Soured on the System: Disaffected Men in 20th Century American Film

This work analyzes popular films produced in the years of significant historical change from 1946 to the end of the twentieth century. Although the American middle class expanded significantly with the economic prosperity that followed World War II, postwar films often depict middle-class men as discontented with the mundane nature of work and with declining autonomy in an increasingly corporate-bureaucratic society. Disaffected male characters represent traditional values of independent thought and action as they negotiate life in the “organized system” (corporate life and the consumer culture) increasingly demanding dependence and conformity, which they resist. Such tensions between independence and conformity remain constant and central themes in American culture, and the phenomenon is rooted in silent feature films, early film shorts, and in nineteenth-century literary texts created as early as the 1850s.