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

American working class. Although the working class remains an amorphous concept—today’s working class can include blue-collar workers clinging to disappearing factory jobs, white-collar workers facing downsizing, small farmers losing their family farms, the unemployed threatened with mortgage foreclosures, or recent college graduates experiencing a dry jobs market—it retains much in common with its 1970s predecessor. Many in the white working class in the 2010s still see themselves as the one social group that has not benefitted from government programs. Large numbers of its members, in fact, see themselves as the reluctant benefactors, through their tax dollars, of minorities and new immigrants who threaten their own unsteady grip on the economic ladder.

One key factor has changed since the 1970s, however. In an America where whites will soon represent less than fifty percent of the population, it is not as fashionable or politically savvy as it once was to direct anger overtly towards minorities, women, the putative “privileged,” or even left-wing groups. Now, at least rhetorically, the clear target is the government. There is no longer a significant threat from within from the left, except for those on the fringe right who believe the government itself is “socialist”; as a result, criticizing the government in the 2010s is not viewed as collusion with the left as it might have been in the 1970s. It is important to note, however, that the brunt of this criticism, which originates in many cases in the working/middle class, is directed specifically at the Obama Administration’s progressive agenda. Those who have protested attempts to enact these progressive policies have also found powerful support in Washington on the right, much as the white working class did in the 1970s with the Nixon Administration, a situation to be discussed in more detail in chapter 5. But the source of working-class angst and fears remains consistent with the narrative exploited by the right-wing films of the 1970s: the white working class remains tethered to the belief that it is losing ground to “minority interests” even as it is being called upon to support those same interests. The 1970s Hollywood image of the working class as victim thus continues to shape the identity of significant numbers of the white working and middle classes. (While the election of the first African American president surely has