Because I'm happ... SHUT UP!

It is 1945 and the WW2 have just finished with the beginning of a new era. Now, the Cold War, Vietnam, Sputnik, Capitalism, Laika and Neil Armstrong are the #TrendingTopics of the moment while the American Dream is in its highest level after being the protagonist and the most successful country of the battle against the Nazis.

Capitalism and the American Dream brought to the world new sets of beliefs about people, family, society and economy; it changed the way of how life is seen and supposed to be. Coke’s commercials seem to represent the US culture showing how a happy family looks like and should be, and at the same time, spreading all this consumptions all over the globe.

People are bombarded with thousands of images of heteroparental families, women as housewives, men as successful providers, two kids (one boy, one girl), all of them Caucasian –of course-; images of big houses with big yards, amazing cars and a dog. The TV, the radio, advertisements, the government, the streets: all of them are trying to say “If you do this and that, you’ll be happy. If you are different from all of this, you are wrong and a complete alien who won’t be glad of its existence”.

BUT! What if all these selling aren’t truth? What if those aliens are as glad as –or even gladder than – those American dream citizens? What if HAVING is not happiness? This is just what Osborne, Albee and the Beat Generation share, and this is what I invite you to discover right away.

Even though I have been talking to you about the American Dream, it is obvious – I think – that this conception of happiness is more or less the same in all the occidental countries. So first, we have this Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, a 1956 English play by John Osborne. Jimmy, a worker class who married a high-society woman, is constantly complaining about almost everything. The important thing here is: society forced us to be happy, but why should we be happy with these impossed roles and how should we be happy if we can see that if you are not rich and do not have contacts your probabilities of succeed in something are really low? If you are not rich you are completely messed up, then again, HOW CAN WE BE HAPPY?!?!?!

Second, we have these Martha and George, an adult married couple from the US in Edward Albee’s play Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf. To go straight to the point, I will refer to two important moments of the play: Bringing the party to the house and the death of the son.

At the beginning of the play, we can see Martha coming home very late after the party of the University in which his father is the headmaster and George is a professor. George wakes up and Martha says that she invited a young couple who was at the party to the house. She is drunk and making a lot of noise and disasters and George is really pissed off because all of the mess she is doing. Then, here is the question: why bringing the party to home? Because at the same time you bring the party, you bring the appearance of happiness, you bring the masks, you bring all the roles we play when partying.  

On the other hand, Martha and George talked about a son all over the play. As we already know, a traditional family is formed by a dad, a mom, and the children. Without children there is not any family. Nonetheless, that son never existed, at least not physically. Martha and George weren’t able to have children and to talk about their son was a way to talked about its relationship. That is why at the end of the play, while George is saying a requiem Martha refers to the death of her “son”, meaning that the death of the son is in fact, the death of their relationship.

Finally, we have Allen Ginsberg from the Beat Generation and his poem Howl. The Beat Generation is recognized to not believing in the idea of happiness that society sells. Howl presents us the real panorama in the streets. In the first part of the poem drugs, sex and alcohol is described: the Non-Coke version of the world. In second part, it can be seen the reaction to this problem of the society which is identifying the enemy (Moloch) and fighting the enemy with enormous amounts of anger, but then, the voice of the poem recognizes that fighting anger with anger, fire with fire, is the worst option one may do. Consequently, in the last part of the poem, the narrator faces this problem confronting hate with love (Carl Soloman, his friend). Realizing that support, love, integration, togetherness, will defeat hate.

What Osborne, Albee and Ginsberg share is that the vision of happiness that is out there, in the media, in our society, is not accurate. All these works are a criticism of the society, of what we are supposed to do in order to be happy. Family roles, gender roles are constantly questioned.

Pearl Jam’s Garden hit says “I don’t question our existence; I just question our modern needs” and that is exactly what these three people are questioning. The modern needs of buying, the modern needs of having, the modern needs of being a successful businessMAN and being a successful MOTHER.

What if we don’t want to be anything like that? Nothing, because we all should have the opportunity to not be part of that sick society.