Copyright Radical Teacher Apr 30, 1995All That Hollywood Allows: Film and the Working Class
To design a college level film course that focuses centrally on class is to break new ground. A two volume collection of more than seventy current film course outlines and reading lists does not list even one such course and there is almost nothing in print in this field that has the word "class" in its title, let alone mention of the working class. 1 This does not mean that no one is teaching film from this perspective, but it does mean that class gets subsumed under other considerations and so pushed away from the public arena.
Determined to prevent these issues from dropping out of sight altogether, two members of the Society for Cinema Studies organized panels on working-class representation for two consecutive annual meetings of this academic organization, and they are now editing a book on this topic. 2 Still, what struck me on both occasions was the edgy, even peevish tone of their invitation. Unfortunately, their impatience was not misplaced, for amidst euphoria over virtuoso breakthroughs in poststructuralist film theory on the one hand and over the opening up of film studies to feminism, multi-culturalism, and most recently Queer revisions on the other, attention to working-class issues has not yet found its rightful place.
RESISTANCE IN FILM STUDIES
Of course, the avoidance of a class perspective has been endemic in the United States, where individualism and capitalism have long provided the cornerstone for political practice and ideology. It is easier for us to talk about "poverty" than about exploited classes, about "termination" and "downsizing" than about firings, about "the economy" but not about class conflict. Even with the end of the Cold War, class awareness continues to be shunned as a potential conduit for communism. Four years ago, when the Society for Cinema Studies established a special Task Force on Race and Class, thereby registering that racism and economic disenfranchisement are partners in oppressing people of color, those present at the Task Force's founding meeting voted to drop "class" from its title. Though the vote passed by a very narrow margin, the message was clear: we will support the progressive agendas of identity politics (i.e., concerning ethnicities, genders, sexualities, etc.), but we hesitate to do so in relation to the systemic effects of capitalism.
For me, mulling over these anecdotes, the initial question was whether film studies as a discipline resists class analysis in ways that do not apply to feminist and other anticolonizing scholarship. Put differently, I wondered whether the immensely productive influence of post-structuralist theory on film studies, including its melding of attention to apparatus, form, and social use, might not conflict with a materialist and activist class perspective. Knocking about here may be an unvoiced recoil from Marxist criticism, as if it is necessarily mired in an outmoded predilection for thematic readings and at odds with the cutting edge discourses of ideology and refracted meanings elaborated by Althusser, Foucault, Machery, Jameson, Bakhtin, and others. Mas'ud Zavarzadeh makes this point forcefully in Seeing Films Politically, where he argues that the self-absorbed pleasures of contemporary theory affected a shift in the meaning of "ideology," "power," and "hegemony" which turned them into abstractions detached from a materialist analysis of social class. 3
I dwell on this problem at the start of this essay because what happens in the classroom is informed by broader inquiries circulating in the academic world. In this respect, Zavarzadeh's argument is not as rarefied as it might seem, for it concerns choices, not inevitabilities. His focus is on individuals' choice to immerse their work in self-referential theories (derived from semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, etc.) at a cost to politics. To this I add the choice to foreground decolonizing perspectives in ways that end up driving a wedge between considerations of class and identity politics. Yet none of these divisions is necessary. If anything, in each case inclusion of class analysis is compatible with the very practice that at present excludes it. That this divisiveness affects the teaching of a popular medium friendly to progressive analysis is particularly ironic. Thus, while feminist film courses are increasingly in evidence, and while the teaching of other aspects of diversity is clearly on the rise, within this general embracing of egalitarian agendas the issue of class remains marginalized, as though there might be competition between class and other group positionalities.
Film theory and identity politics are not inherently resistant to class analysis, but they have tended to function this way, even if inadvertently. They have helped us be critical consumers who understand the politics of representation -- notably the representation of disenfranchised groups such as women, African Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asians, Native Americans, lesbians and gays, and myriad others. But they also let film studies remain relatively unreflective about the role of class in scenarios of disenfranchisement and about the possibility of materially based conflicts and alliances across such groups and within them. That is, despite their emphasis on liberatory discourses as key to social change, both poststructuralist theory and identity politics ended up participating in the broader silencing of class-focused discourse in the United States.
Though I review these pitfalls to suggest that we must look to ourselves as partly complicit in the erasure of class, it is worth remembering that Hollywood and its satellites, including films made for television, further muddy the waters. It is not that films fail to depict characters from all walks of life, but that they discourage awareness of the fact that "walks" translate into classes, and that classes are defined by incompatible interests responding to gross inequalities and injustices. In this respect, film studies, so steeped in Hollywood's glamour industry, is particularly susceptible to the seduction of artifacts constructed to deflect viewers from class awareness. This construction occurs at all levels of narration. Most obviously it is evident in films' thematic preference for middle-and upper-class protagonists and perspectives. More subtly, it is also evident in ways films diminish working-class characters and disregard the conditions affecting their lives. But permeating each narrative are also commentaries inscribed by each film's audio and visual "languages" -- by the costumes, sets, lighting, film stock, color filters, editing, music, camera positions, selective amplifications, and much more -- which often tilt films toward a seemingly depoliticized reception that favors identification with ruling-class interests.
In this sense, then, any and all films are available for class analysis, from Schindler's List (1993) to Tongues Untied (1989), and from The Age of Innocence (1993) to The Joy Luck Club (1993). The very effacing of class relations proves instructive, once students learn to see how our films mystify the positionality of their characters within class. Working-class people in particular, students can discover, are often made the butt of jokes, a cause for distaste, or objects for admiration, but rarely initiators of in-depth debate concerning social justice or the possibility of social change. Considered in aggregate, our films glorify wealth, dismiss or primitivize the working class, criminalize the poor, and pass off the heterosexual and patriarchal white middle class as a norm barely distinguishable from the upper classes. To help students become aware of this prevailing practice is to help them see how the film industry produces false consciousness -- how it buries the vernacular of ordinary lives in myths of a universal human condition that supposedly transcends class considerations.
THE POLITICS OF CINEMATOGRAPHY
While the above argues that any film or film course can be taught from a class perspective, this essay concerns feature length fiction films made in the U.S. that focus on working-class issues centrally. (Films made in Europe and elsewhere bring up related but also different issues this essay cannot address.) Almost invariably, close analysis shows, our films work to normalize existing class relations in order to contain our understanding of workers' agency. Consider, for example, what Hollywood does with one of its all time screen idols, Marlon Brando, in his McCarthy-era working-class roles, notably in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata (1952), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Wild One (1954). With his flesh pressing against denim, leather, checkered flannel, or the frayed gossamer of a cotton T-shirt, as the case might be, and with the camera closing in on his sensuous face as it gropes for comprehension, this degraded Prometheus mingles the pessimism of the postwar era with Cold War capitalist agendas. In the case of On the Waterfront, the Brando character ends up as a Christ-like savior who must stumble to a working man's Calvary before he delivers the cowering longshoremen from their corrupt union and back to the paternalistic safekeeping of the state, church, and family. Seen against the historic background of the McCarthy hearings, contemporary unrest at the waterfront, and the United States's gearing up for its newly staked out position as a world power, this was meant to be a happy ending.
Viva Zapata was also scripted to reassure its predominantly North American and western-identified audience. Concluding on a note of sadness for this folk hero's betrayal and fall, the film nonetheless writes off the Zapatista uprising as uncivilized and corrupt, and it further comforts viewers with the apotheosis of Zapata's white horse as the reincarnation of the man's spirit. Seen against the history of the United States's relations with Mexico from the Mexican Revolution to the 1990s Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas, the film posits the necessity of a North American intervention and hegemony south of the border. The Mexicans, it suggests, are not ready for self-government, and their grassroots organizing for land reform are bound to founder on greed and treachery. Focusing on the individual leader rather than on the peasants he represents, the film uses Brando's gift for slackening his facial muscles and slurring his speech to discredit him. Posing him as an icon of things Mexican, it has him project a magnificent primitivism lit up with flashes of intuition and it stresses his landed gentry origins. Nowhere do we find the articulate intelligence or informed communal solidarity which defined the historic Zapatistas' struggles.
While each of these films has a particular political agenda, their shared practice of suppressing class consciousness, disempowering workers, discrediting collective bargaining, and invoking religion as a stand-in for social change are standard practice in Hollywood films. The Deer Hunter (1978) is just a more recent example. Produced shortly after the Vietnam war and focusing on a group of working-class friends impaired by horrifying ordeals suffered in Vietnam, this film uses the spectacle of exotic warfare and nostalgia for a supposedly Edenic prewar past to obscure the plot's immediate context, namely the collapse of Pennsylvania's steel industry and the unemployment crisis increasingly affecting workers nationally. The film has war, but the class position of this war's victims on either side does not lay exclusive claim to our emotions. The returning veterans' relation to their country, community, and jobs is shaped by physical and psychological wounds acquired overseas, not by their place in an economic system that left miles of rusting steel mills along Pennsylvania's waterways. In this connection, the plot's initial celebration of a homogeneous ethnic community (Slavic) combines with the deer hunt and the closing sequence's singing of "God Bless America" to put forth an essentialist view of this country as vulnerable only to the brutality of others. Invoking the rites of marriage in the industrial landscape, male bonding in the wilderness, and the salve of patriotism when all else fails, the film provides an ersatz healing that offers audiences no lasting comfort.
Bringing class analysis to bear on these films allows students to see how each of them pursues an agenda relevant to its historic moment. On the Waterfront promotes the subordination of labor to government regulation and capitalist interests; Viva Zapata taps anti-communist anxieties and a racist view of the non-western Other to justify United States intervention in Central America; and The Deer Hunter invokes family, nature, and flag in its response to a controversial war and as a cover-up for a faltering economy. Such readings, focusing mainly on the use of the working class to serve particular national agendas, can only benefit from a further broadening of the inquiry to include attention to gender, ethnicity, and related categories of inequality and exploitation as implicated in the construction of class relations. Note, for example, these films' ambivalent representation of male workers' physical power, where admiration and even covert desire mingle with the need to debase and contain workers' intelligence, articulation, and therefore agency. Consider, too, the symbolic function of women in these films as conservators of hearth and home, and the ways this role advances the cause of law and order within narratives geared to affirming the political status quo. Or consider how the foregrounding of ethnicities (Irish, Mexican, and Slavic in these instances) lets cultural and religious identity -- at once sentimental and racist -- displace class consciousness.
Once we normalize attention to such issues, the possibility of teaching film from a working-class perspective materializes at every turn. Key here is not simply what one might select for teaching, but the questions brought to bear on this selection. Assembling a filmography is just a first step, then. The more difficult task is to teach students (and ourselves, especially if not trained in film analysis) to appreciate the extent to which the very process of representation constructs meanings. That is, everything the apparatus can do and all that we prepare for it is active in the construction of meanings which interlace with a film's thematic concerns, supplementing, modifying, and sometimes contradicting the position apparently taken by its plot. Whether we use an occasional film to illustrate some aspect of a broader inquiry or teach an entire course on working-class issues, we need to understand the medium's resourcefulness in using cinematography to inscribe ideology and politics.
The function of religion in On the Waterfront and The Deer Hunter can serve as just one example of this activity. Though both films use religion to define the working class by race and ethnicity, they do so to different ends. In On the Waterfront religion is at once a galvanizing force (mediated through Fr. Barry's and Edie's characters and speech) and a metaphoric reminder of redemptive agony (conveyed through images ranging from the bleak rooftop crucifix-shaped antennas to Terry Molloy's final "passion" as he stumbles up the gangplank that is the waterfront's Via Dolorosa). In The Deer Hunter religion is opaque, impenetrable. Its contents withheld, its ritual beautifully filmed but disrupted with choppy editing, here cinematography stresses the exotic otherness of the working class and its worship, using the very process of representation to distance the viewer from comprehension. Though of course much more distinguishes these cinematographic treatments (e.g., the difference between the lush expressionism of black and white film and golden wash over soft color, or differences in sound-track and verbal content), even this truncated analysis suggests that each film uses religion to define working-class prospects differently. On the Waterfront argues for a docile work force, anchoring this agenda in a spiritual commitment to the existing order as a matter of divine rightness; The Deer Hunter holds on to ritual without comprehension, yearning nostalgically for the reassurance of a church and hearth which by the film's end have lost their power to heal or inspire.
DESIGNING A UNIT ON WORKING-CLASS REPRESENTATIONS
So far, my own college level teaching has not included a course devoted solely to working-class representations. I teach diverse commuting students at an urban university come on hard times, and my courses are inclusive, focusing on social class as interwoven with gender, ethnicity, region, sexual orientation, occupation, and the like. While this arrangement normalizes attention to class as routinely applicable to all films, a systematic focus on working-class issues pulls this group out of the periphery and into the center of our work. One way of doing so is to create a unit that studies working-class representations centrally for part of a given course. This was my solution in two courses, "America on Film" and "The Politics of Film." But there is enough material for a whole course on this subject, let alone similar units which can be designed for a variety of courses in and out of film studies. The rest of this discussion will concern, first, the potentials of the unit I developed and, second, the possibility of reworking this configuration to different ends.
It was my choice to focus my working-class unit on organized labor and the politics of employment. The films I selected -- The Grapes of Wrath (1940), On the Waterfront, Salt of the Earth (1953), and Matewan (1987) -- concerned traditional labor issues as we know them in the public sphere: salaries, safety, job security, class consciousness, solidarity, and collective bargaining. This is not the only direction to go. One can teach about filmic representations of the working class in the domestic sphere, about work in situations that traditionally precluded collective bargaining, or about the poor as an underclass, for example. One can teach about the working class through the lens of gender or analyze it with an eye to racism. While the films listed here allow for all of this, I selected them partly because of ways they fit into the needs of each course as a whole and partly because they foreground class consciousness and solidarity. This investment in activism proved helpful in these particular courses. It countered representations of injustice and conflict with ideals of social amelioration, and it encouraged us to probe each film's ideological position in relation to such prospects.
Because Salt of the Earth and On the Waterfront were made within a year of one another yet assume diametrically opposite positions on the question of class struggle, their pairing is central to this unit. Produced at the height of the HUAC's investigation of Hollywood, and by a director implicated as a friendly government witness (Elia Kazan), On the Waterfront embraces a straight capitalist and McCarthyist agenda. Bestializing its workers, it insists on a compliant work force, it affirms the rightness of being a "stool pigeon" for a government shown to collaborate with private capital, and it offers a familial/religious model of redemption as its comfort to the masses. Salt of the Earth, in contrast, was made by Hollywood renegades (Michael Wilson, Herbert Bieberman, and others), several of whose careers were shattered because of their socialism and because they refused to cooperate with HUAC. This film stresses workers' need to resist containment by joint capitalist and government interests, it shows how the seemingly private functions of sexism and racism play into this containment, and it argues for grassroots organizing and solidarity across gender and ethnicity as a way to win workers material gains. There is nothing in On the Waterfront to suggest that workers are capable of acting on their own behalf, that unions serve workers, that solidarity is a useful tool or that collective bargaining can win better income and working conditions. Everything in Salt of the Earth suggests as much. Paternalism, brawn, and individual martyrdom hold no charm here; practical needs, dialogue, collective wisdom, and mutual respect do.
It is not accident that these two films differ stylistically as well as politically. On the Waterfront is a dazzling film, resonant in its symbolic use of the cinematic apparatus on top of Marlon Brando's star status. Its predominantly nocturnal settings bathe the gladiatorial struggles it depicts in metaphysical implications, while its claustrophobic enclosures -- tenements, alleyways, a barren playground, or a cavernous ship's hold -- turn the waterfront into a latter-day hell. Even the soundtrack seems to enact a primal battle between good and evil, where the shriek of a foghorn, the heartbeat throb of percussion, and an Irish jig's invocation of a preindustrial (and in this film's context, prelapsarian) past, mingle with jazz to encode the outlaw seductions of urban life. Salt of the Earth, in contrast, enjoys the unexpected benefits of a low budget production. Denied the comforts of sophisticated technology, a large professional crew, or wasteful footage ratios, its use of barren New Mexico Hills and miners' housing as its set, and of miners to enact aspects of their own lives, is compelling. The very simplicity of the soundtrack here contrasts with On the Waterfront's density. Most important to this largely Mexican-American union struggle is the use of intertwined musical strains derived from the Mexican Revolution and folk traditions and from Anglo union songs and popular culture. In short, what Salt of the Earth's semi-documentary procedures lose by way of gloss they more than regain by way of clarity and honesty. Form, in either case, functions as a metaphor for the human situation at hand and as a conduit for reception. In Salt of the Earth the recourse to cinematographic authenticity ends up supporting the workers' struggles; in On the Waterfront the very exuberance of its formal operations creates a conceptual overload appropriate to its murky politics.
Produced at the height of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath makes for a useful introduction to this pair because its tangled political contradictions anticipate the definitive parting of ways we see in On the Waterfront and Salt of the Earth some fourteen years later. It shares Salt of the Earth's affection for the dispossessed but not its faith in militancy. Rejecting what intimations of collective action Steinbeck did include in the original novel, it nods toward New Deal politics and embraces a fast-disappearing notion of the "family" and an ill-defined idea of "the people" as its redemptive hope. Moreover, while its representation of migrant workers aspires to the truth-claims of documentary, the effect is rather contrived both because the film is nonetheless obtrusively crafted and because it quotes too directly the studied and aestheticized images Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and others bequeathed us as the iconic distillations of the working class. Even the leitmotif of "Red River Valley" rings false here. A cliche "western" motif, this "red maiden's" love song to a feckless cowboy has no substantive relation to anything in the film beyond folksy pretense. Not incidentally, this film, like On the Waterfront, rejects collective proletarian action and embeds political discourse in nocturnal scenes, high contrast lighting, and claustrophobic sets that signal moral and political confusion. Indeed, its most artfully crafted footage is assigned to Muley's incoherent explanation of how the banks repossessed the land. Composed in bold diagonals and unfolding through dramatic superimpositions, fades, and rhythmic editing, this elaborate sequence awes one with its epistemological instabilities. Not as paranoid or disdainful of workers as On the Waterfront, The Grapes of Wrath nonetheless evinces no confidence in them. In keeping with Depression-era liberal humanism, not socialism, it mourns human suffering without acknowledging the collusion of government and private enterprise in producing that suffering in the first place.
Whether it is taught alone or as part of a cluster of films concerning labor struggles and the dispossession of working-class people, it is especially useful to probe ways The Grapes of Wrath refuses to acknowledge that workers can make gains through militant solidarity. Whatever few nods the original novel makes in that direction, the film resolutely sidesteps. Matewan, in contrast, is an out-and-out pro-union film, a warm paean to what has come down in American mythology as the purest and best of our leftist traditions. A pro-labor film concerning a historic strike in West Virginia of the 1920s, it complements both Salt of the Earth and Barbara Kopple's milestone documentary Harlan County, USA (1976) in its unqualified support for organized labor and in its appeal to its audiences' reason as well as empathies. A gently loving film, beautifully awash in the greens of fresh vegetation and the soft discolorations of faded 1920s clothing, it uses unknown actors of striking physiognomy and a soundtrack replete with melodious ethnically coded folk music to draw us to the miners' side. Among these symbolically laden tropes the soundtrack is particularly eloquent. As with The Deer Hunter's Russian music, On the Waterfront's Irish jig, The Grapes of Wrath's "Red River Valley," and Salt of the Earth's militant union chants and Mexican songs, Matewan's Appalachian, Italian, and African-American tunes encode a diverse ethnic heritage, affirm the "folks'" right to well being, and in one memorable episode weave the miners' different musical "languages" into a beautifully harmonizing trope of "unity" and "solidarity."
Yet for all its inspired socialism, Matewan's appeal is also its downfall. This may be hard to see, given its evident affection for working people and its unswerving political dedication to their struggle. This may be harder yet to see given this film's thoughtful treatment of racism and ethnicity. Indeed, it is the first film since Salt of the Earth to address this divisive issue and argue for workers' ability to build solidarity across ethnic differences. At the same time, Matewan's imputing an essential goodness to folk tradition inscribes nostalgia for a Wobbly past that late capitalism is rapidly rendering useless. Such faith in traditional unionism is heartening but insufficient. It harkens back to a prelapsarian leftist Eden -- not the Eden of On the Waterfront or The Deer Hunter, but the heyday of labor militancy as it existed before multinationals, before the flight of industry to the Third World, before NAFTA. It speaks to the left's dreams at a time when the conditions of working-class life raise different questions and require different answers.
MOVING BEYOND UNITS
Students at a school like the University of Massachusetts -- Boston are not conservative. They approach films about labor struggle without the indifference or even hostility that might emerge in other settings. For me, teaching the film clusters I review above (only the first three films in "America on Film," all four in "The Politics of Film"), the hardest task is not winning them over to a sympathetic viewing, but to the challenge of critical readings. However briefly, the discussion above foregrounds instances of cinematographic manipulation to illuminate the importance of this perspective to decoding each film's stance toward its subject matter. At issue here is a methodology, a way of reading film "language" as a repository of politics and ideology. Applicable to both mainstream and independent oppositional films, it is our sole defense against manipulation. For students, to master these processes and become able to separate the melded layers of each film's discursive practices is to become selective consumers of filmic representations.
For viewers untrained in film analysis, this approach does not come easily. Unlike literature, which our schools treat as a crafted artform in need of expert analysis, films are assumed to be naturally decipherable. As "mere" popular entertainment -- slap-dash concoctions of opportunistic panderings to lax minds and depleted imaginations, as cultural conservatives would have it -- films don't have the aura of "texts" in need of close readings. It is hard to counter this attitude without a critical mass of evidence. Though one can make a case for close reading by teaching a single film (for instance the Grapes of Wrath in a history course about the Great Depression), students benefit from the opportunity to cross-reference several films. The above model centers on the paring of On the Waterfront and Salt of the Earth, and it is further enriched by the addition of The Grapes of Wrath and Matewan. This is just one option, open to countless variations and alternatives.
What follows is a brief survey of some of these options. It is necessarily a sketchy and incomplete survey, leaving out various films for lack of space (notably the marvelous yet barely known film, Northern Lights (1979), concerning farmers organizing in North Dakota at the turn of the century, and the poorly made Hoffa (1992), which disappoints at every turn). Documentaries, so important in working-class representations, are also left out. They require a detailed discussion as a separate genre because their cinematography rests on different codes concerning "truth" and ideology. Nonetheless, this overview suggests myriad possibilities for clusters which can fit the needs of particular courses and for entire film courses focused on working-class issues. The preceding discussion privileges organized labor, but other configurations can privilege questions of gender, ethnicity, family, migration, militarism, sports, and myriad other topics that galvanize working-class identities and experiences.
Blue Collar (1978) would make for a particularly apt addition to the cluster above. Focusing on rank and file paralysis, petty ambitions, and small-time corruption, this film's cynical recoil from labor militancy is diametrically opposed to Matewan's romance. Blue Collar denudes unions of their viability as a political tool and a model of intelligent self-government. Teaching it side by side with Matewan, one can analyze two very different ideological responses to a period of profound economic dislocation and increasing working-class despair. Here the narrative concerns the failed attempt of three friends to take over their Local's leadership and it does so against the background of shallow demands, incompetence, stupidity, and corruption. The greedy bunglers are just too dumb to function in a political arena that has no interest in workers' welfare. Both their personal friendship and their union "brotherhood" disintegrate quickly in face of individual ambition and external pressures. That this threesome happens to be interracial further stresses the fragility of cross-race alliances and the unshakability of racism. When the going gets rough, the men turn on each other with a hate that confirms the film's suggestion that unions have outlived their usefulness.
While Matewan's cinematography responds to the post-industrial crisis of the labor movement by keeping alive the romance of militancy as it existed in a remote past, Blue Collar uses its cinematography to depoliticize the contemporary work place (a checkered cab factory). The decline of labor is axiomatic here, and with it the death of liberal humanism. Instead, it is the process of production itself that holds fascination for us, alongside the workers' doomed struggle to better their lives. As occurs in On the Waterfront too, Blue Collar constructs for its audiences a superior voyeuristic viewing position that relishes the protagonists' gladiatorial struggles within claustrophobic sets that spell disaster. The opening sequence establishes this viewing position by reducing the factory floor to a beautifully composed formalist arrangement of primary colors and neutrals, and by accompanying its prowling camera and rhythmically edited shots with the driving pulse of the blues. At more or less regular intervals this momentum gets blocked, trapped in aesthetizied free-frames of machine parts abstracted from their use and of black workers coded erotically (a muscular torso in a tight yellow tank top) or associated with drugs (a hazy shot of a man inhaling from a rubber hose). No whites get singled out for this treatment, though whites are evident on the floor. Reminiscent of the machine aesthetics of modernist and futurist renditions of the industrial landscape, Blue Collar promotes visual pleasures to which the broader political and economic consequences of its narrative are irrelevant. Condensed in the sensory caress of its rhetoric are its central propositions: the elemental power of machines, the labyrinthine workplace, the fetishized and homoerotized laboring body, and the severing of work from its product.
Interestingly, the difference between Matewan and Blue Collar concerning the prospects of unionism extends to their treatments of racism. Matewan's humanist socialism has faith in unions' ability to eradicate racism, while Blue Collar is utterly sardonic in this regard. But the juxtaposition is also useful as a potential seed of yet another cluster of films -- ones dealing centrally with ethnicity and racism as a working-class issue. In this regard it is worth noting that traditional representations of organized labor in the United States presuppose a white nation and a white workforce. Whiteness, it would seem, is our human norm. The Grapes of Wrath concerns white Oakies; On the Waterfront has only one black character, an unspeaking "extra"; and Depression-era films like Our Daily Bread (1934), The Crowd (1928), or Sullivan's Travels (1944) similarly normalize whiteness as a defining quality of this nation. Stereotyping and essentializing people of color in terms of racist presuppositions, their place within the economic relations of production -- that is, their class -- becomes an invisible consideration. Even An Imitation of Life buries the questions of class it so obviously raises in the pathos of maternal melodrama (in its 1934 version) and in anxieties over female empowerment (in its 1959 version). Overall, race and ethnicity function quite distinctly on the silver screen, with "ethnicity" generally referring to European origins and "race" referring to African, Asian/Pacific, and Native American origins. "Ethnicity," in the United States, invokes sagas of immigration that allow for upward mobility and class consciousness, while "race" invokes a stringent genetic heritage that locks people into a perpetual underclass. Our films include characters of color who remind us that employment is race-bound, but they rarely address the relation between race and class centrally.
The Killing Floor (1984), and American Playhouse TV Production concerning labor organizing and racism in the Chicago stockyards early in this century, is a noteworthy exception. A wistful, loving narrative focusing on the politicization of an African-American protagonist, this film explores in-depth race relations within unions and ways capitalism divides ethnicities and fans racism to disempower all workers. But this film has been a sleeper, as have several others that combine considerations of race and class centrally: Nothing But a Man (1964), Bush Mama (1976), The Killer of Sheep (1977), and Bless Their Little Hearts (1986), for example. That "race" in these instances concerns African-American descent is no accident. Until recent demographic and political shifts in the nature of racist ideology and antiracist activism, the cultural consensus tended to equate "race" with African-American identity in ways that filmmakers are finally beginning to question. Stand and Deliver (1988) and Mi Vida Loca (1994) are two striking examples of films focusing on Los Angeles's Latin communities from a working-class and underclass perspective, but at present the number of African-American films centrally implicated in working-class issues clearly outstrips them. 4
The function of gender within class is easier to identify, considering that all people are gendered. That the films discussed above tend to focus on male protagonists and put forth a masculinist perspective on work and social class is in keeping with the general culture of the labor movement. Salt of the Earth -- an exemplary feminist film in this respect -- is clearly atypical. With the exceptions of Norma Rae (1979) and Silkwood (1983), films which focus on the workplace tend to privilege masculine agendas. This in itself does not preclude feminist perspectives in labor films, but a women-focused study of the working class tends to invite a shift in emphasis from the public arena to more circumscribed spheres, as evident in domestic melodramas like Stella Dallas (1937) or An Imitation of Life, dramas like The Marrying Kind (1952) or A Catered Affair (1956), and the seemingly more public but in fact still largely personal contours of such films as Heart Like a Wheel (1983), The Accused (1988), Thelma and Louise (1991), Rambling Rose (1991), Gas, Food, Lodging (1992), or Ruby in Paradise (1993). As even this very incomplete list suggests, fiction films rarely focus on female protagonists' relation to work, let alone to organized labor. Encoding them mainly as people whose identity derives from personal relations, these treatments essentialize gender as defining identity and subordinate class as a secondary or even invisible consideration.
Though this essay cannot extend the discussion of gender and class, or race and class, the above begins to sketch out the kind of questions one might raise in this regard. As we already saw in the commodification of primitivized male bodies in On the Waterfront and Blue Collar, "gender" includes more than a simple "male" and "female" distinction. The social construction of the working class, we saw, gets further inflected through outlaw sexual fantasies and illicit desires that often remain unnamed. Race, we must remember, is similarly constructed through myriad definitions of masculinity, femininity, and anything between and outside such categories, all of which get commodified in our society in relation to class. In short, interrelation of race, class, and gender turn out to be much more complex than the mantra-like recitation of these three words might suggest. Indeed, it is the very complexity of their interrelations, together with the misguided impression that surely one of these categories must be the key to identity, that plays into the effacement of class in a culture where class consciousness is gutted to begin with.
But in addition to myths of physical destiny and legacies of allied hates that construct working-class representations -- and thus realities! -- are also the particulars of history. As the preceding discussion suggests, filmic representations of working-class people are embedded in history and can be studied in relation to national or group agendas at given points in time. The combat film genre, for instance, is predicated on class divisions that it must reconcile or cover up in the interest of national security; and Depression-era films include coping mechanisms that range from reformist humanism to countless comedies, dramas, melodramas, and entertainment extravaganzas invested in total denial. Each version of An Imitation of Life, for instance, is replete with opportunities to study the interrelations of gender, race, and class, but each is also a case study in evasion. Indeed, once one starts looking, there is no shortage of what to teach concerning working-class representations and there certainly is no need to be hampered by the kind of resistance I discuss at the start of this essay. For me at least, what emerges most clearly from this overview is an awareness of how a critical reading of filmic representations enables us to reconceptualize working-class identities and politics.
NOTES
1 Lunde, Erik S., and Douglass A. Noverr, eds. Film Studies and Film History. Selected Course Outlines and Reading Lists from American Colleges and Universities, two vols. (New York: Marcus Wiener, 1989).
2 E.g., John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism; British Cinema 1956-1963 (London: British Film Institute, 1980); Peter Stead, Film and the Working Class; The Feature Film in British and American Society (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Berg, Rick, and David James, eds., The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 1995).
3 Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Seeing Films Politically (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
4 With the exception of Nothing But a Man, these are formally experimental and polemical films which make no concessions to the prevailing taste for clear narration, visual pleasure, and conformist politics. In this respect they have more in common with the feminist avant-garde or Cuban cinema of the 1970s, for example, than with the African-American films screened theatrically.
FILMS CITED
The Accused. Jonathan Kaplan. 110 min (color), 1988. Films, Inc.
The Age of Innocence. Martin Scorcese. 138 min (color), 1993. Viewfinders, Inc./Uncommon Video.
Bless Their Little Hearts. Billie Woodbury. (b/w) 1986? [info n.a. Distributed by the director.]
Blue Collar. Paul Schrader. 114 min (color), 1978. Swank.
Bush Mama. Haile Gerima. 97 min (b/w), 1976. Mypheduh Film Library.
A Catered Affair. Richard Brooks. 92 min (b/w), 1956. Bowker's "Feature Films."
Claudine. John Berry. 92 min (color), 1974 Films, Inc.
The Crowd. King Vidor. 93 min (b/w), 1928. Swank.
The Deer Hunter. Michael Cimino. 183 min (color), 1978. Swank.
Gas, Food, Lodging. Alison Andrews. (color), 1993. [no info.]
The Grapes of Wrath. John Ford. 129 min (b/w), 1940. Films, Inc.
Harlan County, U.S.A. Barbara Kopple. 103 min (color), 1976. Facets.
Heart Like a Wheel. Jonathan Kaplan. 110 min (color), 1983. Films, Inc.
Hoffa. Danny DeVito. 138 min (color), 1992. Films, Inc.
An Imitation of Life. John Stahl. 106 min (b/w), 1934. Swank.
An Imitation of Life. Douglas Sirk. 124 min (color), 1959. Swank.
The Joy Luck Club. Wayne Wang. 138 min (color), 1993. Swank.
The Killer of Sheep. Charles Burnett. 87 min (b/w), 1977. Third World Newsreel and Mypheduh Film Library.
The Killing Floor. Roland Joffe. 142 min (color), 1984. Facets
The Marrying Kind. George Cukor. 96 min (b/w), 1952. Films, Inc.
Matewan. John Sayles. 130 min (color), 1987. October Films; Facets.
Mi Vida Loca. Alison Andrews. (color), 1984. [no info.]
Norma Rae. Martin Ritt. 115 min (color), 1979. Films, Inc.
Northern Lights. John Hanson/Rob Nilsson. 95 min (b/w), 1979. Facets.
Nothing But a Man. Michael Roemer. 92 min (b/w), 1964. Films, Inc.
On the Waterfront. Elia Kazan. 108 min (b/w), 1954. Films, Inc.
Our Daily Bread. King Vidor. 80 min (b/w), 1934. Films, Inc.
Rambling Rose. Martha Coolidge. 112 min (color), 1991. Films, Inc.
Ruby in Paradise. Victor Nunez. 115 min (color), 1993. October Films.
Salt of the Earth. Herbert J. Biberman. 94 min (b/w), 1953. Films, Inc.
Schindler's List. Steven Spielberg. 185 min (b/w & color), 1993. Swank.
Silkwood. Mike Nichols. 131 min (color), 1983. Films, Inc.
Stella Dallas. King Vidor. 106 min (b/w), 1937. Viewfinders, Inc./Uncommon Video.
Stand and Deliver. Ramon Menedez. 102 min (color), 1988. Swank.
A Streetcar Named Desire. Elia Kazan. 122 min (b/w), 1951. Swank.
Sullivan's Travels. Preston Sturges. 90 min (b/w), 1944. Swank.
Thelma and Louise. Ridley Scott. 129 min (color), 1991. Swank.
Tongues Untied. Marlon Riggs. 55 min (b/w), 1989. Frameline [California].
Viva Zapata. Elia Kazan. 113 min (b/w), 1952. Films, Inc.
The Wild One. Laslo Benedek. 79 min (b/w), 1954. Films, Inc.
(Special thanks to Karen McGovern, of the Media Center at the University of Massachusetts -- Boston, for her invaluable help in compiling this filmography.)
Photo (Scene from On The Waterfront)
My Research
