American Dream · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sits at a kitchen table and explains why he is going back into the plant. He is not confused about anything. He knows what the strike was for, he knows what crossing the line will cost him with people he has known his whole life, and he has done the arithmetic on his mortgage. Kopple holds on him. No narrator arrives to place him, and the film has no uplift to offer him. He sees his situation with total clarity and there is nothing available to him that counts as winning.

That is the whole film, and it is also why a philosopher who never wrote a word about Barbara Kopple turns out to be the right company for it.

Gilles Deleuze had a name for the engine most movies run on: the action-image. Someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the act resolves the situation. Sheriff sees outlaw, draws, town is saved. Labor cinema has its own strong version of this. Wages are cut, the workers walk out, the walkout changes the terms. Hormel cut the hourly wage from $10.69 to $8.25 in 1984, in a profitable year. Local P-9 struck on August 17, 1985. That is a first act, and everyone in the frame is waiting for the second act to do what second acts do.

It never arrives. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: people who perceive their situation accurately and can no longer act on it in any way that changes it. Why bother with the term? Because without it, American Dream reads as a case file of bad decisions. Jim Guyette was stubborn. Ray Rogers oversold. The international was right, or the international sold them out. Those arguments were being had while the film was still shooting, and Kopple refuses to settle them, which has annoyed partisans on both sides ever since. The Deleuzian reading takes that refusal seriously as a finding rather than a dodge. What she filmed is not a strike lost through error. It is a form of action losing its grip on the world it was built to act on.

You can watch the grip fail. In Harlan County, USA fifteen years earlier, Kopple had the classic arrangement: force against force, gun thugs on one side, miners and Hazel Dickens on the other. Here the opponent keeps dissolving. The film's structural signature, borrowed from Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds, is cross-cutting between constituencies who never share a frame. P-9's leadership and Rogers planning escalation. The UFCW international calculating what can actually be won. Hormel management. The households, where a mortgage does its own quiet work. Deleuze's name for a story built this way is the dispersive situation: many centers, weakly linked, no single antagonist to press against. And the cut between those rooms is doing something unusual. In dialectical montage two shots collide and produce a third thing, a conclusion. Kopple's cuts collide and produce a gap. Deleuze called that gap the interstice, or the irrational cut, a join that refuses to resolve into synthesis. The union hall and the carpeted hotel suite are both true and cannot be added together. What no room contains is the actual cause: PATCO, permanent replacement workers, the collapse of pattern bargaining across meatpacking. Nobody on camera can negotiate with any of that.

Then the concept that makes the film hurt properly. In his late writing on political cinema, Deleuze noticed that modern filmmakers could no longer address a people that already existed and was ready to act. The people are missing. What is left is filming the absence, and sometimes the attempt to invent one. American Dream is the record of a people coming apart on camera in real time, with the equipment running. Brothers cross each other's picket lines. P-9's roving pickets shut down sister locals in Ottumwa and Fremont, and those members lose their own jobs for the solidarity. Governor Perpich sends the National Guard so replacements can work. The international puts the local under trusteeship. A union is not a fact, the film says. It is manufactured continuously, and it can break from the inside.

Two performances carry the argument. Rogers, the corporate-campaign strategist, is always performing and knows it; his craft is the rally, the slogan, the press moment. Deleuze would call this fabulation: subjects caught in the act of legending themselves into a story that might come true if enough people believe it. The tactic had worked at J.P. Stevens, the campaign that produced Norma Rae. In Austin it does not, and Kopple keeps the camera on the legend after the belief has drained out of it. Against him sits Lewie Anderson, the international's negotiator, delivering actuarial bad news in the register of loyalty. That posture is what Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called a gest: an attitude of the body that makes an entire social relation visible without anyone stating it. The furniture does the same work. The rank-and-file spaces are crowded, warm, hand-lettered. The institutional rooms are carpeted and half empty.

And the members stop performing. That is the film's real subject and its saddest movement. They become what Deleuze called seers, people who can only watch and endure because no act is left that would count. The slope shows up in the edit: each act's meetings have fewer people in them and more resignation. Michael Small, who scored Klute and The Parallax View, gives the film elegy instead of propulsion. Where Harlan County had Hazel Dickens singing, this one has arithmetic.

None of it exists without the rig. Primary (1960) established the shoulder-mounted 16mm camera with crystal-sync sound that lets a crew walk into a room mid-decision and keep rolling, which is what Kopple's team does inside P-9 executive board meetings. At Maysles Films she absorbed the flatbed method of Salesman, a moral arc built purely from unscripted sync footage with no narrator to arbitrate, and Cathy Caplan, Thomas Haneke and Lawrence Silk apply it to Austin. Wiseman's Meat is the precedent for the Hormel plant material and for refusing to editorialize over it; Finally Got the News for letting workers deliver their own economic analysis with no expert to translate. Harlan County is the direct parent: same residency model, same Kevin Keating camera, Silk back at the same bench fifteen years on. Bazin wanted cinema to preserve the ambiguity of the real and leave the interpreting to us, and direct cinema turned that argument into hardware. Kopple takes it somewhere Bazin did not anticipate, where the ambiguity is not texture but the moral design.

Forward, the debts are concrete. Peter Gilbert carried this camera to Hoop Dreams. The multi-year embedded shoot became a serious form rather than an extravagance. Above all, American Dream licensed the American documentary to end in defeat without despair and without false uplift, and to treat institutional complexity as a subject instead of an obstacle. Roger & Me, from the year before, is its twin and its opposite, same collapse and opposite method, and between them they set the poles American nonfiction has argued about ever since.

Watch it again for the rooms. Count the chairs, notice who has stopped talking, and sit with the question the film leaves open: when the thing you are fighting has no body, what is left of a strike as an act?