Given the controversies that have plagued the present administration, it is little wonder that critiques of neoconservatives have been produced by scholars from all perspectives. Even Francis Fukuyama, widely reputed to be one of the great neoconservative thinkers, has released a trenchant critique of neoconservatives' ideas and policies (America at the Crossroads, 2006). In her contribution to this growing chorus, Mary Caputi argues that neoconservatives have used and abused history in creating a mythical image of America's past, an idealized narrative about American life in “the fifties” that she contrasts with the complex historical strata of the chronological 1950s. She argues that the neoconservatives have cultivated, popularized, and exploited a misleading and incomplete image of a “kinder, gentler America” to generate a peculiarly powerful melancholia that haunts us with the memory of what we (supposedly) were and what we might (erroneously wish to) be again. Only by seeing through this idealized vision of that decade can we “understand that America's true identity is not located in some mythological register of time” and thus “let go of the worries and sadness that drive the need for foundations” and moral certainties (p. 27).

Caputi's account of the pathologies lurking in our popular imagination of the fifties is compelling. Her major “texts” for exploring the limits of this comfortable image are two recent films—Pleasantville and Far From Heaven. Her reading of the films is sharp and detailed. She discusses how both filmmakers skillfully employ the pastiche of fifties-inspired television plots to reveal the human costs associated with the decade's (purportedly) black-and-white sexual moralities. In Pleasantville, she finds a perfect parable of the trap that melancholy for a “hidden substrate,” some untroubled and now lost past, creates in Americans (pp. 28, 98–100). In her analysis of Far From Heaven, she discusses how “the patina of wholeness” (p. 115) and domestic normalcy often hid both repressed desires and harmful prejudices.

She parses her reading of the films out into the various chapters of the work, building toward the suggestion that a more nuanced understanding of the fifties will provide the basis for a more colorful and diverse, open-ended, performative, and satisfying vision of America's potentialities that will open us to “the new” (pp. 122, 131, 168). The strategy works remarkably well, even though her decision to focus her analysis on these two films limits much of the discussion of the repressive character of the period to issues of sexuality and gender roles (see pp. 23, 92–96, 133–38, et al.) when she might have made more of the political intolerance that all too often passed for patriotism (see pp. 121–27). The book is not as broad as it might be, and too dense for most undergraduates, but the perspectives offered on the films could be used as the basis for very useful class discussions in courses on American politics and culture.

The heart of Caputi's argument, however, is deeper than her oft-repeated assertions that these two films reveal a 1950s that is far less idyllic than the “Honey, I'm home” image of domestic bliss and social stability that is often invoked in political discourse (pp. 24, 98, 108, 118, et al.). She wants to demonstrate that our imagination of the fifties is making us anxious, alienated, and disappointed with our public and private lives in the present. I agree with Caputi that this concept of melancholy may explain Americans' longing for idealized pasts that can serve as problematic keys for untangling thorny contemporary dilemmas and inaccurate templates for an uncertain future (p. 72). Given our infatuation with retelling the story our Founding, we should not be surprised to discover that Americans cling to a “veneer of cohesion” that offers the appearance of a plan or destiny to explain our 200-plus years of surprising dislocations, innovations, and unforeseen changes (pp. 71–82, 114–15, 130).

However, I found her efforts to extract a precise reading of melancholy from the works of Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin to be distracting and unnecessarily obscured by the repetitive use of jargon. The tendency to overuse technical concepts, often without any direct application to American public discourse, is most evident in the second chapter. This discussion of Kristeva and Benjamin's works is a detour de force in which it is easy to lose sight of both the United States and the 1950s. Benjamin's explorations of German tragedy (pp. 47–52), Baudelaire's lyric poetry (52–69), or the over-rich twilight of the Parisian arcades (84–92) may be useful vantages for seeing the emptiness and longing that pervade our visions of suburban Edens, but we could apply these insights more productively to our own times if the focus were kept on the contemporary, political manifestations of our unease.

Moreover, while the origins of Kristeva and Benjamin's concepts of melancholy are explored in great detail, the rhetoric of the Right, through which we are told this melancholy has pervaded our political language and trapped our political projects in unrealizable aspirations, is explored in a disappointing and cursory fashion. Caputi oversimplifies our political landscape, writing as though all post-Reagan conservatives are neoconservatives. She cites figures as diverse as Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Reed, Newt Gingrich, Allan Bloom, Rush Limbaugh, and Russell Kirk as though they share a single and coherent philosophy (e.g., pp. 98–105), but this is a dubious assumption. Meanwhile, Irving Kristol, who is widely credited as the intellectual founder of neoconservatism, is discussed only briefly (p. 102), and neither William Kristol nor Fukuyama is mentioned at all. A more accurate account of conservatism's political use of the fifties should take seriously the possibility that the Right, like the Left, is “a diffuse and variegated group of people whose politics frequently conflict” (p. 139).

In short, Caputi commits the very sin that she criticizes. She chides those who celebrate the mythical fifties as a period in which the problems facing America could be understood clearly in black and white for failing to see that indeterminacy and confusion, a surplus of incomplete meanings and competing claims, must always be with us in making political judgments. She reminds us that our political lives are “overripe with meaning” and that any clear narrative is simply not to be had in “chronological” time (pp. 26–27, 70, 137–38, et al.). And yet, she offers an alternative, but equally totalizing, narrative that obscures the tensions, cross-cutting cleavages, and surpluses of meaning that circulate from the Left to the Right and back again (as neoconservatism itself came out of the Left to lead the Right). A unified conspiracy of right-wing misreaders of history is charged with providing all of the unrealizable dreams that fuel our persistent melancholy. America's political discourse is both fascinating and frustrating, but it merits a more thorough discussion and cannot be reduced so easily to simple dichotomies.

In spite of this disappointing oversimplification, A Kinder, Gentler America provides a provocative reading of two fascinating films, a dense introduction to the works of Kristeva and Benjamin, and a suggestive but incomplete application of the insights gained to American political discourse. It would be more valuable if it contained a better reading of the last, but this book raises many worthwhile questions.