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

(1978) explores the impact of the Vietnam War on the working class in a Pennsylvania steel town as the community suffers the loss of native sons to the war just as the economy begins to sour. In Breaking Away, the effects of the economic downturn are felt by four working-class youths who must constitute a new version of community out of their dying one. Both films represent nostalgia for disappearing communities and, despite expressing some leftist ideology, demonstrate the influence of the move to the right in America and the effects of the times on the working class and on white working-class identity. To their credit, neither overtly blames the counterculture for the condition of the working class, but both provide a vivid snapshot of working-class angst as the Reagan years approach.

Throughout much of the counterculture era, filmmakers pitted the counterculture against the working class. In the early years, the counterculture was privileged in most instances; in the middle and later years, the working class was privileged. While these narratives often attracted audiences to the movie houses, they also constructed an exaggerated and thus false binary that helped to define social relationships in America for generations to come. By concentrating on this binary, too many filmmakers failed to shine a light on the nation’s economic and political systems that took America to war and then failed to respond adequately to the social, cultural, and economic needs of its citizens. Despite early attempts to draw parallels between the counterculture and the working class in films like Bonnie and Clyde and Cool Hand Luke, Hollywood abandoned that approach for what it believed was a more profitable formula. Though there are attempts to build or rebuild community in films throughout the era, too often that effort eschews collective action in favor of a tribal approach that divides people along racial, economic, and cultural lines. In the right-wing films, the “orthodoxy,” as James Davison Hunter defines the term, attempts to create communities founded on tradition and, too often, a false nostalgia. In the left-wing films, the “progressivists” attempt to build new communities responsive to the zeitgeist. In films of both the right and the left, however, there is little effort to build lasting bridges across the divide that separates the “orthodoxy” and the “progressivists.” Thus, these films contribute