preview

Great Gatsby Vs. The American Dream Essay

Better Essays

Great Gatsby vs. The American Dream/Materialism How do we define this ideology of the American Dream? Society has formulated this idea over time. We as people have chosen to base our lives around it and make it our goal to try and achieve something that in all honesty is just this abstract idea that we as have chosen to believe and chase over time. Due to society following this ideology, people have grown to believe that happiness can only be achieved after they have reached the American Dream. You see these advertisements for products that make you think if you don’t own that specific product than you are not going to achieve the American Dream. Media has managed to turn people into these materialistic beings that are just sitting there waiting to be told what to buy next. For my paper I will be analyzing the film The Great and focus primarily on this idea of materialism and more specifically how this American Dream myth and ideology plays into it. Why does the media want us to believe that happiness is derived from the “stuff” we buy and not the things we already have? Page twenty-four in the textbook says, “Book, films, and television shows do not just spontaneously occur: all are created as products to be bought and sold in a greater system of commodity exchange.” (Ott. 24) The film The Great Gatsby is pretty much the epitome of what the American Dream myth really is and expresses this notion of materialism throughout it. Surprisingly the film’s main protagonist is not

Get Access