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

from 1890 to 1930” (Ray and Anderson 54). I would add a nostalgia for an imagined 1950s world populated by television parents June and Ward Cleaver of Leave it to Beaver as well as Jim and Margaret Anderson of Father Knows Best. It is a world which working- and middle-class children saw on television every night, a world almost entirely inhabited by “traditional” nuclear families of white, middle-class Americans from small towns. The homes were quaint and neat and bordered by the cliché of white picket fences. Each weekly episode began with a lively but soothing theme song that made Americans want to live those lives in those neighborhoods.

The times were “a-changin’,” however, as Bob Dylan famously wrote. The films of the 1960s and 1970s offered a different picture of America, and the portrayal of the working class in those films says much about where and who we were as a nation. That is not unusual—any first-year film student can tell you that film always reflects its time. But a closer look at the films of the counterculture era—defined here as roughly 1967 to 1981—can do more than just provide a historical perspective of the 1970s; it can tell us much about who we are today. The arguments played out on the big screen during that epoch continue to reverberate throughout the American society of the 2010s. As we explore the counterculture era, I will show how Hollywood’s depiction of the white working class during the late 1960s and 1970s helped to shape the image and self-image of many in the working class who, in the 2010s, are challenging new ideas brought forward by a new progressive government.

Those who have studied Western civilization know that, from the Greeks on, the world has historically been divided into binary forms—good versus evil, black versus white, men versus women, us versus “the other.” This binary form has made sorting out the world an easier task, but it has also led to grave injustices, ethnic and religious wars, and discrimination of all sorts. But binaries work in the popular or commercial arts like film because they create ready-made conflicts. Although scholars in large part have praised the films of the 1970s, calling the period a golden age of cinema, it should not be forgotten that film also reached a large popular audience during this period, particularly during the middle