Far and Away: Utopian Projections, Mythological Quest and The American Dream in Kazan’s America America
Far and Away: Utopian Projections, Mythological Quest and The American Dream in Kazan’s America America

Summary/Abstract: A major contemporary storyteller, the American cinema, has constantly recycled and explicitly or implicitly reactivated classical mythological and religious patterns. The hero’s journey and the initiation rituals associated with it have definitely been some of the most frequently employed such patterns. The initiation journey was a highly important topos of classical mythologies and rites of passage and has penetrated fiction in both oral and written traditions. Elia Kazan’s epic intentionally draws on these traditional narrative frameworks, also employing – by way of the myth of the American dream, with reference to the utopian destination – the myth of the earthly paradise as the object of the quest. Concerning the hero’s initiation, we might say that the traditional patterns of initiation are closely followed in Kazan’s narrative: the protagonist leaves the familiar space, faces dangerous situations and characters, meets a mentor, escapes the temptations of wealth and love and, eventually, is symbolically reborn when reaching the magical destination: he is baptized with a new name, washing away his sins and recovering his lost innocence, while literally receiving a new identity and a new destiny.

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