“Powerful” individual-entrepreneur against “powerless” corporations: Anthropological analysis of the movie “Tucker: The Man and His Dream”

Abstract

This article presents the semantic analysis of the feature commercial film "Taker: Man and his Dream" (1988), directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The film talks about the life of Preston Tucker (1903-1956), American innovator and a car designer. It was pointed out on three basic paradigmatic relations indicated in the film. The first crucial paradigmatic relation, the relationship between individual entrepreneur and a large automotive corporations, is related to the power relations between these corporations and the American state, which is the second key paradigmatic relation. These relations arise from ideas and notions bind to the phenomenon of American automotive civilization. The third crucial paradigmatic relation, relation of the state toward individual-entrepreneur, is traced from the context of the analyzed film’s production and is associated with the phenomenon of American national myths. The aim of the research is to point out the meanings that film imagination builds by crossing ideas and notions bind to the phenomenon of American automotive civilization, with ideas and notions related to the phenomenon of American national myths, as well as to answer the question of whether and to what extent for this type of constructs can be said that they are "true".