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

during the recession that plagued the first years of the Obama presidency, it became even more apparent that the white working class depicted in the films of the 1970s had never really gone away, even if many of its jobs had been shipped overseas.

Prior to Joe Wilson’s outburst from the gallery of Congress, the summer of 2009 had already borne witness to shocking demonstrations of incivility and threats of violence in town halls across America. The same familiar scene flashed across television screens throughout the summer of 2009 and into the fall: angry white Americans shouting down Congress members in town hall meetings from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Washington. The putative subject was health care reform, but the level of passion and the over-the-top expression of vitriol seemed, to many observers, to be wildly out of proportion to the realities of the health care proposal. Those who supported reform were demonized as socialists at best and killers of grandma at worst. Those who rejected reform were labeled crazed right-wingers and closet white racists who refused to accept the legitimacy of the Obama Presidency. Virtually no one had anticipated the depths to which the discourse would sink, and no one in the media seemed capable of fully understanding and thus explaining what was going on in America.

As 2010 marched on and health care reform faced challenges in the courts, the tone of the discourse did not soften. Opponents still derided the president as a socialist; gun advocates marched to protect their Second Amendment rights, rights they had been told were jeopardized by an Obama presidency; and angry and incendiary words continued to flow over the airwaves from talk radio and cable television outlets. As the midterm election season of 2010 approached, the discourse only coarsened in the streets and on the airwaves. But while the tone of the discourse was disturbing, anyone who studied 1970s Hollywood could find echoes of the arguments in films of that era, particularly in films from the right.

Parallels between the 1970s with the 2010s are evident. Then, like now, the white working class was feeling squeezed from all sides. In the 1970s, not unlike the 2010s, jobs and industries were going overseas,