Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American CinemaEverywhere you look in 1970s American cinema, you find white working-class men. They bring a violent conclusion to Easy Rider, murdering the film's representatives of countercultural alienation and disaffection. They lurk in the Georgia woods of Deliverance, attacking outsiders in a manner that evokes the South's recent history of racial violence and upheaval. They haunt the singles nightclubs of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, threatening the film's newly liberated heroine with patriarchal violence. They strut through the disco clubs of Saturday Night Fever, dancing to music whose roots in post-Stonewall homosexuality invite ambiguity that the men ignore. Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men argues that the persistent appearance of working-class characters in these and other films of the 1970s reveals the powerful role class played in the key social and political developments of the decade, such as the decline of the New Left and counterculture, the re-emergence of the South as the Sunbelt, and the rise of the women's and gay liberation movements. Examining the "youth cult" film, the neo-Western "southern," and the "new nightlife" film, Nystrom shows how these cinematic renderings of white working-class masculinity actually tell us more about the crises facing the middle class during the 1970s than about working-class experience itself. Hard Hats thus demonstrates how these representations of the working class serve as fantasies about a class Other-fantasies that offer imaginary resolutions to middle-class anxieties provoked by the decade's upheavals. Drawing on examples of iconic films from the era-Saturday Night Fever, Cruising, Five Easy Pieces, and Walking Tall, among others-Nystrom presents an incisive, evocative study of class and American cinema during one of the nation's most tumultuous decades. |
Contents
Class and the YouthCult Cycle | |
THE RISE | |
Deliverance An Allegory of the Sunbelt | |
The Southern Cycle and the Invention | |
Saturday Night Fever and the Queering of the White Working | |
Looking for Mr Goodbar and Cruising | |
Other editions - View all
Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema Derek Nystrom Limited preview - 2009 |
Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema Derek Nystrom Limited preview - 2009 |
Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema Derek Nystrom No preview available - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
accounts American appear argued articulation association audience become Blue Collar body capital character Cinema claim course critics Cruising cultural cycle Deliverance depicted described desire directed discussed dominant economic Ehrenreich example experience explains fact fantasy Fever figure film film’s filmmakers Five Easy force gender Goodbar hard heterosexual Hollywood identification identity imagined important industry interests James John kind labor largely late Looking male masculinity middle middle-class movie narrative nature Norma Rae noted offer opening organized original pleasure political position practices production professional protagonist question reception relations relationship representations representative Richard Right role scene seems sequence serves sexual signifiers social South Southern story strategy struggles Studies suggests Sunbelt tells Tony trucker turn understanding union University Press Variety various viewer violence Western women workers working-class York