The Working Class in American Film: The Creation of Image and Cu ...

that essentializes both “hard-hats” and African Americans while purporting to be a “labor” film.

In the early left-wing films of the counterculture epoch, alienated youths identified with working-class outlaws whose alienation mirrored their own. Later, they related to characters just like themselves who were elevated to the role of protagonist in what are sometimes referred to as the “youth-cult” films of the late 1960s. The term “youth cult” is borrowed from film theorist David A. Cook. It refers to a spate of films that came to the screen in the late 1960s and early 1970s that offered counterculture protagonists in an effort to capitalize on the youth market tapped by Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider (1969). As Cook notes, these counterculture or “youth-cult” films were “a response by the studios to the exemplary success” of Easy Rider in 1969 (162). These films clearly privileged counterculture values. In the right-wing films of the 1970s, however, the working and middle classes were given their own “heroes” to identify with—a maverick, some might say fascist, San Francisco cop, and a journeyman boxer—two iconic American film characters whose on-screen lives were made incalculably more difficult by the presence of African Americans and/or counterculture characters.

Beginning with the landmark year of 1967, when Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, and In the Heat of the Night came to American screens, Hollywood’s counterculture moment helped to define who viewers are to themselves and to the world as much as any epoch since the Hollywood “factory” began cranking out films in the late 1910s. Beginning with films that explored social issues and a restless youth as the Vietnam War ramped up and ending with films that ushered in the Reagan era, the films of this period reflected their times in both content and tone, and in doing so they gave us a national photo album that traced who audiences were at the time and predicted in some ways who they would become. In studying these films, it becomes clear that the era was best defined by its treatment and its portrayal of the white working class, and it becomes equally clear that these films helped to define the white working class and, to some extent, the white middle class for decades to come. As the fears and anxieties of the white working class bubbled up