Hollywood, the Working Class, and Emotional Realism

Abstract

Gangsters, brutes, union organizers, housewives, and boxers are just some of the working-class characters that have appeared in movies since the 1930s, characters which are the focus of John Bodnar's new book, Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film. The book explores the ways in which ordinary men and women were portrayed in feature films and the larger relationship between the movies and the tensions that emanated from powerful traditions like liberalism and (p. xv). Since the beginning of movies, Hollywood has depicted some of the battles between labor and capital. Yet films, Bodnar argues, are where many of the most powerful ideas in a culture could be represented at the same time, sites where attitudes that were rational and emotional, moral and immoral, angry and sentimental merged (p. xviii). In other words, films since the 1930s, and especially after WWII, presented a that generally was more complex and more emotional than the represented by mainstream politics. To a certain extent, Bodnar argues that traditional politics have been left behind. Labor unions and parties have lost much of their influence and power, and capitalism has rebounded from the challenge it faced during the Depression. Yet Bodnar notes that the push for gender and racial equality and the search for personal rights suggest that liberalism and democracy remain evident. In other words, Blue-Collar Hollywood attempts to recognize the endurance of traditional politics in mass culture as it documents the demise of customary ways of acting in and seeing the and social world (p. xxviii). Films from the 1930s did indeed provide a critique of capital, but films, Bodnar argues, also suffered from what he calls political cross-dressing, which was marked by the merger of all kinds of 'grim antagonisms': worker versus capital, collective versus individual, male versus female (p. 3). In short, 1930s Hollywood did not simply defend union power or offer an