Dos Passos' Movie Star: Hollywood Succes and American Failure

Abstract

When a nubile, curly-haired Mary Pickford look-alike enters the stage to the sound of Everybody's Doing It in John Dos Passos' The Big Money (1936), she signals not only the birth of a new icon but also the death of traditional ideals. In a gloomy, despairing portrait of the 1920s, Dos Passos chronicled in The Big Money a nation in blind pursuit of wealth, power and pleasure at the expense of original dreams of equal opportunity, dignity and happiness. The movie star emerged as the major symbol of the alienated America of Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy.l Margo Dowling rises in The Big Money from rags to riches, but the nation's newest sweetheart achieves success at the cost of integrity and authenticity. Like other radicals of his time, Dos Passos saw the film star as the epitome of bourgeois decay, yet, like the majority of his contemporaries, he was at the same time not a little fascinated with his golden-headed fantasy woman. At a point in history characterized by uncertainty and confusion, the Star functioned as an easily readable cultural sign. Like social observers from de Tocqueville to Beaudrillard, Dos Passos employed the language of type in attributing to familiar images and signs American meanings and codes. The idea of Woman was, as Martha Banta demonstrates in Imaging Women (1987), particularly central to the mind in the early twentieth century, when the fragmentation and alienation of modernity stimulated a desire for clear sign systems.2 In a re-writing of the