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If Jack Kerouac\u2019s cross-country excursions in On the Road<\/em><\/a> capture the spirit of American wanderlust, the road trip that director Michelle Fawcett and co-writer Arun Gupta embark on in their film Occupy Wall Street: An American Dream<\/em><\/a> finds similar ground in its creators\u2019 spontaneous crusade against inequality.\u00a0<\/p>\n The new fifty-one-minute film documents the protest movement<\/a> ignited by the September 17, 2011 occupation<\/a> of Zuccotti Park in New York City\u2019s Financial District\u2014the belly of the greed beast. This first demonstration in what became known as Occupy Wall Street was held in response to continued fallout from the 2008 financial crisis<\/a>, during which, as Fawcett describes in the film\u2019s narration, \u201cbig banks collapsed, the stock market crashed, and the whole economy fell like dominoes.\u201d<\/p>\n Shortly after the occupation began at Zuccotti Park, a cloud of similar protests mushroomed across the country, stretching all the way from Lower Manhattan<\/a> to Los Angeles\u2019s City Hall<\/a>, to Honolulu<\/a> and beyond<\/a>. During this time, the film says, at least forty-two tent city encampments sprang up across twenty-seven states. Amid this upheaval across the country, Fawcett and Gupta (the latter a founding editor of the Occupied Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>) set out on an epic odyssey across the United States, driving from one encampment to another with cameras, in search of the vanishing American Dream. Their result, nearly fifteen years later, is a cinematic portrait of the patchwork uprising against economic inequality, told with great wit and verve.<\/p>\n As Fawcett notes, the 2008 financial crisis marked an end to the United States\u2019s postwar economic boom<\/a>, which enabled millions<\/a> of formerly poor and working-class white Americans to enter the middle class. Fawcett recounts onscreen how employees like her father, a postal worker, could afford to own a home and pursue leisure activities during the 1960s and 1970s. But as she laments to viewers, it\u2019s no longer true that quality of life gets better for every subsequent generation, given the vast inequality accelerated<\/a> by 1980s-era Reaganomics<\/a>, then turbocharged by reckless economic endangerment<\/a> of Wall Street banks, who, she says in the film, \u201cturned homes . . . into casinos.\u201d Looking back, she contends, the United States \u201cwas more equal sixty years ago than it is today.\u201d<\/p>\n Fawcett describes how occupiers\u2019s outrage was sparked by the 2008 federal bailout of Wall Street banks whose irresponsible actions had led to the financial crisis. \u201cAt last, our government came to the rescue,\u201d she says. \u201cBut instead of helping people on Main Street, they bailed out the banks on Wall Street, with trillions of our [taxpayer] dollars . . . . The Great Recession became the biggest transfer and redistribution of wealth in history, from the bottom ninety-nine percent of America all the way up to the richest one percent.\u201d Over an intricate montage intercutting visuals of shuttered homes and businesses along an unspecified street with occupiers at Zuccotti Park, demonstrators are heard chanting: \u201cBanks got bailed out, we got sold out!\u201d<\/p>\n The film is grounded by encampment footage that the filmmakers shot throughout their trip, intercut with animated maps tracing their road trip and flashbacks. They make substantial use of use black-and-white archival footage, news clips, and photos, including scenes from the 1936 autoworkers sit-down strike<\/a> at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan; young Black activists participating in a sit-in<\/a> at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960; and students seizing buildings<\/a> on college campuses in 1971 to protest the Vietnam War. This historical material illustrates how Occupy Wall Street organizers took direct influence from organizers in the labor, civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. The organizers also took inspiration from mass protest movements that arose shortly before the initial Zuccotti Park occupation, including the Arab Spring<\/a> from 2010 to 2012 and the 2011 occupation<\/a> by students and workers at the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n Amid scenes of rank-and-file occupiers in city streets and parks across the country in their canvas compounds of pitched tents and tarps, the film includes interviews conducted after the events of Occupy Wall Street, with leftwing luminaries such as activist Staughton Lynd. Another veteran activist, political scientist Frances Fox Piven, notes, \u201cParticipation in the movement is the most transformative part of the process.\u201d Author Naomi Klein denounces the \u201cdistribution crisis.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But as the encampments persisted into a second month, city governments across the country eventually cracked down against the protesters. By November 15, 2011, acting under orders from New York City Mayor\u00a0Michael\u00a0Bloomberg, the empire struck back. New York City police officers flooded the scene to pepper-spray<\/a>, detain<\/a>, and ultimately evict occupiers at Zuccotti Park. Similar mass removals quickly replicated across the country, with police arresting<\/a> more than 7,000 people at demonstrations nationwide. Referring to then-President Barack Obama, one distraught protester bitterly complains onscreen: \u201cThe President says you shouldn\u2019t use violence<\/a> against peaceful people in Yemen and Egypt<\/a>\u2014but it\u2019s okay to do it here.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, a new wave of dissent is sweeping the country, with the most recent\u00a0 \u201cNo Kings<\/a>\u201d rallies drawing<\/a> more than seven million people into street demonstrations nationwide. And as a result of mass mobilization<\/a> across New York City, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani will soon be sworn in as mayor. At a march<\/a> on Wall Street alongside the Reverend Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III in August, then-candidate Mamdani addressed the crowd<\/a>, speaking to the same festering inequality that sparked Occupy Wall Street nearly fifteen years ago. \u201cAs we stand here, in the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest country, in the history of the world,\u201d Mamdani said, \u201cas we stand here by Wall Street, where last year they had more than $40 billion in bonuses, we ask ourselves \u2018How is it that one in four New Yorkers are still living in poverty?\u2019 \u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Occupy Wall Street: An American Dream <\/em>provides a timely look back at a still-recent movement whose impacts are still echoing in contemporary politics. Under the guise of the road trip genre, these uneasy riders capture the moment with panache, humanity, and clarity. For me, Fawcett and Gupta\u2019s informative and entertaining film brought back vivid memories of a shining moment\u2014if an untidy and all too brief one\u2014when the lawn of City Hall in Los Angeles was covered by an emerging, egalitarian network of dissidents demanding an end to economic inequality.<\/p>\n The film<\/em> also made me realize why English novelist Zadie Smith, identifying herself as a socialist in a September essay<\/a> for The New Yorker<\/em>, wrote that \u201cthe most inspiring (to me) political slogan of the past twenty years managed to create a common space in a single phrase: \u2018the ninety-nine per cent.\u2019\u201d I, for one, am 99 percent certain that the events of Occupy Wall Street are as relevant now as ever, and that Fawcett and Gupta\u2019s film is an essential viewing for all contemporary activists fighting to make the American Dream affordable to all.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n