The Working Class in American Film: The Creation of Image and Culture by Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s
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The Working Class in American Film: The Creation of Image and Cu ...

Chapter :  Introduction
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Film theorist and educator Robert Kolker describes this in Film, Form, & Culture:

The reason that attention must be paid to film is that most of us get our stories—our narratives and myths—from it, or its close cousin, television. In other words, from the late nineteenth century onward, people have turned to film as entertainment, escape, and education—as an affirmation of the way they live or think they ought to live their lives. (1)

James Davison Hunter also understood the power of the media to define issues and the people they sometimes divide:

The mass media not only reflect ideals but actually define reality in a society—by selecting which events “deserve attention” and are, therefore, “important,” and which events are ignored and, therefore, unimportant; by depicting individuals and communities in particular ways [emphasis added]; and by presenting what is acceptable and unacceptable. (174)

What we learn about people, however, is not the unvarnished truth. Just as we can learn about another group, or ourselves, through film, we can also develop a false understanding of a particular social, ethnic, or racial group if films essentialize its members. The same holds true if the group we identify with is essentialized. This identification with a particular group, through narratives, then impacts what we do. As Margaret R. Somers says, “People act in part according to how they understand their place in any number of given narratives, however fragmented, contradictory, or partial” (84). In short, we choose narratives that tell us who we are, and maybe who we want to be, and we act accordingly.

When the “counterculture era” in film began in 1967, the working class had been in large part absent from film for much of the previous decade. Some excellent films of the early 1960s highlighted working-class characters—Lonely are the Brave (1962) and Hud (1963) are two—but for the most part Hollywood had ignored the working class for some time. By the middle of the decade, however, that began to change as