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

some import here, that is a topic I will leave to others.) In short, the anger expressed by pockets of the working class, including the Tea Party and other more marginal groups, though more visible in the new millennium than ever before because of new media and 24-hour news cycles, is not new. It was vividly expressed in the American cinema more than three decades ago.

The concept of “working class” has always been an elusive one in an American society that has historically resisted class distinctions, a topic that will be discussed in more detail in chapter 1. Some use the term as a synonym for “blue collar” or “hard hats,” as Peter Biskind notes, but that is not the case here. In this work, the working class is defined primarily by economic status. Anyone of modest means who generally lives from paycheck to paycheck and often feels economic anxiety would be considered working class. Whether members of a particular group would identify themselves as working class—for example, teachers, nurses, low-level white-collar workers, middle management, and so on—is not the issue. Some of the characters in the counterculture films may well consider themselves middle class—the restaurant proprietor, the TV reporter, the local police chief—but for my purposes they are explored as working class either because they fit into the economic definition offered previously or because they are representative of working-class values or the working-class view of the world that the films of the 1970s explored and often exploited.

I should also note that, although I primarily use the term “working class” to identify the white working class, clearly the working class crosses racial lines. But the concern here is the reaction of the white working class to change, from a struggling farmer/rancher in Easy Rider to the overwrought proprietor of Alice’s Restaurant (1969) or from two drifters trying to find their version of the American Dream in Scarecrow (1973) to the directionless high school graduates in a dying industrial community in Breaking Away (1978). Although I briefly look at “blaxploitation” films and their impact and also explore African American characters in films like Medium Cool (1969) and Blue Collar, my primary focus is the white working class.