Blue-Collar Hollywood

By examining how movies handled the tension between the two ideals of individualism and democracy from the Depression era to the present, John Bodnar provides us with a refreshing antidote to the general tendency of film and cultural historians to only look at one era or decade. Bodnar gives us a new twist on the old theme of mass culture as a locale that promotes individual freedom and expression and erodes ideas of collectivity by arguing the experience of mass art has an inherent, stable essence that promotes liberalism over community, providing an alternative perspective on the conservative paradigm that has dominated previous scholarship on the subject. -- Lary May, author of The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the American Way John Bodnar's Blue Collar Hollywood makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the interaction of film, politics, and American society from the 1930s through the 1950s. Bodnar shows how working people-the numerical heart of the nation's population-were increasingly portrayed as troubled individuals with emotional problems, antisocial tendencies, and an inability to contribute to the collective political good. He argues that Hollywood films undermined ideas about democracy by advancing a dominant vision of working people as folk who do not participate in any meaningful way in American institutional and political life. Blue Collar Hollywood is a perceptive and important study of the impact of film on the evolving-or more appropriately, devolving-nature of American democracy. -- Steven J. Ross, author of Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America

Instead, these movies were infused with the same current of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through the American imagination.From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless, from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of their times while providing a diversion-sometimes entertaining, sometimes provocative-from the realities of their own lives. In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which popular American films made between the 1930s and the 1980s depicted working-class characters, comparing these cinematic representations with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and the promises made to them by the country's political elites. Based on close and imaginative viewings of dozens of films from every genre-among them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Boyz N the Hood-this book explores such topics as the role of censorship, attitudes toward labor unions and worker militancy, racism, the place of women in the workforce and society, communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and faith in liberal democracy. Whether made during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, or the Vietnam era, the majority of films about ordinary working Americans, Bodnar finds, avoided endorsing specific political programs, radical economic reform, or overtly reactionary positions. Instead, these movies were infused with the same current of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through the American imagination.