Introduction

Summary

In the April 2015 premiere episode of the final half season of the hit HBO series Mad Men, successful Manhattan advertising executives Don Draper and Roger Sterling, slumming in a diner, have their order taken by a dignified but downtrodden waitress into whose apron pocket is wedged a battered copy of The 42nd Parallel (1930), the first novel of Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, which chronicles the American nation as it emerged as a superpower in the early twentieth century. Flirtatiously teasing her, Roger asks, “Do you have anything by John Dos Passos?” By calling attention to the incongruity of the appearance of this novel of the 1930s in the possession of a working woman of 1970, when the episode takes place, screenwriter Matthew Weiner tacitly underscores the economic and class dynamics that underlie the critique of capitalism the series shares with U.S.A. Likewise recalling the novel's representation of the stark economic inequities that ensue when corporate greed precipitates a boom and bust cycle, in his 2016 Academy Award-winning screenplay adaptation of Michael Lewis's 2010 novel The Big Short Adam McKay drew not only substance but style from U.S.A., using joltingly juxtaposed fragments of popular culture to propel his revelatory film. In the Daniel Espinosa film Child 44 (2015), adapted from the 2008 Man Booker prize contender by Tom Rob Smith, a single shot of The Big Money (1936), the trilogy's third novel, serves as a signifier for a character's dangerous and covert opposition to the suppression of speech and thought in the work's Stalinist Russian 1950s setting. Acclaimed documentarist Adam Curtis, whose work in films such as HyperNormalisation (2012) and The Century of the Self (2002) explores the intersections of global forces such as consumerism and social media, credits Dos Passos as the primary aesthetic and ideological influence on his own work. Curtis insightfully asserts that in U.S.A. Dos Passos “prefigures everything” by creating, through his fragmented compositional technique, “the great dialectic of our time, which is between individual experiences and how those fragments get turned into stories, both by individuals themselves, and then, by those in power above them.”