How do social classes affect our lives? I’d like to say that it doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, middle class, whatever. But sadly our world doesn’t work that way, social class affects everything; the way we think, act, dress, behave, speak, or think. No matter who you are, you’ve been categorized into some sort of social “box” in society’s eyes. Artists, whether it is paintings, music, films, etc., have the responsibility of portraying to the public something worth thinking about. In films, it’s easier to understand an artist’s message because they have a larger time span, versus a painting that once it’s done, stays constant. Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone, largely utilizes costumes and dialogue to make a social commentary about the stereotypes of social classes. But that being said, I haven’t seen many other movies that focus on something besides obvious visual and material objects. Because social class affects every part of our lives, even emotions are included. Everyone gets happy, sad, angry or afraid but does our social class define what a middle class man gets happy about versus a rich CEO of a multibillion-dollar company? Or even better, do they experience and view fear differently?
Candyman, for those of you unfamiliar with the horror film, was directed by Bernard Rose in 1992. It revolves around the urban legend of Candyman, a twist on the Bloody Mary myth. Story goes, a young black artist fell in love with a local white woman. To her father’s disgust, he sends out a lynch mob after the artist; with stolen honey from a nearby apiary, they smeared it all over his body, severed off his painting hand and replaced it with a hook. He was stung to death by the bees as the locals chanted “Candyman.” The film follows Helen, a graduate student, as she delves deeper into the legend for a thesis paper.
Like Wall Street, Rose does utilize costumes and dialogue to highlight distinctions between the two classes but he focuses largely on the concept of fear to reinforce and break down these social divisions. There are two specific social classes portrayed here: the poor people living in the ghetto of Cabrini Green (fun fact! This is actually a real housing project!) and then the upper middle class academia. A lot of times race and class are mixed and almost inseparable, this is the case in Candyman; the poor are predominately African American and the upper middle class are white. Interestingly enough, the original story by Clive Baker was set in Liverpool, but Rose chose to set the film in Chicago (a historically important urban settlement at one point for African Americans). You can see that artists have complete control over what they do and there’s no doubt that this change in location largely helped get Rose’s message across.
Throughout Candyman we see that the people of Cabrini Green are constantly held to the expectations of the upper middle class academia to be foolish. There’re three groups that reinforce these expectations: the police, Helen’s professor and the top psychologist at the mental hospital. These three groups immediately denounce the fears of the people of Cabrini Green as idiocy. This makes it something that “those” people do. It’s almost as if the two classes are being made into two separate cultures, and if so, then these three groups are virtually committing ethnocentrism. Because the people of Cabrini Green fear something as irrational as Candyman, they are therefore “beneath” them and packaged into these social classes, not allowing them to break free and be part of any other social group. Now, of course, most people would obviously refute the idea of some dude running around killing people with a hook long after he died as a possibility. But were the citizens of the upper class just “supposed” to refute things like these because they are educated? Rose is upholding this stereotype that those who are of a lesser class are not only uneducated and different than the upper middle class but also that they are foolish. Now, this really isn’t the truth because a man from the ghetto could be very well educated but after loosing his job, his home or going bankrupt had to move into one of these gang-ridden housing projects because he had no choice, but it is a stereotype after all.
But we also see the breakdown of class distinctions in the film. Where Helen lives and Cabrini Green are most definitely not two different sides of the world, they’re in the same city. Even Helen’s condo complex shares the same blueprints, the only difference was that hers were sold as condos and Cabrini Green as a housing project. But Rose really merges these two social classes in the scene where Helen finally meets the infamous Candyman. Helen, who again, is from the upper middle academia class, has come to realize that the nightmare of those lower than her has come alive. Only she is able to see the Candyman and others of her social class cannot because she’s begun to share the same fear as the people of Cabrini Green; she does what only the people of Cabrini Green are “supposed” to do and that’s fear something totally irrational and crazy. She breaks this barrier between the two worlds and strikes down the distinctions in the social classes.
Everyone experiences fear but Rose is able to take this emotion and correlate it back to the levels of social class.
