“F*** US, F*** NATO, F*** Bill Clinton!” This is the unexpected welcome a Romanian stationmaster offers a US marine in Cristian Nemescu's 2007 film California Dreamin’ (Endless) when the latter insists the train should depart without presenting the needed papers, by virtue of carrying a NATO cargo.Footnote 1 The movie, awarded un certain regard at Cannes, draws its inspiration from a real event which was covered in the Romanian press at the time: in 1999, a NATO train transiting the country was stopped by a stationmaster for lack of custom papers.Footnote 2
My paper focusses on the film California Dreamin’ (Endless) to examine how the postcommunist context – rarely explored in current American studies scholarship – signifies and appropriates the real and imaginary American presence in the region. The Eastern European connection that my article explores not only is associated with a geographical place, but points to the relation to/of the US with a world for which the US “has never been the great power; it has always been a dream. An important dream: the shining knight on the white horse who rides in to carry us away … this dream remains fundamentally unaltered.”Footnote 3 While this view was expressed by the Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy as a response to Jürgen Habermas's indictment of the support of the “New Europe” for US foreign policy in 2003, it well captures the assumptions about the US in many countries from the former communist bloc. In Romania, for instance, the expression “The Americans are coming!” (Vin americanii!) was a familiar phrase during and immediately after World War II, as the Americans were expected to come and “rescue” the country from the Soviet yoke.Footnote 4 The expression still enjoys significant currency in the Romanian media: a Google search for Vin americanii testifies to the popularity of this catchphrase (163,000 results) and illustrates a wide range of uses referring to the desired American presence/arrival in sports competitions, musical concerts, and investment in general (real estate, fashion, beverages, electronics, etc.). Though it has acquired more jocular and ironic overtones, it has frequently been used positively with reference to the establishment of a NATO base near the Black Sea in 2005 or US military drills taking place within Romanian borders.Footnote 5 At the same time the formula is also used humorously to refer to the very unlikely hope that somebody else will magically solve an entire country's problems, as the popular rock band Taxi well capture in their lyrics:
Moreover, this postcommunist locale – a missing link in the transnational American studies scholarship, a relation of the “Second World” with the US – is also relevant for the current analysis of the US from “outside” its geographical and political boundaries because Romania currently plays a central role in the US foreign policy in the area through its strategic geopolitical position and its warm acceptance of NATO bases in the region.Footnote 7 Moreover, the present Romanian President, Traian Băsescu, is a staunch supporter of a continued commitment to the US and NATO: one of his phrases, the so-called “Washington–London–Bucharest Axis,” became a leitmotif of Romanian foreign policy from his 2004 election onwards, sometimes uttered in covert opposition to the country's EU allegiances.Footnote 8
In this context, the movie California Dreamin’ (Endless) functions as an “object” of American studies.Footnote 9 I single it out from other Romanian movies or popular-culture products as it captures how the present context engages critically with both the real and the imaginary presence of the US in the country. I acknowledge the various guises of America and the fragmented nature of its representations when traveling abroad and, by taking the movie as a lens for the post-1989 Romanian context, my paper will answer the following questions: how is the US global reach signified and decoded in the aftermath of communism, and what new meanings does “America” acquire? What national pasts and contested regional presents inform current interpretations of the US and its presence in Romania? What “interferences [does the US] create” in its former Cold War “other”Footnote 10 at the beginning of the twenty-first century?
By engaging the sociohistorical specificities of the postcommunist Romanian space, my paper will unravel the ideological complexities of Americans and US culture abroad and analyze the cultural and political imaginaries about the US in the post-Cold War period in Romania that the film reveals. My argument is that California Dreamin’ (Endless) presents, on the one hand, a historically diverse and highly relational construction of the US which informs national identifications in the region and, on the other, the extent of American influence in post-Cold War Eastern Europe at the turn of the twenty-first century.
I also contend that the dialogic Romania–US examination that the movie successfully achieves can become an ideal model for approaching the US in the Eastern European space; this is possible because, as my paper illustrates, Nemescu's work offers a spatiotemporal approach to the US presence in Romania and thus goes well beyond the enthusiastic view of the immediate post-1989 democratic changes which came “wrapped in the American flag,”Footnote 11 or the more recent ones related to the Iraq War, when the “New” Europe was the US “friendly ally”Footnote 12 and significant differences appeared between the former communist bloc and “Old” Europe as far as the Euro-Atlantic relations were concerned.Footnote 13
HISTORICAL CROSSROADS: “THE AMERICANS ARE COMING!”
California Dreamin’ (Endless) is set against the backdrop of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. It centers on a train transporting American military equipment which, on its way to Kosovo, is stopped for several days in a small Romanian village. Although the train has been authorized for travel by the Romanian government, the local stationmaster does not allow the train to leave because some custom papers are missing. He is more than stubborn in his determination to make sure that the NATO train complies with railway regulations. The American marines guarding the military equipment find themselves stranded in the tiny village of Căpâlniţa, where the local people spare no effort in welcoming them to their community. The mayor throws a party in their honour, spiced up with Romanian traditional food, beer, local folk dances, American rock ‘n’ roll songs, and beautiful girls easily charmed by the soldiers. The tensions between the village leaders also come out, and the mayor and the villagers revolt against the stationmaster, who is also the local black-market tyrant. At this point, the NATO train leaves. An ending note informs us that the US marines reach their destination and the radar the train was carrying becomes operational two hours after the cease-fire had been declared in Kosovo.
This apparently simple and uneventful storyline becomes a cinematic success in the hands of the young and gifted director. Historically, the US and Romania have come together in cinema primarily through Dracula films, or with Romania serving as an exotic, faraway prop. Other Eastern European movies feature questions of immigration to the US rather than the implications of the US presence in the region.Footnote 14 Cristian Nemescu's movie offers a major change of perspective, through both the theme and the highly contextualized way in which he tackles this topic.
The plot of the movie weaves four stories. First (in chronological order), there is the story of a child whose parents “disappeared” in communist prisons after World War II for “collaboration” with the Germans when the communists took over. Second, we have the encounter between this child, now a railway stationmaster, Doiaru, with a US marine commander, Captain Jones. Third, we witness the warm reception of the US soldiers by the Romanians during a five-day stay in a remote village; finally, the fourth story depicts the short-lived love affair between a seventeen-year-old girl (Monica, Doiaru's daughter) and the young US marine deputy, Sergeant David McLaren.
The main focus of the movie, the arrival of the Americans, is set within overlapping historical backgrounds: World War II, post-1989, the NATO bombing of Serbia. This strategy allows it to revisit and play upon fantasies and projections of the US in recent Romanian history and popular imagination. Through its multiple generational crossover and numerous flashbacks, the movie anchors itself not only in 1990s Romania but also during World War II. At the same time, the story line the movie presents foregrounds an important moment with reference to the historical Eastern Europe–US intersection, namely 1999, the year of the NATO bombing of Serbia. The actual production of the movie takes place during the Iraq War and the War on Terror, both key moments as far as Eastern Europe–US foreign relations and cooperation are concerned, as the “new democracies” became part of the coalition of the “willing,” thus supporting US intervention in Iraq.
At the level of plot and factual events that led to the making of the film, it is the NATO bombings of Serbia,Footnote 15 a highly debated and controversial matter for the Romanian public at large, which provides the historical background. In spite of the unflinching official political and military support Romania has offered NATO,Footnote 16 the general attitude of the population in 1999 was reserved, even critical, not because of anti-Americanism or grassroot local objections to US foreign policy, but because in the popular imaginary Serbia has been perceived as the only “good neighbor” in Romania's troubled history, one with which Romania has had no clashes or territorial disputes.
The writing of the script and general production of the movie took place in 2005–6, during the Iraq War and the War on Terror. The director refers to the “analogy” foreign viewers will probably make between “the political situation now and the film.”Footnote 17 The American cast (Armand Assante and Jamie Elman) generally allude to this in their interpretation of the script, thus bringing into discussion current US intervention abroad. Armand Assante, who plays Captain Jones, views the film as a “metaphor for the world as it is right now.”Footnote 18 Such views are well grounded and the parallels the film draws with reference to recent history point to the film's complexity.
However, interpreting California Dreamin’ (Endless) as a critique of US intervention and US imperialism in world politics – namely a Romanian reaction in line with the worldwide attacks on the Bush administration's policy on international affairs – would be to oversimplify. Reading the film as a record of cultural clashes and misinterpretation, as many reviewers, genuinely charmed by the question of mistranslation the film humorously explores, have done, would also fail to do justice to the movie.Footnote 19
I argue that any such interpretations, while warranted by the complexity of the film and the many nuances it brings into discussion – are restrictive. The movie engages with multiple and contending meanings of “America” as it problematizes and brings into dialogue overlapping and contradictory local ideologies in relation to the US. By unravelling the superpositioning of plots and ideologies, I show the multiply ambivalent nature of such discourses that the film well captures; by examining how the subplots of the movie envision a continuous questioning and interrogation of the precommunist past and the postcommunist present upon which images, perceptions, fictions, and appropriations of “America” are predicated in the post-1989 Romanian context, I also point to how the movie succeeds in alternating perspectives, Romanian versus the US, at the level of characters, cast, narrative threads, and cinematic techniques.
The precommunist past, the first temporal line, unfolds gradually through black-and-white flashbacks of several World War II air raids and through Doiaru's grandfather's comments as he reassuringly tells his family, “I'm telling you the Americans will be here today or tomorrow.” Doiaru's own parents, when taken to prison by the communists, tell the young boy, “Don't be scared, before we return, the Americans will be here.” The flashbacks from before and after 1945 highlight the phrase “The Americans are coming,” which encapsulated the hope that the US would rescue Romania from the takeover of communists and Soviet influence.
The past can be seen as the causal explanation for the present and the reason for Doiaru's staunch refusal to let the Americans pass, in spite of all political and hierarchical pressure exerted upon him by the authorities and in spite of the train's possession of all the necessary approvals except the needed bureaucratic documents. His defiant attitude against anything American – bluntly stated during the first encounter with Captain Jones, as seen above, and consistently followed throughout their exchanges – can also be accounted for in terms of the traumatic events he experienced (the communist takeover and the consequent loss of his parents) as a result of the failed hopes and unfulfilled expectations about the US in the aftermath of the war. Moreover, the historical background of World War II that the film repeatedly emphasizes also points to the problematic relationship between past and present in postcommunist Romania, with reference to the US, for a whole generation who felt betrayed and “sold out” at the Yalta conference in 1945. The numerous black-and-white flashbacks to those traumatic but hopeful times bring the past and the present constantly in dialogue and throw more light on the narrative thread, as they intertwine with the contemporary events filmed in color.
The ambivalent Romanian attitude to the NATO bombings at the time might also explain Doiaru's obstinate refusal to understand the strategic and military importance of the cargo – this “exceptional situation.” The NATO bombing of Serbia, which was not addressed in the interviews about the making of the film, surfaces in the film in multiple ways: first through the newscast constantly playing in Doiaru's house and in the offices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; second, in the thorny questions he keeps asking Captain Jones about the impact of NATO's military on civilians (“Why are you bombing Yugoslavia”?) which problematize US foreign policy.
The depiction of the past emphasizes the crushing impact history has upon the individual, Doiaru in this case, a small boy made an orphan by historical events. The close-up of the bomb dropped on the unfortunate population in the black-and-white footage depicting the 1940s foregrounds the inscription on the bomb – “Made in Newport Beach, California” – and thus complicates and destabilizes the past–present causal relationship which seems to characterize the behaviour of the stationmaster. Romanians were waiting for American salvation to come in the mid-1940s, but all they were left with were American air raids and bombs.Footnote 20 The bomb close-up subtly undermines the image of the US as a saviour and thus the whole revamped rhetoric Romania developed after 1989 with reference to the role and importance of the US and NATO in the region.
Doiaru's historical and political awareness, as well as his self-righteousness with reference to the NATO cargo – “I don't make legislation, I respect legislation” – is ironically undermined by his role as the black-market tyrant who controls the village economy. He regularly steals from the freight trains that pass through his station, and he is close to taking over a factory driven to bankruptcy by his corruption. His national pride and painful awareness of his country's history alternately caught between empires and international interests are counterposed against his black-market practices. Doiaru can be seen as embodying the effects of both the communist and postcommunist periods: he is a man traumatized by history, harboring no hopes or illusions; a widowed husband who pampers his only daughter, struggling to make his unfulfilled dreams come true for her (buying her things and doing everything to make her life in the stifling village a happy one); and a representative character for the post-1989 economic transition, corruption, and black-market practices.
The encounter between Doiaru and Captain Jones, the film's second narrative, is a real-life encounter, happening “now,” and the scenes depicting the clashes or attempted bonding between the two are masterpieces of the two actors' performance and the director's way of alternating perspectives and camera angles, without taking sides or making judgements. From this perspective, the wonderfully crafted pair adds to the other juxtapositions in historical background, narrative thread, and contrasting Romanian discourses about the US (Figure 1). More importantly, though, the Doiaru–Captain Jones encounter is both a historical and a fictional one: the local stationmaster finally faces his unfulfilled hopes and dreams about the US and its role in Eastern Europe. Captain Jones is the individual with whom Doiaru jokes and shares national food specialities, but much more than that, the American marine stands for the images and roles the US has had for the orphaned stationmaster in the last fifty years. The Romanian stationmaster thus confronts both his past and the imaginary constructions of the US. Doiaru's answer when asked about his knowledge of English refers to the long-expected arrival of the Americans to save them: “Didn't I tell you? … I was waiting for you.” When offered a cigar, more critical questions about US politics and role in international affairs follow “What is wrong with Bill Clinton?” “And you are bombing people for Bill Clinton?!” Doiaru constantly questions and teases the marine about US foreign policy while the latter, consistent with his status, does not engage and invokes his military duties, getting clearing for his transport. The relationship between Doiaru and Jones serves as a microcosm for the narrative of Romanian expectations regarding the US and its role in the region. The present (accidental) “arrival” of the Americans in Romania is thus juxtaposed with the expected but unfulfilled arrival in 1945; the third and fourth subplots of the movie add further juxtapositions and post-1989 meanings to US presence in the Romania.
The attempted bonding between Doiaru and Captain Jones over a cigar.
POST-1989 LOVE STORIES – “LOVE ME TENDER, LOVE ME SWEET, YOU'LL MAKE MY LIFE COMPLETE”
The narrative thread of the overenthusiastic welcome of the US marines by the villagers – notably the mayor throwing a party re-celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the village even though such a feast had taken place only a month before (an event the Americans are unaware of) – also plays on multiple levels. It can be read in the tradition of the almost internalized self-orientalizing attitude in the Balkans that numerous films from the region share. It can also be said to depict the image of traditional Romanian hospitality, the joy and reverence felt toward the arrival of the Americans.Footnote 21
The mayor of Căpâlniţa, who stages the grand party, wears a stars-and-stripes tie; he even gets an Elvis impersonator onstage and has him croon “Love Me Tender” in a Romanian burr; everything is set against the background of American flags and decorative paintings with American icons as diverse as George Washington and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Figure 2). The familiarity with American culture, particularly popular culture, which the party displays, illustrates the Americanophilia that characterizes contemporary Romanian popular culture.Footnote 22 More importantly, the excessive enthusiasm has a more pragmatic dimension, as the Americans are seen as investors, able to help boost an economy in shambles. By re-celebrating the village anniversary, the mayor makes the most of his chance to put his little kingdom on the map and solve village problems by trying to finagle American dollars from the soldiers stranded there, to set up possible business ventures, or to make the village a “twin” town of a US city. The entrepreneurial mayor justifies the re-celebration in these terms: “As far as the village affairs go, the arrival of the Americans can only do us good because we get publicity, we'll draw new investors to our village; our guests are potential investors, too.” It is by no means a disinterested welcome, but a savvy approach with clear economic targets and gain in view. The workers from the local factory try in turn to make the most of the Americans' arrival and go on strike, hoping to get media attention and achieve their trade union goals. The high-school girls also become quickly available and prove instantly attracted to the young marines – they throw themselves at the new crop of young men. Their behaviour speaks again about the lure of things American in the small village, even more so when it looks like there is potential marital bliss with an American husband.Footnote 23 The arrival of the Americans acquires multiple meanings which depend on each group's interests – joint business ventures, trade union interests, possible husbands and a subsequent move to “America.”
A local Elvis impersonator, crooning “Love Me Tender” in a Romanian burr.
The fourth narrative thread I have identified in the film, which regards the short-lived love story between the rebellious and independent Monica, Doiaru's seventeen-year-old daughter, and Sergeant David McLaren, brings another perspective to the “lure” of America and its significance in the postcommunist context. After a declaration of love – lost in intended mistranslation by Andrei, Monica's enamoured classmate (“I want to kiss you” turns into “He wants to know what kind of music you listen to”) – and a scene of passionate lovemaking, Monica severs any possible tie with David. At the end, with the NATO train finally set to leave, he asks her to write her phone number on his palm; having watched her recede into the night, he opens his fist and finds that she has scrawled a childish sun. Monica's behaviour can be seen as embodying another facet of the younger generation's attitude with reference to the US. Hers is a more canny approach – David is not an escape route but a midsummer crush – which enables a mature distancing from the charming US marine and everything he stands for and rounds off the portrayal of the new generation and its relation to the US that the movie offers.
The fourth narrative thread brings together the two discourses – the desire for all things American versus breaking all ties with America – and plays upon ambivalences and ambiguities inherent in Monica's behaviour. The focus on the young generation, with its heterogeneous reactions to the US and what it stands for, is characterized by the same steering clear of judgements or commentary, moral or didactic messages, which is an overall feature of the movie. This subplot focussing on the younger generation questions the present and opens up the future – the coda presents Monica and Andrei meeting later as students in Bucharest. They opt to leave the poor village behind but not via the Americans, rather as students relocating to the country's capital.
The interpretation of the love story between Monica and David is enriched when read in relation to the juxtaposition between the attitudes of the old and the new generations towards the US that the other plots suggest. The Romanians' grudge against and disillusionment with the Americans who failed to rescue them from Soviet domination after World War II (Doiaru) are counterposed to the younger generation, anchored in the present and embodying free spirit and savvy (Monica). “America” is desired, but the hopes and illusions it offers are no longer imprisoning – suggesting, in the case of Doiaru's generation, deferred action and deferred responsibility for one's destiny: they are overcome. Monica breaks free from the dreams of her father and her grandparents, as the postcommunist period allows her to forge her own destiny.
FUTURE PASTS – “CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ ON SUCH A WINTER'S DAY”
California Dreamin’ (Endless) captures past and present Romanian discourses about the US depicted in their ambivalence and historical complexity. The topos of the American abroad is successfully employed, steering away from caricatures and stock types. Two pairs of linked characters (Captain Jones/Sergeant McLaren and Doiaru/Monica) serve to illustrate generational and attitudinal positions regarding Romania's image of America and its role in the region. Significantly, the pairing of the protagonists – Doiaru versus Captain Jones, Monica and David – adds to the other juxtapositions already mentioned (historical background, narrative threads, and opposite Romanian discourses about the US) and foregrounds the way the film alternates Romanian and American viewpoints. Indeed, Nemescu not only chose American actors to play marines, but continuously encouraged them to bring to the film their North American upbringing and views, which they successfully did.Footnote 24 By this attention to realism, the movie significantly departs from other representations of Americans in the region, which tend to be either fleeting or parodic.Footnote 25 The American soldiers in California Dreamin’ (Endless) are never imagined as simpleminded agents of Yankee imperialism or standard types. Captain Jones is arrogant and daring but a surprisingly adaptable marine. At the same time the director attempts to highlight an American viewpoint, thus alternating and switching perspectives. Jones's exasperation at the delay of the official papers leads him to pay personal visits to Doiaru's house, in an attempt to get clearing for the NATO cargo. The scenes of attempting to bribe Doiaru or befriend him – while drinking local brandy and sharing Romanian sarmale – are highlights of the movie and illustrate the complexity of these characters.
While California Dreamin’ (Endless) is a movie about the “traces” and “specters”Footnote 26 of America in the Romanian context and the ways in which the postcommunist context reconfigures the precommunist visions of the US, the engagement with the American presence in the village entails presenting Romanian realities of the late 1990s. The movie shows them in a wide range of contexts with profound “cultural intimacy,” in Michael Herzfeld's term;Footnote 27 such contexts cover everything from the corruption and poverty of the dusty village and the inertia of state institutions to the failure of the educational system and lack of values in general.
Using handheld cameras, tight frames, and guerrilla filmmaking techniques, Nemescu employs multiple points of view and shows Romanian realities from a US perspective as well. The images of horse-drawn carriages, makeshift stores or farm animals on the main road – the reality of a Romanian village – are abandoned in favour of close-ups and character-oriented images from the marines' perspective. Romania, for the two marines, is just another military assignment and not a backward country, at the “bottom of the heap,” or an exotic allure, as depicted by US journalism and travelogues.Footnote 28 The movie abounds in what can be called reversed exoticism, as the Americans are the subject of everybody's inquiry and gaze and not the dilapidated postcommunist village.
By oscillating Romanian and US viewpoints at the level of characters, narrative threads, and cinematic techniques, Nemescu never passes judgement but keeps the complexities and ambiguities of situations and histories in play. Moreover, by counterbalancing the Romanian view with the American one, Nemescu establishes ironic contrasts and destabilizes any assumptions, preconceived ideas, or expectations.
The final part of the movie best captures such an instance as the tense situation in the village is presented from the American angle. When Captain Jones is asked by the mayor to help him regain order and get rid of the corrupt Doiaru – whose black-market practices are stifling the village's development – he enthusiastically addresses a meeting of villagers. He offers an impressive discourse against oppression and tyranny: “We'll defeat all Doiarus of this world” (Figure 3). For him, Doiaru now stands for repression and corruption. Jones assumes the role of democratic savior fighting tyranny and despotism, though only rhetorically. This discourse is successful: it comes against the recent communist past with its dictatorial practices, and, consequently, Captain Jones does rally the villagers' support against the stationmaster.
“We are standing as one, united as one!” Captain Jones addressing the villagers and promising help to get rid of the corrupt Doiaru.
The role of the American as world policeman and democratic liberator is problematized and presented with all its complexities and downsides. It is a shrewd appropriation of local interests and conflicts. The mayor gets the American marine on his side to fight local corruption, a move that Jones plays along with because it will allow him to leave the village and continue his mission to Serbia. Meanwhile, the customs papers finally arrive, Doiaru is sacked by the Ministry of Transport, and the train leaves the station. A fight breaks out between the stationmaster's people and his opponents; Doiaru is killed in the presence of his daughter. The mayor expects the Americans to help them (as Captain Jones promised the villagers: “We'll protect you, you have my word”), but the train is gone. The last glimpse of the town of Căpâlniţa is of a small-scale civil war with firebombs torching police cars.
In the context of US foreign policy, the movie's ending can rightly be seen as a critique of US intervention abroad or even, as an American reviewer has noted, of “the American tendency to stir up trouble and then head for the hills (feigning ignorance all the way).”Footnote 29 Romanian film critics, on the other hand, interpreted it through a different lens, namely that “real Americans become prisoners of the Romanian imaginary which influences their actions.”Footnote 30 I would suggest, however, that the ending, when read against the interwoven plots I have discussed above, points to the reenactment of the US's “abandonment” of Romania after World War II, functioning also as a mirror image for the then-current situation in the former Yugoslavia.
The film's title and the soundtrack round off the meanings the US has accrued in the postcommunist context. The lyrics of the Mamas and the Papas' 1960s popular hit, “California Dreamin’,” are first mentioned when Andrei, Monica's colleague, uses them to teach her English so that she can “leave this shitty village.” The song itself is played only when the movie ends, after the short coda with Monica and Andrei meeting as students in Bucharest. The lyrics of the song, about a man in a cold winter landscape longing for the warmth of California, echo both the dreams (broken or fulfilled) and the power to keep dreaming which has characterized the attitude of the film's protagonists in relation to the US. The acute sorrow about the past and the dormant hope, stripped bare by the ending of the movie, seem to be taken over by the obsessive and upbeat soundtrack:
But the soundtrack, featuring an American hit of the 1960s, not only captures how the hopes and illusions of several different Romanian generations come together in relation to the US, but also points to the future. If past and present representations of the US converge in the village of Căpâlniţa with the arrival of the Americans, the connection between past and future is achieved in and with the soundtrack. This song – about an old man dreaming – first teaches Monica English; a tune from the American past projects and opens the future for the young Romanian generation. This future projection and ambivalent dreaming come via the past, the music of American hippies. A traumatic and ultimately hopeless dream captured by the phrase “The Americans are coming!” is ambivalently projected into the future, as the bringing together of the song title “California Dreamin’” and the “endless” from the movie title suggest.Footnote 31 The same idea of connection with the future is suggested by playing the soundtrack only after the ending of the movie, when the credits screen is shown. The viewer's experience of the multiple dreams, fictions, and representations of the US that the movie shows is now linked with the reality of the cast, director, screenwriter, producer, and technicians whose names roll on the screen and also with his/her reality after watching the movie.
However, the film resists the temptation to disambiguate history and solve contradictions. The movie's ending with the soundtrack from the 1960s crowns the way Nemescu brings together past and present, US and Romania, in an ongoing critical questioning and interrogation of both sides.
POST-1989 ROMANIAN RECONFIGURATIONS OF THE US
By shuttling between and around World War II, the Cold War, and its aftermath, California Dreamin’ (Endless) offers the needed dialogic examination of Romania–US relationships, and points to how Romanian identities and histories have been constructed and negotiated in relation to the US. The film's engagement with the real and imaginary presence of America leads to the inscription of many meanings of “America” and its discourses in the post-1989 Romania across generations, the political spectrum, and social strata. The juxtaposed temporal layers that the movie contains point to the shifting relationship between the post-Cold War, Yugoslav Wars, the communist, and the precommunist eras in relation to the US. It reveals American imbrications in the region; it resurfaces political and diplomatic discourses the US labors to forget in the name of democracy, freedom, sound institutions, and Romanian silences hardly acknowledged in the political and official discourse. In so doing, the movie offers an artistic critical intervention in the political and ideological apparatus on both sides of the Atlantic. The real and imaginary presence of the US in Romania is neither idealized nor demystified but becomes subject to sustainable inquiry depicted in all the paradoxes that the specificities of the postcommunist context entails.
For American studies scholarship, California Dreamin’ (Endless) can be of much interest, as it brings to light the distant reach of the US and its intersection with the “Second World” in the second half of the twentieth century; it sheds light on an ideal Eastern European version of a critically engaged, locally attuned and globally anchored decentring approach to the US. The film embodies the necessary critical practice meant to unsettle and relativize any given discourse – American or Romanian in this case – that American studies scholarship is looking for in Eastern Europe. It strikes a balance between appreciation and critique of US culture; to put it another way, it balances what critics suggest should be the “respect” and the “attack mode” towards the US in Eastern Europe.Footnote 32 Such an approach shares neither the cynicism of some European scholars about the “uncritical mimicking” and “self-provincialization”Footnote 33 of American studies in Central and Eastern Europe, nor the idealism of some others intrinsic in viewing the American studies community engaging “in social and political changes”Footnote 34 in Europe. The larger global and historical context that the film provides, together with its alternation of viewpoints, responds to what Djelal Kadir called for in American studies scholarship, i.e. a perspective that is “translocal and relational, never fixed or naturalized,” with a discursive locus, to paraphrase the same critic, which is “supple, mobile, transnational.”Footnote 35
Through its multiple narrative threads, historical layers, and alternating viewpoints, the film effectively encapsulates the main tenets of transnational American studies at the turn of the twenty-first century, engaging the US and Romania in continuous critical dialogue, opening up “spaces for misrecognition, for inchoate forms of friction or divergence, lacunae that often ironically generate the most illuminating points of cross-cultural contact.”Footnote 36 In this way, California Dreamin’ (Endless) unsettles familiar discourses and images that official and political encounters between the two countries have made popular.
For post-socialist cultural studies, California Dreamin’ (Endless) offers a language and a means to overcome postcommunist political views and mainstream assumptions in relation to the US/NATO, “the ultimate totemic symbol of Western civilization.”Footnote 37 It imagines a nonbinary critical location and a space of inquiry that explores the post-1989 images, appropriations, and political mythologies about the US.
Mapping the overlapping terrain of the foreign and the domestic, past and present, the film critically reconfigures – without taking sides, without becoming pro- or anti-American, and without attempting easy revisionisms – the space between the US and one of its main supporters in the “New Europe.” It explores axes of local, national, and international interests, pointing to the contradictory, ambiguous sociocultural representations that accrue to “America” as it is caught up in itineraries and (mis)translations across a “Second World” site. This dialogic examination, Romania–US, that the film proposes, artistically brings to the fore the contemporary outlook on the US from a lesser-known site in American studies.
