? How may your thoughts possibly be channelled into a peaceful trust, when what you save is taken away from you? It's about the loss of dreams. On one hand the great one, in the film sparely accentuated. On the other the private, almost shameful one, about meaning, about making the slaughter of the swine worthwile. The employer says what the Swedish politician Alf Svensson said during the election campaign in 1991: ''Isn't it better with 8 dollars an hour, than nothing at all?''
The alternative is not just nothing. Nobody who dreams of being able to take a vacation without having to pay over-time wants to hear that her alternative is nothing. In American Dream people are forced to understand that the base for their super-structure of longing and escapism is their ability to work. ''I only want to go to work.''
The dreams are prohibited whecn the wages fall from 10 to 8 dollars.
Only in the moment when you stand among the others in the gym-like halls and hear the strike leader say, thoughtfully, threateningly, calmly, that now, power will be robbed of its sweet night sleep, like they've robbed us of ours - only then is it possible to imagine that you no more will be humiliated and cheated, and freeze your fingers handling meat and blood. On the other hand, that's when you've ended up at the sold-out American dream again. _
ULRIKA MILLES

Medverkande
Documentary: Producent
Barbara Kopple, Arthur Cohn: Manus
Barbara Kopple: Foto
Peter Gilbert, Kevin Keatin, Hart Perry, Mark Petersson, Mathieu Roberts: Musik
Michael Small: Talat språk
English