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

In Part 2, I look at films of the late 1960s and early 1970s and explore the treatment of the working class as counterculture foils. Here, the construct of the working-class/counterculture binary blooms. The first film explored is the iconic Easy Rider, a film some call the most influential of its time. As noted earlier, it inspired a series of counterculture/youth-cult films that highlighted the counterculture experience, and it also set the tone for the depiction of the working class in the youth-cult films that followed. One of these films was Alice’s Restaurant, an Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) film based on the real-life tale of Arlo Guthrie’s refusal of induction into the U.S. Army. Although the film offers some stereotypical renderings of the working class and privileges the counterculture, it represents a somewhat more balanced view of the two groups than many youth-cult films. Unfortunately, as we will see, it did not go far enough in depicting the commonalities between the working class and counterculture or in showing a way forward for the two groups in communion.

Medium Cool follows Alice’s Restaurant and incorporates real footage from the 1969 Democratic Convention and the riots in Chicago. Not a youth-cult film in the vein of The Strawberry Statement (1970) or Zabriskie Point or Getting Straight—its protagonist is a professional news cameraman and not a member of the counterculture—it nonetheless examines the relationships between the counterculture and the working class as well as the effect of the media on both. Its preoccupation with the “cool medium” of television is particularly germane here because the film touches on the impact of the media on the formation of identity.

The final film discussed in Part 2 is Billy Jack (1971 and 1973), a film about a Vietnam War veteran of mixed Native American and white/European ethnicity who returns to the reservation to promote counterculture values. During the early 1970s, Native American values were intimately connected with the counterculture, sometimes in a crass commercial manner. Most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, the film offers a more balanced view of the working class than its youth-cult predecessors. In doing so, it helps to bring an end to the demonization of the working class in film while, paradoxically, reviving the