Biopics usually have someone reaching adulthood in a time other than that of birth. Counting out only infancy, one biopic stands out for expressing only one turning: The Diary of Anne Frank. She lived only in a 4T. Anne Frank of course never quite achieved adulthood.
Mobsters are freaks, so I could not quite place Goodfellas. It follows a clique of organized criminals from the 1950's to the 1980's. It says little about normal life -- the sort that does its job, pressures its kids to get ahead by getting a solid education, and taking on adult responsibilities. Henry Hill and his lot may reach chronological adulthood but never truly come of age ... well, mobsters never really grow up. They steal, they deal drugs, they loot, and they kill. Occasionally they get caught and do time, but otherwise they never get beyond the teen male-bonding phase of life They are out only for themselves, and most businesses insist upon subordination that nearly obliterates self. If employment isn't bad enough, slumlords ensure that one has practically no room for consumerism in America, at least for the last forty years. Once evangelical-fundamentalist religion became the norm for the bulk of American Protestants, this religion offered consumerism as an economic ideal based upon complete subordination to the economic structure that American elites wanted: suffering with the pretense of joy despite real and pointless deprivation. Many of Generation X worked two near-full-time jobs just to survive, and as one can expect such ultimately is not good for productivity. People simply worked longer for less.
Remember: as early as the 1930's the consensus was that people needed only forty hours, at least in industrial work, to meet the basic human needs of the time. About fifty years later Since then workers have found that the unbridled greed of shareholders, slumlords, and executives is the only permissible objective in life.
Creating an attractive movie about the gritty realism about X life in which some ill-paid worker whose working life begins at age 20 or so in the Awakening-Unraveling transition and ends in a 4T in a destitute retirement before the current 4T is resolved (or is resolved too late to do that wretch any good) with no that does not become an unrelieved sob-fest that few audiences want to see. The celebrity circus was at least entertaining, but the celebrities are something of an elite that can transcend the dictates that apply to sweatshop workers. The sweatshops of the neoliberal era went from manufacturing places to restaurants and stores, and workers had to dress up to work in many such places, only to live down to crowding, food insecurity, and numbing boredom off the job. Meanwhile the elites live like sultans.
If you think that this language borders on Marxism, then in a way you are right: the economic elites of America are mostly mirror-age Marxists, the sorts of people who endorse the social and political nastiness that full-blown Marxists condemn. These are the people who want pre-revolutionary conditions of economics and pervasive fear of the elites to be maintained through the ages, to be enforced if necessary through state terror -- and fascism often does the trick before it implodes in apocalyptic wars that the fascists seek because war is highly profitable. Mirror-image Marxism and fascism often merge because they share cruelty and greed as their moral basis. Just look at Nazi Germany, where workers became serfs.
Mobsters are freaks, so I could not quite place Goodfellas. It follows a clique of organized criminals from the 1950's to the 1980's. It says little about normal life -- the sort that does its job, pressures its kids to get ahead by getting a solid education, and taking on adult responsibilities. Henry Hill and his lot may reach chronological adulthood but never truly come of age ... well, mobsters never really grow up. They steal, they deal drugs, they loot, and they kill. Occasionally they get caught and do time, but otherwise they never get beyond the teen male-bonding phase of life They are out only for themselves, and most businesses insist upon subordination that nearly obliterates self. If employment isn't bad enough, slumlords ensure that one has practically no room for consumerism in America, at least for the last forty years. Once evangelical-fundamentalist religion became the norm for the bulk of American Protestants, this religion offered consumerism as an economic ideal based upon complete subordination to the economic structure that American elites wanted: suffering with the pretense of joy despite real and pointless deprivation. Many of Generation X worked two near-full-time jobs just to survive, and as one can expect such ultimately is not good for productivity. People simply worked longer for less.
Remember: as early as the 1930's the consensus was that people needed only forty hours, at least in industrial work, to meet the basic human needs of the time. About fifty years later Since then workers have found that the unbridled greed of shareholders, slumlords, and executives is the only permissible objective in life.
Creating an attractive movie about the gritty realism about X life in which some ill-paid worker whose working life begins at age 20 or so in the Awakening-Unraveling transition and ends in a 4T in a destitute retirement before the current 4T is resolved (or is resolved too late to do that wretch any good) with no that does not become an unrelieved sob-fest that few audiences want to see. The celebrity circus was at least entertaining, but the celebrities are something of an elite that can transcend the dictates that apply to sweatshop workers. The sweatshops of the neoliberal era went from manufacturing places to restaurants and stores, and workers had to dress up to work in many such places, only to live down to crowding, food insecurity, and numbing boredom off the job. Meanwhile the elites live like sultans.
If you think that this language borders on Marxism, then in a way you are right: the economic elites of America are mostly mirror-age Marxists, the sorts of people who endorse the social and political nastiness that full-blown Marxists condemn. These are the people who want pre-revolutionary conditions of economics and pervasive fear of the elites to be maintained through the ages, to be enforced if necessary through state terror -- and fascism often does the trick before it implodes in apocalyptic wars that the fascists seek because war is highly profitable. Mirror-image Marxism and fascism often merge because they share cruelty and greed as their moral basis. Just look at Nazi Germany, where workers became serfs.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.