The Man In The Grey Fllannel Suit Analysis

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Recommended: Conformity in the 1950s

The “American Century” was the age of post-world war II United States. America was the powerhouse of the world, with industries booming over the luxurious Golden Age of consumerism. The Military Industrial Complex drove the post-war era of mass production in all industries. The core of the middle-class culture, the “American Dream”, created the want to-be lifestyle for the population. Middle-class Americans dove into their pockets and savings to buy the new technology, which included the modern car, the television and the radio. Television brought a new age of mass media, combining the private life of the home with public news and entertainment. The ideal lifestyle casted a shadow of conformity over the entire country that caused middle class …show more content…

People worried more about their social status, whether they owned the newest products. As seen in the movie, “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit”, the main characters are a middle class family who are just making enough money to be comfortable with their lives. The mother of the family is so ashamed of their old house and broken appliances that she becomes distant to her husband because she complains that they do not have nice things. Artifacts became more important to the middle class American than the people in their life did. Lewis Mumford described this phenomena as “If she is well-to-do, she is surrounded with electric or electronic devices that take place of flesh and blood companions”. Similar to the distance in their relationships, people lost their sense of belonging in a society that told them exactly how to think and act. The providers of the family, mostly the men, became like robots in business suits with a designated schedule in a cubical office. While women took a step back from their progress in the work force when families moved to the mass produced suburbs, physically separating them from the work place and making them to stay at home. American citizens gave up a lot their own personal life and freedoms for the luxury of mass …show more content…

Individuality no longer existed, which left many men and women to be concerned about the role they actually played in society. Social critic, C. Wright Mills, wrote, “We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor”. Through both mass media and mass production, the high powers of society controlled what the citizen knew and how they acted. American citizens were giving up their freedoms to the control of the mass produced culture. The working class sunk into their daily routines, not progressing or using their own free will. The way for the American people to take back their individual lives was to realize that they did belong to themselves and were endowed a free world. As Mills described as “to really belong, we have got, first, to get it clear with ourselves that we do not belong and do not want to belong to an unfree

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