Desi Lands

Shankar in Desi Land addresses the emergence of a hybrid Desi teen culture in San Jose that is distinct from the mainstream white culture. She notes that "Desi teen culture signals a generational consciousness and an effort to further define the category of Desi" (79). She points to their use of ethnicity and popular culture to define what it means to be Desi. Shankar also notes that "these meanings differ across class and other statuses" (79).

Although she applies her analysis to the South Asian community in general in San Hose, my experience with second generation Sri Lankan migrant teens living in California has been very different. Unlike the Desi teens that Shankar has studied , these Sri Lankan teens have very tenuous or almost no connection with their motherland in terms of language or culture. There is no strong common ethnic or cultural repertoire to bind Sri Lankan teens together, since the community is very small and scattered unlike the large population of Indian migrants living in San Jose. My overarching impression was that these teens are fully absorbed to the mainstream white teen culture and are separated by an unbridgeable gulf from their parents, who are first generation migrants.

Education, Division, and Failed Industry Edwin

Desi Land was an interesting look at modern day consumptions ad its implications for status by a particular social group. While the many experiences highlighted in this the Desis are not necessarily indicative of all immigrant groups, this study makes me wonder what is seen as progress for recent immigrants to America. From what we have read for today there seemed to be little focus on education as a tool to gain cultural capital. It only seemed to work as a means to an end for the families and the students mentioned, in that education in itself is not a sign of progress. For example, in the conclusion when one of the fathers, Mr. Malik, berated Shankar for not advising his child to do well in school so he could make a lot of money in the future. I’m curious to see if this particular trend continues down through the generations.

The explanation and frequent mentioning of the communities also left me with a question. In these tightly knit communities how is the class or income difference resolved. From the descriptions of the students and the communities that they belonged to it was clear that not everyone made the same amount of money. This fact was also likely made clear to everyone in the community due to the continuous flaunting of expensive goods to confirm status. Shankar’s explanation of metaconsumption confirms this. So how then did this not drive divisions in these communities as it does to society as a whole?

Finally, it was interesting to see how the prevailing industry influenced the many students. Many of these children seemed to have little interest in technology, yet due to their surroundings they professed desires to pursue careers in this field. Yet when the technology bubble burst they repudiated these interests for more financially secure ones. I wonder if similar cases occurred in Detroit or Pittsburgh after their own collapse of major industry.

Class and Progress

Class and Progress

It was interesting to finish the class with a contemporary anthropological study of class and race in American society. As someone trained in Anthropology, I especially enjoyed Desi Land's close analysis of South Asian teenagers in California, but I think that Shankar was limited in her ability to analyze class, in part because of the context that she was looking at. One of my professors in undergrad taught me that most cultural Anthropology falls into one of two categories. The first, conflict Anthropology, looks at how societies deal with internal problems, rifts and power struggles. The second, cohesion Anthropology, examines societies as they operate as social structures and reproduce themselves. I believe that Shankar's study falls into the latter category, as it looks at the ways in which South Asian diasporic communities create space and support each other. Overall, Shankar gives a good impression of how South Asian teenagers deal with a dual cultural identity in the United States, moving between familial and social expectations in a complex, multicultural world.
However, Shankar's book raises a few issues about the difficulties of analyzing class in in a diverse and complicated world. She gives a cogent arguement that families that would be categorized as "working class" elsewhere fall more into the category of middle class due to the high wages in Silicon Valley, increased property values, model minority status and strong networks of family support. Clearly, the desis of Silicon Valley occupy a far more ambiguous position than Marx's bourgeoisie and proletariat. Issue of timing, wages, race and family structure inform the ways in which class is constructed in the region. Under this model, it would appear that classical conceptions of class cannot hold up against other social factors.
But, the 90s internet bubble provides a lens through which class can be understood better in relation to this study. Shankar points out that the bursting tech bubble totally changed Silicon Valley after she left, and altered the job prospects for the teenagers, often dictated by their family's economic status. What this may tell us about social class is how contingent it is on economic conditions overall. In times of growth and prosperity, conflict tends to die down; as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all ships. Of course, we know that not all ships will rise, but enough ships rising can make class differences seem inconsequential. As the recent economic crisis indicates, social and class tensions are more intimately connected to the GDP than those of us on cultural side of the fence would sometimes like to admit.
All of that being said, class remains a real social category with real implications. Shankar's book continually shows more that the higher the class in Sillicon Valley high schools, the more popular, successful desis there were. Even in the tech boom of the late 90s, Shankar showed the ways in which class were inscribed into teenagers' lives. Though the economic conditions provided more opportunities for social mobility than usual, Shankar carefully lays out social differences between classes of desi teens.
Especially in complex capitalist societies, class often intersects with various other social, economic, racial and physical issues. Although progress sometimes masks the role of social class in the United States, it underlies economic relations to a great degree.

Women's Roles, or Lack Thereof

Brit

In Elizabeth Faue’s essay, “Gender, Class, and History,” she addresses the issues that working-class women studies faces, and still faces today.  Often times, working-class studies ignore the concepts of gender and race in favor of trying to articulate the class struggles.  The problem with this is that class is structured even further to include gender and race, and in order to get as much of the big picture as possible, these things need to be acknowledged.  Faue did a good job of bringing these issues into perspective by highlighting the importance of gender, and women’s working-class history.  “At the same time, there are perspectives on class identity and categories of experience—the most important of which is gender—that cannot be ignored in any study.  The findings of the last forty years of work in labor history suggests—even demands—that gender and class (and, we also know, race) be seen as interlocking and interconnected categories” (31).  She brings up the point that these categories are all woven together to create a narrative, and without incorporating as much of each category as possible, the narrative is incomplete.  Further, throughout her essay she acknowledges that women are often overlooked, or gendered even within the studies as they often are within the working-class. 

Through working-class studies we are able to see the role that women were often forced to take on in their work, and their seemingly lack of importance in terms of the work force ideals. “Still, they raised issues about domestic ideology and its impact on class politics, analyzed the sex segregation of the labor force and sex typing of occupations, and located gender conflict in workplace competition and occupational practice” (23).  Women were gendered to specific jobs, such as nursing, and while these jobs were, and still are considered important, they were feminized to exclude men, just as certain skilled labor was attributed to masculinity to exclude women.  Even today, it is apparent that there is still a battle between feminine ideals and masculine ideals.  Men are still often excluded from nursing, although there are men who are nurses, just as women are still excluded from certain types of skilled labor thought to be too dangerous or labor intensive.  To add insult to injury, women are not even equal to men in the work place today, often making less money and overlooked for promotions in favor of a man.  Having working-class studies incorporate not only class, but also gender and race can open allow for a more historically accurate narrative that could, eventually, evoke change in ideals and workplace ideology.  

just what kind of man are you, anyway, Mr. Frick?

Agatha

reading New Working-Class Studies after visiting the Frick mansion yesterday brought home the ridiculously wide contrast between the lives of a wealthy industrialist's family, versus the lives of those who made such opulence possible. of course, there were so many levels of hierarchies present in the home which are worth thinking about–that of guests and outsiders coming in to be received, that of servants and governesses in relation to the family, and that of the men and the women (one wonders what daily life was like for Mrs. Frick if she was reading The Five Arts of Woman, By the Author of How to Be Happy Though Married).

in particular, while reading Paul Lauter's chapter on working-class writing, i couldn't help making a comparison between the "inside" perspective of a working-class person versus the (seeming) "outside" perspective of our tour guide's description of the Frick family, and of servant life. i remember laughing to myself when we were in the library, and our tour guide noted that, on one of the paintings on the wall, the artist took the liberty to add an extra flounce of flowers to the painting "to make it more sentimental." contrast that to the line that Lauter quotes from "The Orange Bears": "i remember you would put daisies / on the windowsill at night and in / the morning they'd be so covered with soot / you couldn't tell what they were anymore" (65).

the image of those extra "sentimental" flowers, of the almost oppressive ornateness of the house, is so startling in contrast to the pitiful image of those soot-blackened daisies, of the violence and physicality of labor. i faithfully believed our tour guide when she testified that the Frick family treated their servants with great kindness and solicitousness; and yet, what of those thousands of others who, across the river, had no room in their lives for "extra sentimentality?" it is striking to consider that in one sense, there is very obvious display of intense labor in the opulence of the Frick home; and yet what is missing from this display is the physical, often brutal reality associated with that labor, whether it is the sweating laundress in the basement, the painstaking plasterwork of the craftsmen applying aluminum–aluminum, i tell you–to the walls of the breakfast parlor, or the strenuous toil of the factory itself, by whose capital everything in that house was realized.

to rival myself, however, i would like to know more about places like Frick's settlement house which our tour guide referred to. would such a place have been the kind of center that gave working-class people access to tools with which to define their "class sensibility," as Lauter calls it?

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.

The “working class” girls point of view on higher education – Jennifer

In Renny Christopher’s chapter “New Working-Class Studies in Higher Education” she discusses the challenges facing first generation college students that I would like to address. What Renny discusses are many facts and figures that obviously are meant to represent the majority but what about the minority? I believe I am that minority. I am a first generation college student as are many of my family and friends. In my family my mother was one of six children and only one brother went to college. My father was one of four and only one of his brothers went to college as well. In my family now everyone of my generation has gone to college. It seems the majority to Christopher is not the majority I am familiar with. I went to a high school that presumed the vast majority of us would go to college and truthfully anyone and everyone I knew in high school did go to college. My high school was made up of working class and middle class families, yet that did not divide who did and did not go to college. I, like most of my peers, attended a four-year institution. I was not under prepared because my parents did not attend college as Christopher suggests. I never felt out of place or ostracized as Christopher concludes of many first generation college students entering four year institutions: “it demands that students from the working class deny their past, dissociate themselves from their families, and remake themselves in its own image in order to ‘earn’ a place within it” (216). I never felt this way about my college experience. My parents and family were always supportive of my time in college. I never felt I had to remake myself simply because I was attending college. I was remade because I attended college; I found who and what I wanted to be.

As I was reading Christopher’s article I felt the complete opposite of everything she was concluding and saying. I felt more included and where I should have been in college. College, to me, was an equalizer. I was meant to be in a particular class just as much as the person sitting next to me and it didn’t matter their background or mine. I met my best friend in college and she, like her husband who also graduated with us, came from families where they were first generation college students. They were also very prepared for college and thrived at Robert Morris just as I did. Maybe because I come from Christopher’s stereotypical working class, first generation college student type I feel more inclined to want to see college not separated by these barriers she refers to but joined. If you tell these students statistically they are less prepared for college is that going to encourage them to succeed? If you present college as a clean slate for everyone no matter background and economic conditions will that encourage them more to succeed? All I know is whether or not I’m the minority in the majority why can’t everyone who is a first generation college student be taught to see college as I saw it? To me that will help them succeed.

Fear of a Working Planet

In the essay "More Than Two Things," David Roediger takes up the issue of how to deal with diversity within working class studies, especially under the auspices of the cultural studies mantra "race, class and gender." I'm attracted to his novel interpretation of "state of the art" to include older cultural forms that directly deal with the intersections of multiple identities, but I am still struggling with the difficulties of providing full coverage to academic work. It seems that any politically conscious study always runs up against the wall of "You forgot about someone!" For example, not a single text that we've dealt with this semester has addressed sexuality in any manner. Occasionally the authors we've read have thrown out a sentence acknowledging the oppression of heteronormativity, but then each text goes back to a largely heterocentric view of humanity and a totally binary construction of gender. And I don't think that's necessarily a huge blemish on the works. There is something to be said for focused research projects and specific studies that treat a single subject. EP Thompson got enough pages written just by focusing on white, male working people in Britain, and I shudder to think about how large his book would have been if he had addressed women. And I think that is the real benefit of the field as an organizing structure; it's unreasonable to fully consider all of the elements that go into a cultural moment.

However, the field is also a limiting factor in what is studied. While Roediger comes up with some great heuristics for analyzing identity intersections, he leaves a lot of elements out. Though we can take individual texts as a starting point for understanding race and class, a scholarly approach also benefits from the sort of broad contextualization that Kelley brought to "Race Rebels." The depth of case study needs to be scaffolded by broad historical frames that will inevitably leave certain factors out of consideration. In an increasingly complex world, we need increasingly complex and innovative methods for interrogating the world and getting to the bottom of things. Despite our desires for an overarching theory of everything, like was promised by older theorists, the current world needs a multiplicity of lenses and disciplines to accurately reflect the changing culture.

Brother Can You Spare a Dime?

In beginning Rachel Lee Rubin’s chapter “Working Man’s PhD: The Music of Working-Class Studies,” I was apprehensive and curious at the same time. We have discussed the before the problem at times with the study of popular culture – people can flock to the topics they love without really “saying” anything about their cultural consciousness. That is what I was worried would happen with this chapter and I was pleasantly surprised to find myself wrong.

Most likely every person in our class can name a popular song, whether classic rock, or rap, etc., that in some way discusses the class-consciousness of the singer of the characters in the song. After the introductory paragraph, I already had Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, and Creedance Clearwater Revival swimming around in my head.

While I truly found this discussion fascinating, I found it curious that Turner left out any reference to the roots of popular music on the early 20^th century – the theater. If Lady Gaga and Katy Perry now dominate the pop charts, then seventy years ago they were covered with the sounds of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, and George and Ira Gershwin. Now one of the songs most remembered as indicative of the Great Depression, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” written by Yip Harburg (the composer of “Over the Rainbow”) appeared in the 1932 musical, Americana. Below is an excerpt from the song:

They used to tell me I was building a dream

And so I followed the mob

When there was earth to plow or guns to bear

I was always there, right on the job

They used to tell me I was building a dream

With peace and glory ahead

Why should I be standing in line

Just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run

Made it race against time

Once I built a railroad, now it's done

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun

Brick and rivet and lime

Once I built a tower, now it's done

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Versions of this song sung by Bing Crosby and Rudy Valle captured the frustration and despair of the working class as it was thrust into unemployment and depression. 22 years later, a musical comedy based on the pulp novel 7 ½ Cents, debuted on Broadway. The Pajama Game was able to capture a moment of worker frustration, ultimately culminating in a strike, while still maintaining the happy-go-lucky atmosphere of the 1950’s. The musical opens with an elegy to the clock, as every moment gets them through production and closer to quitting time:

Hurry up, hurry up

Can’t waste time, can’t waste time

When you’re racing with the clock

And the second hand doesn’t understand

That your back may break and your fingers ache

And you constitution isn’t made of rock

It’s a losing race when you’re racing with the clock…

When will old man Hasler break down

And come up with our 7 ½ cent raise?

How in hell can I buy my a swell new second hand car

On that salary he pays?

These are just two examples of how the messages invoked in musical theater were able to “facilitate a sense of group identity, a commonality based on shared experiences and shared economic interest – indeed, what could be called class-consciousness.” (Rubin 172)

Sell Outs

A couple of weeks ago, I was trying to explain 4chan to a friend and we came up with the phrase "an old part of the internet." As the internet ages, we see forms and functions codifying and becoming controlled. Even as new forms come into being (twitter, facebook, etc), they can be seen as improvements on older forms and programs (livejournal, friendster, geocities). In many ways, this seems to be a pattern that emerges throughout cultural studies and cultural history: we see the rise of a new medium of expression that carries with it a chance for liberatory communication between people on the margins. Inevitably, though, each form becomes totally subsumed within the capitalist structure as forms become codified and corporations take control of distribution and production, turning the possibility of revolution into a mouthpiece of corporations. In other words, we like their early stuff, but then these media sold out.

This narrative follows through cultural studies to the core: EP Thompson talks about the "folk festivals of capitalism" and Theodor Adorno is always harping on how much better everything was when films were silent and jazz was disruptive. The question that then arises is whether this accurately describes how capitalism interacts with artforms or if it is imposed by nostalgic scholars. There seems to be a pervasive nostalgia, especially on the left, for simpler times when unions were strong and wars were collectively fought. As an artform enters the mainstream, it begins to follow conventions and acquires the glossy patina of corporate interests. John Waters' earlier "Hairspray" will always look a lot more authentic and revolutionary than the spectacle featuring John Travolta in a fat suit.

In some ways, this narrative makes a lot of sense. Most people would admit that capitalism's greatest asset is its voracious ability to consume and capitalize on almost anything (just look at the profit margin on Che t-shits). And "Working Class Hollywood" definitely shows this development as film production moved from independent studios to the highly consolidated studio system in Hollywood. Media consolidation always brings with it a severe conservatism that will limit what stories get told and how. And the drive for profit almost makes it inevitable that capitalists will take over any profitable media.

So under this model, there seems to be a moment in any medium in which there is radical potential, a weird period before anyone knows what's going on or how we can take advantage of a form of communication. I think that we've documented this narrative enough, and we need to start looking at ways in which this moment can be extended. I think that advocates for net-neutrality are forming this sort of movement already (even before the fight has truly begun), and there are ways in which blogs, ebooks and social media haven't been totally taken over by capitalist codification. Maybe capitalism will always have more money, energy, innovation than radical movements and the sell out is inevitable. But I still think that there are ways of modifying consumption patterns and the assumptions of media themselves that can extend this brief moment of flowering when media forms are new.

Morality of Exploitation

One of the points that I found interesting in Ross's analysis of the early 20th century films is the limitations of Progressive Ideology that permeated them. While having a subject matter that is purportedly radical in addressing the experiences and the exploitation of working class, these early films did so within certain constraints. The fact that the poor had to fit into a certain mould to deserve our 'sympathy' and 'justice' brought to my mind the idea of a "Nobel Savage," the virtue attributed to the 'lowly born' in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the exclusionary and reformist impulse behind such stereotypes. Ross notes that "the compassion of filmmakers was genuine, but it was also contingent on poor acting in certain ways: they should be clean, respectable, hardworking, virtuous, kind and supportive of their families... The cinematic poor are in fact idealized versions of how the middle class ought to behave" (50). Ross further notes the prevalence of patriarchal gender stereotypes - of virtuous poor women who were able to fend off their exploiters with the help of a 'friendly male' - in these films. These limitations seem to have curbed the subversive potential of these films to an extent, making them contradictory texts.

Further, Ross underlines that these films ultimately attributed the blame for exploitation and the problems of the poor to a greedy Boss or a manager and, consequently, the struggles of the workers were most often figured as against corrupt individual capitalists, rather than against the system as a whole. This is a another problematic aspect of these representations, which displace the blame onto an individual, rather than the workings of the system that ultimately enables them to act the way they do. The system doesn't produce or shape the individual in any significant way in these representations, but the individual precedes the system, ultimately making it a matter of individual goodness and morality. Thus, the impression that I gathered from Ross's discussion of these limitations is that these early films portrayed workplace exploitation and corruption as moral issues connected with specific individuals, rather than political/social/economic issues. Such representations would have been cathartic for the oppressed viewers of these films in their powerlessness to dismantle the lager exploitative social structures.

The Value of Films

Brit

As I read Working-Class Hollywood, I began to wonder what how movies are interpreted today.  Movies throughout the ages have been used in various ways, but today I feel that with such a wide range of genres, movies can be virtually anything to anyone.  During the Second World War many movies were used as propaganda, such as Saboteur, showing a man’s struggle to bring the real culprits to justice.  After the war movies depicted soldiers coming home and what that meant for them and America as a whole, as seen in films like The Best Years of Our Lives.  Each successive era has shown films that have some bearing on the social issues at hand, but as I think about it, not that I have a vast knowledge of film history, there do not seem to be many working-class struggle type films. 

Even today, with all the different types of films being created, the most socially conscious are documentaries.  Just as Kruse and others attempted to use documentaries as a way to show social issues as they happened, directors today use documentaries to raise awareness of many of the social issues at hand.  Documentaries are far more successful today in terms of availability, most notably being available through Netflix and other venues, they still lack the broad appeal of feature films.  They generally have limited release in theaters and are not shown nearly as often, but I do believe that films have value, beyond the monetary value production companies place on them.

Beyond the idea that films are entertainment or a form of escape, films often can and often do say something about a social issue.  There are countless films available for people to watch and learn from either by going to the theater or watching movies at home.  With new ways of watching films, either through Redbox, Netflix, Amazon, or any of the other various resources, people can watch virtually anything.  While there are movies out there that are virtually made for entertainment’s sake, take for example Sucker Punch, there are also films being made that say something about the state of society right now.  The Company Men focuses on three men who have to face corporate downsizing and how that affects their lives and the lives of their families.  This film shows the affects of unemployment, which is a crisis we are facing today, and it does it as a feature film with big name actors like Ben Affleck and Tommy Lee Jones.  Films say something, whether they are made-for-television, documentaries, foreign, or feature films, they are valuable as more than just works of art or entertainment. 

Rowdy Viewers

While I found many aspects of Steven J. Ross’ “Working-Class Hollywood,” interesting, his accounts of audience participation got me thinking: when films transitioned from silent to talkies were the voice’s of the audience replaced by the voice’s of actors? Ross describes a typical theater in the silent era: “a communal atmosphere in which audiences regularly booed, cheered, or applauded scenes that reflected harshly or kindly on their lives and politics” (25). This seems very different from a typical movie going experience of today, at least in most cases, but I suppose the films are also very different. Now they are longer, and some (perhaps badly) rely on dialogue to move the plot forward. Maybe instead of comparing the theater going experience of the past to today, we should find a more compatible comparison: YouTube Sessions. When friends watch YouTube videos they react and talk about what they are being shown.

However, I can even think of other situations today where silence is not imposed on a theater going audience. For example, at 5^th Ave Cinema’s (student run Cinema at Portland State) there was definitely a “communal atmosphere” wherein students would react to the film and comment on what they were watching. The Cinema showed a variety of film genres, from art house films to cult classics like John Carpenter's The Thing. The films were hand selected by “film people” and tended to draw a knowledgeable audience who had already seen the film before. So because of the type of audience, the price (free for students, $3 for guests), and the films being shown, there still exist pockets of rowdy viewers.

Conservative Today, Liberal Tomorrow

During the 2008 election Obama caught some flak for remarks regarding working-class voters.

Obama argued that many had fallen through the economic cracks during the Bush and Clinton administrations and that they were angry because of job losses dating back 25 years, "It's not surprising then they get bitter . . . They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Both Clinton and McCain blasted Obama for being out of touch with the working class as well as his “breathtaking elitism,” yet Obama maintained, "I said something everybody knows is true . . . which is there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania — in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois — who are bitter. They are angry. They feel like they've been left behind."

Obama ultimately played down his characterization of the American working class as a population whose exploitation and victimization basically drives them to guns, racism, Jesus and meth, but his initial comments reflect a privileged liberal narrative. The dissenting voices of today perpetually represent the working class as victims: victims of a rich man’s war, victims of corporate America’s ceaseless campaign of consumption, victims of educational testing. . .

This narrative ironically resonates with Ross’ analysis of the conservative labor-capital films of the early 20th century in Working Class Hollywood. In these “conservative” films workers are represented as lawless and violent, but above all, as victims. “Conservative filmmakers repeatedly portrayed strikes and radical movements as led by a handful of foreign-born agitators who relied upon violence and duped good but naïve workers into serving their own corrupt needs.” Likewise, Ross affirms in the epilogue, “The most long-standing conservative image of the silent era is undoubtedly the depiction of working people as easily manipulated.”

Perhaps nowhere is this continuity with today’s liberal representations more apparent than the progressive, anti-war documentaries of the “War on Terror.” The Grounded Truth, Fahrenheit 9/11, Gunners Palace, Restrepo, and Occupation Dreamland all use the working class soldier as their primary object of representation in the telling of the modern war story. The soldiers are always depicted – with sympathy and condescension – as victims of their working class economic conditions, ignorance, or a combination of both. The prey of military recruiters, the human shrapnel of George Bush’s policies, the soldier of the liberal imagination does not know why he is in the Middle East and is helpless to change that. In the Grounded Truth one soldier stated, “There’s nothing we can do. We have to keep going.” Another soldier echoed, “I have no control over what put me in Iraq.” They have been duped and manipulated by government and big business – not by radical European union leaders, Reds, or simply corrupt agitators as was the working class of the conservative silent era film. Still, the working class is defined as a naïve victim (what was once manifestation of conservative ideology). It makes me question whether these modern accounts of war serve the progressive ends which they lay claim.

Last thought:
-Many directors of the silent era celebrated the “virtuous individual” over the “collective mob.” In The Scab (1911) the protagonist, a union leader, is condemned for making “his little family to suffer” due to his obstinate support of the union struggle. The working class protagonist concludes, “Family unions should not be sacrificed for labor unions.” Likewise the hero of The Strike at the ‘Little Jonny’ Mine convinces his fellow drunken and rowdy miners to stop their violent striking and achieves wage increases by working with the mine superintendent and the local sheriff and placidly negotiating. Today, we often see the working class celebrated and reinforced for being good husbands/wives and content/peaceful laborers who are never without a smile and always without ambition or vision that exceeds providing for their family and perhaps taking a vacation to their native country -UNDERCOVER BOSS!

screening for class consciousness

Agatha

i admit i was also surprised, like Edwin, to think of the origins of film as more than that of a commodity, to see it as the grounds for political and social contention. i guess i always imagined that most of the first films made, were choppy, black-and-white, vaudeville-esque ten minute romps of flappers doing the charleston. Ross gives a much more powerful picture of film as a venue for "teaching immigrants what it meant to belong to a particular class" (21).

that phrase also gave me some pause, however. Ross seems to both view the film as a means of inciting political action and labor-solidarity, but conversely also a sort of means of manipulation on the part of the filmmaker, à la Adorno. which is it? i guess we could ask the same thing of any film today, however, and of any creative expression of culture, for that matter.

i do like how film opened doors between class relations in many ways, but it seems like this working-class empowerment is complicated (well, duh). i mean, anyone could sit anywhere in the theatre (a revelation!) but "respectable" people didn't go to these theatres. so how much class-mixing really went on there? i wonder, too, about the realities of immigrant/race dynamics, of whether or not italians, jews, blacks, and swedes, really embraced sitting next to each other in the darkened nickelodeon. maybe. but sometimes that seems a little too hopeful as a twenty-first century look at the past.

it seems like while early labor filmmakers could make cheap films on their own time, they could reach a mass labor audience; but once the expectation for elaborate and costly film became the norm, these filmmakers effectively lost to the affluent resources of middle-class investors and censorship boards. i wonder today how this struggle translates; are the "radical," independently funded films really all that radical? or if the movie industry were different, were still in its baby-stage of undefined, would we see so much more diversity of thought on the big screen?

Ross's final lament over the turning of the labor film industry over to middle-class censorship and to Hollywood's homogenizing clutches, made me think of a film we watched last semester, I Remember Mama (film adaptations, anyone?). i debate with myself whether the film is part of the last vestiges of the overt class-conscious film, as it glorifies the life of a Norwegian immigrant family living in San Francisco; or whether its lack of political antagonism, and soothing family-values message, are rather part of the new Hollywood trend to present all (good) Americans as classless, yet noble, citizens of a democractic society. what complicates this more for me is that we discussed last semester how even such a film in which immigrants take a central role, became non-existent after WWII, effectively making even this film seem a bit "controversial." which is really kind of laughable if you ever get a chance to watch it. but still, perhaps I Remember Mama is an expression of that transition, that conflict between radical labor filmmakers and the blooming Hollywood industry.

I Guess Film is Ok Edwin

I was initially skeptical of this week’s reading, because I have a difficulty in observing film beyond its base as a commodity. Film, although it has the capability of being a truly artful production, tends to get warped and changed through difficulties with budgets and censorship by production companies. However, this is a modern problem of film production, and while I was skeptical of Ross’s work, it was refreshing to observe the humble and social reflective beginnings of film. Even though it is clear that movies began solely as a method in which to make money.

Ross, however, polishes over this fact very nicely in describing film as one of the first mass forms of mass leisure for working class individuals. Although the purveyors of these first “nickelodeons” did indeed have money in their sights, they inadvertently created a form of leisure that diminished the alienation that many working class individuals felt on a daily basis. It is also interesting to see how film grew as an art form, not because it was absorbed by a different type of producer, but because better films made more money: “By offering the public better films and theaters, industry leaders began attracting greater numbers of white-collar and middle class patrons” (32).

Ross’s discussion of melodrama was also interesting. Judging from the description of some of the films, these depictions of working class plight set up a clear “good guy,” “bad guy” dichotomy. These movies made it ok to hate your boss, even though he was the moderator of your survival. They showed the disgruntled factory worker that they are not alone in their anger; that their feelings were popular enough to shown as entertainment to hundreds of people a day.

In this work Ross really focuses on the cohesive nature that film had, and this idea has not faded. One only has to look at the cult success of the movie “Office Space” to see that people still hate their jobs and their bosses.