The Myth of the American Dream as reflected in Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal 1993

Year 2004, Issue: 19, 69 - 75, 01.04.2004

Lerzan Gültekin

Abstract

The aim of this article is to give a brief survey of the development of the American Dream as the national myth of socioeconomic success, based on capitalist competition, and analyze its influence on contemporary American society, as reflected in Adrian Lyne’s film Indecent Proposal. As is known, myths are about human nature with all its hopes, desires, fears and needs. However, they also embody the cultural values of any given community as a way of bringing order and meaning to life. Moreover most myths generally emphasize the same point: the search for the self – in other words, the quest myth of self-knowledge. The quest is a spiritual journey, or rather a psychological journey to maturity through which heroes need to define, or ‘prove’ themselves, and suffer the agony of adult life to gain its reward and to make a name Leeming 197 . Richard Slotkin writes that human beings are “essentially a myth-making animal[s]” 7 , and “[m]yth is history successfully disguised as archetype 20 because “myths are stories drawn from history” 16 . He also states that American history, replete with myths peculiar to its culture, reflects the mythologization process through the cluster of indigeneous myths called the American Dream of success.

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