Stan RIDGWAY

WALKING HOME ALONE

Stan Ridgway   

                                                  VIDEO                                                                  

 

COVER ARTWORK

    

This is the written comprehension of the lyrics of the song : Walking Home Alone

Two videos about The American Dream.

Speaker Series: The Future of the American Dream - Excerpt

This videos is about the future of the american dream. A man, Bob Herbert tells us that the most important aspect of the American dream is having a good Job. This is the basis of all others things. He says that to realise their dreams, the people have to be support by a good job which enables gain monney. He takes the example of the childrens on the school who are better prepared to become writters journalist or lawyers. Because thanks to this kind of job they can gain monney and reach to better way of life. According to him, having a good job, is the future of the American dream, and the belief of the news generations. 

In America - Trailer

This film takes place in New-York. It is about a family who leaves in this new city because they lost one of their childrens. They try to build a new life but it is very dificult because the father doesn't find a job. This movie gather lots of very important point of the American Dream. First, it seems that the importance of the family is very present. Because there is two little sister who try to understand this system and the father looks like  desperate. Then, the idea of the employement is here too, by the father. Finally, the black man who can be the symbol of the Hope, represents the ideal of the American dream beliefs, a land of opportunities to everyone. However, I think that it is a pessimist point of vue of the american dream, maybe even a criticism but I am not sure.

Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese

GoodFellas is a film about the american mafia based on a true story. The story takes place in Brooklyn in 1955, we follow Henry Hill's life, a boy who always wanted to become a Gangster. Indeed, at the beginning of the film he says :  "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster" and he is going to reach it by being hired when he was 11 by the most important gangster family of Brooklyn : The Lucchese crime family. Henry learns the basis of the life as a mafia. He becames very quickly one of the best guys in the group. In this group there are "El Capo" Polly acted by Paul Sorvino, and two other men very influent and powerfull, Tommy, acted by Joe Pesci and Jimmy acted by Robert de Niro, who acts in a lot of mafia movies. 
 But when they are involved in a drugs affair,  Henry's life is going to change dramatically. 

This is the trailer of the movie. 

We can consider this movie as a thriller because there are all elements which are characteristic of this genre.
Indeed, there is a central protagonist, Henry Hill who is telling his story thanks to a voice-over. We can see all his life since his childhood until the end. His job makes him faces the death all the time, either because he has to burry someone killed by his "friends", either because he is threatened. 
Henry has to be careful because in the film Tommy kills a guy who belongs to another band of gangsters and this band reach to killed Tommy and another man. So some times its very dangerous because in his job he doesn't have real friends. Then, at the end, he has to change his identity because Jimmy wants to kill him. We should not forget either that he goes in jail twice. 
The main storyline is about his life as a gangster, it shows how its like to be a gangster.
 He has to gain money commiting infractions. But when he is involved with drugs, his aim is to do things behind the back of "El Capo" without being discovered by him. 
There is also Tommy who is very unpredictable and kills people without reason, so Jimmy and Henry must hide Tommy's murders. It's kind of the opposite of a mystery that has to be resolved. 
Henry Hill tell us the story, we see everything through his point of view. His voice-over explains the character's personnality, the actions, the project of futurs thefts and the slightest details of the gangster life. 
This movie is based on a true story so in most cases the actions can only be true. Furthermore, we can see that everything in the film is very credible because we can found them in a lot of other movies like "The Godfather" or "Malavita". 
The notion of justice here is in every part of the film, indeed, the characters dispense justice by themselves, its not very conventionnal but this is the gangster law! And the morality is more or less the same. Because the gangsters don't have real morality, only Henry's wife has a kind of guilty conscience. She is the only one who have a real and "normal" morality. Henry's friends have their own morality, the law of the strongest.
The unique sign of innocence in this movie are the two henry's daughters, who live the further away as possible of their father bussiness.

Statistic about the American Dream

This graph is not surprising to me because we can see that opportunity comes first and this is the basic value of the American Dream, indeed, for a lot of emigrants this is a land where everyone can work their way up and achieve upward mobility. Then, freedom ranks second.
To explain that we can remember the Founding Father who were the seven politicians who signed the declaration of independence in1776 and 11 years after wrote the Constitution in 1787.
 It was too, a welcoming land for the Pilgrim Fathers who were Puritans who traveled to the USA in 1620 aboard the mayflower to escape religious persecutions in Great Britain. Since this time, American has become a symbole of freedom and an example of democraty.
Financial security aspect is a very important aspect too, for the people need to have monney to meet their own family's needs. We can oppose it to wealth which shows more a kind of desire to strike it rich. Indeed, we can speak of wealth when the people want to meet needs that they don't have like a huge house, lots of cars, the last technological products... etc
Family is an idea which is liked by everybody. Everybody wants to have the perfect model of family which means, two working parents, children who have a very prestigious education and who will be part of the consumer society.
The item of happiness can regroup all the other categories, because when the people manage to be rich, with a lot of hard work and will power, when they have a perfect family, when they need nothing else, they imagine that they will be happy... But as is often the money can't buy happiness ! 


This document redefines the American Dream as the people see it nowadays.We can see that the values aren't the same because the society has changed a lot over the last centuries. We notice a kind of fear of the future for example when 47% of the people are dreaming of money for their retirement. It's true that in America the system it is very different from the european one. It's more individualistic and almost everything is private. When in Europe there is the social security, in America the people have to pay for all their medical treatments and save for their retirement by buying pension funds, for example.
The second notion is to have their own house, which is a heritage of the American Dream which made dreaming the emigrants dream in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because to have their house we have to have money, the basic element of the American dream.
In this graph we can see a kind of evolution in the demands and need of the people because of drastic changes in society.