EJAC 29 (1) pp.

5–18 © Intellect Ltd 2010

European Journal of American Culture

Volume 29 Number 1
© Intellect Ltd 2010. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejac.29.1.5/1

CHRIS RICHARDSON
The University of Western Ontario

The empty self in

Revolutionary Road or: How
I learned to stop worrying
and love the blonde

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article focuses on the themes of self and selfhood raised in the 2008 film conformity
Revolutionary Road and the 1961 novel of the same name. These texts, I sug- consumption
gest, demonstrate how American culture has been performing a double movement desire
since World War II, simultaneously appealing to an essential, stable notion of the immaterial labour
self while ingraining a sense of emptiness and incompleteness in individuals. Using performativity
Judith Butler’s concept of performativity as its main theoretical framework, the article self
approaches Revolutionary Road from three angles. First, it explores the transforma-
tion of the American aesthetic by focusing on the setting in which the plot takes place
– the suburbs of New York in the 1950s. Second, the article investigates the sweeping
changes that occurred in the workplace during this period, focusing mainly on the
autonomous Marxists’ concept of virtuosic and immaterial labour. Finally, the article
considers Lacan’s theory of desire as it relates to the domestic sphere. The article con-
cludes by arguing that these texts represent a subtle ‘revolution’ in American thought
that encourages readers and audiences to embrace the performative nature of the self
rather than attempting to satisfy what Cushman calls ‘the empty self’, which can
never be satisfied.

Then perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction [original
emphasis]. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself

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Chris Richardson

1 In Sherwood’s play, a as individual [original emphasis], of inventing a final, rarest fiction: the
World War I war bride
finds her American fictive identity. This fiction is no longer illusion of a unity; on the contrary,
husband dull and it is the theatre of society in which we stage our plural.
defeated and decides
to move back to (Barthes 1975: 62)
France. This plot
clearly inspires April’s Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road begins with a performance in an empty
desire to relocate, theatre. The star of this performance is April Wheeler, played by Kate Winslet
with her family, to
Paris in the novel. in the 2008 film adaptation. The first line of the novel is worth reading closely:
‘The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with
nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the foot-
lights of an empty auditorium’ (Yates [1961] 2008: 3). Here, Yates introduces a
theme running throughout the book, the theme of performances without audi-
ences and actors unsure how to act without a script. The Laurel Players are
members of a suburban community near New York City. They are staging an
amateur theatre performance of Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest.1 As the
plot progresses, one observes the death throes of Frank (played by Leonardo
DiCaprio) and April’s marriage, their banal encounters with friends and neigh-
bours, and Frank’s feigned rapport with secretaries and colleagues at work.
Throughout this narrative, it becomes increasingly apparent that the acting has
continued long after the performance of The Petrified Forest has concluded.
Yates’ novel was first published in 1961 and takes place in the post-war
years of the 1950s. Though it was not an instant best-seller, the novel quickly
rose to cult status in the 1960s. As Leonardo DiCaprio notes, there was a
‘group of people [that] knew how special this novel was’ (Rose 2008). In 2008,
Sam Mendes directed the film adaptation, changing relatively little from the
book. In fact, much of the dialogue is taken directly from its pages. This sug-
gests that the concepts Yates introduced 50 years ago remain relevant, timely
and possibly central to the existential crisis Americans continue to face in the
twenty-first century. In this article, I explore the themes of self and selfhood
raised by Revolutionary Road, using Judith Butler’s concept of performativity as
my main theoretical framework. I consider the work of psychoanalysts Jacques
Lacan and Philip Cushman to explore how desire and consumption relate to
performativity. And finally, I turn briefly to the autonomous Marxists’ concept
of virtuosic and immaterial labour to explore how the workplace becomes a
stage where one sells his or her performances. Through a symptomatic reading
of Revolutionary Road, it becomes evident that contemporary American culture
performs a double movement: it appeals to an essential, stable notion of the self
while simultaneously ingraining a sense of emptiness and incompleteness in
individuals. The novel and the film are illustrative of this condition and indicate
the presence of a source of anxiety that has plagued Americans since World
War II.

THE PERFORMATIVE SELF

To examine how the modern self is constructed, I first turn to Butler’s account
of performativity in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
([1991]2007). Though Butler’s work was developed specifically in relation to
gender, it has been expanded in many directions since its original publication
almost twenty years ago (see Allen 1998; Buchbinder 1998; Cameron 1997;
Campbell 2000; Jones 2000; Livia and Hall 1997; Lloyd 1999; Redman 2001;
Savran 1998; Webster 2000). The crux of her argument is that the stable identity
is a fiction. Our actions ‘produce the effect of an internal core or substance’

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 The empty self in Revolutionary Road or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the blonde

(Butler 2007: 185). But these acts are performative in that they construct the
self rather than reflect it. In actuality, Butler argues, the self ‘has no ontological
status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’. In other words, by
talking about oneself – indicating what one likes, dislikes, needs and desires –
a stable self is presumed to exist. This essential self, however, is a product of
such discourses and gestures and exists only in that we talk and act as if it were
real.
Butler supports her position by turning to speech acts theorists like Austin
(1962), Haar (1985), and Searle (1970). Haar, a key linguist whom Butler ref-
erences, argues that the notion of the masterful, bounded self is merely a
linguistic construction that the speaker perpetuates each time he or she artic-
ulates a sentence. Haar argues that the Cartesian concept of the self – I think,
therefore I am – is really just a linguistic fallacy.

It was grammar (the structure of subject and predicate) that inspired

Descartes’ certainty that ‘I’ is the subject of ‘think,’ whereas it is rather
the thoughts that come to ‘me’: at bottom, faith in grammar simply con-
veys the will to be the ‘cause’ of one’s thoughts. The subject, the self,
the individual, are just so many false concepts, since they transform into
substances fictitious unities having at the start only a linguistic reality.

(Butler 2007: 28–29; Haar 1985: 17–18)

Haar (1985: 9), referring to Nietzche’s concept of the will to power, argues that
our ‘will’ is really just ‘a plurality of instincts and impulses’. This mirrors Lacan’s
view of the subject as an inherently unfixed entity, an absence that misrecog-
nizes itself as masterful and whole. ‘Discontinuity, then, is the essential form
in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon’, writes Lacan
(1998: 25). He argues that without its ‘linguistic structure’ the self would fail to
be ‘definable, accessible and objectifiable’ (Lacan 1998: 21). The self, accord-
ing to these theorists, only arises from the syntax and grammar that we use to
describe it.
Critics of the constructionist approach to the self argue that there must be
an original object that has been deemed the self in English, le moi in French, el
yo in Spanish and so on and so forth. This object would therefore exist before
words could reflect it. Butler (2007) asserts, however, that this notion of an
original self does not – and cannot – exist. ‘There is no pre-existing identity
by which an act or attribute might be measured’ (Butler 2007: 192). No true or
false self. No real or distorted self. Instead, Butler suggests, the idea of a true
self is really just a ‘regulatory fiction’ that hides the fact that all identities are
constructed through performances. To understand Butler’s argument, it helps
to explore the concept of genealogy.
In a sense, genealogy is an historical way of seeing things. But, unlike tradi-
tional historiography, genealogical investigations reject the idea of a true or
transcendental object. Foucault (2003: 352) writes that ‘genealogy does not
oppose itself to history . . . it opposes itself to the search for “origins”.’ And,
of course, the romantic idea of the essential self presumes an original, pure
object that must be uncovered. ‘The Me fabricates a coherent identity’, writes
Foucault (2003: 355). This is not to say that we do not exist as living, breath-
ing individuals. Any investigation of a coherent self, however, presumes that
such an object exists and has always existed. ‘The genealogist needs history
to dispel the chimeras of the origin’, writes Foucault (2003: 354). What he

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Chris Richardson

and others demonstrate is that we cannot assume that the words we use to
understand the self now reflect things throughout time and in all areas of the
world.
Cushman (1995: 301) allows us to fill in some of the gaps in this analysis by
approaching the performative self not by way of genealogy but through what he
calls a ‘constructionist, hermeneutic approach’. Cushman (1995: 6) too pushes
the ‘origin myth’ to the side and seeks instead to understand the construction
of the ‘empty self’, which he argues represents a modern ‘individualism no
longer leavened by a moral tradition of political discourse and communal val-
ues’. The story of how the empty self came to be, writes Cushman (1995: 4), is
one of ‘increasingly lonely people trying to live decently in a world of growing
complexities, confusions, and dangers’. He is concerned with how language
directs us to an essential self that must be liberated. In his research, Cushman
concentrates on professionals who claim to free the self while simultaneously
perpetuating a pervasive emptiness that maintains the desire to be liberated.
He is most interested in common phrases like ‘the real you’ or ‘your inner
life’ (Cushman 1995: 20). These discourses are best embodied in psychology
and advertising, he argues. Through his reading of the cultural history of psy-
choanalysis in particular, Cushman paints a vivid picture of American life after
World War II. ‘In the place of family, community, and tradition, baby boomers
were offered the anonymity of the suburbs, the banality of a watered-down,
uncreative mainstream religion, [and] the morals of Saturday morning cartoon
shows’ (Cushman 1995: 235). The world of the empty self is the one in which
Revolutionary Road takes place.
In the living room of the Wheelers’ home, subtle parallels are continuously
raised between the anaesthetizing television set and the empty promises of
the suburbs. Yates’ novel, in fact, can easily be read as a dramatic portrayal
of Cushman’s description of post-World War II America. Take, for example, a
scene that occurs after an argument between Frank and April:

And it was the next night, or the next – he could never afterwards remem-
ber which – that he found her pacing the kitchen in the same tense,
high-shouldered way she had paced the stage in the second act of The Pet-
rified Forest. From the living room came the muffled strains of horn and
xylophone, interspersed with the shrieks of midget voices; the children
were watching an animated cartoon on television.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing’
‘I don’t believe you. Did something happen today, or what?’
‘No.’ Then the perfection of her curtain-call smile began to blur and
moisten into a wrinkled grimace of despair and her breathing became
as loud as the boiling vegetables on the stove . . .

(Yates [1961]2008: 218)

A New York Times film review of Revolutionary Road argues that ‘nothing
much happens in the story, just two ordinary lives coming apart at the seams’
(Dargis 2008: 1). I would take this description one step further and argue that
it is the idea of the ordinary, stable life that comes apart in this film. To interro-
gate the theoretical premises I have just laid out, I examine Revolutionary Road,

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 The empty self in Revolutionary Road or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the blonde

both the film and the novel, from three main viewpoints. First, I explore the 2 According to
Minzesheimer (2009),
transformation of the American aesthetic by focusing on the suburban home in Yates once lived on a
which the plot takes place. Second, I investigate the changes that occurred in Revolutionary Road in
the workplace during this period. Finally, I consider the domestic sphere, where Westchester County,
25 miles (about
the main drama transpires. It is within these spaces that I argue the anxieties of 40 km) north of
the empty self become most pronounced. Manhattan.

3 A New York Times critic

calls the house a
‘ticky-tacky little box
THE WRITING ON THE WALLS on a hillside on that
cruelly named street,
The title of the novel indicates just how integral the setting is to Yates’ Revolutionary Road’
narrative.2 In both the film and the novel, a flashback occurs early in the plot (Dargis 2008: 1).

where we see Frank and April looking to buy a home on this stretch of land. Its 4 Not only has abstract
name, like many aspects of post-war America, is exaggerated to sound much expressionism been
linked to the
more unique and special than it is.3 Revolutionary Road is really just a col- American atomic age,
lection of ‘great hulking split levels, all in the most nauseous pastels’ (Yates some authors have
even claimed it was a
[1961]2008: 30). The Wheelers look for ‘something out of the ordinary – a small tool of the US
remodelled barn or carriage house, or an old guest cottage – something with government (see
a little charm’ (Yates [1961]2008: 30). Unfortunately, the only thing their real Cockcroft 1974;
Guilbaut 1983;
estate agent could provide is a quaint home with a picture window. ‘I don’t Kimmelman 1994;
suppose one picture window is necessarily going to destroy our personalities’, Kozloff 1973; and
says Frank when they decide to settle there (Yates [1961]2008: 31). This com- Varnedoe 2003).

promise, however, becomes emblematic of the hesitant conformity that defines

the Wheelers’ lives.
Aesthetically, few, if any, details stick out inside the Wheelers’ middle-class
suburban home, with the possible exception of the paintings on the walls.
These paintings are predominantly abstract works, found especially in the bed-
room where the more intimate moments between Frank and April take place.
The paintings, which seem to haunt the mise-en-scène, work as signposts that
reveal the Zeitgeist of the times. Guilbaut (1983: 96) writes that ‘the discovery
of atomic energy had made the world so difficult to understand in its totality
that traditional languages . . . were no longer capable of giving full expression
to the realities of a nuclear world’. He argues that ‘only abstract art could com-
municate the new meaning of human experience, the incredible feeling of total
disintegration’.4 The need to find a new language to understand and commu-
nicate within contemporary America is indicative of the kind of change the
modern self was undergoing at the time.
The art movements after World War I were generally more optimistic,
attempting to create utopian images that would help in the reconstruction
effort (Krausse 1995; Varnedoe 2003). But following World War II, ‘painting lost
all meaning and justification’, writes Krausse (1995). Artists could no longer
paint flowers, figures or landscapes. They were forced to seek extreme and per-
sonal forms of expression to demonstrate that Hitler and the Fascists would
never again dictate what was to be represented. Growing mainly out of New
York, abstract expressionism was ‘seen as the only art that could be appropriate
for the “free West” ’ (Krausse 1995: 107). During this period, painters like Jack-
son Pollock, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko began to
produce ‘a confusing diversity of styles and trends’ (Krausse 1995: 108). Ulti-
mately, this is the story told on the walls of the house on Revolutionary Road.
The mise-en-scène evokes the search for meaning and identity in a world that
seems devoid of such things. Visually, this is what (dis)orients the viewer of the
film, setting the mood and reflecting the dizzying experience that began in the

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5 Lazzarato (1996: 133) 1950s, and – as anyone who has stepped into a modern art gallery knows –
defines immaterial
labour as ‘the labour
continues to disorient people today.
that produces the While the film is clearly set in the 1950s, the feel of this world reverberates
information and into the present day. In an interview, DiCaprio tells Charlie Rose (2008):
cultural content of the
commodity’.
When I first read the novel, I thought it was so much about the time
period – 1950s, post–World War II, this great migration to the suburbs,
what the idyllic, iconic American family represented, the role of the man
and the woman in the household . . . This is the beginning of prescrip-
tion medication, wife swapping, drinking, all this stuff. And [all] from the
confines of the suburbs. I thought that that was the main theme. All that,
when we did the movie, systematically got stripped away.

DiCaprio seems to highlight that the suburbs, gender divisions, medication and
alcoholism were not at the heart of either the novel or the film. They merely
reflected symptoms of a more foundational trouble. This deeper-lying problem,
I would argue, is the exposure of an empty self, of the lack of the individ-
ual essence Americans had been sold through the promises of neo-liberalism.
Cushman (1995: 79) argues that this terrain has shaped ‘a self that experi-
ences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning. It
experiences these social absences and their consequences “interiorly” as a lack
of personal conviction and worth, and it embodies the absences as a chronic,
undifferentiated emotional hunger.’ In short, Cushman argues that ‘the post–
World War II self thus yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way
of compensating for what has been lost’. With this rising consumption, we also
have, beginning in the 1950s, a significant change in the workplace.

FRANK AS VIRTUOSO
A considerable source of confusion and anxiety in Revolutionary Road involves
Frank’s job in Knox Business Machines (a stand-in for real-world IBM). When
meeting John for the first time, Frank is asked ‘Whaddya do there? You design
the machines, or make them, or sell them, or repair them, or what?’ (Yates
[1961]2008: 197). For a moment, Frank is taken aback. He does none of these
things. ‘Sort of help sell them, I guess’ is Frank’s hesitant response. In this
scene, Yates alludes to the transition many urban workers experienced in the
latter half of the twentieth century. At this time, the market assumed the traits
of what (post-)Marxists now call ‘virtuosic or immaterial labour’.5 Virno (2004)
describes the virtuoso as someone whose performance is an end in itself, as
opposed to the traditional labourer who produces material goods. By the 1950s,
Virno argues, virtuosity had begun to change into ‘labour for the masses’ (Virno
2004: 56). This is when ‘the virtuoso begins to punch a time card’ (Virno 2004:
56). The transition into the immaterial labour market is an experience that the
majority of contemporary workers now face.
Frank’s job is not to physically design, make or repair the computers, not
to directly sell them, and not even to understand them (which he clearly does
not). His task is to organize advertising campaigns for the company. Frank hires
designers, works with salespersons, and answers bosses, all of whom seem to
pass the work along to someone else. Instead of producing anything tangi-
ble, Frank’s job is to perform – his product is his performance. He is careful to
walk with a certain demeanour, interact with a certain gusto, clench his teeth
at points in conversations to appear strong and masculine. All of these things

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occupy his mind from nine to five. They are, in part, what he is being paid
for. But, as Virno (1996: 13) points out, this transition to immaterial labour is
primarily the result of ‘a socialization that has its center of gravity outside of
the workplace, a socialization punctuated by discontinuous and modular experi-
ences, by fashion, by the interpretations of the media and by the indecipherable
ars combinatoria [original emphasis] of the metropolis’. Frank cannot leave his
workplace persona at the office.
A disconcerting effect of this change in the economy is the blurring – if
not elimination – of the previously separate spheres of the economic and the
domestic. This situation may previously have been ‘a special and problematic
case’ but it has now become the ‘prototype of all wage labour’ (Virno 2004:
61). When Frank is promoted within the company, he tries to explain the
new position to April. But she responds with confusion: ‘I don’t get it. What
does that mean you’re supposed to do?’ (Yates [1961]2008: 80). Frank replies,
‘Who the hell knows? They explained it to me for half an hour and I still don’t
know, and I don’t think they do either.’ Frank’s decision to take the new title is
described in the novel as ‘a kind of joke’ that others fail to see the humour in
but which fills Frank with a ‘secret, astringent delight’ (Yates [1961]2008: 80).
I would argue that the best way to understand this joke-without-laughter is
through Jameson’s concept of pastiche (Jameson 1991: 16). He describes pas-
tiche as a symptom of postmodernity (or the cultural logic of late capitalism),
in which people act out a sort of ‘blank parody’. Jameson (1991: 17) argues
that this is connected to the ‘death of the subject’ or, to say it another way,
‘the end of individualism as such’. Returning to a perspective closer to But-
ler’s, this may not be so much the ‘death’ of the subject but the realization that
there never was such a subject. The kind of pastiche in which Frank is par-
ticipating reveals the complete absence of a ‘pre-existing identity by which an
act or attribute might be measured’ (Butler 2007: 192). It reveals a set of cir-
cumstances in which there is no true or false, no reality or distortion, just the
revelation of what Butler (2007: 188) calls an ‘imitation without an origin’. In
short, Frank’s performance is what constitutes him. He is, in effect, imitating
himself.
A telling scene in the film occurs soon after Frank and April plan to leave
New York for Paris. While they wait for the right time to relocate, Frank con-
tinues to perform his daily nine-to-five grind on the fifteenth floor of the Knox
Building. On his way home one day, Frank pauses on the mezzanine of Grand
Central Station. In the film, he leans against the balustrade as the camera
approaches from an extreme-low angle. Though he is still dressed in his con-
servative suit and fedora, his tie is loosened and his top button undone. Frank
looks cool and collected in contrast to the swarm of uptight businessmen who
scatter in all directions behind him. Globe and Mail critic Liam Lacey (2009: R5)
calls this one of the ‘most perfect shots in Revolutionary Road’. In this scene,
Frank embodies the traditional hero figure, living by his own rules with little
regard for the crowd (Boorstin 2006). The opposite of heroes, Boorstin (2006:
81) argues, are celebrities, whose ‘lives are empty of drama or achievement’
and whose ‘chief claim to fame is their fame itself’. For a moment, Frank is
both hero and celebrity. He stands there with little regard for what the masses
think of his actions. At the same time, however, he is noticeable and unique
in relation to the similarly dressed drones behind him. Cushman (1995: 65)
suggests that perhaps the switch of focus from hero to celebrity was really a
‘response to the condition of being lost in the crowd, overlooked in the crush
of humanity recently assembled in the large cities’. It is important, however,

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6 See Jenkins (1995), that Frank has not yet done anything noteworthy. Rather, Frank embodies the
Jewitt (2001) and Rose
(2001).
hero whom he soon hopes to become.
Frank is overlooked by the crowd behind him but stands out to the viewer
as a unique and special person. This scene points to the internal contradiction
Frank personifies in his attempt to become both hero and celebrity. Only in
an age in which the visual dominates can such a scene take place.6 This marks
a notable shift between the novel’s publication soon after the war, when the
cult of the celebrity was still a developing concept, and Mendes’ film release in
2008. By the early twenty-first century, film audiences have been conditioned
to see themselves as the stars of their own narratives. Think of all the films
that have been set in Grand Central Station, teaching audiences how to think
and operate in such crowds – North by Northwest (1959), Midnight Run (1988),
The Fisher King (1991), Carlito’s Way (1993). In each film, despite the masses of
people, there is always a clear star who captures our focus, whether it is Carey
Grant trying to avoid police or Al Pacino shooting at gangsters. The camera
is what makes Frank stand out; if it were not there, there would be nothing
special about him. The fact that such a double movement can only exist in
a fictional universe points to the impossibility of embodying both hero and
celebrity outside of such fiction. As Sussman (2003: 280) notes, in contemporary
society ‘one is to be unique, be distinctive, follow one’s own feelings, make
oneself stand out from the crowd, and at the same time appeal – by fascination,
magnetism, attractiveness – to it’. The problem, however, is that no one can
actually achieve this status. Frank’s best efforts to become hero and celebrity are
doomed to failure. This situation, as I explore in the next section, demonstrates
what Lacan describes as the paradoxical nature of desire.

DOMESTICITY AND DESIRE

While a critique of traditional labour has been around arguably for as long
as people have been earning wages, a strong cultural critique of the home
is something that comes to the forefront of social thought only after World
War II. During this period, we see the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex (1949 [translated into English in 1953]) and Betty Friedan’s The
Feminine Mystique ([1962]1997). Perhaps, then, the most important insights of
Revolutionary Road take place within the domestic sphere.
The main point of tension in the Wheelers’ home revolves around April’s
idea to relocate to Paris and leave the mind-numbing suburbs behind. She pro-
poses this trip to Frank, arguing that he has always been destined for greatness.
The problem, she claims, is that Frank has never had the opportunity to find
himself. To fix this, she offers to work for the first few years in Europe so that
he can discover his true calling. They discuss this plan virtually every night after
Frank arrives home from work:

‘Everything you say might make a certain amount of sense,’ he began

again, and one of the ways he could tell he was losing the argument was
that his voice had taken on a resonance that made it every bit as theatrical
as hers. It was the voice of a hero, a voice befitting the kind of person Bill
Croft could admire. ‘Might make a certain amount of sense if I had some
definite, measurable talent. If I were an artist, say, or a writer, or a—’
Oh Frank, can you really think artists and writers are the only people
entitled to lives of their own? [ . . . ] It’s got nothing to do with definite,

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measurable talents—it’s your very essence that’s being stifled here. It’s
what you are that’s being denied and denied and denied in this kind
of life.
(Yates [1961]2008: 120–21)

If April’s comments were true, Yates seems to imply, there would be no ten-
sion; no novel in fact. But what Frank intuits, and what has likely resonated for
readers and audiences over the last 50 years, is the nagging feeling that there
may not be that essence, that being, which April is so determined to find. Here,
we have the clearest illustration of Butler’s (2007: 185) argument that it is only
through ‘acts, gestures, and desire’ that the idea of an ‘internal core or sub-
stance’ is produced. Such acts, she argues, ‘are performative [original emphasis]
in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express
are fabrications [original emphasis] manufactured and sustained through cor-
poreal signs and other discursive means’ (Butler 2007: 185). If Frank were to
leave his job, his friends and all of the mundane acts through which he has
constituted his ‘self’ over the last three decades, he would not find his essence.
He would discover nothing. Searching for his core, he would literally arrive at
a giant, gaping void.
Borrowing from Nietzsche, Butler (2007: 34) evokes the idea that ‘there is no
“being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added
to the deed’. Frank realizes that without reiterating the tasks that have come
to define him, there would be no self. His search in Paris will be futile. ‘The
appearance of substance is precisely that’, writes Butler (2007: 192), ‘a constructed
identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience,
including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform’. At the heart
of this anxiety is a comment Frank had once made to April when they met.
After making love to her for the first time, he told April that Paris was the only
place he had ever truly felt alive. He claimed it was a place to which he felt
destined to return. But this confession, this glimpse of the naked truth so to
speak, was just as much a performance for April as it was for him. He said it
not as a revelation of his true self but as an imitation of someone interesting and
important; someone that never really existed outside of the acts that seemed to
allude to this originating person hidden behind Frank’s eyes.
Frank is not the only character to put on such façades in the novel. It
seems that everyone in Revolutionary Road is guilty of embellishing their per-
formances to some degree. One key line that highlights this attempt to please
others is repeated throughout the novel: Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?
It is first said by April on stage during her performance in the Petrified Forest,
then when Frank recalls falling in and out of love with her (see below); it is
evoked again when April’s neighbour fantasizes about having an affair with
her, then finally it appears when April and Frank no longer own the house
on Revolutionary Road. Eight simple words: ‘Wouldn’t you like to be loved by
me?’ This idea of seeking the desire of the Other is an important aspect of the
narrative.

Nowhere in these plans had he [Frank] foreseen the weight and shock
of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the
swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn’t seen in years, a girl whose every
glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing (‘Wouldn’t
you like to be loved by me?’ [original emphasis]), and that then before his

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Chris Richardson

7 As Bruce Fink argues in very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering
his translation of
Lacan’s (2006: 760)
creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom
work, ‘in the he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted
sentence, Le désir de woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain
l’homme, c’est le désir
de l’Autre, one of the call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp clinging underwear
obvious meanings is and his own sour smell.
that man desires what
the Other desires. It is (Yates [1961]2008: 13)
also implied that, as a
man, I want the Other
to desire me.’ In this passage, and others like it, we see that desiring someone and being with
8 The scope of this article
that person are two very different things. April’s love for Frank is never real-
does not allow for a ized when she marries him and moves into the house on Revolutionary Road
closer look at the because her love was directed toward a person who was never really there. With
gender dynamic at
play here. April’s need her plan to move to Paris, April calls Frank’s bluff. She confronts Frank, forcing
to liberate Frank him to recognize his performances for what they are. Both Frank and April have
rather than herself is been trying to be people they are not in order to impress the other person. This
an aspect of the film
that is worthy of exemplifies Lacan’s argument that one’s true desire is the desire of the Other
further examination in (Lacan 1998).7 This desire to be desired, however, means that each person acts
the future.
in a way that leaves no one happy in the end. Somehow, April retains a glim-
mer of hope in finding a true, essential self hidden under Frank’s performances.
She attempts, despite the risk, to make one last effort to find this inner person.8
April is so adamant about making this last attempt that she is willing to sacri-
fice everything, including herself, to attain her goal. This leads to the sad climax
of the novel and the film.
By the end of Revolutionary Road, one is faced with a realization about
desire. In the beginning, both Frank and April desperately desired one another.
They soon found, however, that attaining these desires somehow left them
unfulfilled. In Cushman’s words, they remained empty selves. Lacan (1998: 166)
explains this emptiness by arguing that when we explore desire more closely ‘we
see that something new comes into play – the category of the impossible’. In the
early scenes in which Frank charms April with stories of war and adventures in
Paris, it is clear that he truly desires her. But April as the object of desire is not the
same as April the living, breathing mother of his children. Frank realizes this,
though not necessarily consciously, when he is confronted by her gaze; when she
forces him to recognize – or misrecognize –himself qua performative subject.
Lacan (1998: 167) writes that ‘by snatching at its object, the drive learns in a
sense that this is precisely not [added emphasis] the way it will be satisfied’. In
other words, desire encircles its object but never takes hold of it. Frank needs
April but at the same time he pushes her away. This disavowal is at the heart of
their marital trouble. Unlike their neighbours who trade in romantic aspirations
for more comfortable lives in the suburbs, Frank and April cannot give up on
their desire for completion; an ending that their generation was promised in
countless television ads, newspaper stories and psychological discourses. The
only way for Frank to truly have his object of desire is, however, if April is no
longer in the picture. ‘Is it surprising that [sex’s] final term should be death?’ asks
Lacan (1998: 177), referring to the French term for orgasm – petite mort. In
English, petite mort literally translates into ‘little death’. In other words, it was the
idea of April that Frank fell in love with, an idea that can only exist without
having her in the flesh. April’s death is the only way she can be forever his
desired object. This is the conclusion with which Yates leaves his readers.

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 The empty self in Revolutionary Road or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the blonde

A SUBTLE REVOLUTION
Revolutionary Road does much more than tell an entertaining story. The novel
and the film point to a condition with which Americans have been struggling
since World War II. Its portrayal of contemporary American life can seem sad
and depressing. But it may also direct us to a less anxious way of approach-
ing this situation. There is no traditional revolution in Revolutionary Road, but
there is an attempt to extricate revolution from the blind alleys into which it
often leads. Yates’ story reveals the need to look inward, as well as outward,
at the emptiness of a self that Americans have been conditioned to believe
to exist and at the political and historical antecedents that have created this
lack. In providing this glimpse of disillusionment and sadness in the suburbs,
Yates and Mendes seem to hint that perhaps it is more desirable, as Kristeva
(2003: 22) suggests, to ‘rehabilitate the word “revolt,” in the sense of both a
re-evaluation of the past and an openness to the future’. This realization has
significant implications for any personal/political acts to be performed in the
future.
Yates and Mendes may not provide the answers to where one must go from
here. They do, however, provide an invaluable service by asking readers and
audiences to reassess the concept of the self and the conditions in which it is
produced. Barthes (1975: 24) argues that a good novel creates the most plea-
sure ‘if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to
look up often, to listen to something else’. After experiencing the story of the
Wheelers of Revolutionary Road, it is difficult not to look up, to attend to the
world in a different way. It suggests that things may not be as stable as Amer-
icans have been led to believe and that desires may not be as easily attainable
as one would hope. These insights can, however, become a source of plea-
sure as well as a source of pain. The subtle revolution that Revolutionary Road
inspires may lead towards an embrace of the performative nature of the ‘self’
and allow individuals to take pleasure in their performances rather than deny
them. As Barthes suggests, ‘perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as
fiction [original emphasis]. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagin-
ing oneself as individual [original emphasis], of inventing a final, rarest fiction:
the fictive identity’ (Barthes 1975: 62). Barthes asks that we learn to enjoy the
fictive identity rather than fear it. He suggests that we live this fiction no longer
as a unity but as a plurality that we perform in the theatre of society. This stage,
unlike that of the Laurel Players, is one from which we do not walk away at the
end of the night.

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Suggested citation
Richardson, C. (2010), ‘The empty self in Revolutionary Road or: How I learned
to stop worrying and love the blonde’, European Journal of American Culture
29: 1, pp. 5–18, doi: 10.1386/ejac.29.1.5/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Chris Richardson is a doctoral student in Media Studies at The University of
Western Ontario. He received a Bachelor of Journalism from Ryerson Univer-
sity in 2007 and a Master of Arts in Popular Culture from Brock University in
2008. His work primarily focuses on intersections of popular culture, journalism
and the construction of space/place. He has written on Bloc Party, Bret Easton
Ellis and Kanye West, and is currently co-editing a collection on habitus and
representations of ‘the hood’ with Hans A. Skott-Myhre of Brock University.
Contact: Faculty of Information and Media Studies, North Campus Build-
ing, Room 240, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, CANADA,
N6A 5B7.
E-mail: cricha48@uwo.ca

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