In 1938, the Great Depression was still taking a toll on the jobs and savings and lives of working- and middle-class white people--not just socially marginalized minorities. The confidence and ballyhoo of the Roaring Twenties had long since disappeared (Tallack 86-87), and the social-welfare safety net that was the hallmark of the New Deal was only just taking hold on one hand, and on the other was the subject of fierce attack by anti-New Deal policymakers (Leuchtenburg 131 et passim). At a time when the difficulties of the Depression were visited on most of the population, the American masses turned a great deal of attention to the fortunes of the racehorse Seabiscuit. In her book about the horse's career, Hillenbrand says that Seabiscuit "was nothing short of a cultural icon in America, enjoying adulation so intense and broad-based that it transcended sport" (xvii). Like 1930s America, Seabiscuit was down and out, but he overcame obscurity and became a folk hero.
The motion picture Seabiscuit is a metaphorical presentation of the idea that, in a metaphorical sense, Seabiscuit prefigured America's triumphant rise over the course of the rest of the 20th century. All of these cultural dynamics appear thematically and in the mise-en-scFne by way of a narrative structure that intertwines Seabiscuit's biography with the biographies of his human family--his owner Tom Howard, his trainer Tom Smith, and his primary jockey Red Pollard. How the owner discovered the trainer and the trainer the horse, and how the jockey insinuated himself into the owner's stable form one narrative line. A second line has to do with the refinement of Seabiscuit's racing career and the way in which, as Hillenbrand says, the horse "captured the American imagination" (xix). The third has to do with the human stories running in parallel to Seabiscuit's, in particular the story of the flawed but all-heart jockey. These lines of action are embedded in the narrative o...