So, the highly artificial Mountain Dew is an elixir and urine; its a treat and a betrayal. Davids aggression against his grandmotherwhich is to say, against an Old Country that he doesnt know but that shadows all his social interactionsechoes the alienation that he himself experiences in the world. The gulf between them is clearly cultural and generational. But, Chung insists, its also personal and, like a predilection for soda, idiosyncratic: the stuff of families, part of the normal violence of intimacy, where you get to be unkind to someone precisely because you know you can.

There are other objects. The dreamed-of American ranch home on the pasture is, at the same time, a trailer house in the middle of nowhereboth unmovable (the irony about mobile homes) and precarious (as the later tornado watch will underscore). Eden, what Jacob actually calls the land, is also already the site of exile; the previous owner, we learn, couldnt make a go of it and killed himself. The cowboy hats and boots that David favors are the material vestiges of a still-active story of the American frontier that holds his father (and indeed his whole family) in its grips and, at the same time, cheap toys.

Flickering between transcendence and detumescence, the objects of the American dream in this movie are misleadingnot because theyre lies, per se, but because they hold out a continual assurance, as addictive as the high fructose corn syrup in Mountain Dew or the cigarette that Jacob draws on like a Marlboro Man. The American dream is a hook, like a pyramid scheme requiring a heavy initial investment (such as, say, 50 acres in the Ozarks) with the endless but unsustainable promise of exponential growth. In this scheme, abundance is a moving target, not a destination. What Jacob loses and what he strives to acquire are mutually supporting narratives. They drive and cancel each other in an ever-growing yet never balanced ledger.

Within and alongside the labors of this chase, we see the work and stretch and pull of kinship. For the immigrant, the ambivalent economy of private and familial feelings is entangled with the ambivalent economy of the American dream. When Monica tells her husband I cant do it anymore near the films climax, does she want to stop struggling for the farms success, or stop prioritizing his goals over hers? Is it about the land or their marriage? Is there a difference? Their intimate relationship is framed by the wider vision of the American dream. Its this constant navigationbetween being a private individual and also a public body that is foreign to yourselfthat Minari captures and leaves unresolved.

In the last year I found myself facing a new foreign territory: this time, a cancer diagnosis. Friends, in kind support, tell me how courageous I am in my fight. But I know I am not courageous at all. I feel fragile, broken, a flotsam in the sea of medical protocols and procedures. Cancer is a door that I have to walk through, a step at a time. Sometimes, when you find yourself and your loved ones in a wholly strange landscape, you move forward even if you are making no progress, and that movement is, in itself, not nothing.

See the article here:
A Visual Anatomy of the American Dream - The Atlantic