The American Dream Analysis

Living the “American Dream” through the perspective of a Czech immigrant Many people around the world travel to the United States wanting to live a utopian life known as the American Dream. With the idea of having an equal opportunity to achieve success, these people get hit with reality and realize that the American Dream is a hoax. The only way to escape this harsh reality, even for a brief moment, is through the sound and ‘human touch’ feeling that music and entertainment brings. There are two worlds within a musical: a ‘real’ world where we experience the difficulty of reality and a ‘utopian’ world which we escape that reality through songs and dances. A utopic world is one that contains no suffering, poverty, racial, sexual, and class

One example is the use of color from reality to a musical. In her real world, the scenes look dull and gloomy with lots of contrast while her utopian world is vivid with lots of saturation, warm colors, and vibrancy. This represents how her real world is cold, exhausting, and unhappy while her utopian world is where her happiness lies and she can control it however she wants. Another element is the use of the camera. Von Trier used multiple hand-held cameras, as such used in documentaries, in order to give the audience the feeling of being participants as if we were there in the same setting as the characters. The audience gets to see, feel, and experience the private as well as shocking moments that other moving frames cannot do. The unsteady and tremulous movement of the cameras represent Selma’s life slowly becoming unsteady and out of control. The director also uses lots of close ups so that the audience can specifically focus on the character’s emotions and actions while eliminating the universe around it. However, in her utopian world, he uses lots of high angles, crane, and long shot to show Selma is in the center of the universe. He uses the crane movement with the musical in the factory to show the full location of the work place and all the workers dancing. Selma describes how Hollywood films are, “it goes really big and the camera goes, like, out of the roof…” making a reference to tilt, roll, and track camera movements with lots of sound. In this musical, there is no use of these camera and moving frames when dramatic moments occur which represents how her life cannot be a musical except in her