Hollywood, long accused of being a serial class denier, surprised many commentators in the 1970s with the release of a cluster of films focusing on working-class characters and their lives. Labour scholars noted this welcome development and attempted to account for the phenomenon; few cinephiles, though, took an interest. That Derek Nystrom, who teaches English at McGill University, returns to the intellectual challenge in his stimulating and provocative fusion of film and class analysis is to be applauded by social historians.
Some suggested that nostalgia for a disappearing world of industrial communities accounted for this cinematic efflorescence – by itself, a rather unsatisfactorily explanation, in my opinion. Nystrom, who has the advantage of a four-decade gap, explores the question with a far more sophisticated and nuanced model. Looking at the overlap between movie industry restructuring and broader shifts in the political climate and class relations, Hard Hats suggests that the 1970s represented a brief window of opportunity. Between the death of the old vertically integrated Hollywood studios, the emergence of a young, middle-class audience, and the consolidation of conglomerate “New Hollywood”, a group of Young Turk directors, encouraged by the collapse of the production code, looked closely at the failings of a society coming to terms with the Vietnam defeat and political corruption at home. At the same time, the end of the long postwar boom and the restructuring of industrial America tilted the balance of class power away from the working class and toward mobile capital and their middle-class consorts. This brief “Hollywood Renaissance” terminated with industry reconsolidation at the end of the decade and, more and widely, with the abrupt shift to the right in the Reagan 1980s. In retrospect, the 1970s in Hollywood was a decade that temporarily allowed greater artistic license to explore the disappointments and unfinished business of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
For Nystrom, it is not the working class that is central to his study: “I will argue that these depictions of white, blue-collar men […] are best understood as products of middle-class fantasy about that class.” And further: “What do the decade's films reveal about the class unconscious of the middle-class film-makers who invented these characters, as well as the middle class critics who evaluated and interpreted them for their (intended) middle-class audiences?” (p. x) Working-class heroes, variously seen as threats or allies, were the social “other” around which displaced middle-class concerns, anxieties, and dilemmas were debated. Drawing on Barbara Ehrenreich's ideas, Nystrom argues that during the 1970s a new middle class, or “professional managerial class” (PMC) emerged. This new social formation, located between capital and labour but independent of each, was objectively antagonistic to the working class – a class that it managed and ideologically directed in the interests of capital.
Some may question the belief that social relations in the 1970s were so profoundly ruptured as to create a new middle class. If anything, it is the 1980s that represent a more dramatic upheaval, with the introduction of the Reagan administration's deregulation of industry, tax breaks for the rich, stagnation in working-class incomes, and intense hostility toward organized labour. In contrast, the 1970s can be seen as the closing years of New Deal labour–capital harmony. Similarly, inside Hollywood, more dramatic changes took place in the 1980s with the consolidation of independent production companies and the emergence of “flexible production”.
Working-class masculinity in the 1970s is explored through close textual and contextual analysis of three film clusters – labelled by Nystrom, “the youth-cult cycle”, “Southern films”, and “the new nightlife films” – each associated with the PMC's changing thematic and geographic cultural concerns. In his treatment of Five Easy Pieces (1970) and other films of the first cycle, Nystrom reminds us that Hollywood's auteur PMC, whose members included Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, and Frances Ford Coppola, was at best ambiguous in its attitude toward the working class and invariably hostile to studio unions. Indeed, it is a strength of this book that links are drawn between shifting production methods, on the one hand, and changes in cinematic representation, on the other. Young directors felt their artistry thwarted by an ageing workforce and old-fashioned unions. Weakened by the arrival of independent film production companies, “runaway” film making, and divisions within the ranks of labour, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees was forced to make contract concessions.
In the second cycle, as industrial production migrates from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, Hollywood's PMC aided capital's reconstruction of the Southern working-class reputation, and the solidification of the New Right, with deft replacement of the nasty “redneck” image found in films such as Deliverance (1972) with the easy going “good ole boy” of White Line Fever (1975), and Smokey and the Bandit (1978). The third cycle, sparked by the disappearance of traditional manual occupations and the PMC's existential crisis of confidence, takes up the theme of masculinity in Saturday Night Fever (1977), Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), and Cruising (1980). Here the older cinematic working class composed of macho skilled manual workers gives way to characters drawn from low-skilled service occupations.
The focus of Hard Hats – the middle class's perception of the working class – blurs from time to time. The characters highlighted often come from lower-middle-class occupations. Taxi drivers, Appalachian mountain men, “rednecks”, and independent truck drivers are either unambiguously middle class or from indeterminate class locations. Thus, rather than offering us the PMC's refracted take on the working class, Hard Hats also illuminates Hollywood's attitude toward the lower classes and manual labour more generally. That lower-middle-class and working-class groups are constructed as the muse of Beverly Hills writers and directors is, rightly, politically and socially significant, but we need to be clear where, within the social hierarchy, Hollywood's gaze is directed. Puzzlingly, films that do foreground working-class subjects are either ignored – FIST (1978), Rocky I and Rocky II (1976, 1979), and Silkwood (1983) – or are included in the conclusion, more as afterthoughts – Blue Collar (1978), Norma Rae (1979), and 9 to 5 (1980).
Hard Hats’ close textual analysis of 1970s films offers substantial insights into changing representation of workers’ masculinity, but Nystrom also raises important but often unanswered questions about the process of cultural production within the motion-picture industry and the relationship between Hollywood's PMC and wider society. For Hard Hats, Hollywood's PMC is made up of salaried film directors independent of the capitalist class who, nevertheless, act in its interests. While Nystrom exposes this group's attitudes toward subordinate classes through an analysis of the films it makes, what goes unexplored is the PMC's relations with capital. In Hollywood the practice of hyphenation – producer-director and producer-screenwriter – allows the possibility of a far closer bond between classes than Hard Hats suggests.
To answer this question properly requires a level of documentation that historians do not possess. We do not have a ready-made alternative to the correspondence files of the Production Code Administration which helps map internal disputes about scripts and film production during the studio era. Whether sensitive communications between executives and directors will become available, or if anyone has bothered to save e-mail traffic, remains to be seen. Hard Hats has done us a great service by exposing the cultural anxieties of Hollywood's PMC. Nevertheless, readers of this journal will want to ask further questions that lie beyond the scope of this book and which deal with the precise relations between Hollywood's PMC and wider US society: how does Hollywood's PMC, as a social formation, fit within the broader pattern of class relations, and to what extent does Hollywood's PMC speak for the whole of the PMC on cultural matters, or are there competing voices?
Whether we fully endorse Hard Hats’ social configurations, or recognize the significance of the 1970s, above all, what Nystrom demonstrates is just how fruitful the fusion of class analysis and film studies is to sparking intellectual controversy and advancing debates among social and cultural historians.
