Working-Class Stories
I watched Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank the other night. It was a pretty excellent film, even if the plot twist was predictable. Essentially, a very confused, messed-up, and angry 15 year old causes problems and gets into fights, yet shows great tenderness in other cases. She also loves to dance, as evidently do many of the young women in her neighborhood who watch a lot of videos. Her alcoholic single mom gets a new boyfriend who seems like a perfectly nice working-class guy and gentlemen. Of course he’s not and mayhem ensues. You can read the Times review here.
It’s a good movie and you should see it. But I write about it because it reinforced something I see again and again: the commonality of the British working-class film and the complete disappearance of the working-class from American film. In Britain, portrayals of working-class life are entirely common. These don’t have to be political either. The height of the form might be Ken Loach’s outstanding Sweet Sixteen. Loach makes overtly political films too but these are highly inconsistent and usually less satisfying than his portrayals of just everyday working-class life. They don’t have to be social realism either–Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels may not be a realistic portrayal of working-class life but working-class people are absolutely central to the story.
Contrast this to the United States. I don’t have many expectations from the big studios that at this point make superhero movies, a few comedies, and official Oscar contending films that 10 years ago seemed to all be about the Holocaust and today seem to be all about old British royalty.
But what about independent film? We supposedly have this vibrant indie film scene in the U.S. One can certainly question its quality (and I very much do) but there are a lot of films being made. And yet the working-class is almost entirely absent. Simple stories of working-class people barely exist. There are probably a lot of reasons for this. Britain of course has a much more honed sense of class consciousness than Americans. And most of these indie filmmakers here probably don’t come from working-class backgrounds themselves and naturally enough tell stories that have meaning to them.
Nonetheless, the disappearance of stories about working-class people from American film is sad and the plethora of good movies covering these topics shows how much American filmgoers are missing out on.
“And most of these indie filmmakers here probably don’t come from working-class backgrounds themselves and naturally enough tell stories that have meaning to them.”
Bingo.
I think the question though is whether the background of the British filmmakers working on these movies is appreciably different and I don’t know the answer to that.
There’s a lot more access to UK universities for the working class, and a lot more encouragement & openings in even quite poor secondary schools (based purely on anecdotes of course)
Made by rich Hollywood stars, per The Firesign Theatre. Of course, you’re right in general.
You can track the diminishing presence of the working class in American film and TV. Even by the time of Roseanne our inclusion was seen as aggressive. In reality it was not at all uncommon to have working class protagonists that were not self consciously marked as such but just reflected expectations of who were the appropriate subjects of art well into the 80s.
Which is why I want to stress the importance of Winter’s bone. Excellent. At ease. And while grotesque, does not go around making a big deal of the fact that it was among the few films to focus on working class life of the last 5 years.
Yes–Winter’s Bone is an important exception to this trend.
Winter’s Bone is more rural poor than working class, but still a fine film.
The list is definitely short.
You Can Count on Me
Erin Brockovich
The Wrestler (a stretch, though the scenes in the grocery are sharp)
City Island
Sling Blade (if we go back to the ’90s)
The Valley of Elah and The Hurt Locker are mainly concerned with war, though we get more than a glimpse of who mainly fights in these conflicts.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s indie work tends to focus on working class and declasse middle class people. Brick, Hesher, Uncertainty, a few others.
8 Mile?
There’s also a fair number of movies about inner city African American life.
What about Ben Affleck’s movies? Gone Baby Gone and The Town both deal with working class people, as does Good Will Hunting, although that’s older.
Also The Fighter, The Perfect Storm.
Unstoppable is a B action movie about train engineers.
I find certain periods of film had much more interest in the working class, especially those done during the Depression. Even certain film studios of the time had more interest in the subject than others (not just Warner, btw). After the code came in, films in working class environments became a smaller portion of Hollywood’s output. The interest seems to ebb and flow, lately it’s been a drought.
Wanted to make this point–as well as that its excellent young star, Jennifer Lawrence, is probably best known for being in The Hunger Games and the latest installment in the X-Men franchise, supporting Erik’s point.
Before The Hunger Games Lawrence was best known for getting an Oscar nomination for Winter’s Bone (overrated, I regret to say, and I expected to like it). She was good. John Hawkes was terrific but nobody noticed.
Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy from a couple years ago was pretty good.
British films do a good job of depicting working class stories even when the major theme of the film is barely about class. See, e.g., Beautiful Thing (gay film); Attack The Block (alien action movie). Nonetheless, class is definitely part of these stories, whereas American films that include depictions of working class Americans often do so in a way that downplays class difference as a real thing. However, I wonder if one exception to this general rule would be American films that focus on the stories of racial minorities; in those circumstances, American films seem (slightly) more willing to engage with and acknowledge class differences.
When dealing with minorities it depends. Of course another huge problem in American film is how White they are. And then there’s the Tyler Perry films which intend to appeal to a very middle-class sensibility (or so I understand because like every other white person I’ve never actually seen one).
The films of Spike Lee are certainly far more class-conscious than any other “serious” director’s works out there. Tarentino is another that has a good eye and ear for class issues, though obviously he only uses it to make the sort of pulp movies he prefers.
Class consciousness is still very strong in Britain. Here even mentioning class makes you a Bolshevik. Elites have completely erased discussions of class (even in art) from our public discourse.
I think the evolution of hip-hop would be an interesting subject to look into as far as discussions of class in modern art go.
I don’t know really enough about it to comment very much, but it seems like discussions of class have been the most prominent topic of some genres of hip-hop music, even if they weren’t always explicit.
Class certainly played a role in the early days of hip-hop, though this was mostly subsumed under a race narrative. Much of the overtly political message, however, has been lost as a consequence of the current dominance of white suburbanites in the market.
Unless you translate it into genre code.
Erm … Eight Mile?
AKA Eminem’s I Do So Have Street Cred So There.
I see lots of working-class people in US films, just not white, English-speaking working-class people. From the execrable Maid in Manhattan to the excellent Pariah through the mediocre Today’s Special, lots of working-class folks. Just not white, Anglo ones.
Less snarkily and responding to MPAVic above, the class analysis seems about right to me, from my perspective in the penumbra of the indie world. There’s next to no money for first features here, so if you wanna demonstrate directoral chops, you batter have a rich family, or at least a family with access to rich folk who might invest. Or rich-ish friends who’ll work for free.
cf the UK where there’s a developed (but besieged) infrastructure in place for up-and-comers. Cash and in-kind. And allegedly a meritocracy.
Yes, but it was exceptional in that it told a story in which class was essential to the plot but not fetishized, and (by my take) it wasn’t congratulating itself on looking at “them” rather than the “us” that suffocates movies such as Tiny Furniture and most wes Anderson films.
The British show Misfits was excellent, although it had a tendency to fetishize, largely because no one outside of the working class appeared. They weren’t needed for the story, so why include them.
But to avoid Hartzianisms, its important to remember that this is a recent development. It has marked most of the films of my life, but the naked insistence that no one’s live’s matter but the fabulous was absent from westerns, from film noir, from pulp crime, from pretty much most movies made from 1933 onward (fuck Philadelphia Story).
What about Wendy and Lucy? Beautiful little story about a working class woman and her dog.
My sense was that the Michelle Williams character wasn’t identifiably working class. She was kind of a drifter, but that could just as easily be someone of any social class.
I was thinking about Wendy and Lucy – which is a brilliant and heart-breaking little movie – as I read the post. We do learn (in a phone call home) that Wendy is working class. She’s not a drifter – only a few days before the film begins, she’s left her family home for the first time because the conflict with her stepfather has become intolerable, and she’s on her way to Alaska, where she thinks she can find work. The theme of the movie, to my mind, is the lack of opportunity – intellectual as well as occupational – for working class young women.
But Wendy and Lucy is a one-character film, and it doesn’t have what we usually expect in a working class film, which in Erik’s words is “the portrayal of working class life” – the relationships between family members, co-workers, partners, and employers, and the depiction of homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces.
Interesting–and agreed that it really doesn’t say anything about the working class–although I like it a good bit.
There was a time when the top TV show in the US was Dallas and, shortly after that, when the top TV show in the UK was Eastenders. So this isn’t a recent trend.
Another thumbs up for Winter’s Bone, but, also in TV I’ve noticed that one of the great plusses of
Friday Night Lightswas that most of the characters were of more ‘humble’ means — including the coach which is a definite change from our obsession with say, Paterno.Also I would probably put Breaking Bad in there too as even though the Protagonist is a teacher he’s a high school teacher which is becoming more and more working class.
I wouldn’t include Breaking Bad because the premise of the show that you’re referring to–that Walter, like a lot of other middle class people, is gradually getting squeezed out of the middle class as it shrinks, and is cooking meth to save his family from the same fate (at least, he was in the beginning)–isn’t quite the same thing as what Erik is referring to. In fact, as the show has evolved, Walter’s imminent financial ruin is the least of his worries.
Rural poor is working class. So is urban poor. So is urban middling. What the fuck do you think we’re doing?
I would love to see more non white working class movies in the U.S. Maid in Manhatten isn’t one. The point of the working class movie is the standard of reference. Where does citizenship and real life transpire? Maid in Manhattan, while presenting a working class does not present this as the reality the audience should recognize. Name them. I would love to watch em.
Tyler Perry films are pretty much the denial of working life. This is a function of audiences and aspiration. Everyone who goes to a Tyler Perry film works and yet most are about the private realm in which we are all middle class and borderline idle rich. Only way to keep the audiences onboard is to studiously obscure working life.
It’s a bit of a stretch to call “Winter’s Bone” a depiction of working class life, seeing as none of the major characters has a job.
The main characters in “Winter’s Bone” aren’t temporarily unemployed working class people. Rather, they eke out a subsistence living largely outside the cash economy. Ree is teaching her younger siblings to hunt as a major survival skill. Their mother is an invalid and their father is an absent meth cook.
So “working class” is limited to those people who derive their income in legal, taxable ways? I’d question that.
Yeah, in 2012 I see no reason to limit “working class” to the industrial proletariat.
I dunno. Seems like there’s enough of a difference between what we usually refer to by “working class” and people who “eke out a subsistence living largely outside the cash economy” and who hunt “as a major survival skill” to warrant two different terms. All kinds of important social and economic factors are going to be different for those two groups.
And it seems like especially when we’re talking about representation in art. One of the reasons Winter’s Bone was so successful was that it was exotic; it depicted a location, lifestyle, etc. that was completely foreign. Collapsing all that into a “representation of working class life” misses a lot of what’s going on, seems like.
Of course there are some conceptions of class where the people of Winter’s Bone are obviously working class. If some analysis uses broad categories like “capitalist”, “people on salary who have enough discretionary income to invest/take advantage of financial instruments”, “working class”, and “destitute”, they would most likely fit well into the “working class” category. But moving to a conception with a little finer grain will probably quickly separate them out.
I dunno. Seems like there’s enough of a difference between what we usually refer to by “working class” and people who “eke out a subsistence living largely outside the cash economy” and who hunt “as a major survival skill” to warrant two different terms. All kinds of important social and economic factors are going to be different for those two groups.
That was my initial thought as well, but with the dearth of decent working class jobs in the “new economy” muddling the differences between the working class and the poor, it seems that such a distinction might be outdated.
I agree the downward spiral of the economy is making a lot of old sociological and cultural groupings redundant or obsolete.
But is having to learn to hunt as a major survival skill really ubiquitous enough that it belongs under “working class”? Or making a subsistence living outside the cash economy?
I mean, it’s possible. But Jesus I hope not.
Attempting to “harvest” the bulk of the meat your family would consume that winter was fairly common in rural NY/PA back in the 80s. Not life or death but the more deer in the freezer the better the next six months would be.
During the late eighties, when I was working as a janitor for minimum wage and no benefits, I considered trapping rabbits in my town for their meat (I may have gotten this idea from Roger and Me) before finding out about some of the diseases that they carry.
The Fighter? Sunshine Cleaning? Little Miss Sunshine? I think all of these were stories of people in the working class or on the edge.
Juno
Four Brothers
Can we all agree that Melancholia, in which the problems of the rich are so much important than yours that a planet must crash into the globe, was the worst? Cause it really was.
This comment makes no sense.
This comment is false
+1
It’s a movie about how even global annihilation isn’t enough to overcome the main heroine’s ennui; it’s practically a Swiftian parody of a Wes Anderson film.
The class angle is deliberately played down in service to the uplifting power of X in various sports movies.
This is a problem with all sorts of movies that might otherwise claim working.
middling comedy + alan arkin = working class picture
This is a problem with all sorts of movies that might claim working class cred: they treat the fact of working class origins as something to be overcome. Rudy. Pretty in Pink. The Fighter. That silly movie about bank robbers in Boston.
But for movies that tell the story with ease, without fetish, without presenting working class origins as the central tragedy to be resolved, there are few being made in America. On a regular basis I deal with people who make “indie” movies. More often than not they are trash, who have never worked a day, or whose work experience began when they were 29 when they tried to film their first movie, or work on their first live production. They equate their brief experience between being cut off and the working through of nepotistic relations with hard times or working class life. To be honest, I find most indie films more indulgently decadent and ignorant of work and working class life than Hollywood.
This is a problem
with all sorts of moviesthe standard-issue American “success story that might claim working class cred: they treat the fact of working class origins as something to be overcome.FTFY
You say “disappearance of stories about working-class people,” and david speaks of a “diminishing presence,” but was it ever different? I mean, sure, Grapes of Wrath, On the Waterfront, Norma Rae, but I’m not sure the bench was deeper in the 30s or 50s than it is now. British film seems like an exception here, not only by comparison with the U.S. but with other European countries too. Or am I wrong?
It was definitely different in the 30s. The early movies of Preston Sturges alone. In the 40s and 50s you lost the political edge of course, but there were still plenty of working-class people in movies. And in the 70s too.
Well here’s a sample list (not all, but mostly American); not that it’s authoritative, but it suggests there’s more out there than one might think.
I do notice a tendency for American movies that are about working-class people to be very self-consciously about working-class people. Something like Breaking Away, where class is built into it but not the main or only point, is a bit more unusual. And the 2000s do seem a bit thin.
So I glanced through this list starting in the ’80s and it struck me that while many of the films putatively portray working class people and lives there is a rather large accuracy gap in the portrayal. I’ll never forget my mother laughing one day watching Rosanne — relatively speaking a show that did a fine job with working class presentation — because the family lived in a absolutely humongous house, far to big for a working class family in a large city to afford.
On one had you get Matewan, a consciously in-your-face portrayal of shitty living and on the other you get Bull Durham where nobody lives in difficult circumstances (Susan Sarandon’s character lives in a place that would cost a fortune in many parts of the country and is where a good part of the movie is set). Guess which one did better at the box office and you’ll find the roots of the problem.
Special shout out to Sling Blade for really capturing the working class feel. Did it so well without infringing on the story line.
Do you really think that Bull Durham did better at the box office than Matewan simply because Matewan had more realistic portraits of working class people? It couldn’t be that a comedy about baseball attracts more viewers than a drama about a coal miners’ strike?
Of course not. I thought the comparison between the two nicely illustrated that different kinds of movies require different kinds of portrayals and that a movie like Bull Durham is not only going to be more successful but also stay away from the more gritty side of working class life portrayal. Which is the root of the issue — obviously Hollywood is going to more consistently make potentially more profitable movies.
Maybe I should have been more clear.
Everyone’s threshold for suspension of disbelief is set differently, but whatever problems Roseanne had, the size of the set wasn’t one of them IMO; like Friends (about which similar complaints were made), a big ensemble cast needs a larger soundstage to work on. (All in the Family made do with a smaller one, IIRC, but generally had less people crowding onto it.)
Watching Roseanne I never got the sense Lanford was a large city, but more a small to midsized one.
The family in Roseanne didn’t live in a big city. They lived in exurban or rural Illinois, not even in the Chicago metro area.
Yeah, I grew up in the country just outside of a “city” with a population of less than 20,000, and I always assumed that Lanford was similar.
I (obviously) didn’t watch the show with enough regularity to know — didn’t even know it was set in Illinois — and made a bad assumption.
Thinking about it now a couple of decent working class tv shows come to mind: The Drew Carey Show and Laverne & Shirley.
Add to that My Name Is Earl and Married With Children.
The list is far from authoritative for the 1930s, just the barest highlights are given.
Even for the 2000s it misses some obvious ones like Eight Mile.
That list is not very good.
Maybe in America it’s a little easier to pretend that, when you hear X movie star’s voice, it might be someone like you.
Broaden the category beyond those films that are self consciously working class in the sense of being about the political struggles of the class to include those where the standard is working class, even if these are spy movies, pulp movies, noire movies with no “intellectually redeeming” qualities. That’s where I see the big difference.
What era are we talking about here? Would Good Will Hunting count? That movie about the rocket boys from West Virginia? Smoke Signals?
on TV, Louie? It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia? What qualifies a movie or TV as focusing on middle class life?
Recent(ish) American “indie” working class film: Frozen River.
Also, no discussion of working class stories in American film can ignore Killer of Sheep.
Frozen River. Yes. Forgot that one.
Gran Torino? Million Dollar Baby? Mystic River? No Country For Old Men? The various Spider-man films?
Erik specifically excluded superhero films, and if you extend that to genre pictures in general, arguably No Country For Old Men as well.
I didn’t take his comments as excluding genre films, but rather as assuming that big-budget super-hero movies exclude working-class people. In the cases of the current prominence of Batman and Iron Man I can understand that certainly is true.
If Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels can count I don’t see why No Country For Old Men should be excluded. They both share the basic plot of working class guys finding something valuable being chased by violent men who want it back. I could be wrong though and am interested in being told exactly why I’m wrong, which is why I used question marks.
Heavy.
Y’all forget, “STICKS NIX HICK PIX”?
We’re embarrassed to have to work 2.5 jobs, not proud. We don’t wanna be reminded when we go to the movies.
WINTER’S BONE & BREAKING AWAY focus on the transformative power of youth, and even then, the protagonist requires one metric shitload of logistical support and luck (not to mention pluck/will to power).
Once you pass 30, you’re dead to us. “Roseanne” is the exception, and tv is different from movies.
My favorite working class movie? MONSTER, by Patty Jenkins.
At least in the 30′s escapism brought us Fred and Ginger.
I did not forget but then I only had to remember it for six years.
Shameless was a Brit series to start, but is very working class in both incarnations. Emmy Rossum is awesome.
There’s a nasty little black comedy by Stuart “Re-Animator” Gordon called Stuck, and the most notable thing about it for me — and this is a movie in which Stephen Rea spends most of it embedded in a windshield — was seeing Mira Sorvino working as a nurse’s aid in a retirement home and literally cleaning up shit.
I saw the beginning of that once, and always wanted to get back to it. Based on a real story.
The correct answer is “Flushed Away”.
And is that “Who is John Galt” a personalized ad for me, or is everybody seeing it?
I don’t see ads. Sorry LGM folks, but I get bombarded with them on many sites and had to take decisive action.
Sometimes the ads are worth it just for the awkward/ironic placement.
I block and whitelist sites that deserve it.
You should whitelist LGM too.
I’ll take it up with the board.
I received it as well — definitely not personalized. And most definitely the awesomest possible ad to have show up on this post.
Not just you Brad.
Oh, the lists I’m for the crime of voting (for Gary Johnson) in the Republican presidential primary this year. I’d think an organization as wealthy as the NRA would have less rambling robocalls. It took Wayne like two minutes to get to the point, which was something about U.N. treaties.
Beasts of the Southern Wild? Or is that too magical realism?
“Brokeback Mountain” beautifully depicted the subtle shades of gradation in Jack and Ennis’ economic conditions. I loved the way Ennis and his wife moved up – to an apartment in a tiny town over a laundromat.
Various t.v. shows in recent years had working class characters (delivery men, waitresses, oil refinery workers, nurses, etc.).
Also, there were various films concerning working class life (many sports related; one that might count that comes to mind because it also involves teen girls is Toe to Toe) though the class conscious Brits might still trump us.
Paul Newman was genuinely working class in Nobody’s Fool.
Loomis should rescue The Risk Pool. SEK writes Lemieux directs.
Risk Pool was excellent, just as good as Nobodys Fool and Empire Falls. Shame the movie never came to fruition.
Another issue might be how Americans and British people relate to class. As I undertstand, most British people defined themselves as working class well into the 1980s. Many white working class Americans define themselves as middle class rather than working class. Non-white working class Americans define themselves by race rather than class. Even if they define themselves by class, it would be as poor or under-privileged rather than working class. Since Americans do not really define themselves as working class than its not something that gets depicted in media.
Reminding me of a line from that wonderful working-class movie, “Melvin and Howard,” where Dummar insists to his wife, “We’re not poor! Broke, maybe, but not poor!”
Class exists in the United States but it doesn’t function in quite the same way that it does in most other countries.
Hmm. Whatever happened to that Jonathan Demme?
Are Sanford and Son working class? Is Archie Bunker? Was Jack Tripper in Three’s Company? All of them drew from British originals where the leads were pretty much working-class.
More broadly, there’s a strong working-class presence in British TV, from soap operas through sitcoms to “serious” drama, and there’s also continuity between TV drama and film. All of that combines into a common dramatic vocabulary for the working class.
In contrast, what seems to be happening in the US is the emergence of a new grotesque dramatic vocabulary for the working class that shows up not in drama, but on reality shows.
American indie movies seem to have become defined by this subset of white privilege malaise, haven’t they? More white people of somewhat privileged backgrounds making movies about well-off white people who feel like having everything isn’t enough. As a script reader, I see more of them in prototype form than completed form, but it’s the same sort of storytelling virus that leads to a New York City limited to a 99% white Manhattan and choice sections of Brooklyn.
Probably one of the most outstanding examples of this type of indie film is The Art of Getting By, which I swear sounds like a title out of Patton Oswalt’s “Dumb Gay Friend” routine. “From the writer of ‘Meh,’ and the director of ‘Neh,’ comes ‘Bleeeeeeeh’.”
+1.
Off-the-top-of-my head genre pictures with IMO a genuine working class vibe -
JUNIOR BONNER (western)
STIR OF ECHOES (ghost story)
ANGEL EYES (romance/mystery)
WINTER’S BONE (crime/mystery) – as many have
mentioned
on the tee-vee
10-8 (police procedural)
a short-lived series about LA County sheriffs. Thought it was as effectively and entertainingly ‘ground-level’ as BARNEY MILLER.
Another reason there are more good British films telling working-class stories? Bob Hoskins.
Who has, alas, announced his retirement due to Parkinson’s.