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

accompanying narratives have rarely challenged the capitalist system or the government structure. That was certainly true in the mid-1970s when Hollywood defined the white working class in several popular right-leaning films as victims of social programs put into place to address past wrongs against specific groups, African Americans and women in particular. Though these films did in theory critique an active, progressive government, they also offered up the recipients of new social programs as the real villains. In defining the working class as victim, Hollywood needed a cinematic antagonist for the white working-class protagonist, and it chose the “counterculture” in its various iterations. In a conservative move, Hollywood designated the white working class as defenders of tradition while establishing the “counterculture” as the enemy to that same tradition. Earlier in the epoch the “progressive” view held sway when Hollywood privileged the counterculture in a series of films from 1969 to 1971. As shall be seen, in both cases the economics of the film industry, not a deeply felt ideology, drove the narratives of these films. A study of Hollywood’s rendering of these two broadly defined groups in films from both the left and the right during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s provides a window into the formation of the two views that have come to represent the American culture wars forty years later.

In films that privileged either the counterculture or the working class, Hollywood helped to define the combatants in the culture wars by choosing to exploit the differences between the two groups while ignoring their real and potential commonalities. In its struggle to rise from the rubble of the crumbling studio system in the 1960s, Hollywood created this artificial binary of the working class versus the counterculture in an effort to bring more and more young viewers to the multiplexes that were cropping up across America. The creation of this false binary provided the kind of conflict that Hollywood needed to put “fannies in the seats,” as the saying goes. Instead of attempting to build bridges between the two groups by exploring their shared antipathy towards a government engaged in an unpopular war and a monied class and corporate elite who supported that effort, Hollywood took the easier route. As it has done throughout its history, Hollywood took the more expedient and putatively