Adventureland and the Carnivalesque of Capitalism

Greg Motolla's Adventureland is only ostensibly a coming of age tale. The real story, the true awakening, occurs in the background. Set in the summer of 1987, the film follows nerdy college grad James (Jesse Eisenberg) as he is forced to work at a rundown amusement park surrounded by geeks and attractive workers. As the story goes, he has his romantic illusions challenged, his pretensions ruptured, but discovers love and life lessons in the process. Yet the spectre of class and economy haunts the narrative in such a way that it's never simply a coming of age tale. Indeed, Adventureland reveals its genuine 80s insight through a class consciousness that emerges only in the background, gaining an acuity through its very obliqueness.

For just as John Hughes used his teen angst films to preach 80s class consciousness, Adventureland's coming of age tale acts as a framework to explore the intersections of class and capital. In doing so, it recognises the 80s as a decade defined by its wild shifts in status: downward mobility was just as common as upward mobility, while movement both ways across the blue collar/white collar divide was rising. In the film, James’s middle class dad is demoted, while Lisa P's father has fallen into the depression of unemployment. Em (Kristen Stewart) is working at the park despite her wealthy father, while intellectual Joel (an excellent Martin Starr) is embarrassed about his lower class status ('I'm poor. Girls aren't going to go after me when there are all these yuppies around'). Meanwhile, James's college friend (and future yuppie) returns from a trip around ‘the old world’ (Europe), only to realise he wants to be part of the ‘new world’ (Harvard Business School). Late 80s capitalism is here a carnivalesque state - one where social hierarchies are flipped (the old overtaken by the young, upper class forced to work as lower class), the sacred mingles with the profane (religion and pot seem to be constant refrains) and 'truths' are subverted or exposed. Towards the end of the film, James champions Herman Melville for writing Moby Dick - a "700 page allegorical novel about the whaling industry". For Mottola, Adventureland is his 107 minute allegorical film about the carnival industry.


The central underlying tension of the film is between the idea of carnivalesque as a liberating and revolutionary force (as argued by Russian anarchist Mikhael Bakhtin) and carnivalesque as an assimilated and contained transgression. For Bakhtin the carnival was a period when rules were reversed and the social order turned upside down: thus the king becomes the fool; the fool becomes the king; heaven and hell twist ('Satin lives') and fact and fantasy mingle. He argued this allowed people to see the world anew, outside of its dominant traditions and power structures. The concept found support in the counter-culture protests of the 60s and still has its advocates among the radical left (eg. Michael Hardt), who defend it as a theatrical means to subvert capitalism and restructure our bourgeois desires and pleasures.

But what supporters of carnivalesque overlooked was that the carnival itself was an exception that ultimately proved the rule. While it ostensibly endorsed transgression and symbolic usurpation, carnival's real function was to get the masses to blow off steam and, in doing so, allow them to continue with their everyday lives. In the passage from the 60s through to the 70s and 80s, the carnivalesque became merely another means for capital to reorganise its production: the commodity was seen as less a functional necessity than a fulfillment of our own individual sense of self, while consumer culture transformed teenagers into the locus around which capital circulated. By the 80s, the radical yippies of the 60s and 70s were becoming middle aged yuppies, while the conservative PJ O'Rourke's of the world were as much about sex, drugs and rock and roll as they were guns, taxes and defense of country. Rather than a means for resistance, transgression became mainstream behaviour; ‘carnivalesque' became a far more appropriate description of the movements of late capitalism than the means for its subversion.

In Adventureland, the amusement park is the primary symbol of this commodification of the carnivalesque. Its bright signs, cheesy pop music, banal rides and rigged games are about the safest kind of transgression you could imagine. Indeed, one of the recurring images in the park is of bright coloured lights in the background. The lights are shown up close and out of focus in the opening credits, but they gradually become clarified (and commodified) as the coloured globes of the amusement park: the utopian promise of the 60s clarified as a desperate spectacle. Class position too has become a joke, with workers arbitrarily separated into ‘rides’ and the less popular ‘games’. Utopian possibilities exist here only as a thin fantasy lure - the actual games are in fact all rigged.

This utopian failure perhaps accounts for the sense of death and melancholy that pervades the film. When Joel quits the park he is said to have "passed on". Lisa P ponders the existence of God after seeing her unemployed father in extreme pain. Em's own father, whose wife died from cancer, chooses to go out with Francy, a woman he met in temple who has also lost her hair (but from the stress of divorce). Em points out the weirdness of it - her father is trying to relive his relationship with her mother but through its dying form, enjoying the fantasy as ghost. Indeed, Francy's bourgeois manner and Em's description of her as a 'status obsessed witch' gets closest to revealing the class origins of this unnamed spectre.

Class and ghosts are further linked in the film's multiple literary references. James talks of being a journalist ala Charles Dickens, exposing poverty and social stratification. But Dickens of course paid reference to ghosts as much as he did class (‘A Christmas Carol’). In a similar reference, Joel gives Sue a copy of Nikolai Gogol’s 'The Overcoat’ - a book about an impoverished clerk seeking to rise above his class with a fancy coat but who is later accosted by thieves and his coat stolen. As a result, the clerk catches fever and dies, only to reappear in the epilogue as a ghost who steals people's coats. The ending has provoked varying interpretations but it seems clear that the ghosts aren't merely spectral forms of the afterlife (the living thieves are also suggested to be ghosts), but indicative of a more haunting class consciousness that pervades the novel.

A central scene in Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ also elucidates a key revelation in Adventureland. Just before the clerk - named Akaky - falls ill and dies, he is scolded by a 'prominent personage' for his improper remarks about secretaries (improper because of his lower class). Yet the remarks themselves were provoked by Akaky’s traumatic awareness of the contingency behind class authority and status. The awareness is so haunting for Akaky it causes him to almost faint and it’s after this scene that he catches the fever that kills him. On his deathbed, Akaky hallucinates the prominent personage, initially asking his forgiveness but then finally cursing him. For Gogol, as with Mottola, class consciousness is linked to a crisis of authority, a traumatic revelation of the contingency involved in symbolic status. The blind spot that defines and haunts both Gogol’s and Mottola’s characters is their inherent (Jew vs Catholic) yet arbitrary (‘you’re definitely a games person’) class position.

In Adventureland, various narrative strands are connected through this crisis of authority. For James it is his father’s demotion and subsequent drinking problem that incite his journey to class consciousness. For Em, the film suggests, it is her father’s collapse of authority (he is going out with a dying version of her mother) that provokes her rebellion against his class expectations. Yet the lie of this authority is perhaps most apparent in Ryan Reynold’s maintenance man. Mike Connell is a figure who encapsulates the essential fantasy of class – the fantasy of superiority.* In the park, he is seen as a ‘legend’ and a person to look up to, precisely because he presents himself as ‘above’ his lowly position (he brags he once jammed with Lou Reed**). Yet this fantasy of superiority is actually what allows the class structure to function. By conceiving reality through the prism of a superior class, Connell disavows its status as fantasy and avoids acknowledging the cultural/economic conditions that frame it. For class consciousness to emerge, James must move beyond these class fantasies. As Mark Fisher writes: “the working class becomes the proletariat when it recognises this - when, that is to say, it begins to dis-identify with the 'class fantasy' which has kept it in its place.”

At first, James tacitly supports the illusory stance of Connell (as well as his father), even after it's been ruptured. But he later turns from this complicity to advocate the liberating potential of symbolic rupture. Herman Melville may have died unappreciated, with his obituary incorrectly written as 'Henry Melville', but as James protests - "He was an impassioned man when he was alive! I hope when I die, I'm fortunate enough to be called Henry". James argues the usurpation of fantasy doesn't have to be disillusioning but can in fact be liberating. The unmasking may lead to uncertainty but it also reveals the limits we thought constrained us were actually illusory in themselves. For Mottola, passion is what counts - regardless of consequence, certainties or limits - a passion that sees something outside and beyond symbolic 'truths' and class aspirations. When James goes to New York, it’s less out of a sense of graduate school entitlement and more out of a desire to escape social hierarchies (“I’m going to look for a shitty job and...I don’t know!”).

Despite the realisation that the carnivalesque of the 60s merely made way for the capitalist carnival of the 80s, Adventureland ultimately seeks to redeem the liberating potential of 60s counter culture. Throughout the film, James aligns himself with the values of the 60s. While Lisa P might believe in God, James believes in the 'transformative' power of love. While his mother reads Tom Wolfe's tale of carnivalesque capitalism, James is engrossed in bohemian author Henry Miller. The utopian lights that appear at the beginning reappear in James' loving gazes at Em and in his breakout journey to New York. Indeed, the lights manifest themselves in other forms, such as the July 4 fireworks (which inspire a collective wonder despite James' preference for Bastille Day) and the flares Frigo fires at an imaginary 'Viet Cong' (an image that explicitly evokes the turbulence of the 60s).

When James finally leaves the lights of the carnival for the similar coloured lights of New York, the utopian possibilities are still there but without the contained and empty carthasis of the carnival. The future may still be 'rigged' but this time he is confronting it with all the uncertainty, irresolution and possibility of the unknown.



* Class fantasy can also refer to a fantasy of inferiority, made particularly apparent in the film by the figure of Joel.

** Lou Reed is played and referenced repeatedly throughout the film in the songs of Pale Blue Eyes and Satellite of Love (both songs about affairs). In one particular scene, James remarks to Connell that Reed is a hero of his as he listens to Satellite of Love on the radio, but Connell fails to recognise the song despite boasting he once jammed with the musician. Ironically, Reed has said the song tells the story of a man who watches the launch of a satellite on television while having feelings 'of the worst kind of jealousy' over his unfaithful girlfriend. Apart from having literal relevance to James' situation, the song also alludes to the pure belief in fantasy (the satellite of love) as well as its inherent ambiguity. While the fantasy may inspire love, it also covers up opposite feelings of envy and distrust, becoming a far more comforting image than confronting the uncertainty of whether your girlfriend is faithful or not. This is of course, the symbolic quandary that James finds himself at the end - how to maintain the fantasy that inspired him without also succumbing to its deception; how to embrace the possibilities opened up by fantasy but without symbolic reassurances. The song Pale Blue Eyes on the other hand ties up money, affairs, carnivalesque and death, all in three lyrics: “She said, Money is like us in time/It lies, but can't stand up/Down for you is up.”