A New Kind of Class Situation

Abstract

Graham Cassano calls on Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation to understand the relationship between audiences and the socially conscious films of the New Deal period. These films called forth a new kind of working-class audience while that audience was itself developing out of the trauma of the Great Depression, which made the films possible. Working-class filmgoers were able to recognize themselves in these films as part of a “class situation” even when those films deployed retrograde images of race or gender. Cassano’s investigation of the work of John Ford is especially telling and evokes the arc of the New Deal from its early radical period through the period of national unity during wartime and the cold war and red scare that followed.

Key Words:

• John Ford
• Great Depression
• Interpellation
• New Deal Cinema
• Working Class

Notes

1 Cassano also points out the role of music in such interpellation, and one could do the same for radio or theater, of course. But it is film that is most successful, at least in this period.

2 Stephen Ziliak uses the novel in his microeconomics course at Roosevelt University because it illustrates “the visible hand of class conflict.” See “Professors Share Their Experience with Teaching Intro Economics,” Institute for New Economic Thinking Blog, 17 August 2011, https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/professors-share-their-experience-with-teaching-intro-economics.

3 This speech, made by Henry Fonda in the film, may be usefully compared to the courtroom speech Gary Cooper makes as Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, to encapsulate the distance between the social democratic and neoliberal worldviews.

4 A song that has the same tune as “Solidarity Forever.”

5 It is ironic that the neoliberal turn came just after another radical period in American cinema, the 1970s.

6 The thirteenth refers to Popular Front films in the United States, France, and Spain.