The Tooth of Crime: Killing the American Dream Essay

From the beginning of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime, the reader is offered with a present. Act one opens with Hoss singing “The Approach Issues Are” wherein he, sardonically, appears to hit the nail on the pinnacle in terms of American tradition: “right here’s one other phantasm so as to add to your confusion.” (Shepard 203)

America is a rustic constructed on ideas of justice, religion, and freedom, however these ideas are all too typically eclipsed by capitalistic drive, human nature, and survival.

The battle between the idealism with which this nation was settled and the truth with which it has to contend is what brings the confusion. Phantasm, in all its numerous types, is how America copes with that confusion. It’s like Hoss says, “we’re insulated from what’s actually taking place by our personal fame.” (207)

            Act one reveals Hoss as a veteran rock star, already on the high, however decided to maintain constructing that “stairway to Heaven.” He’s a performer, true, so misplaced in his act that the one construction holding him collectively is the code of the sport; the ideas which he finds to be damaged an increasing number of: “the code’s happening the tubes.

These are gonna be the final days of honor.” (217) He finds it troublesome to adapt to the entire confusion; he’s desperately holding on to the code, his ideas, however he’s discovering that he is likely to be the one one taking part in by the principles at this level. Plainly Shepard is heralding Hoss’ preliminary naivety because the genuine hypothetical American Approach, as unauthentic a method because it actually is.

            Hoss is sadly too late in realizing that the sport is a farce, yet one more phantasm piled onto layers of established illusions. It dawns on him that Crow, the Gypsy killer, marking him is actually the identical factor Hoss did to realize his standing. He says to Galactic Jack, in a second of readability, “that’s how we began ain’t it. We went up towards the Dudes. Wiped ‘em out.” (212) He begins to see the vicious cycle of his pursuit of energy and fame, all parallel to America’s personal, and, by way of Hoss, Shepard makes a very daring assertion about America’s tradition when he says, “the longer term’s identical to the previous.” (218)

            Crow represents the following technology of performers in act two. He’s looking for the celebrity and fortune that Hoss labored for by dodging the code and dethroning the king. He’s extra devious, maybe much more decided, and higher tailored to a actuality wherein justice, religion, and freedom are beliefs relatively than ideas. He doesn’t observe a code, and to him, the sport is a few victory relatively than enjoyment of the sport play itself.

As he says of himself in “Crow’s Track,” “I imagine in my masks–The person I made up is me.” (232) Crow’s character brings much more phantasm to the confusion. He’s younger and inexperienced, and “powerful as a blind man,” (249) as Hoss factors out proper earlier than his suicide. Hoss even explains the worthlessness of “all this invisible gold…this assortment of torture,” earlier than taking his remaining mark, however his phrases fall on the deaf ears of youth, decided to do higher than these earlier than, regardless of making the identical errors.

            Crow will see the highlight for some time, as America does, however the cycle will come round once more and, as Cheyenne tells him close to the top of the play: “They’ll be comin’ for you subsequent.” (250)

Works Cited

Shepard, Sam. “The Tooth of Crime.” Seven Performs. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. 201-251.