Easy Riders and American Beauties: playing around with middle-class identity
Popular culture serves as a tool for shifting towards more flexible identities.
In Sam Mendes’ 1999 film American Beauty, we witness the protagonist, Lester Burnham, a forty-something husband and father, suffer a middle-class crisis. On top of developing a crush on his daughter’s best friend, Lester swaps his well-paid, white-collar career for a job at a burger stand, starts hanging out with a young crowd, and resumes his youthful pastime of pot smoking. He even changes the way he talks, the clothes he wears, the car he drives, his hobbies and his cultural pursuits.
Off-screen, midlife crises typically occur in men in their 50s who end up buying a Harley Davidson bike or an electric guitar, usually completely out of the blue. The phenomenon also affects well-off women over the age of forty, who suddenly become hippie dreamers with a keen interest in an adventurous boho aesthetic.
What these “Easy Riders” and “Mamma Mias” are doing is distancing themselves from the straitjacket of conventional middle-class roles.
For them, popular culture serves as a tool for shifting towards more flexible identities.
By embracing the clichés produced by popular and underground cultures, these privileged Western middle-class agents, invariably white, wealthy, well-educated and in good health, seek to regain their authenticity and assert their ability to control their own creative self-expression.
It’s difficult to see how this could be achieved by taking up knitting or by learning to play the organ. Imagining someone from a socioeconomically disadvantaged background having the same opportunities for this kind of identity shape shifting is harder still — though we do need to bear in mind that, when it comes to our identities, we all possess agency, even if there are limitations on that agency. Plus, all our lives are saturated with popular culture.
In order to properly understand politics, societal hierarchies and identities we may well need to develop a better understanding of the aesthetics of popular culture. In fact, this might be more crucial than we realise.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, popular culture reflects and shapes our lives in a powerful way.
The entertainment industry produces ready-made role models and identities at a breathtaking pace, each season bringing new hit movies and other pop cultural products and making them available to a diverse, global audience.
There is a perception that this is an industry that can offer us little beyond modelling how to be beautiful and successful. Popular culture, the thinking goes, shapes the way we see our bodies and our status in society, while providing suggestions for how we might go about becoming better versions of ourselves. And yet there is no actual evidence to support this idea. In fact, what popular culture does do is suggest a wide range of ways for us to performatively adopt new roles in all directions, both vertically and horizontally. There are times when we might choose to slum it aesthetically and stylistically, though most of us would of course prefer not to do so when it comes to our personal finances. Whatever your direction of travel, films and TV series will help you get there.
Perhaps Lester Burnham’s tragicomic middle-class odyssey could serve to remind us that we are constantly shaping our identities by embracing, contesting and mocking different creative performances — and that popular culture can play a major role in that process. We can learn a lot from films.
Max Ryynänen
Max Ryynänen is Senior Lecturer on the Theory of Visual Culture at Aalto University’s Department of Art. He works at the crossroads of visual studies, aesthetics, cultural studies and cultural philosophy. He has also written on art for a variety of publications and has experience of art gallery management.
Aalto University’s Master’s programme in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art (ViCCA) sees visual culture, curating and contemporary art as an agora for the exploration of theory, science, technology, ecology, urbanism, popular culture, economies and societal impact.
Downplaying class with style: Middle class anxiety and the aesthetic performance of role distance by Jarkko Pyysiäinen and Max Ryynänen, read the full text at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304422X17302838
