TV Series and American Dream. Nostalgia and survival of a suburban imaginary.

Abstract

In American memory, life in the suburbs remains a context of prosperity, crucial to that imaginary known as the American Dream. However, it is an idyllic setting that television series have been questioning, even since the very flowering of this way of living. This article proposes a study of fictions from the middle of the last century that have been applied to a dysfunctional reading of the American Dream: that is, narratives that managed to illustrate the opposite sides of homogenization and standardization, revealing the order of the everyday as a precarious simulacrum. These are, however, ideological motives that the most contemporary productions seem to reread as a "nostalgia": a category that Fredric Jameson's theory develops in order to challenge artistic forms where the ideas of the past are elaborated allegorically, as images residuals on which the present imposes another line of significance. The proposal will argue that the keys to this nostalgia must be traced to the postwar suburbanization process, an enclave that cannot be thought outside of an incipient late capitalism whose serial reproduction planned both an urban project and the conformation of subjectivities. In dialogue with Jameson's contributions, the article aims to show how mass television has functioned not only as a mode of aesthetic production, but also as a social institution with critical force.