FILMS GO FOR BROKE
Where do we learn poverty is shameful and dangerous? At the movie theatre
The well-to-do wife of Steven Mnuchin, U.S. treasury secretary, former actress Louise Linton, recently shared a heated exchange on Instagram over photographs of her wearing (and flaunting) expensive clothing brands. Linton, who once gave an interview about the dozens of diamonds and other jewels she would be wearing to wed Mnuchin, asked the commenter if she had “given more to the economy than me and my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes OR in self-sacrifice to your country?” and concluded with a final barb: “Your life looks cute.”
Not a big surprise: After all, Linton and Mnuchin are both creatures of Hollywood, a territory none too friendly to poor people.
In the entirety of U.S. cinema, there are fewer than 300 movies that significantly concern themselves with poverty or homelessness. Often, movies that seem to be about poor people are actually about rich people. If you know My Man Godfrey, Oliver Twist or My Own Private Idaho, you may remember them as being about, respectively, a Depression-era hobo, a hungry orphan boy or two homeless hustlers. But in each instance, the central character is actually a rich man in poor drag.
The Soloist appears to be about a homeless Juilliard-trained musician played by Jamie Foxx. But the narrative actually centres on the reporter (Robert Downey Jr.) and how he finds new meaning in his work, saves his marriage and repairs his relationship with his son — all thanks to the Important Lessons he learns by helping Foxx. It’s one way in which old doctrines show themselves, counselling us to aid The Poor because it’s a way to achieve our own salvation.
When the main characters are genuinely destitute, they are often objects of fear. C.H.U.D. is one notorious case, in which homeless men literally rise up from the sewers to slaughter the upper classes. While many horror flicks with “vagrants” as the villain were made in the 1980s, the bigotry that inspired them endures: Kevin Drum recently insisted it is “perfectly understandable” to be disgusted by homeless people.
Poor people on film are often irredeemable and irresponsible. Precious purports to care about its characters but nonetheless traffics in the ugliest racist stereotypes about welfare recipients and poor AfricanAmericans.
Alternatively, poor people onscreen are broken and need to be fixed (The Saint of Fort Washington, Being Flynn), or lost and in need of rescue, as with movies (Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers) that feature a Nice White Lady coming to inspire and save black and brown children, who merely need to be motivated so they can improve their lot. These stories are especially insidious because they teach viewers that poverty, as HUD Secretary Ben Carson said recently, is a “state of mind” rather than a condition we create through our politics and public policy. In the movies, poverty is rooted in individual failure (or in one dramatic, tragic event), and the larger political and economic forces that constrain people’s opportunities are absent.
The Grapes of Wrath, still among the best movies about poverty, shows audiences rural families in need. So does The Glass Castle, along with better films like Winter’s Bone, Frozen River and Wendy and Lucy. But these conform to their own pattern: When movie poverty is rural, it is white (with exceptions, like Ballast and George Washington). And this white, rural poverty is much more likely to be portrayed sympathetically. As recent events remind us — from the extravagant efforts mainstream media have made to humanize racist, homophobic, and xenophobic white Trump voters, to violent public rallies by neo-Nazis — we still inhabit a white supremacist culture.
The newly released
The Glass Castle, based on author Jeannette Walls’s memoirs of growing up poor, offers a fresh opportunity to watch whiteness work, given how much it deviates from the book to make the alcoholic father blameless and the neglectful mother merely eccentric. It softens this family’s poverty in a common way, too.
The Glass Castle takes a brutally unsentimental, cleareyed accounting of growing up poor and turns it into a maudlin movie about a woman’s troubled relationship with her father and their reconciliation. And another opportunity to show movie audiences something about the reality of poverty in the United States is squandered.