SOURCE: Gillespie, Nick. “Bye-Bye American Pie.” Reason 28, no. 7 (December 1996): 53-8.

In the following essay, Gillespie examines representations of the “American dream” in several works of fiction and popular culture, including Ford's Independence Day.

The literary critic Lionel Trilling once suggested that novels “deliver the news,” that they tell us “about the look and feel of things, how things are done and what things are worth and what they cost and what the odds are.” Novels, said Trilling, encode “a culture's hum and buzz of implication”; they record our daily business of living, loving, working, and dying.

The same holds true for other forms of cultural storytelling, including movies, television shows, and pop music. And, of course, the “news” itself, which employs a wide variety of dramatic forms and techniques even as it strives to represent our world in a realistic, accurate way. All these stories deliver the news...