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Overview
Despite America's practical and technological aims, the money spent on film and sports events tends to convey an image of a whimsical nation. This work explores these conflicting images through an analysis of movies, revealing the ties that daily activity and thought have with a world of myth.
Synopsis
Americans consider themselves practical, realistic people engaged in building a complex technological civilization. At the same time, however, we spend countless billions on activities that fly in the face of our supposed commitment to down-to-earth realism: our movies, television programs, and sports events seem to be the pastimes of a whimsical, fantasy-ridden people. "American Dreamtime" explores these conflicting images through an analysis of blockbuster movies, revealing the intimate ties our daily activity and thought have with a world of myth.
Author Biography: Lee Drummond is an independent scholar living in California. He directs the Center for Peripheral Studies.
Richard J. Parmentier
In his innovative and original study of popular American films Drummond finds a virtual forest of symbols-not disembodied, language-based meanings but of pervasive images of machines and animals that are generative of the mythic ambiguities of American culture.