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.