Ambition and ideology: intertextual clues to A Simple Plan's view of the American dream.

In the voice-over narration in the opening sequence of Sam Raimi's 1998 film, A Simple Plan, Bill Paxton, who plays protagonist Hank Mitchell, defines happiness for the American man: a wife who loves him, a good job, and friends and neighbors who respect him. Hank inherits this definition of the American dream from his father, a midwestern farmer driven to suicide when the American economy shifts, eliminating the possibility that family farmer can be a "good" job. Despite his father's fate, Hank, with a college degree and a job as the accountant for the local feed store, has managed to construct a life that not only provides him an adequate middle-class income but also ensures his comfortable place within his community. Married to his college sweetheart, a part-time librarian pregnant with their first child, Hank, the film makes clear from the beginning, has apparently succeeded where his father failed.

Obviously, plot requires that Hank's status as a "happy" man be disturbed if a story is to emerge. Screenwriter Scott Smith, adapting his own first novel (A Simple Plan 1993), not only disturbs his protagonist's status quo, but, in the act of adaptation, also alters his original conception of both characters and plot. One consequence of the changes he makes from novel to film is the underscoring of the story's deep intertextual roots. Although Richard Schickel links the film to Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and a number of reviewers make note of its similarities to the Coen brothers' Fargo, as well as to such classic films as John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1), it is through even deeper intertextual roots that Smith and Raimi reveal their complicated ideological statement regarding the state of the American dream at the end of the twentieth century.

Stuart Klawans notes "something ... chillingly peculiar to late nineties America" in A Simple Plan, and Richard Rayner calls its "fiercely moral investigation of the Puritan ethic.... a perfect story for the late-Clinton era." Such readings position this film as a text almost necessitated by the cultural climate of its era. Its use of intertextuality reveals that connection to its era in a different way: the postmodern narrative's fondness for employing earlier texts as building blocks in its construction. Julia Kristeva defines intertextuality as "the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation of the enunciative and denotative positions" (15). In A Simple Plan, Smith and Raimi transpose three specific sign systems, or texts, central to the western canon: Shakespeare's Macbeth, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Through their complicated interweaving of these language "systems," the filmmakers achieve a new articulation of the relationship between the American dream and ambition, between Christian morality and capitalistic expectations. Within the intersections of these texts, they discover a way to render for a broad audience the tragic consequences of our culture's mixed messages and our apparently inevitable willingness to negotiate the murky moral territory that is our fate. Smith and Raimi underscore the conclusion that Nick Carraway reaches at the end of The Great Gatsby, yet another canonical text central to this film: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (189).