For the past 250 years, the “American Dream” has been summed up in a simple image: a house, a healthy-looking family, a white picket fence. But increasingly, younger Americans see that traditional image slip away as high housing costs, stagnant wages, and inequality fence them in instead. A newly released movie asks the question: What does the American Dream look like now?
The movie, called “Amerigo: The Search for the American Dream,” is a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary that was released on June 1, produced by husband-wife duo David and Julie McCourt. The couple spent over two years traveling across all 50 states and conducting more than 1,000 unscripted interviews with Americans of diverse backgrounds about whether they think the American Dream, the promise of opportunity, prosperity, and a better life, is still a reality.
For each person interviewed in the film, the American Dream was different, based on their own varying perspectives of the ideal life, but the search for personal freedom and security were common themes.
The 90-minute documentary was screened at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center on Friday night and was followed by a conversation with the filmmakers, MV Times publisher Charles Sennott, and an engaged audience of around 100 people.
David McCourt is the author of “Total Rethink: Why Entrepreneurs Should Act Like Revolutionaries” and an Emmy award-winning TV producer for “Reading Rainbow,” a children’s TV show that encourages reading.
Drawing from his own journey toward the American Dream as an Irish American, McCourt serves as a narrator and interviewer throughout the documentary. The film was named after a historic figure from the 1400s, Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer and navigator whom the Americas are named after.
“I’ve never been as brave as the explorers in the 1400s, like Amerigo Vespucci, but I have been given the opportunity to live an incredibly interesting and fortuitous life, what many would call the American Dream,” McCourt says at the beginning of the film.
The format of the documentary is rooted in his interest in listening to people and learning from their thoughts and experiences, rather than formulating a single message.
“This was a listening tour. Most documentaries decide they want to teach you something. We wanted to listen,” McCourt told the audience after the screening. “We decided we would just tell the American people what they thought.”
“We always thought that ordinary people were extraordinary,” co-producer Julie McCourt added. “We felt that every voice mattered.”
The film explores systemic issues that have left the interviewees feeling like the American Dream is entirely out of reach. High housing prices, expensive healthcare, corporate interests, and political polarization are some of the factors raised by interviewees in the first half of the documentary.
“Right now, I feel like it’s an American nightmare,” an unnamed interviewee in the film says.
According to Rachel Goslins from the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, there are two groups most likely to believe in the American Dream today: first-generation immigrants and multimillionaires.
“The likelihood of a first-generation immigrant doing better than his or her parents is the same today as it was 100 years ago,” Goslins says in the film.
Immigration came up a few times in the film as an example of the continued endurance of the American Dream. But for some who arrive in the U.S., the reality doesn’t match the idealized vision they were promised.
It’s through perseverance of the arts and community that the American Dream is still alive today, the film argues.
“The American Dream is nothing without community,” Michele Bannon, mayor of Carbondale, Pa., says in the film. “And it doesn’t come from sitting on your laurels and expecting someone to live your life. It comes from people creating their lives and building their lives and having a dream.”
Sennott is also featured in the film, bringing his experience as an international journalist and longtime correspondent for the Boston Globe to the documentary. “We’re going to have to come together to help each other if we’re going to actually succeed in the future,” he says in the film. “Right now, we are so polarized, so divided. I worry that we can’t keep that American Dream alive without really paying attention to how we’re going to focus on community and make sure we take care of each other locally.”
Music is the driving element for the closing scenes of the film, and artists such as the rapper Goldie, folk and country singer Johnny Cash, and the rock band Green Day are highlighted. Various guest artists are featured singing their interpretations of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the famous patriotic song written during the Civil War for the abolitionist movement.
Julie McCourt, who has had a long career in the entertainment industry and is the daughter of songwriter Ron Miller, created the film’s playlist, and co-wrote a song that became one of the film’s anthems, called “A Better World Is Waiting,” which she said has some “religious overtones” but is mostly about joy and coming together.
After the showing, the audience asked questions about private equity and encounters the interviewers had as well as shared concerns about technology and the rising use of artificial intelligence.
Sennott asked the filmmakers about their biggest takeaway.
“The takeaway, after my wife and I have spent two years traveling across the country, is that Americans are great. Americans are not nearly as divided as the media makes it out to be,” David McCourt said.
Sennott pushed back on that assertion and said the media encompasses a wide scope and can’t be put in one box. Local journalism, he said, tries to “get it right.”
While difficult topics were tackled on Friday, David McCourt shared an optimistic view on the American Dream that ripples through the documentary itself: “We were reminded that Americans [place] No. 1, or 2, or 3, every year: We give away more money than anyone else in the world, helping strangers and volunteering,” he said. “As long as we don’t lose that, I’m incredibly hopeful, because that is what makes America special.”
