Page 462 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Representat ons of Class | 1

Thomas. Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the
United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Allison Perlman

rePresentations oF Class

U.S. media simultaneously ignore class-based inequalities and convey the
mythical idea that anyone can rise above their socioeconomic origins if they just
work hard enough. While representations of class are not as controversial as the
media’s treatment of gender and race, they are no less important as cultural indi-
cators of unequal power relations.
Did you ever notice how many doctors, lawyers, and business executives pop-
ulate the fictional and nonfictional worlds of U.S. television? Like other forms of
commercial media, TV dramatically overrepresents the lives—and lifestyles—of
well-educated, upper-income professionals. As social critic Barbara Ehrenreich
points out, about 70 percent of people in the United States can be considered
“working class,” in that they perform monotonous (and often low-paid) forms
of manual and service work, labor for wages instead of salaries, and often do
not have college degrees (Ehrenreich 1998). Yet, we rarely see their experiences
on the job, in the community, or at home reflected on the screen. As numerous
media scholars have shown, when working-class people do appear in the media,
they are often shown to be pursuing the American dream of upward mobility—
or else they are often blamed for failing to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.”
Given the stigma ascribed to working-class people by mediated images and dis-
courses, it is not surprising that most Americans reject that label. According to

titanic
The 1997 blockbuster Titanic reworked the cross-class romance narrative—a staple of Holly-
wood film—at a moment of growing class polarization. In the midst of corporate downsizing,
cuts to social welfare programs, and looming economic recession, the film offered a feel-good
story about a poor artist who is traveling in steerage and a pampered socialite who is traveling
first-class. Defying the steep social hierarchy inherent to the two-tier spatial organization of
the ship, Jack and Rose fall in love and eventually come to reject the European-coded class
hierarchies of the “bygone” era depicted by the film. Celebrating Rose’s voluntary downward
mobility and situating vivid social and economic inequalities squarely in the past, Titanic re-
affirmed the American dream of classlessness at a moment of impending doubt about the
future of the middle class. Filmed in Mexico to exploit the cheap labor of “runaway” movie
production, the film offered a quintessentially American fantasy in which the structural in-
equalities of the global capitalist order can be overcome by the choices of plucky individuals.

See Laurie Ouellette, “Ship of Dreams: Cross Class Romance and the Cultural Fantasy of Titanic,”
in Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, eds. Gaylyn Studlar and Kevin Sandler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2002).