thoughts about what it means to be american

as the title says above

hollywood infected your brain, you wanted kissing in the rain. I've been living in a movie scene puking american dreams. I'm obsessed with the mess that's america- hollywood by marina and the diamonds

July 4th is coming up, and what a strange time it is to be celebrating. I’ve been sitting with a few thoughts and I wanted to share.

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Most of the people that I’m surrounded by are fairly progressive. And a lot of the rhetoric I’ve been hearing these past few months have been centered around shame. Shame about being American, shame about our leadership, shame about the state of our country. A lot of people have been saying that the American Dream is dead.

And I get it. In my generation especially, social mobility feels nearly impossible. We’re drowning in debt, priced out of home ownership, stuck in a rat race just to survive. Those ideals we were raised with—the promise that in America, you can be anything—feels like a lie.

When I think about the “American Dream”, a few things come up for me. I think of my parents I’ve watched both work incredibly hard to build the life they have today. I think of so many immigrants who I know, some of my closest friends and family, who have come to this country— those who come here legally to work in tech in Seattle, and those who work undocumented in the orchards of eastern Washington. I think of grade school, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, learning about Manifest Destiny (before I knew how violent it actually was), playing Oregon Trail from a floppy disk, watching Little House on the Prarie… I think of Star Trek!

(Honestly, I think Star Trek is quintessentially American, painting a very utopian picture of what a possible future America could look like- with an extremely diverse crew, a very Kennedy-esque captain, their mission to “seek out new life and new civilizations”…)

The mythologizing of that American Dream that I grew up with still lives in me. Because when I ask myself what it feels like to be American, I think of optimism. Drive. Hope. A sense of adventure. The spirit of exploration—even if that idea is complicated, even if its history is deeply flawed. I think of the words I recited hundreds of times: “one nation under god, indivisible with liberty and justice for all”, and how I still truly believe in it.

As I write this down it feels terribly naive and idealistic. Maybe it is.

It’s been six months since I started this Substack, ironically because of politics. I had so many conflicting thoughts during the inauguration. I don’t typically talk about politics—definitely not publicly—but this year has impacted me more than I expected. I’ve been worried about how divisive this country is currently, how much more violent and angry this country is, how much obvious corruption is going on. Sometimes I think about how there’s a sickness in society that we’ve ignored for too long.

All of this has made me think more deeply about my role both as an American and as a filmmaker, as Hollywood has played a central role in shaping and exporting how we view this country.

There’s a quote I return to often from Charlie Kaufman’s famous WGA speech during the last writer’s strike:

“We are trained to do the bidding of people motivated not by curiosity, but by protecting their jobs. And we lose sight of what our work is… Our work is to reflect the world, to say what’s true in the face of so much lying. The rest is window dressing at best, Triumph of the Will at worst. Adrienne Rich wrote, ‘I do know that art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.’ The world is a mess. The world is beautiful. The world is impossibly complicated. And we have the opportunity to explore that.”

Maybe at the end of the day being American means having the courage to imagine a better future and believe in change.

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what i’m consuming 🍰

photo by silas chu

Over the weekend, I co-hosted a retreat we throw a couple times a year called Story Studios. It’s a weekend where we bring together a group of people to create stories collaboratively through different mediums. This time, it was film! It was so fun gathering together at 11pm, sleep deprived and a little delirious to watch each others’ short films—made in under 24 hours. They were funny, heartfelt, and wildly creative. I came home Sunday totally exhausted but deeply inspired.

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who i am

Hi, I’m Gisella! I’m a repped screenwriter based in Seattle. I directed a feature-length documentary and most recently, my pilot Body Brokers was on the 2024 Blacklist Latine List. Follow me on my journey to get my first screenplay green lit 💚