: Study Questions: Week Seven

Escape to Failure

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Carnal Knowledge (1971).

The Dream in Decline

By the late 1960s the attraction of the American Dream had lost a great deal of its power over our culture. The Dream, like the DuPea home in Five Easy Pieces, was often perceived as a trap to be escaped. The question, however, became; escape to what? Jack DuPea flees, but he never really escapes. His final flight to the arctic is not in pursuit of a new ideal or sense of community but a further attempt to escape his father's world which he seems to find impossible to cast off. In Carnal Knowledge the two men manage to reject the conventions of the American Dream, but what do they find to replace it? These films mark an important cultural transition between the discontents of the Dream evident in All That Heaven Allows and The Graduate and the pervasive sense of loss and the nostalgic yearnings for a return to the era when the Dream flourished, a yearning which dominates many films of the 1970s (The Last Picture Show and The Deer Hunter).

1. Five Easy Pieces opens with images of men at work followed by the famous country music song "Stand By Your Man." In what ways are the song's lyrics an ironic comment on the action which follows?

2. Two previous films (Rebel Without a Cause and The Manchurian Candidate) suggest that the major threat to the American Dream, at least to the ideal family at the center of that dream, can be found in the malign influence of emasculating women. To what degree does this film repudiate that explanation? Consider not only the relationship between Bobby and Rayette but also the nature of the entire DuPea family?

3. Music is central to this film. How does the conflict between two types of music reflect a larger cultural and class conflict?

4. What does Bobby's encounter with Shirley (Betty) and Twinky at the bowling alley reveal about his character? What is the significance of his pretending to be a TV car salesman? Of his claim that on TV "you got to be sincere"?

5. What is the significance of Bobby's job as a rigger in an oil field? How does the setting and the driving machinery link these scenes to other macho film genres, especially the western and the war film?

6. After his payday spree, Bobby returns to pick up Rayette at the diner. The scene of a man and a crying child (apparently the other waitress' family) at the diner is followed by a scene at Elton's trailer. What do these two images of family life suggest about the American Dream? What is Bobby's reaction to Elton's baby?

7. What is Bobby's reaction to Elton's announcement that Rayette is pregnant? What is the significance of his brutal put down of Elton as "some cracker asshole who lives in a trailer park," a nobody who has no business comparing "his life to mine"?

8. Conversely, how does Elton's disgust at Bobby's irresponsibility suggest a moral superiority among the working-class characters? In what way might this superiority be seen as a reversal of the association of class and moral value reflected in The Best Years of Our Lives and previous films? What other scenes in the film reinforce this reversal of class and morality?

9. How does Bobby's attire in the scene at the recording studio symbolize his schizoid personality? What are the roots of that deep division within him?

10. What is the importance of placing the DuPea house on an island in Puget Sound? What does its separation form the mainland suggest about the family's separation from America itself? How does this setting equate beauty and sophistication with emotional repression and deformity?

11. What is the thematic significance of the rude treatment of Bobby's sister at the recording studio? How is it related to a later scene in which her brother, Karl, calls her "penis envy"?

12. One scene of lovemaking between Bobby and "Betty" is not only detached from the preceding and following scenes but takes place wordlessly. What is the significance of this scene? How does it embody Bobby's conception of the ideal relationship? Consider the way he silences Rayette throughout the film.

13. Do you see any relationship between the psychic and physical disabilities suffered by Bobby's brother and sister and the fact that they are still bound to the family home? Has Bobby's rebellion liberated him, or is he equally bound?

14. On the trip from California to Washington, Bobby, Rayette and the two travelers they have picked up stop in a diner, where one of the film's most memorable scenes takes place. Furious that the diner's rules deny him a perfectly reasonable request for toast, Bobby insults the waitress, smashes dishes, and walks out. After he is praised for his rebellious independence, and he replies "But I didn't get it did I"? How does this episode tend to sum up Bobby's life?

15. In what ways are Katherine and Rayette similar in their relationship to the DuPea family and its aesthetic and intellectual milieu? How is the vulgar good will of Rayette played off against the cruel politeness of the DuPea family and friends?

16. The DuPea Patriarch, paralyzed and smiling enigmatically, sits motionless at the narrative and thematic center of the film. What does his condition represent? How does Bobby's encounter with him help explain the film's concluding scene?

17. As the lumber truck takes Bobby to Alaska, the driver comments, "Where were going it's going to get colder than Hell." How does this comment square with earlier references to Alaska as a place free from "crap" and "filth?" For those of you familiar with Dante's Divine Comedy, do you see any parallels?

18. It's no accident that Jack Nicholson is featured in both these films. In what ways are his characters similar? Why do you think that his screen persona epitomizes the the breakdown of the male gender roles identified with the American Dream in the 1950s?

20. Carnal Knowledge, which traces the lives of the central characters from the early 1970s to the early 1970s, dramatizes the decline of the American Dream. How do each of the film's major episodes (which are marked by the different women associated with Jonathan and Sandy), mark steps in that decline?

21. Describe the ways in which the film presents Susan as the idealized symbol of the American Dream? How does her behavior raise doubts about the validity of that dream?

22. How do the professions chosen by Sandy (physician) and Jonathan (tax lawyer) help define essential differences in their characters? In what ways is this contrast similar to other pairs of male associates in American culture (think of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn)? Which is the more of a calculating achiever? Which is the searcher?

23. What comment does the film make on the theme of romantic love, the love which was seen in the 1950s as one of the emotional underpinnings of the American Dream?

24. In what ways does the search for romantic (and sexual) fulfillment tend to reduce the humanity of the objects of desire?

25. Finally, in what specific ways do both these films make the same criticisms of the validity of the American Dream? Does it fail becaued the Dream itself is flawed, or are the dreamers to blame for their failures?