The tone was upbeat, and because no great confrontation with the State or the Market was called for, the movies left viewers hopeful and optimistic. Typically, a combination of sturdy bourgeois virtues (industriousness, thrift, temperance) plus a soupçon of luck was all that was required. the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan, the ballad of the street” (I: 67-68), and early moviemakers heeded his call.ģIf the problems posed by the films were social, the solutions were nearly always personal. “I embrace the common,” announced Emerson, “I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Would they lose their jobs? Could they feed their children? Suppose illness or accident struck? What daily humiliations did they endure? What if they got in trouble with the law? From these concerns, concrete and mundane but resonating powerfully with audiences, moviemakers concocted innumerable plots, mostly sentimental ( Gold Is Not All, 1910) but sometimes harsh and unforgiving ( Musketeers of Pig Alley, 1912).
Indeed, the preoccupations of the urban poor drove the young movie industry, which in film after film depicted the poor’s deprivations and fears, hopes and joys. In an era when the nation was transformed by industrialization and immigration, movies conceived poverty very largely as an urban phenomenon. The movies’ poor, however, were not just any poor.
Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Blackstone Rangers” PrologueĢ“For the poor always ye have with you” (John 12:8), cautioned Jesus, and early moviemakers took this maxim to heart, using the plight of the poor as the core of numerous films. “Living in the richest country in the world, wouldn’t you think you’d have a better life?”
Subsequent white underclass movies followed this pattern, but more recently the American Dream has reasserted itself in popular underclass films, sounding a more positive note. During the silent and Depression eras, movies featured the urban poor prominently, but afterwards their role drastically shrunk and did not regain its place until the black underclass films of the 1990s, which, in a softened version of ‘60s radical critiques, redefined the deserving poor as rejecting the dominant socioeconomic system in favor of an often hedonistic rebellion. Movies have tended to portray poverty as environmentally caused and sustained, often directing ambitious characters toward criminality with a to-understand-all-is-to-forgive-all logic. “Menace II Society?” investigates cinematic portrayals of American urban poverty and the urban underclass as part of an ongoing public discourse on the nature of the urban poor, the causes and conditions of their poverty, and the appropriate responses from society.
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