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

taking some working-class youth with them; and, most importantly, towards the recipients of new or expanded government social programs. Hollywood’s decision to concentrate on these tensions between the working class and the counterculture served to exacerbate tensions between the groups. The creation of this false binary helped not only to define the antagonistic relationship between the working class and counterculture but also to create the image of a working class that was forgotten by a government more interested in providing support for minority interests.

The enduring image of the working class as the “forgotten people” was drawn primarily in the right-wing films of the era although early youth-cult films by left-wing filmmakers exploited the false binary from the other direction. It could be argued that the negative portrayal of the working class in youth-cult films encouraged a backlash in right-wing films, which responded in defense of the working class. But instead of examining the working class in a nuanced manner, as some left-wing films attempted to do in the early 1970s, the right-wing films resorted to formulaic, clichéd representations of the working class that endorsed the working-class-as-victim narrative. In the hands of filmmakers from the right, the “working class” was an amorphous concept used as a catchall to represent a variety of social characteristics and to examine a variety of social ills. In these films, the working class was always portrayed as the victim of a system stacked against it, whether the protagonist was a police detective trying to navigate a legal system that favored the rights of the criminal or was a seemingly washed-up “pug” of Italian descent who must prove his courage and worth by fighting a “loudmouthed” African American man. Working-class characters in these films held a variety of attitudes and beliefs, but central to their belief systems was a deep distrust of government and a resentment of any minority interests who benefited from government programs as well as a keen distaste for intellectuals, whom they viewed as the vanguard of major leftist movements.

Four decades after the culture wars began and Hollywood decided to exploit the convenient and profitable working-class/counterculture binary, these cinematic images from the past continue to define and shape the