CultureShock:American culture emphasises new beginnings over the power of the past, which is one reason why cinema is its dominant art form
In Sam Shepard's play, A Lie of the Mind, first produced in 1985, an American mother and daughter, Lorraine and Sally, fantasise about tearing up their lives and starting again in Sligo. There, Lorraine imagines, she will find "Relatives. Ancestors. I don't know." When her daughter objects that "Maybe they're all dead", Lorraine replies that "People don't just die. They don't just all up and die at once unless it's a catastrophe or something. Someone's always left behind to carry on. There's always at least one straggler left behind. Now we'll just ask around until we find out who that is. We'll track him down. And then we'll introduce ourselves. It's not gonna be that difficult."
The passage captures something of the American paradox - the way the restless desire to start again, to write a new story on the blank sheet of history, rubs up against the desire for an authenticity that can only be found in the distant past. New beginnings are the classic American narrative. America itself is the New World, a pristine place where humanity could get a second chance, free from the encumbrances and original sins of old Europe. The religious dynamic of redemption, in which the sinner is saved and begins a new existence from which the past has been washed away, shapes both personal lives and politics.
In Europe, past sins come back to haunt you. Think of our tribunals, or in the cultural sphere, Günter Grass's belated confession that, having spent decades excoriating Germany's amnesia about the Nazis, he had suppressed all along his own membership of the SS. In America, past sins are almost an asset, allowing you to tell your tale of salvation. Figures as politically diverse as George Bush and Barack Obama skilfully weave personal narratives in which a misspent youth is the dramatic prelude to a good, productive, responsible adulthood.
One thread of this difference is the relative weight of theatre and cinema. Theatre's intensity makes it very good at the return of the repressed. The great European theatrical narrative, from the Greeks to Shakespeare to Ibsen, is the relentlessness of the past, the way things that happened in your previous life, or even before you were born, will catch up with you and shape your destiny. This can happen not just in tragedies, but even in comedies: the greatest comedy of 20th-century theatre, Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, is about a "dead" man who keeps coming back.
Cinema has had much more influence on the shaping of American mentalities and it is also much better at "new beginning" narratives. Redemption is the golden thread of American popular cinema, from It's a Wonderful Life and Mr Deeds Goes to Town to The Shawshank Redemption and The Passion of the Christ. And this has an interesting effect on American playwrights. It has made it, in a sense, hard to be American and a playwright at the same time.
All the great American dramatists tell European stories, in the sense that they are more concerned with the past catching up with their protagonists than with tales of new beginnings. Serious American drama begins with Eugene O'Neill, whose work runs directly counter to official American optimism, and is haunted by the ghosts of the dead. It continues with Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, who don't really do redemption either. Miller plays such as The Price and All My Sons are structured around the haunting return of the repressed past. Williams's plays became less and less optimistic as they went on, to the point where American audiences found them almost literally unbearable. Albee's people have generally run out of steam, with no new leaf to turn except, perhaps, a final twist into madness.
That leaves Sam Shepard, whose fascinating little play, Kicking a Dead Horse, is now on the Abbey main stage. Enthralling in itself, not least for the seamless relationship between the writing and Stephen Rea's performance, it also illuminates much of Shepard's other work. More explicitly political than anything he has done before, it sketches some of the invisible architecture that supports his work. It clarifies, in particular, that central tension between the desire for new beginnings and the search for an imagined authenticity.
Though Shepard insists in his stage directions that the dead horse of the title is not to be approached metaphorically - "In fact, it should actually be a dead horse" - it does embody the expiry of the restless American impulse that has always haunted Shepard's people. They've always imagined themselves riding off into the sunset in pursuit of a new life. Rea's Hobart Struther had seen himself "setting out like Lewis and Clark across the wild beyond". Stuck in the desert with a dead horse and nowhere to go, like the Americans stuck in the deserts of Iraq, the only horizon he can really imagine is actually an old one of solitary virtue, heroism, "ancient aching bones".
What he needs - and what, Shepard implies the US needs - is an end to the fantasy of always moving on and the acquisition of an ability to live in the given world. To escape the dream that is literally going nowhere, he needs to do what American culture has seldom done: understand where he is.
