This book began more than 30 years ago with a trip to a cinema in central London. I was working at Hamleyâs (the famous toy shop) and looking for cheap entertainment that wasnât just the pub after work. So Katie Daniels and I ventured to a nearby cinema in Soho because weâd heard that the tickets were cheap on a Tuesday. We had no idea what we were going to see but we bought tickets for Pedro AlmodĂłvarâs What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984). It was the first subtitled film Iâd watched. This was also the first film Iâd seen with working-class characters that seemed real. I was hooked. AlmodĂłvar was my âgatewayâ director, and from that first film at the Metro Cinema, I sought out films from around the world and became a regular at the small independent cinemas in central London. This might not seem such a big deal, but for a shop girl from a London council estate, this was a huge deal. There werenât many like me at the Metro and I have been told on many an occasion that working-class people donât like art house cinema. But I saw myself represented in these films in ways that didnât happen in the Hollywood films that flooded our suburban cinemas. I became an autodidact film buff and most likely annoyed everyone who accompanied me to the cinema. Fast forward 30 years and I find myself working as an academic and able to teach film studies and introduce to students some of the films I loved so much as a teenaged shop assistant. The irony of watching films with working-class characters in cinemas full of middle-class audience members has never been lost on me and itâs something that Iâve wrestled with for a long time. I have some ideas on audience that I will share later, but I will assert here that working-class people do like art house films, but that the opportunities to watch them are not often forthcoming.
The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the representation of working-class people world-wide in contemporary cinema to see what commonalities of experience might be presented and to consider the differences and cultural specificities on offer in some of these representations. There are many questions to be posed and not all will be answered, but I will try. My main point is that representation is importantâit really does matter, and seeing yourself or others you recognise on screen is powerful when you are marginalised, ignored, demonised or ridiculed. Working-class people globally do most of the work. Working-class people make the products, deliver the products, dispose of the products, clean up after everyone, look after the children, the elderly, farm the land, build cities, cook food, serve food, cut hair, dig for those minerals needed to make those products or to provide energy. Working-class people form the majority but are the least represented.
I take an interdisciplinary approach born from working-class studies. This means a focus on the lived experiences of working-class people (Linkon and Russo 2005, 11) which is why I started with an autobiographical note. Iâve written elsewhere about the importance of autobiography in working-class studies (Attfield 2016, 46, 2017, 95) but I will repeat here that I come from a working-class background, and grew up on a north-east London high-rise council estate. I have first-hand experience of hardship, working-class work, poverty, classism, but also of community, resilience, culture and fun. I am whiteâethnically Anglo-Saxon and so I have never experienced racism (although I have witnessed racism on many occasions). My class background gives me some authority to speak in class, but I am aware that I have benefited from white privilege. It is important therefore to be intersectional, which, according to Hill Collins and Bilge, requires an understanding of how âthe major axes of social divisions in a given society at a given time, for example, race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability and age operate not as discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but build on each other and work togetherâ (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016, 13). Intersectionality can be used as an âanalytical toolâ (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016, 12) to identify and understand how the layering effects of discrimination operate. The majority of the films discussed in this book illustrate the concept of intersectionality in concrete terms as characters face layers of oppression due to their class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and gender. There is a major omission thoughânone of the films deals explicitly with disability and class which points to the lack of engagement with disability within the film (and other cultural products) more widely.
The field of working-class studies allows the scholar to draw from disciplines that are relevant (Linkon and Russo 2005, 11), and in this book, I draw from film studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology, economics, geography, literary studies, labour history and so on. This combination of theories and approaches might seem messyâand even within film studies, there are many different theories that I draw from. Within film studies, I dip into Marxist, feminist, semiotic, formalist, phenomenological and various other approaches using what has been described as a âpiecemealâ methodology favoured by some feminist scholars such as Freeland (2000, 356) who suggests that this helps to avoid a heavy âtop-downâ approach where one theory is applied to everything. Although there is probably a general tone of Marxism because a Marxist approach is not just concerned with analysing films but also influencing production and looking for ways to effect change (Rushton and Bettinson 2010, 34). Film is a great pedagogical tool and has potential to be used to educate, inform and agitate (which is not mutually exclusive with entertainment).
Defining Class
Before beginning any analysis of film, I need to define what I mean by âworking classâ.
To suggest that there is an identifiable global working class might seem a bit ridiculous and I am not attempting to homogenise working-class experience. Itâs probably quite obvious that working-class experience will be very different between one place and another, and not everyone who might fit into the categories Iâm using to assign working-class membership will identify themselves as working class. So, the definitions are already problematic but necessary. How is class generally defined? There are various ways that scholars understand class.
A classic Marxist approach divides people according to their position in a capitalist society. There are two main classes in this modelâthe bourgeoisie, who are the capitalists and own the means of production, and the proletariat, who sell their labour to the capitalists in a system of exploitation that requires the proletariat (working class) to âgenerate a social surplus product for those who own the means of productionâ (Boucher 2014, 31). Itâs a neat model, but it doesnât allow for nuance. And does it apply outside of the western world? Can we compare a factory worker in the UK with a rural farm labourer in India? The type of labour they sell, how much they get paid for it, and their working conditions will vary enormously.
A more contemporary economic definition might consider the role of power (Zweig 2004, 4). This model suggests that in general, the working class are those who are reliant on others to buy their labour and who have little to no power in the workplace (Zweig 2004, 4). Understanding how power works also helps to differentiate between people who also sell their labour, but who have control and autonomy in terms of the work they do. Academics are paid by an employer, precariously employed academics are paid by the hour, but this does not make them working class. They might experience poverty due to a lack of regular hours and might be exploited by their institution. But this does not equal working-class status. The academic enjoys a good amount of autonomy in their workplace. They can usually choose how they will teach and what they research. Despite the constraints of the neo-liberal university and the work-intensification that makes many academics unwell due to overwork and stress, they are still not working class.
A sociological approach to class uses the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and considers the cultural aspects of class, particularly that which is related to the consumption of art and cultureâin other words, âtasteâ (Bourdieu 1984, 6). In this model, class is not determined by income alone but also by the amounts of other types of capital that are accumulated. Middle- and upper-class people have high levels of cultural capital, which is the knowledge of things deemed important by middle- and upper-class people, such as knowledge of high art, literature, and general knowledge, and which allows entry into middle- and upper-class spaces. Working-class people, due to lower levels of educational capital (formal education), often have lower levels of cultural capital and therefore find it difficult to be accepted into these middle- and upper-class spaces (Bourdieu 1984, 1). The lack of cultural capital means they are deemed inferior (intellectually and culturally) by their middle- and upper-class counterparts (Bourdieu 1984, 7). Bourdieu (1984) suggests that the type of culture consumed is used as a way of âlegitimating social differencesâ (7). Possession of cultural capital is necessary when attempting, for example, to gain employment in a middle- or upper-class dominated industry. Knowing the ârightâ kinds of things means fitting into the middle- or upper-class world and is often more important than having the right kind of thingsâsomeone who is asset poor, such as an artist, but cultural capital rich, is likely to be accepted by the middle-class gatekeepers of the art world (the gallery ow...