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

Hollywood found a way to appeal to a younger audience by producing films that featured working-class protagonists who embodied counterculture values. In the 1967 films Bonnie and Clyde and Cool Hand Luke, antiheroes like Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, and Lucas Jackson gave Hollywood an opportunity to endorse counterculture ideals through narratives depicting working-class characters. The great societal fissure had not yet torn apart Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and working-class antiheroes with counterculture sensibilities were able to draw the young to movie houses. But that brief period ended quickly as Hollywood turned to the counterculture itself for protagonists only two years later. Unlike Bonnie and Clyde and Cool Hand Luke, which generally presented the working class in a sympathetic light, these new left-wing films essentialized and even demonized the working class while they valorized the counterculture, presenting it as victim of an oppressive society buttressed by a reactionary working class.

As the 1970s approached, the progressive actions of the Great Society begat a reaction, and the treatment of the working class in film again changed. A souring economy, the Vietnam War, and the resulting cultural wars were moving the country to the right, and Hollywood responded with a series of films that privileged the working class. This change came gradually. As the decade began, the working class was still demonized in Joe (1970), a complex film that manages to denigrate both the working class and the counterculture. But as the 1970s progressed, the working class became a more sympathetic presence on the screen in a cycle of right-wing films. In these films, the working class generally signified “real” American values in contrast to the supposedly distorted and dangerous values of the counterculture. The counterculture, previously portrayed as “victim” in the left-wing films, was now depicted as vile, dirty, and sometimes murderous. In right-wing films such as Dirty Harry (1973) and Rocky (1976), Hollywood served up working-class heroes to represent and extol “middle-class values” at the expense of putative “counterculture values.” This same critique of those counterculture values was embedded ever so subtly in films as disparate as Jaws (1975), the first summer blockbuster, and Blue Collar (1978), an antiunion film