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  • The Celluloid Economy
  • Kathy M. Newman
The American Ruling Class Directed by John Kirby Bullfrog Films, 2007
The People Speak Co-directed by Chris Moore, Anthony Arnove, and Howard Zinn Voices of A People's History of the United States, 2010
What's the Economy for, Anyway? Directed by David Batker and John de Graaf Bullfrog Films, 2010

Will the revolution be televised? Or will it simply be turned into a commercially successful radical documentary, of the sort distributed by companies like Bullfrog Films and the History Channel? Over the last ten years, scholars (such as Nick Couldry and James Curran, authors of Contesting Media Power) who study the relationship between media and dominant power structures have urged critics and audiences to consider the power of alternative media. We get a glimpse of that potential in three recent documentaries that take on some of the central questions about how economic power works in American society.

The question of whether or not America has a ruling class makes for a provocative "documentary musical," The American Ruling Class. Lewis H. Lapham, just before giving up the reins of Harper's Magazine in 2006, wrote the script as a latter-day fairy tale about two fictional graduates of Yale University who can't decide if they "want to rule the world, or save it."

The film is quirky—a kind of inverted reality show, in which the characters are fictional but the circumstances are real. As the opening disclaimer explains, "any resemblance to real life is entirely intentional." One of the Yalies—Jack, from a wealthy family—accepts an offer to work for Goldman Sachs after graduation. The other Yale man—Mike, from a more modest background—works as a waiter and wants to be a writer. Mike is the character we are rooting for to save the world, and most of the film consists of Mike's tour of the ruling class, from Wall Street to Hollywood to Mexico. Along the way, the two young men meet an astonishing number of actual members [End Page 106] of the ruling class—including Bill Bradley; James A. Baker, III; Lawrence H. Summers; and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.—most of whom deny the existence of their own kind. Mike also meets some of the great progressive intellectuals and artists, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Kurt Vonnegut, and Robert Altman. At the end of the film, one of our country's greatest living treasures, Pete Seeger, plays the banjo while walking Mike down the path to either his job interview at Goldman Sachs or something more noble—we're not entirely sure. What we are sure of, however, is that Lewis Lapham has an impressive rolodex. To see James A. Baker, III placidly deny the existence of a ruling class is to see something rather extraordinary indeed.

The music, Pete Seeger's included, is one of the most original elements of the film. There's an infectious dirge performed throughout the film about the "great and mighty Wurlitzer" (a reference to propaganda efforts of the CIA, if you follow that sort of thing), and a musical tribute to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. The music adds a sophisticated and absurdist element to something that occasionally feels too naïve—like a college student's senior thesis project—especially when the amateur actors playing the Yale men pontificate about the meaning of life. The question of whether or not those of us in the privileged middle and/or upper middle classes should work from the "inside" or the "outside" of the system seems less compelling during our current Great Recession, in which having any sort of work at all is a lucky break.

One of the most surreal moments in the film occurs when Mike takes a tour of the People's History of the United States with Howard Zinn. In this scene, Mike boards a streetcar to find that Zinn is his tour guide, and the world outside the streetcar becomes an animated version of Zinn's landmark history. This bizarre interlude hints at the larger film project Zinn was working on when The American Ruling Class was being made. At the turn of the millennium, Zinn...

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