Classism in art? Horror! Oh the humanity! It cannot be! Well, yes, of course it can be. It’s a reality, a harsh one, but a reality nonetheless. To believe that art is unaffected by class divisions is to willingly cover your eyes and try to navigate a maze. You’ll run into something almost immediately.
Let’s start with film. Who watches films? Films, in contrast to theater, are economical forms of entertainment. So that means films are widely accessible to everyone. Matinees for films sometimes have discounted prices. Smuggle in some snacks and treat yourself to a new release. Films are available to almost everyone. So filmmakers must take into account who is going to consume their product. Films like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street are made with this “all classes will see this” mindset. Bud Fox’s father and the airline workers are honest blue-collar people who watch each other’s backs and want the best for everyone. Meanwhile, Gordon Gekko, the rich and powerful, lacks a moral compass and manipulates every person who falls into his clutches. This black and white view of the classes, this Robin Hood attitude, is what I think made Wall Street a success. If the everyman had seen a morally upright Gekko and crooked union workers, the movie would have been slammed. How dare you say that these poor laborers are crooked? And how can a man with that much money be “good”? You’re out of your mind!
Contrast that with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The moral ambiguity is strong in this one! Here, only the lower classes are really depicted. In fact, the destitute are painstakingly documented and their squalid lives are panned over in the slowest motion possible. However, there’s a lack of Robin Hood-ing happening here. There are no rich scapegoats here. The seventies were a dark time for New York City; a lot of people were down on their luck. Travis sees this and becomes angrier and angrier. He wants his city cleaned up. Times are so hard that young runaways like Iris resort to turning tricks to scrape by. Travis is angry, so angry that he takes a stand by killing three people he deems “scum” and becomes a hero. No one is safe in Scorsese’s New York. In his New York, everyone does what he or she must, even when its illegal or immoral or just plain wrong, to survive in the urban jungle. Who is good? Who is bad? It’s all relative.
Artists play with class structure to their benefit. Stone used a stereotypical view of class divisions a la Robin Hood to curry favor with the broad audience flocking to see his film. Scorsese broke down this idea of a stereotype by showing us a vast array of dark, morally turned around characters who are just trying to survive. That way, it’s not so easy to pass judgment about the classes or if one class is morally superior to another class. Remove Robin Hood from the equation and you’re left with the everyday human, a dramatized version perhaps. Every person, economics aside, has moral obstacles to overcome.
