Tuesday Tally

Movies about the White Working Class

This is the forgotten demo, these are the Trump voters. Here are a few timely and timeless movies about young, white working class men.

The Outsiders: We watched this recently for the first time in decades. It was a big deal in 1983, and we think may well have begun the 50's nostalgia we endured in our youth. Basically you got a bunch of no-future white kids in small town Oklahoma. Patrick Swazye is the adult of the group, working a construction job, but even he joins the brawl against the Socs at the end. The Socs, that is the Socials, these are the preps and jocks with nice cars and cheerleader girlfriends. The Socs are seemingly the enemy of Patrick Swayze and his greaser pals. But the real enemy is time and place. Two greasers (Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise if you can believe it) are working at a gas station. Emilio Esteves is a lay about clown. We're meant to sympathize with Swayze's little brother Pony Boy and his buddy Johnny Cade played by Ralph Machio. Johnny Cade with an abusive father is doomed even before he knifes a Soc. The girls are just going to love Pony Boy, especially after he dyes his hair blond. Then there's Dallas, played expertly by Matt Dillon. He's a dropout and criminal, destined to head back to the klink if he isn't killed first. The feel of the film is perfect post-war Midwest. Well done Mr. Coppola.

Breaking Away: More Midwest, this time in Bloomington, Indiana a university town. Once more the successful kids (at IU) are seemingly the enemy and once more the enemy is really time and circumstance. It's September and four childhood friends have graduated HS and don't know what to do with themselves. There's a sliding scale of hopelessness here, Dennis Christopher likes biking and all things Italian. He'd like to do something else with his life but is not sure what. Daniel Stern has a sense that there's more to life but being a towney but has no idea how to find it. Dennis Quaid was the HS QB and now he's nobody. He realizes at 19 the best years of his life are past him. Jackie Earl Haley, and it wouldn't be a 70's film without him, doesn't know of a wider world and doesn't care anyway. He gets hitched at the end of the film. This movie is about place, and aspiration. The movie is it's title. Dated? Sure. Timeless? Yes.

Saturday Night Fever: Boy has this film ever evolved. It perfectly invoked the 70's down to the clothes and music and was completely out of place in the 1980's. We would have beaten the crap out of someone for listening to the Bee Gees in 1988. John Travolta is another working class kid, just out of HS with a job at a paint store. He loves to dance but is constrained by his environment. His father is out of work, his mother is heartbroken that his brother has left the priesthood. Grandma lives with them and only speaks Italian. He's got the same bunch of no future friends, with the dumbest having knocked up his girlfriend. Modern viewers will be aghast at the ethnic chauvinism and misogyny. This is really a rough movie abut New York in the 70's and nearly as dark as Taxi Driver.

They Weren't Born in a Small Town...

The most estimable Kyle Smith reviews a book about the White Working Class:

‘We’re voting with our middle finger,” a Trump supporter in South Carolina told a reporter last fall. No doubt.

Pretty much.

Smith describes the never ending Kulture Kampf the urban left has waged on the WWC for the last 50 years. He goes into the economic crisis faced by the WWC and offers this fascinating tidbit.

At a high school reunion, [the author's] husband returned home still using the habits he had picked up in the upper class, and it led to an uncomfortable moment. “What do you do?” he asked an old classmate. When you’re a lawyer or a financier, part of the global professional class, it’s a perfectly innocent question. Elites love to talk about their jobs, indeed define themselves by their professions. Not so the WWC. They see work devotion as an indicator of upper-class narcissism. They do the bulk of the boring, repetitive, unglamorous work, some of it physically demanding, and they don’t define themselves by their labors at all. That classmate of Williams’ husband replied spitefully, “I sell toilets.”

Now we had no idea about that, and are as guilty as anyone of asking with a confident nod, 'So what do you do?' Here's another fascinating tidbit, which we guess we kinda sort knew:

WWC women want to spend less time at work, not more. They wish they had the option of being stay-at-home moms, and even if they were men they know they wouldn’t be in the running to be CEOs. A woman from Appalachia says in the book, “I’m voting to save my boyfriend’s job."

Smith swears the author is not conducting an anthropological survey but simply trying to understand a demographic cohort  that was widely ignored by politics and culture.

This area is totally foreign to the bi-coastal elites. It's almost as if they never even heard of John Mellencamp:

John Mellencamp is a Democrat, btw, but there is no place for him in the Democrat Party.

Right now that party is run by a smarmy Jew from Brooklyn and a whackjob old lady from San Francisco. It's most visible congresscritter is Maxine Waters, who ought to be standing outside of a drug store in LA shouting things at invisible animals. Schummer actually made a speech at Trump's inauguration where he invoked something called 'gender identity', which he doesn't really mean.

There's no hope for them.