ABSTRACT
Hollywood films instill a widely recognized narrative of human experience. This narrative comes in various shades of what is a single dominant theme: a heroic encounter with extreme inner challenges and outer obstacles, most often ending in success against the odds. This chapter aims to convey something of the essence of American film with two main premises. The first, is that Hollywood-derived screen stories epitomize a critical feature of the modern Western psycho-cultural situation, in which the individual, estranged from traditional sources of meaning and behavioral guidelines, negotiates inner and outer encumbrances to discover a unique and ultimately meaningful path. The second premise is framed by Jung’s model of individuation and related concepts that provide a fitting means to comprehend these stories, not only in terms of their dramatic elements, but also their imagistic, cinematic presentation. Innovative striving, personal reinvention and the transcendence of external limitations define the American experience.
