Masterpiece Moment: The Americans - Robert Frank's Road Trip

Before we get to Robert Frank, we need to talk about the United States he was driving through.

The Americans happens in a country very busy telling itself a story, a big one, a loud one, a story with marching bands, a mortgage plan, and possibly a casserole.

Post-war US was not simply imagining itself as successful.

It was imagining itself as the inevitable.

This was the country that had won the war, built the suburbs, filled the highways, stocked the supermarkets, and now carried itself like it had the moral authority to tell the rest of the world how modern life was supposed to look.

There is a little manifest destiny still humming under all of this.

Not in the old covered wagon way exactly, though honestly, the US does love a rebrand.

But in the belief that expansion, consumption, dominance, and national confidence were proof of virtue.

More cars, more highways, more appliances, more military power, more cultural influence, more America.

But underneath the shine was something much more complicated.

Segregation was not a footnote.

The Cold War was not background noise.

And the American dream was not equally available to everyone.

So when Robert Frank traveled across the United States in the mid-1950s, he was moving through a country trying very hard to look unified, and he kept finding fracture.

Before we get to Robert Frank, we need to talk about the United States he was driving through.

The Americans happens in a country very busy telling itself a story, a big one, a loud one, a story with marching bands, a mortgage plan, and possibly a casserole.

Post-war US was not simply imagining itself as successful.

It was imagining itself as the inevitable.

This was the country that had won the war, built the suburbs, filled the highways, stocked the supermarkets, and now carried itself like it had the moral authority to tell the rest of the world how modern life was supposed to look.

There is a little manifest destiny still humming under all of this.

Not in the old covered wagon way exactly, though honestly, the US does love a rebrand.

But in the belief that expansion, consumption, dominance, and national confidence were proof of virtue.

More cars, more highways, more appliances, more military power, more cultural influence, more America.

But underneath the shine was something much more complicated.

Segregation was not a footnote.

The Cold War was not background noise.

And the American dream was not equally available to everyone.

So when Robert Frank traveled across the United States in the mid-1950s, he was moving through a country trying very hard to look unified, and he kept finding fracture.