Career movies: American business and the success mystique

Abstract

Introduction From American Dream to Success Mystique Defining the Genre and Other Theoretical Approaches Organizational Structure Chapter 1. The Classical Corporate Executive Film Executive Promotion and Family Allegiance Corporate Nationalism Shoring Up the New Male Bureaucrat Beyond the Corporate-Family Equation Chapter 2. The Emergence of the Career Woman From Shamed Working Moms in Noir and Classical Melodrama to Embarrassed Ones in Comedy The 1970s and After: Transitional Consciousness Gives Way to Clones, Comedic Supermoms, and Competitive Saboteurs Consumerism's Legacy of Narcissism and Displacement Chapter 3. The Entrepreneurial Impulse Surveying the Agony and Ecstasy of Ownership Immigrant and Racial Issues in Family Businesses Entrepreneurial Femmes Fatales in the Film Noir Tradition Eroticized Success Mastery and Repetition Compulsion Chapter 4. Huckster Foreplay: The Promotion Industry From Early Cinema Hucksters to Corporate Media Demagogues Directing Desire in the Postwar Classical Film Evident Resistance in the Transitional Era The Entrepreneurialization of Employment and Other Promotional Realities in the 1980s and 1990s Chapter 5. Working in American Televirtuality From Network TV to Cultic Space and Cultural Metaphor The Drive to Virtuality in Production and Consumption Reception and Simulational Identity in Cyberspace Conclusion List of Film Stills Notes Bibliography Index