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  • Popular Culture and Democratic Politics
  • Elspeth H. Brown (bio)
John Bodnar , Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American FilmBaltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. 284 pp.
Judith E. Smith , Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960New York: Columbia UP, 2004. 444 pp.

Academics are rarely asked to review such closely related histories. Both of these works, by senior historians of the United States exemplify some of the exciting possibilities-and pitfalls-when social historians analyse the politics of culture. Both works consider the relationship between representation, democratic politics, and working-class life in twentieth-century America. Influenced by recent works in U.S. history that consider the relationship between class formation and culture, both projects see cultural representation as a site of political struggle, where new subjectivities are shaped in dialogue with popular culture forms. As John Bodnar argues in his introduction, political "negotiations take place over symbols and lifestyles in television narratives, movie features, or various forms of popular music" (xxvii). Bodnar focuses on Hollywood film and the representation of working-class Americans, while Smith's wider narrative frame reveals a rich intersectional analysis of democratic politics in a multiracial and multiethnic nation.

John Bodnar's Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film examines the representations of working people in Hollywood film from the 1930s through the 1970s. His goal is to read Hollywood's depictions of working-class lives against the ebb and flow of mainstream political ideas in this fifty-year time span. In making his selections, Bodnar chose films where "working people were protagonists of consequence" (xviii) [End Page 335] and which featured some of the recognizable working-class types that emerged in American film during these years, such as the boxer, the gangster, or the fallen woman. In films such as Public Enemy (1931), Knute Rockne, All American (1940), The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951), and Raging Bull (1980), Bodnar examines the "complex ways in which Americans imagined working people" (xvii).

Although clearly influenced by the work of Michael Denning, Lary May, and others who have historicized the relationship between politics and culture in this period, Bodnar gently critiques this historiography for failing to account for the wide range of Hollywood films that "did not speak directly to debates between labour and capital . . . or simply validate the ideals of conservative political formations at a given time" (xxi). Bodnar wants a history that can account for the cultural resonance of figures such as Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski, a brutish working-class figure whose legibility relies neither on the legacy of Popular Front politics nor the discourse of Cold-War containment. In an effort to broaden the political frame against which these filmic representations are read, Bodnar returns to the classic American political traditions of liberalism, illiberalism, and democracy. The book seeks to show the endurance of what Bodnar calls "traditional politics" (xxviii) in the representation of America's working classes, despite the demise, for example, of mass democratic mobilizing in American politics outside the frame of film.

Bodnar explores the relationship between American politics and filmic representations of working people through five chapters. His first chapter, on the 1930s, concerns the question of how to reconcile liberalism and its dependence upon the individual with the era's mass democratic politics. Here, Bodnar sees some the era's gangster and boxer movies, such as Public Enemy (1931) and Kid Galahad (1937), as exemplars of the liberal emphasis on upward mobility and individual action, even if crime is the only way out. In contrast, in movies such as Our Daily Bread (1934), working-class protagonists choose the democratic alternative to liberal individualism by staying in their communities and leading social justice campaigns for fellow workers. In this chapter, the contrast between liberal individualism and democratic politics is starkly rendered; Bodnar argues that neither the films, nor the period in which they were made, resolved the contradiction between these two political modes. [End Page 336]

In two chapters on the 1940s, Bodnar argues that, during the war, the "vast discourse about the promises and pitfalls of liberalism was suspended" (55). Instead, ideals of American democracy were reformulated as...

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