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

more profitable path by creating a convenient binary that offered a simple narrative for film audiences. In doing so, Hollywood not only exacerbated tension between the working class and the counterculture but also helped define each group in a way that continues to shape cultural discourse three and four decades later.

Beginning in the late 1960s, when the debate over the Vietnam War raged the loudest, and continuing through the 1970s, Hollywood portrayed the white working class as the binary opposite of politically engaged progressive youths, African American civil rights activists, enlightened women seeking equality, “hippies” who had chosen to drop out of society, and other groups generally placed in the progressive, or “modern,” side of the ledger. Although the working class and student protesters had areas of disagreement and tension—the protesters were perceived by many in the working class to be the sons and daughters of the privileged, possibly because of media representations of them as such—they also had many areas of potential agreement, not the least of which was the hope for a quick end to the Vietnam War. But the portrayals of both groups in the media, particularly in film, exploited their differences and exacerbated the natural tensions that otherwise would have been but one component of the relationship between the groups. The creation of this false working-class/counterculture binary provided the conflict necessary to a carry a cinematic narrative, but at the same time it provided explosive and ready fuel for those outside the world of cinema who would exploit the false binary for political purposes.

If one looks back to the epoch that saw the dominant culture challenged by a counterculture in the streets, in the courts, on college campuses, and in the arts, Joe Wilson’s outburst fits neatly into the discourse that dominated the 1970s and has continued on many fronts in the first decade or so of the new century. Then, those who felt threatened by a changing world, one that was beginning to respond to social and economic inequities previously ignored or denied, reacted defensively and forcefully to changes enacted by a government it felt was too progressive. Student protesters were confronted by blue-collar workers in New York and other cities for denouncing a war; women