By John Bodnar
From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the proper Thing, Hollywood has usually dramatized the lives and struggles of operating humans in the USA. starting from idealistic to hopeless, from sympathetic to condescending, those portrayals faced audiences with the important fiscal, social, and political problems with their occasions whereas supplying a diversion―sometimes pleasing, occasionally provocative―from the realities in their personal lives.
In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways that renowned American motion pictures made among the Thirties and the Nineteen Eighties depicted working-class characters, evaluating those cinematic representations with the aspirations of standard americans and the guarantees made to them through the country's political elites. in accordance with shut and creative viewings of dozens of movies from each genre―among them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of Wrath, It's an excellent Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Boyz N the Hood―this e-book explores such themes because the function of censorship, attitudes towards hard work unions and employee militancy, racism, where of girls within the crew and society, communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and religion in liberal democracy.
Whether made throughout the nice melancholy, global battle II, the chilly conflict, or the Vietnam period, the vast majority of movies approximately traditional operating american citizens, Bodnar unearths, kept away from endorsing particular political courses, radical monetary reform, or brazenly reactionary positions. in its place, those videos have been infused with an analogous present of liberalism and well known concept of democracy that stream during the American imagination.
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Extra info for Blue-collar Hollywood : liberalism, democracy, and working people in American film
Example text
The answer for Americans was participatory democracy and the creation of public institutions like public schools and political parties that are necessary to promote broad participation in public life and regulate the expression of individual desire. An astute observer of early-nineteenthcentury America realized that men suddenly “intoxicated” with new ideas of egalitarianism and freedom often concluded that they did not need other people. 25 Scholars like Robert Wiebe have demonstrated how democracy merged effectively with liberalism in the early nineteenth century.
The accuracy of such statements were not so much the point as was the perception by some officials in the industry that they had to avoid moral and political squabbles and, to a considerable extent, excessive partisanship. ” This sort of audience penetration meant for these moral guardians that films needed to be placed under more restraint than, say, a novel or a work of art that would reach only a highly discreet group. 17 The search for universally acceptable film narratives had particular 8 BLUE-COLLAR HOLLYWOOD consequences for the status of working women.
During the 1950s, the Supreme Court began to systematically exercise the power of judicial review as a means of protecting individual rights, although the cause of civil rights also benefited from governmental initiatives after the war like Harry Truman’s order to integrate the armed forces. Today 70 percent of the decisions of the Supreme Court involve individual rights; in the thirties, the figure was 10 percent. It also now clear that the position the United States held on the world stage as a champion of fairness and justice opposed to totalitarianism brought its racial traditions under severe scrutiny from other nations.