In today’s society there is a distinct separation between the social classes. Those of the upper class are depicted as wealthy, distinguished, well-groomed individuals. Those who find themselves in the lower class are shown as poor, unkempt, and inferior. This separation is only reinforced with portrayals in movies and television and has been done so since visual media has been about.
In My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison for example, Audrey’s character Eliza is the loud, rude flower girl with a Cockney accent. You know she is poor just from looking at her drab, dark clothing and the dirt on her face. 
Harrison’s character Professor Higgins on the other hand is a wealthy man as seen from his neatly pressed pants to his clear, eloquent voice. The media also has a way of showing that those in the lower class need to be reformed because they are so inferior, they must be taught to work to improve their lives. With My Fair Lady this can be seen by Harrison’s attempts to teach Eliza to be a proper lady so she can fit in with high society. The film also depicts the upper class as something lower class people should strive to, Eliza for example takes no offense to Harrison’s proposal to teach her, and in fact she wants it.
The media also reinforces the idea that the upper class is made of shallow, ruthless, and lowly human beings. Many writers and directors have been proving the saying that ‘all that is gold does not glitter’. This is easily shown in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, Wall Street starring Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas. Sheen’s character Bud is a stockbroker who dreams of being rich and powerful like Douglas’ character Gordon Gecko. By working with Gecko, Bud abandons his morals and commits corporate espionage, using insider secrets to earn millions on the stock market. At the end of the film, Bud regains his morals but ends up in jail for insider trading.
One of the film’s most iconic scenes is when Bud gets his new Upper East Side penthouse renovated. Workers are seen painting moldings to make them look like marble, plaster made to look like brick to add class to the room. It shows how the upper class lives in this calm façade of happiness and superiority. Bud’s upscale apartment is a façade and his expensive suits a far cry from his humble blue-collar beginnings. Yet one can’t help but wonder as to this scene’s deeper meaning. Does showing the apartment as fake show that Bud was never truly an upper classman? That being truly apart of the ‘1 percent’ is something that is simply unattainable?
This can be seen not only in movies and TV but in novels as well. One classic example of this would be F. Scoot Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The main character Jay Gatsby is a very rich man living in Long Island where even though he is wealthy, he does not fit in with those around him. He is considered different because his wealth was not inherited but rather earned. Gatsby has no royal relatives or rich parents and is therefore excluded from being truly apart of the upper class.
The media plays a very important role in determining class structures in society. That is because they present them to us in a way that makes us favor one over the other. In some cases being an upper classman is something people admire and strive to be apart of. On the other hand it is seen as many character’s downfalls as they are drawn into worlds of greed and excess. These portrayals greatly affect class structures because they influence our opinions of them. In a way, filmmakers and writers are inadvertently telling us what to feel about class. The reality is there are so many different perspectives of social structure that it’s hard to tell which is really true.
