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

those most obsessed with “liberal” and “hedonistic” Hollywood, fail to understand that the working- and middle-class whites who make up the “middle America” they purportedly champion were defined, in large part, by films that emerged from that little burg outside of Los Angeles. They also fail to understand that Hollywood, since the early studio years, has always operated in its economic self-interest. When that meant privileging the “counterculture” to attract a youth audience, that is what Hollywood did. When that meant defining the “working class,” or white males of any class, as the oppressed defenders of tradition in order to attract a mass audience, that is what Hollywood did.

Although excellent work has been done in the study of the working class in film by Steve J. Ross, John Bodnar, Peter Biskind, and others, no one has explored the treatment of the working class in films of the counterculture era in relationship to the cultural and political wars of today. I consider this a continuation of work that has chronicled how the portrayal of the working class in film has helped to define the working class for itself and others throughout Hollywood’s history. I also see it as a work that helps to shed new light on the tenor of discourse in America in the new millennium.

What to Expect

In Part 1, I take a brief look at the history of the working class in American film to examine how film has helped to forge the identity of the working class, particularly since the inception of the studio system. Once I have set that foundation, I explore in some detail how the working class was portrayed in the early stages of the counterculture epoch in two films noted previously, Bonnie and Clyde and Cool Hand Luke. The purpose of exploring those two films is twofold—to provide a starting point for the portrayal of the present-day working class and to provide a contrast with the rendering of the working class during the middle and latter stages of the epoch, when the binary of the counterculture versus the working class was constructed. These two films represent a promising beginning to an epoch that failed to live up to its promise.