Depicting Class Edwin

In his essay “Under Construction: Working Class Writing” Lauter goes through the motions of attempting to describe working class writing. I enjoyed how he decided to move away from the idea that working class writing has to be essentially an exercise in functionality. For years, the idea that a working class text must be political reduced the “working class” genre to a scant number of texts. For a piece to be “working class” it does not have to be steeped in politics but instead can simply be an honest depiction of working class peoples. The poems and texts that Lauter mentions are all indicative of this method of classification and as he notes “it is not a concern for class, as such, that marks working class writing” (68). So, working class writing can be political but it doesn’t necessarily have to be, but what about working class film?

Zaniello’s essay “Filming Class” gave many examples of what he considers to be working class film. Some of the examples were apolitical while most of them were not. What is also interesting to note is that many of the expressly political films mentioned were also successful. That leads me to the question of whether or not a working class film has to be political in order to be successful. It is obvious that infusing polemical arguments into a narrative makes good entertainment. Michael Moore is one of the more blatant examples of this. His movies routinely bait viewers into adopting positions on many different controversial subjects. Yet what is problematic about this is that dramatizing working class life is seemingly the only way to goad people into discussing ideas of class struggle.

It appears that in terms of literature, working class works do not have to be political to gain an audience. However with film the opposite seems to hold true; in order to reach the masses documentaries movies and TV have to be explicitly political.