Mariyanthie Linaris

It would be inaccurate to say that we are not all confined by the definitions of class all around us; class structures constrict almost every aspect of our lives, from whom we associate with, who we marry, where we go. The list goes on. And all of this is especially prominent living in New York. We see every class division from the population below the poverty line, the struggling lower class, the stable middle class, and the flourishing upper class.

For those who might not be so exposed to the wide range of social divisions, art is a huge part in passing along information. Art can either perpetuate class stereotypes or break the mold and offer a different perspective. This is not a new concept; film and theater have been influencing the population for years. Personally, I remember watching My Fair Lady at a very young age and gathering from it that the rich and poor will never be on an even playing field, that the poor are basically a game to be bet on. Then I saw Annie Get Your Gun, where Annie Oakley, a dirty girl who is just “doin’ what comes naturally,” wins over the hearts of the high society people and makes a name for herself despite her financial status. Clearly, different works portray classism in different ways.

Take Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, for instance. The film follows Bud Fox on his journey to become a successful stockbroker. The film enables classic stereotypes of the upper and middle classes. Through the morally ambiguous actions of Gordon Gekko, Bud’s “role model,” Stone perpetuates the stereotype that the rich lie and cheat their way up the social and economic ladder. The middle class is represented through Bud’s father, Carl Fox, a hard working blue-collar worker who encourages his son to do the morally right thing. The film’s representation of the middle class enables the population to believe that all middle class people are honest, hard working people who look out for each other.

Now compare Stone’s film with Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese. Taxi Driver follows Travis Bickle, an insomnia ridden former United States Marine turned late night taxi driver. Clearly, this film paints a very (very) different picture of the lower/middle class. With all the robberies and prostitution and all that good stuff, Scorsese translates the idea that the lower class people are definitely not always the honest, hard working people we like to believe they are; instead, we are left with the idea that these people will do anything for money, regardless of the social norms of right and wrong. But wait, I thought that was just for the wealthy upper class people (according to Oliver Stone)? Apparently not. While Stone perpetuated the stereotypes of the upper and lower classes, Scorsese rebelled against them, proving that no one, upper class or lower class, is above lying and cheating your way to a pay day.

God of Carnage, by Yasmina Resa, was pretty wild from start to finish. The play centers around Veronique and Michael Reille and Annette and Alain Vallon, two sets of parents in France who attempt (strong emphasis on attempt) to discuss their sons’ altercation. Both couples seem to be higher-class people. The discussion starts calmly, but quickly takes a sharp turn to borderline violent. People are vomiting all over the place, cell phones receive a watery grave, wives attack their husbands, and the matter of a toothless boy with a swollen lip remains unaddressed. In my mind, I thought these high society people would calmly discuss the issue over some wine and cheese perhaps, but their behavior deteriorates to that of three year olds fighting over the last red crayon in the supplies basket. God of Carnage makes its audience realize that high society people are not always as put together as we may believe they are and can actually fight dirty.

Clearly, different windows offer different views inside, but we cannot rely on one window to give us the clearest, fullest view.

PS: Why does this website act like everything is being posted like four hours ahead? It is 11:47pm, not 3:47am, eportfolios.

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.

Artists have a tremendous influence on their viewers. They can manipulate points of view, show us things they want us to see and completely blind to things they don’t want us to see. One of the subjects that artists clearly manipulate to convey their message is class distinctions.

The different classes: poor, middle, upper, have extreme baggage associated with them. We, as observers, have many pre-conceived notions, stereotypes when we view people from any class. The poor are struggling to survive, especially in big cities, like New York. We always see the homeless people on the street, sleeping under some disgusting shelter, on some filthy sidewalk where people spit, dropped their cigarettes, and where maybe animals have peed. When we see those poor people struggling even though they’re extremely tired, we can’t help but feel sorry for them and want to help them. But why then don’t we help them even though they’re clearly in our sight?

The middle class is viewed as hard-working people that jobs from garbage men to stock brokers. They have to make a living day in and day out, but also then have to go back to their families. Most of us can relate to them, as we are middle class. The viewers usually like the middle class the most, because they aren’t greedy, deceptive, and have good morals usually, However, is that always the case?

Then, there is the conniving, superficial, greedy assholes, the upper, wealthy class. They are the suppressors of the middle and poor classes. You cannot say that you are a middle class person until you’ve had an experience when you’ve wanted to punch one of their kind in the face. I’ve heard of well-dressed people steal waiters’ tips off of tables. In Stone’s Wall Street, Gekko is seen as a clear upper class man, who has all the money in the world. And because of these stereotypes, we hate him.

While one mission of the artist is to show us these recurring themes, the bigger mission is to show us what happens behind the scenes, away from our eyes. Nothing is straightforward. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver enlightened the viewers to the true natures of some classes. The poor are not just the ones struggling to make it; they are also the ones involved in crime, drugs, and prostitution. Iris has to do something to cover her butt, so she gets involved with prostitution. Maybe even a bigger surprise to us is Travis’ behavior as a middle class man. He does have some good morals, as he wants to change the city, clean it up. Scorsese shows us the middle class is not pure either as Travis becomes a murderer, even though his true intentions are to better the live of people that need help, like Iris.

The plight of an art is dig for muck in the social classes, as the muckrakers did during the Progressive era. They expose the underlying motives and happenings in social classes that we, as the viewers, probably won’t expect. Therefore, a question is raised: are there really any genuine, distinct social classes?

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.

Artists know how much of an influence they have on their spectators, and so they like to bring up important world issues even to their audience members who are at the ripe age of… 5 years old? That’s right, sometimes even younger. Social class distinctions play a role in just about EVERY piece of artwork. Sometimes the class structures are shown explicitly, such as in Robin Hood, where children from a young age learn that the rich guys? They’re evil sadists who take money from the poor and sit in their castles all day counting their gold. While the poor people? They’re honest and humble hard working citizens who just need a hero like Robin to get back their money for them. Who knew that stealing and committing crimes would be such a fantastic idea!?

Other times, a piece of art can suggest the distinctions of class more implicitly, such as in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’ Portrait of a young peasant girl. Although the title clearly labels the girl as a peasant, her smile captures the piece of art and makes the viewer grow fond of her; and as her ragged clothes, dirty face and tired eyes slowly make their way into our view, emotions of anger and sadness as well as questions as to why she is so poor takes over. What heartless animals would let this happen to this precious little girl?

Whether art is depicting class distinction in the explicit view or the implicit one, I found that there are generally two themes that aritsts choose from when reinforcing class structures. The first theme is that the people with less money are the hardworking innocent ones who can’t seem to catch a break, while the rich people are selfish and greedy thieves that will stop at nothing to make more money. This is greatly portrayed in the movie Wall Street, where Charlie Sheen’s character Bud Fox devotes his life to getting out of the never-ending cycle of being a middle class citizen. Oliver Stone creates many contrasts through out the movie that compare the middle and upper classes, such as the unorganized and messy one bedroom apartment that Bud lived in versus his designed multi million dollar condo that had a beautiful view, as well as his crowded cubicle in comparison to the rich businessman Gordon Gekko’s spacious and beautiful office. Just when you think Stone couldn’t make his view any more clear, he adds a scene where a man in a suit and tie is standing next to a homeless man. Stone’s film very obviously emphasizes class structure, and his choice of making the rich guy a villain and Bud’s father Carl, an old caring father who works hard in his blue collar job, the middle class man, appeals to a middle class audience, and greater reinforces the idea driven into our minds as children when we watched Robin Hood over and over again.

The second theme makes Robin Hood the “bad guy”. The artist presents the poor as dangerous criminals with no morals, and was strongly portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver. Filled with prostitutes, pornography and murder, the film compared the lower, middle and upper classes, making the lower class look like an abomination in comparison to the people in the middle and upper classes who are doing bigger and better things and have their lives together. It is clear that the poor are stuck in a vicious cycle as the movies main character, Travis Bickle, becomes mentally worse though out the film, and when things seem to be going up as he meets Betsy, a middle class citizen, it does not last long and Travis plunges time after time into new all time lows; becoming a murderer and attempting to assassin the upper class man in the film, Presidential Candidate Palantine.

Class is an inevitable structure in everyday life and as art is a representation and part of the culture of a society, class distinctions and even a lack of class distinctions in a piece of artwork express the ideas and opinions of the artist. As a young girl I’ve always said I’d wish I’d have a job where I could be influential to a large group of people (now I’m going for speech pathology so I guess that didn’t exactly work out), but since the artists of the past and the present did get that chance of being an influence, they’re using that power to talk about serious global affairs, even if their audience are 5 year old kids.