Working Class in British Films 1950S-2000S : Identity, Culture, and Ideology
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University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 12-2011 Working class in British films 1950s-2000s : identity, culture, and ideology. Tongyun Shi 1961- University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Recommended Citation Shi, Tongyun 1961-, "Working class in British films 1950s-2000s : identity, culture, and ideology." (2011). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1320. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/1320 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WORKING CLASS IN BRITISH FILMS 1950s-2000s: IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND IDEOLOGY By Tongyun Shi B.A., Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1984 M.A., University of Warwick, 1991 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Humanities University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky December 2011 Copyright 2011 by Tongyun Shi All rights reserved WORKING CLASS IN BRITISH FILMS 1950s-2000s: IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND IDEOLOGY By Tongyun Shi B.A., Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1984 M.A., University of Warwick, 1991 A Dissertation Approved on October 14, 2011 By the following Dissertation Committee: Robert St. Clair, Dissertation Director Annette Allen Dennis Hall Steve Sohn ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my father. 111 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation could not have been finished without the help and support of many people who are gratefully acknowledged here. First and foremost, I'm honored to express my deepest gratitude to my director, Dr. Robert N. St. Clair, for his constructive guidance, suggestions and valuable comments throughout this work. His kindness and encouragement has made me feel warm all the way through. He was always quick in responding to my emails. And his thorough and meticulous editing of this dissertation was most appreciated. I am also extremely grateful to Dr. Annette Allen and Dr. Osborne P. Wiggins for their support and guidance over the past five years, and Dr. Allen's willingness to participate in my dissertation and her strenuous effort in helping to revise my writing. I would also like to thank the other committee members, Dr. Dennis Hall and Dr. Steve Sohn, for their comments and assistance. Thanks are also due to other teachers in this PhD in Humanity program, Prof. Elaine O. Wise, Dr. Pamela Beattie, Dr. Guohua Chen, Dr. Jian Zhang, Dr. Li Jin, Dr. Youzhong Sun, Dr. Yi'an Wu, and Dr. Zaixin Zhang, whose inspiring teaching broadened my horizon. I am also greatly indebted to Dr. Xiujie Sun, who helped to make this PhD program possible and offered a lot oftimely help to us. Additionally, J am very IV grateful for the friendship of all of the members of this PhD program. I warmly thank Zhenping Wang, Y~uan Ding, Qin Ma and Heng Wang for their valuable advice and friendly help. lowe my loving thanks to my dear husband, Bin Wang, for his love, support and understanding, and to my daughter, Yining Wang, for her support and blessing during all my hard years in doing the doctoral study and finishing this dissertation. And last but not least, I am thankful to my parents and all the family members for their thoughtfulness and encouragement. v ABSTRACT WORKING CLASS IN BRITISH FILMS 1950s-2000s: IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND IDEOLOGY Tongyun Shi October 14, 20 II Britain was the first country to industrialize with the Industrial Revolution and therefore had the world's first industrial working class. In the 20 th century, the traditional British working class went through many social and political changes, represented especially by the post-war "rise" and a lasting "decline" since the 1970s, a fate which is worth academic study. Class matters not only in sociological sense, but also in cultural sense. This dissertation, through close text analysis of seven British social realist films--two New Wave ones, Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); three bleak ones by independent directors, High Hopes (Mike Leigh, 1988), My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985), and Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach, 2002); and two commercial comedies, Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996) and The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), explores major themes in the screen representation of British working class from the 1950s to the present and analyzes the changes from the theoretical framework of British Cultural Studies, probing into the relationship between identity, power, the impact of ideology and VI cultural resistance behind the working-class identities. It also adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding and evaluation of the cultural identity of British working class, with sociological and historical understanding of the issue of class and working class provided. The dissertation concludes that the British working class screen identity has transformed from an image of masculine energy, pride and dignity of the 1950s and 1960s to "underclass" collective shame and loss of respect in the 1990s and 2000s. The shift reflects changes in fundamental attitudes in British post-war society from welfare egalitarianism to the neo-liberal enterprise culture. The cinematic representation has reflected and reinforced dominant ideological position, but at the same time conveyed more left-wing progressive views. The dissertation therefore calls for cultural policy support for socially purposive British national cinema to keep social realism as a democratization of representation of national cultural life as well as a sustained concern for working-class dignity. Key Words: working class; films; Britain; cultural studies; identity; ideology; vii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................ iv ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................. vi CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 1 The Research Significance and Issue of Study .................................................... 1 Thesis Statement .................................................................................................. 7 British Social Realism Tradition ......................................................................... 7 Research Methodology ...................................................................................... 13 Literature Review .............................................................................................. 15 Thesis Structure ................................................................................................. 24 II. BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES ON CLASS AND WORKING CLASS ........... 26 Culture: From Elitism to "A Whole Way of Life" ofPeople ............................ 28 Althusser on Ideology and Gramsci on Hegemony ........................................... 34 Stuart Hall and the CCCS .................................................................................. 41 The Marginalization of Class and the Moral Significance for the Study of Class ........................................................................................ 53 Key Concepts .................................................................................................... 56 III. CLASS AND WORKING CLASS IN BRITAIN: ................................................. 63 SOCIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING ............................. 63 Defining and Classifying Class and Working Class .......................................... 64 Looking at Class: Britain--A Class or Classless Society? ................................. 74 The Rise and Decline of British Working Class ................................................ 95 The rise and decline of working-class politics ............................................... 96 Transformation in working and living conditions ........................................ 107 The "Underclass" and Devaluation ................................................................. 118 IV. WORKING CLASS IDENTITY IN NEW WAVE FILMS .................................. 125 viii From the Grierson Documentary Movement to the New Wave ...................... 126 Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959) ............................................................ 140 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960) .............................. 151 Working-class Identity in New Wave Films: Theme Analysis ........................ 162 V. WORKING-CLASS IDENTITY IN FILMS OF LOACH, LEIGH AND FREARS ........................................................................................ 178 Thatcherism and the Working Class ................................................................ 180 Mike Leigh and High Hopes (1988) ................................................................ 183 Leigh and his films ......................................................................................