Class structures are a reality- low, middle, and high classes do exist. That is the truth, and artists cannot change this fact. But what they can change or rather what they should change, is the light that each class is portrayed in. In this sense, artists have a significant ability to shape our thoughts on different ideas. After all, a person of low or middle class does not know how a person of high class lives, they can imagine what it would be like- but they would never really know (and vise versa). It is usually what they see in movies and TV shows that give these people an inside view on how the rich supposedly live and act and what it’s like to be rich (and vise versa). Artists should try to display a less rigid and defined system of class structure.
The movie Wall Street (Stone, 1987) is centered around a stockbroker’s rise and fall and through this Oliver Stone highlights the middle and high-class lifestyles in NYC. Although Oliver Stone portrays the rich as superficial and money hungry he also presents them as powerful, prestigious, and successful. And so, Wall Street is a movie that reinforces social stratification.
In Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage we are introduced to two couples that seem to be of high class. However, Reza’s play depicts the complete abandonment of class structures. The wealthy couples try to settle a predicament in a polite manner, a manner that would suit their class, however they fail miserably. The couples show their true colors as they get drunk, argue, and fight. Reza successfully illustrates that everyone, even those of higher class act, think, and feel the same as any ordinary person.
The shows and movies we watch usually influence our thoughts, and so artists, the creators of such media, have the ability to reinforce, or try to breakdown, class structures. Now I specifically used the word “try” because artists have constantly bombarded the public with advertisements, movies, and TV shows which associate a certain lifestyle, ethnicity, or thought with different class structures. To get a clear and fair representation of different class structures, artists have to undo the stereotypes that they have embedded into our minds. For instance, Blacks and Latinos are constantly portrayed as low class criminals in films and as a result the viewers tend to associate what they see on the big screen with real life. And likewise, when the successful, rich, beautiful, heroic characters are of white ethnicity, we tend to draw these connections to real life, whether we realize it or not. When an artist chooses to reinforce the system of social hierarchy they only add to the problem. When an artist attempts to breakdown class structure through their work, they seek to amend and redefine our views on social hierarchy.
