In 1974, Steppenwolf Theater, having adopted their name from the Hermann Hesse novel, put on their first season of plays. Originally published in 1927, this choice of the company name from the Hesse book was more spontaneous than illustrative of any particular influence. They needed a name, and Ricky Argosh, the director of the first production, was holding the novel in his hand when founding member Gary Sinise decided they should have a title for their fledgling theater collective. But it was a reflection of the plea for self-examination of Hesse’s protagonist and the intellectual hypocrisy of the Weimar-era setting of the book.[1]
Jeff Perry and Gary Sinise, soon joined by Terry Kinney, started out in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and began a journey that has taken them from putting on theater in malls and church basements, to national recognition as one of the most highly regarded theater companies in the United States. Influenced by the films of John Cassavettes and his sense of voyeuristic naturalism, and the ethos of The Group Theater, which embodied the voice of social drama in the 1930s, these three founders expanded into a company of actors, directors, and designers that have contributed over forty-five years of uniquely American theater that has added to a national conversation about American issues, including those addressed in this project: wealth and poverty. How so? In a study of the mechanics, goals, and results of Steppenwolf’s development over its decades of making American theater and undertaking outreach to the wider community, psychologist Bob Harlow identifies a set of core values held by the group that included the idea of building a new kind of theater where artists (not administrators) drove decision making, and the organization prioritized the cultivation of new voices and new artists. This is coupled with a sense of responsibility to the theatrical and cultural community.
Martha Lavey, who served as the long-time Artistic Director for Steppenwolf, was instrumental in setting out these core values. Under her leadership, the group increased the level of the intellectual conversation to be found within its walls, favoring scripts that evidenced substantial societal debates, especially of the responsibilities and culpability of the upper-middle-classes. As she explained: “Steppenwolf began as a conversation among artists. … The ensemble members envisioned their role as speaking from a platform to an audience. There has been an evolution over the past number of years [to] where it now feels like a conversation with a community, where our role is the activation of a public discourse.”[2]
How does theater move beyond its limitations to break through the fourth wall and inspire change? Presentation of wealth and poverty connects to cultural politics by presenting its audiences with portrayals of struggling Americans left behind and then asking “what can we do about it?” Charles Isherwood asked “Can art save the day? More specifically, can theater rouse the populace from a sense of numbed anxiety? Can a stage play change minds, or help channel passive beliefs into active commitment? Art’s ability to stir activism, an argument for the possibility of real impact.”[3]
Steppenwolf Theater of Chicago has done something unique: they have created a thriving, living theater over forty-five years that has evolved artistically, spiritually, and in its financial approach to keeping its doors open. That commitment to a larger purpose, to theater that matters, to theater that challenges its audience and its community to look at these issues through the lens of provocative plays and consider if they themselves are part of the solution or part of the problem – and still be wildly entertaining and worth the price of admission – is rare. The Group Theater itself collapsed from infighting and lack of funding. However, Steppenwolf has not only survived, but thrived. Why? What sets them apart from a thousand other well-intentioned and passionate groups of actors looking to change the world, only to eventually bend their knees to the prohibitive economic reality of American theater? There are many fine regional theaters in the United States, but this one has been especially well-served through good times and bad times by its mission to show its audience fellow Americans who refuse to be categorized by tropes social scientists are rejecting about the notion of a “monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty.”[4] And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation. As Alice O’Connor points out, the “war on poverty” instead, became a war on the poor.[5] The unique ability of live theater to allow audience members to see themselves in the characters onstage while alone in a darkened theater; to walk out of a performance feeling an identification with a troubled soul they had just witnessed struggling to cope with systemic racism, or the crushing weight of poverty, is distinct. Bearing witness to our common humanity is live theater’s magic, its essence, and its power to promote change.
In my conversation with him, Terry talks about Steppenwolf’s approach to issues of wealth and poverty, and gender and race in the troop’s development, while also commenting on the American government’s lack of commitment to the arts, and how theater goes forward in the age of Covid.
The influence on Steppenwolf of the Group Theater, the ensemble created in the 1930s as the first not-for-profit theater collective during the height of the Depression, speaks to a shared vision of theater that matters, and a combination of entertainment and larger purpose. As Terry Kinney explains in the video, Steppenwolf actors self-identified as working-class kids born of working-class parents, and wanted to specifically perform plays by writers who focused on the kind of people they themselves felt they were. Why theater, and why Chicago, instead of dreams of film and Los Angeles? Steppenwolf inspiration, Harold Clurman, a founder of the Group Theater, argued that a play was different from a movie, or a radio broadcast, in that a play pretended to affect one’s heart, and awaken a social conscience. “In the end, however, the development of playwrights, actors, repertory and the rest are important only as they lead to the creation of a tradition of common values, an active consciousness of a common way of looking at and dealing with life.”[6]
The three founding members were soon joined by John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Al Wilder, Moira Harris, H.E. Baccus, Joan Allen, and designer Kevin Rigdon. The working-class roots of this core group came through in their fierce depiction of the “communal spirit” that John Steinbeck wrote of. Steinbeck, in his series of articles, The Harvest Gypsies, written in 1936, focused on the plight of migrant workers of California’s Central Valley, a struggle Steppenwolf captured in productions of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men, directed by Terry Kinney.
Now in its fifth decade as a professional theatre company, Steppenwolf has received unprecedented national and international recognition, including a series of Tony Awards and The National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government. In Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago: In Their Own Words, theater historian John Mayer describes what started out as three teenage boys from corn-country Illinois, and became a national institution: “What Steppenwolf Theatre Company has accomplished is truly remarkable – here were some high-school students who had a dream, and they had no idea where it would take them. Look where they’ve ended up. They have become the model for the start-up of so many other companies. I compare it to Apple starting out in a garage and growing into Apple computers. That’s what Steppenwolf is to theater.”[7]
Anna Shapiro, Steppenwolf’s current artistic director, cites a contemporary priority of “expanding the ensemble and nurturing new voices. We have to create more opportunities for young and diverse artists to work with us,” she said. “We want the art we make to look more like the world we all live in. Steppenwolf had a really homogeneous origin that does not reflect its interests now. We have an organic process now about what kind of conversations we want to be in, and we want those conversations to be wider and include more people.”[8]
Through their Community Partnership model, which seeks to build authentic and mutually beneficial relationships and bring Steppenwolf’s programming outside of their theater walls, Steppenwolf aims to provide no-cost, barrier-free programming and establish long-term partnerships with community organizations working to empower Chicago youth through the arts. For four years, part of that outreach, Steppenwolf Education, has toured its acclaimed Steppenwolf for Young Adults productions to detained and incarcerated youth in juvenile justice facilities. Also, BUILD, Inc. has been an important part of Steppenwolf Education’s work, bringing students from West Side Chicago communities to Steppenwolf and Steppenwolf to them. This program provides a lifeline to the youth they serve.
[1] John Mayer, Steppenwolf Theater of Chicago: In Their Own Words (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 14.
[2] Bob Harlow, Thomas Alfieri, Aaron Dalton and Anne Field, Building Deeper Relationships: How Steppenwolf Theater Company Is Turning Single-Ticket Buyers Into Repeat Visitors, (New York: The Wallace Foundation, 2011), 45, 57.
[3] Charles, Isherwood, “The Culture Project and Plays That Make a Difference,” The New York Times, September 3, 2006, 35.
[4] Patricia Cohen, “Culture of Poverty Makes a Comeback,” The New York Times, October 17, 2010, 32.
[5] Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 197.
[6] Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the 30s, (New York: De Capo Press, Inc., 1975), 68-69.
Ronald Reagan entered office in January of 1981 facing a longstanding economic crisis, characterized by stagflation and rising unemployment. In his inaugural address, Reagan presented a diagnosis of the calamity, hinted at a plan of action to overcome it, and projected a vision of future prosperity and national renewal. Half a century before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had responded to the miseries of the Great Depression by expanding the role of the government in the everyday life of citizens, endowing it with a new role as caretaker. He created new agencies and programs which together established the New Deal welfare state. Reagan took a drastically different approach to national economic hardship. “In this present crisis,” he asserted, “government is not the solution to our problem: government is the problem.”
If government was the problem, then what was the solution? In direct contrast to what he saw as a bloated, intrusive, and stifling bureaucracy, Reagan presented the ideal of the free, enterprising, creative individual. He evoked an exalted national past which he aspired to revive, an America whose flourishing was animated by the spirit of individualism:
If we look to the answer as to why, for so many years, we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here, in this land, we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth.
Appealing to a transcendent American “we,” Reagan negated other possibilities of collective formation and action for groups centered around class, race, and gender. What’s more, what distinguishes this “we,” for him, is an individualism marked by ‘negative’ liberty, or freedom from restraint (in economic terms, free-market capitalism). As opposed to a collectivist understanding that places communal interest and identity above the desires of any one person, this view identifies anything beyond oneself as a mere limitation, something that gets in the way or holds one back. Reagan promoted a vision of the world where all significant action or toil fundamentally took place at the individual level, as did all true success and all due earning. This was a world where, with the government out of the way, every American citizen would have a fair and equal opportunity to build his or her own wealth, where the “unfettered, hardworking entrepreneur…living by the inexorable market laws of supply and demand, either fail[ed] the test or ma[de] a fortune.” It was a world where heroes were not confined to the movie screen, nor were they hard to find: great in number (though their greatness lay not in their numbers), they walked the streets of America every day.
Drawing on his long career as a Hollywood actor, the president expressed this ideology with romantic flourish. Indeed, if Reagan channeled his experience in the movies to dramatize these ideas, individualism featured on the silver screen as well. What do the major movies of the 1980s have to say about Reagan-era individualism? This essay answers this question by considering three Hollywood blockbusters, roughly spanning Reagan’s presidency: Rocky III (1982), Silkwood (1984), and Wall Street (1987). It pays attention to the role of class and how it informs each film’s position on the issue. In their depictions of the wealthy and the working class, how and to what extent do these movies affirm or challenge this individualist ethos? What particular meanings do they attribute to it? What do their representations of solitary struggle and/or communal solidarity suggest about American society at the time?
Given the many layers of meaning associated with individualism (see Table 1), it’s impossible to claim any single version as definitive. While these movies’ articulations are not identical, we will see that they often overlap. Furthermore, many aspects of individualism involve an oppositionto a collectivist value system. Thus I will also gauge how some form of collectivism appears in these movies, implicitly or explicitly. Beginning with a strident celebration and ending with a scathing critique of Reaganist individualism, we will see that even the most skeptical of these films attest to the powerful grip of this ideology in the 1980s.
Table 1.
Some elements of individualism I will be looking for in these movies (note that some of these include opposition to collective ideals):
A. A belief in self-reliance and self-interest, often with an opposition to relying on anyone but oneself. B. Conversely, a denial of obligation or duty towards anyone but oneself. C. A belief in the individual as the fundamentally meaningful social unit. D. A belief in the individual as the fundamental source of action; the denial of collective action. E. Heroization of the individual; in economic form, heroization of the self-made man/woman, or lone entrepreneur. F. In economic form, a belief in “money meritocracy,” or the idea that the economy is an even playing field where individuals prove their worth. This view identifies wealth with success and with moral merit.
Rocky III
The third installment of the Rocky series arrived in 1982 and became the highest grossing movie in the series up to that point. In it, Rocky Balboa fittingly finds himself with more wealth than he has ever had. His life is unrecognizable from what it had been in the original Rocky, when he worked as a loan-shark’s debt collector while earning practically nothing as an amateur boxer. He has gained fame and fortune. Leather jacket and jeans have been traded for finely tailored suits. He has left his blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood and brought his wife (Adrien) and trainer (Mickey) with him. The three of them, along with the couple’s child, now live in a lavish mansion, decked out with grand paintings, glass chandeliers, and expensive furniture. Rocky’s is a bonafide rags-to-riches success story. Meanwhile, his old friend and brother-in-law Paulie has seen no improvement in his economic standing. An early scene depicts Paulie’s sense of frustration at his immobility in comparison to Rocky’s success. A long night of drinking is followed by an interaction with a bartender who seems less interested in the man himself than in his connections to Rocky. Paulie wanders off into an arcade, nursing a half-pint of whiskey. Suddenly finding himself before a Rocky-themed pinball machine, he reaches the breaking point: he hurls his bottle at the arcade fixture in a jealous rage.
In the next scene, Rocky collects his hungover, half-drunk friend from a jail cell, and the conversation that follows clearly illustrates the film’s individualistic core. Paulie berates the boxer for neglecting to share any of his newfound wealth or offer him a job. He feels that his past good deeds towards Rocky (which he exaggerates) have gone unrepaid. He takes off a watch Rocky had gifted him and throws it on the ground. Rocky responds, “You talk like everybody owes you a living! Nobody owes nobody nothing. You owe yourself.” (WATCH 2:05-3:06)
It is necessary to take a step back from the story and reflect on the scene’s basic elements to grasp the cultural “work” it performs. We have here what are basically two moral positions, one of which is collectivist, stressing social obligations, and the other of which is individualist, arguing for self-reliance. Who embodies these positions? Rocky is a self-made man, a heroic underdog from humble beginnings who overcame the odds to achieve success (in the boxing ring, a metaphor for the playing-field of life, and in material terms). Paulie, on the other hand, is an envious and crude friend hurling insults and accusations. Rocky isn’t too far off when he calls his friend “a jealous, lazy bum.” But by giving Rocky and Paulie these two moral positions, Rocky III identifies the positions with these characters: heroic economic individualism takes the moral high ground, while the argument for social obligations appears as a cheap way of masking one’s own envy and lack of will-power and self-discipline to go out in the world and work hard for an honest living.
The Rocky series was individualist from the start. The very genre of the boxing-movie focuses on two individuals struggling to triumph within the ring. And Rocky, of course, has become a legendary example of the underdog story, another genre which lends itself to heroic expressions of individual worth. The success of the first Rocky–released during the presidency of Jimmy Carter who, in contrast to Reagan’s vision of abundance, stressed the need to ‘cut back’ and frugally accept economic limitations–demonstrates that such stories were equally inspiring prior to Reagan’s particular promotion of individualism.
However, the differences between the two films are instructive, and they reflect different individualist ideals between these two presidencies. Whereas the original film romanticized the working class, Rocky III romanticizes the self-made economic success story. Rocky isn’t rewarded with a stable fortune for his struggles until the third film. The first movie displays a self-esteem battered by economic hardship: Rocky hopes that by enduring a match with the legendary Apollo Creed, he can prove to himself that he’s not “just another bum from the neighborhood.” (WATCH 3:40-4:10). Acquiring a fortune has nothing to do with proving this in the first film. Yet in the third, his wealth has become that proof, distinguishing him from the “jealous, lazy bum” Paulie. As the scholar Chris Jordan observes, this shift between the films reflects a new focus on upward social mobility as a proof of individual right to socioeconomic privileges. If the working class still forms any part of Rocky’s identity, it is only in the sense of “where [he] came from” (something Rocky’s new trainer, Apollo Creed, constantly reminds him to remember WATCH 0:46-0:52). But “where [he] came from” does not matter to him as a hometown community: he is no longer a member of this collective. Rather, for Rocky III, the boxer’s origins mean a tough condition that he rose above, by his own hard work, just as he climbed up the socioeconomic ladder.
Silkwood
Set in Oklahoma, Silkwood is a working class drama about a woman’s efforts to combat the exploitation and corruption of her employer, a nuclear fuel production plant. With a limited release in late 1983 and wide release in early 1984, the movie is based on events which took place a decade earlier and generated a public controversy over the years: Karen Silkwood was a labor union activist who died in a mysterious car crash on her way to deliver evidence of corporate malpractice to a New York Times reporter. Her story first entered the public spotlight following her death, and it reappeared regularly as a result of lawsuits brought against the company, Kerr McGee, which eventually reached the Supreme Court. By the late 1970s, Karen Silkwood had become an icon for anti-nuclear and feminist groups who invoked her name in their protests.
The premise and themes of the film lend themselves perfectly to a collectivist critique of the idea of money meritocracy: a woman joins her company union in order to fight against the corporation’s exploitation of her working-class community. Arguably, the logic behind labor unions is that, due to the unequal power of the rich over the poor, workers need to join together in solidarity to negotiate for more equitable working conditions. However, the movie suffers from a paradoxical mixture of individualism and collectivism. Unlike Rocky III, no central characters exemplify individualism (and certainly not of the economic variety). Rather, the movie itself is structured by it: Silkwood derives its meaning through the celebration of an individual, without dedicating space to an exploration of the meaning or significance of her struggle. As a result, the film’s initially collectivist message remains half-baked.
Silkwood’s conflict emerges as Karen Silkwood comes to appreciate the grave threats to health posed by the plutonium she and her coworkers handle. The company had played down these dangers, but after Karen’s middle-aged friend gets exposed and undergoes a traumatizing emergency shower, her suspicions grow (WATCH). Then Karen discovers that her company has been shipping faulty and potentially deadly plutonium rods to their buyers in order to fulfill a contract deadline. After this discovery, she gets more involved in the union, joining its negotiating committee and even flying to Washington for a meeting with the national union. The national representatives assign her to dig up documented evidence of this malpractice, which they could share with a New York Times reporter for an exposé. She also begins keeping a notebook of employee mistreatment.
Yet her work for the collective good is overpowered by forces in the film that single her out. Her coworkers (including her boyfriend Drew and close friend Dolly), with whom she shared a harmonious relationship in the beginning, grow increasingly hostile towards her due to her union work. They treat her coldly and occasionally confront her directly. Dolly calls the national union representative an “outside agitator.” Another coworker accuses her of failing to scan herself for radiation, angrily shouting, “I hope you write it down in your little notebook every time you don’t [monitor yourself]. Along with the stuff about the rest of us!” It is as though she were the workers’ adversary, not their advocate. Others jibe at her trip to Washington, implying that she has taken on her activism out of vanity, thinking herself better than everyone else.
All of these accusations grant Karen an opportunity to justify herself, to respond that she wants to work for the collective good. Yet she never does. Besides a private conversation with her boyfriend (whom she asks, “You don’t give a shit if everyone in the plant is being poisoned?”), Karen never explicitly connects her union work with a desire to achieve communal wellbeing. Her activism continues to set her apart, to individuate her. The effect is amplified by the fact that the movie’s subject matter is not so much Karen’s activism, but Karen herself (consider the movie’s name). It presents her as a lone, embattled figure opposing ominous forces bigger than herself. In this sense, she shares similarities with Rocky: hers is an underdog story, but without the happy ending. The film makes her out to be a charmingly naive idealist, and the many unanswered arguments made against her seem to prevail in the end.
One review perceptively called Silkwood a “tissue” of “contradictory implications.” How do we explain these contradictions? The reviewer attributes it to the movie’s basis on a true story whose details were surrounded by controversy and multiple court cases: “rarely has the desperation to square inspirational myth with provable, nonlibelous reportage been more apparent.”
In addition to these pressures, I would argue that the answer lies in the film’s intended audience. As noted above, by 1978 Silkwood had already been made into an icon by anti-nuclear groups and some women’s rights activists (both largely represented by the middle-class). This association was not lost on one angry male reviewer, who cavalierly derided Silkwood for what he called “prefab antinuke, profeminist rhetoric.” Though aimed at a broader audience, the film was certainly made with these publics in mind, particularly the growing antinuclear crowd. This perhaps helps to explain Silkwood’s emphasis on an individual’s story over communal values, as well as its emphasis on the dangers of nuclear energy over the evils of class-based exploitation. Moreover, the movie’s release (1984) came at a time of falling union membership and rising anti-union sentiment. It came three years after President Reagan famously crushed the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike of over twelve thousand federal employees. Just as unions were losing strength and popularity, the anti-nuclear movement never managed to garner much support from organized labor. All of this serves to suggest why the film’s producers were more concerned with reproducing Silkwood as an iconic, martyred individual than as a participant in class struggle.
Wall Street
Wall Street goes further than Silkwood, delivering a scathing critique of unbridled economic individualism. The film centers on Bud Fox, an aspiring stockbroker taken under the wing of Wall Street veteran Gordon Gekko. Bud’s gradual seduction into Gekko’s shady exploits contrasts with the ideals of another figure in his life–his father Carl Fox, a laborer and union leader at Blue Star Airlines. Gekko and Fox represent two contrasting worldviews: ruthless individualism and loyal collectivism. These two characters provide the thematic center of the movie, and the narrative arc traces Bud’s rise as a protege under Gekko, his disillusionment to Gekko’s evil nature, his conversion to his father’s position, and an attempt at redemption.
The film hit theaters in 1987, towards the end of Reagan’s presidency. The 1980s had witnessed the “takeover movement” on Wall Street, where “corporate raiders” would buy up a company’s stock (typically with borrowed money) and liquidate the company to pay off these debts, effectively destroying the company while turning a profit. This development on Wall Street went hand in hand with a flurry of scandals and provoked some negative reactions in the press. The takeover movement reflected Reaganist economic individualism at its worst, and Gordon Gekko, Wall Street’s villain, embodies this spirit. In fact, screenwriter Stanley Weiser largely modeled Gekko’s character on Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn, two of the most notorious corporate raiders of the time.
Before his unmasking as a villain, Bud admires Gekko as a hero. Like Bud (and like Rocky) he came from humble beginnings: his father was an electrician. He is an outsider of sorts in the Wall Street world, as an eccentric self-made man. Gekko despises the “Harvard MBA types” who represent Wall Street’s majority: they come from ‘old money,’ and as such don’t have to earn their wealth like Gekko did. He thus presents a nuanced position on the idea of money meritocracy: while the economy doesn’t naturally distribute wealth according to individual merit, it still allows the upwardly-mobile individual to prove his merit through the accumulation of wealth.
Gekko elaborates his vision of work and society in a series of conversations with Bud. His philosophy abounds with contradictions, a result of his cynicism and self-justification. Take again the idea of money meritocracy. He seems to discredit the idea during a limo ride with Bud, for he rejects the idea that hard work alone brings monetary success (WATCH 0:11-0:54). He illustrates the point with the example of his working-class father. Yet Gekko then goes on to assert that you are either a multimillionaire “player, or nothing.” Looking out the window, he points towards a businessman and a homeless man, saying, “Are you gonna tell me the difference between this guy and that guy is luck?” (WATCH 1:05-1:13). If Gekko doesn’t believe all the rich deserve their wealth, he does blame the poor for their poverty. As in the case of Rocky, the businessman’s wealth sets him apart from the “bum” on the street. Gekko’s massive fortune–which he invites Bud to emulate–reflects his absolute superiority: a player, or nothing.
Wall Street attacks this ideology, and it does so implicitly (most famously in Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech) before Bud comes to his senses. Until then, Bud drinks it up. Meanwhile, Bud’s father represents an alternative, collectivist viewpoint. It is with this position that the film’s sympathies lie. Leader of his airline company’s maintenance workers’ union, he devotes himself to his men, with whom he identifies and sympathizes. His communal, class-based sympathies shine through when he tells his son: “Fare wars are killing us. Management’s gonna lay off five of my men this week. There’s nothing I can do about it.” Carl feels a moral duty to defend the welfare of his fellow workers, and he consistently connects this ideal to his union work, unlike Karen Silkwood.
These philosophies clash when Bud uses his dad’s connections at Blue Star Airlines to organize a meeting with its three union leaders (including his father), Gekko, and himself. Pointing out Blue Star’s ongoing losses and claiming that these will lead to bankruptcy, Bud and Gekko propose a deal: Gekko will buy up the company’s stock and install Bud as president, so that he can improve the company’s financial performance and avoid the destruction of unions that would come with bankruptcy. To make it profitable for Gekko in return, the unions would have to slash workers’ wages, which would be restored once the company began generating net profits. Unlike Bud, Carl Fox sees through Gekko, and says as much in accusation (WATCH). Carl identifies Gekko as a member of the ruling class whose riches derive from exploitation of the poor. He rejects the deal and leaves.
Humiliated, Bud runs out to apprehend his father. Though Bud conceived the deal with good intentions, Carl points out that Gekko is using him for profit. The ensuing argument reveals the father’s unswerving collectivism and the son’s arrogant economic individualism.
Bud: What I see is a jealous old machinist who can’t stand the fact that his son’s become more successful than he has!
Carl: What you see is a guy who never measured a man’s success by the size of his wallet!
Bud: That’s because you never had the guts to go out in the world and stake your own claim!
Bud continues to press his dad to agree, who continues to resist out of responsibility to his men. “Your f****** men! All my life, your men have been able to count on you! Why is it you’ve never been there for me, huh?” In fact, Bud’s father has been there for him. But this accusation successfully guilts Carl into budging. He lets the union membership decide, and they opt for the deal.
But Carl was right: Bud soon learns that Gekko plans to liquidate Blue Star. When Bud confronts him, Gordon’s bottomless cynicism comes fully to light (WATCH 2:11-3:15). He disdainfully mocks the idea that capitalism and equality are compatible: “You’re not naive enough to think we’re livin’ in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market, and you’re part of it.” In the end, Bud manages to save Blue Star through a complicated stock-market scheme. He goes to prison for insider trading, but he has redeemed himself. The film’s final comment comes from Carl, who advises Bud that the purpose of work is in giving, not gaining: “Stop going for the easy buck and produce something with your life. Create instead of living off the buying and selling of others.”
Conclusion
Rocky III, Silkwood, and Wall Street each represent a particular form of individualism and of collectivism. Considered chronologically, they show a progression from an endorsement of individualism and rejection of collectivism, to the opposite. Yet, it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that a similar shift in outlook took place within American public opinion at large. Instead, all three (in their own ways) attest to the immense appeal of individualism throughout the Reagan presidency.
Rocky III straightforwardly affirms this ethos. In the case of Silkwood, a struggle against worker exploitation, carried out through a collective body, reduces to a celebration of a lone hero’s bravery and idealism. Indeed, the story of Karen Silkwood had been given this meaning in the public sphere–in the papers and in memorials and protests–before the movie entered production. And Wall Street, despite its scathing critique of economic individualism, has had a paradoxical effect on audiences. The movie’s screenwriter regretfully reflected on this in a 2008 article, entitled “Repeat After Me: Greed is Not Good.” Over the years, young adults would tell him that the movie inspired them, and that they wanted to be like Gekko. Although Gekko stopped being a hero for Bud Fox, he remains one for many to this day. This enduring audience reaction leads us to conclude that Wall Street’s case for collectivism ultimately succumbs to the allure of heroic individualism as embodied by Gekko and the ambitious Bud Fox.
It is primarily through their impact on and reception by audiences that films shape the societies from which they emerge. Yet audiences are not blank slates: to their engagement with a movie, viewers bring a whole cache of ideas, beliefs, and past experiences. Inasmuch as these are acquired and modified through life, they are conditioned to some extent by a particular historical context, in which any given life is situated. Americans came together with the movies reviewed above during the pivotal presidency of Ronald Reagan. At this time, economic well-being was increasingly seen as the burden of the individual. As noted in the introduction, Reagan himself promoted this perception, in direct opposition to the tradition of state activism for the alleviation of poverty. This fading paradigm, established by FDR, rested on an acknowledgement of social responsibility for poverty, utilizing government channels to fulfill that duty. The individualism on display in Rocky III, Silkwood, and Wall Street reflected and reinforced a trend towards denial of that responsibility. Rocky, perhaps, captured this attitude best, when he said, “Nobody owes nobody nothing. You owe yourself.”
Bibliography
Avildsen, John G, dir. Rocky. 1976; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2004. DVD.
Berlin, Isaiah, Henry Hardy, and Ian Harris. Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Farber, Henry and Bruce Western. “Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Declining Union Organization.” British Journal of Industrial Relations 40, no. 3 (September 2002): 385-401.
Ho, Karen. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street.Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Immerwahr, Daniel. “Growth vs. the Climate” Dissent, Spring 2015.
Jordan, Chris. Movies and the Reagan Presidency: Success and Ethics. Westport: Praeger, 2003.
Joppke, Christian. Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy: A Comparison of Germany and theUnited States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
McCartin, Joseph. Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Aircraft Controllers, and the Strikethat Changed America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Nichols, Mike, dir. Silkwood. 1984; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD.
Orleck, Annelise and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, eds. The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History,1964-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.
Reagan, Ronald. “First Inaugural Address.” Speech, Washington DC, January 20, 1981. The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/reagan1.asp
Richards, Lawrence. “Union Free and Proud: America’s Anti-Union Culture and the Decline of Organized Labor.” Dissertation. University of Virginia. 2004.
Stallone, Sylvester, dir. Rocky III. 1982; Santa Monica, CA: MGM.
Stone, Oliver, dir. Wall Street. 1987; New York, NY: Twentieth Century Fox.
Tompkins, Jane P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Wilentz, Sean. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Films produced in both Mexico and the United States have explored the concept of traveling to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant from both economic and social perspectives. The themes they addressed, similar to academic works on the history of undocumented migration, focused predominantly on community, economic opportunities, and the ways in which immigrant communities adjust to ideas about the American dream. Movies serve as one of the few means of diffusing key issues on wealth and poverty in undocumented immigration to transnational audiences. Films made through collaborations between production companies in the U.S. and Mexico such as Ya No Estoy Aquí (2019)and Sin Nombre (2009)have been provided to audiences via paid subscription streamers such as Netflix and Amazon. These films were then dubbed or subtitled in a variety of languages in attempts to make them accessible to wide audiences. Spanish-language films produced in the U.S. on undocumented immigration, such as El Norte (1983), also portrayed similar economic ideas about success which are interwoven with individuals in the films fleeing violence, poverty, and political strife. The films El Norte, Sin Nombre, and Ya No Estoy Aquí all swirl around the struggles of impoverished undocumented immigrants to make it in the United States. Each relies upon a rigid characterization of undocumented migrants as devoted to their hometowns, patiently absorbing economic exploitation, and attempting to reconcile economic exploitation with an unobtainable American dream.
Released to American Audiences in 1984, El Norte portrays a brother and sister traveling from Guatemala together to the United States. For many U.S. viewers, it was their first experience with a story of undocumented immigration from the perspective of those migrating. The plot of El Norte begins with Rosa and Enrique Xuncax, siblings in a Guatemalan Mayan family who encounter political violence in their village. The film focused specifically on tensions between the military government of Guatemala and laborers. Their father speaks to Enrique about the wealthy coming to Guatemala (though not specifying from where) and taking advantage of the land by exploiting the workers, who are treated as “just a pair of arms.” A military raid on the village leaves their father dead and mother arrested, and Rosa and Enrique, fearing for their own lives, decide they must flee Guatemala. Part two of the film focuses specifically on their travels through Mexico, encountering both helpful strangers and individuals critical of their Mayan heritage. Their economic situation also becomes harsher as they struggle to find the money for someone to smuggle them across the border. The third and final section of the film delves into the complexities that Enrique and Rosa discover as undocumented migrants in the United States, including issues of healthcare, employment, and the cost of living. In addition to its vivid cinematography, the enduring popularity of El Norte emerged from the pertinence of Rosa and Enrique’s experiences to every generation of undocumented communities. Both El Norte and Sin Nombre demonstrate the challenges to survive as an undocumented immigrant. Rosa, for example, dies from an infection she contracted after being afraid to go to a hospital and risk being deported to Guatemala. She works as long as she is able to, recalling the words of her mother: “they told us that in the north you could make a lot of money, but they never told us you had to spend so much.” The images of an idealized suburban home her neighbor described to her start to fade with the reality of wealth and poverty she begins to experience.
The release of Sin Nombre by director Cary Fukunaga introduced American audiences to a unique hybrid of documentary and storyline on the relationship between a former gang member named Willy and a migrant woman from Honduras named Sayra. The interconnected themes between El Norte and Sin Nombre have been noted by Yajaira M. Padilla, demonstrating how both films address the issue of “Central American Non-belonging” experienced by immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to the United States. Director Fukunaga took a different approach towards Sin Nombre by following firsthand a train from southern Mexico towards the U.S. border, aptly nicknamed “the beast” by migrants who travel on it. Fukunaga intertwined his narrative of Willy and Sayra with the experiences of the migrants on the train and demonstrated a clear binary of wealth and poverty to U.S. audiences. The plot of Willie focuses on him fleeing from the gang he is involved in, Mara Salvatrucha, colloquially referred to as MS-13, a notorious gang with roots in both Los Angeles, California, and El Salvador. Sayra, on the same train, is leaving Honduras with several of her family members while she comes to befriend Willie. The fictional narrative of Sayra and Willie, filled with gang violence, robbery, a lack of food and water, and an economically unsustainable situation was complemented by the real experiences of both migrants and Mexican residents who live along the path of the beast; some of the residents ostracized the ‘poorer’ migrants from Central America, while others offered whatever wealth and resources they had to those traveling on the beast. The experiences of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are portrayed in films as a synthesis of staying financially afloat while being subjected to a new transnational identity in Mexico, in which the entire nation becomes “an extended border zone.”
For U.S. audiences, films such as El Norte and Sin Nombre were made by their writers and directors to challenge rhetoric towards migrant communities deemed as either unworthy of economic success or the creators of their own poverty. These films also attempted to dispel a certain trope; the idea that “America is upheld as a nation to be loved and coveted by immigrants, who, if good to America, will be loved in return.” Ultimately, “the road and the final destination are the very sites of the continuous re-inscription of hegemonic norms and not a liberation from them.” The experiences of economic exploitation are not applicable solely to Central American migrants. Why then, was the film focus predominantly on undocumented immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala? Certain authors have provided insights into how these communities in the U.S. shape associations with wealth and poverty. The storylines from Central American migrants touched on the transnational significance of that journey when migrants arrive in the United States. At the time Sin Nombre was released to American audiences, 68% of Honduran immigrants living in the U.S. were undocumented. Beginning in the early 1990s, many migrants from El Salvador arrived as either undocumented immigrants or as refugees. With the influx of Salvadoran migrants to Los Angeles, California, much of the U.S. media rhetoric on both refugees and undocumented migrants associated these communities only with deportations, gang violence, and poverty. As Elana Zilberg argues, the rhetoric that intertwined undocumented migrants with deportation and poverty “treated poverty as an individual pathology rather than as a consequence of the socioeconomic exclusion immanent in the economic system itself.” Films such as Sin Nombre shifted the focus away from individual poverty pathology towards larger socioeconomic structures. In Sin Nombre, it was neither Sayra nor Willy who were responsible for their own poverty, but nor was it the person robbing them either. For U.S. audiences, the issue of who to blame for poverty became a complicated issue. What was certain was that, in each of these films, the individual was not to blame for situations that were portrayed as inevitable. Main characters had to, instead, undergo a shift in their own identities to adjust to surviving the American dream. Films like Sin Nombre displayed the relationship between wealth, poverty, and the development of “this new transnational identity” produced by the clashing of a triple-border crossing with what was supposed to be an American promise for economic opportunity. The transnational dynamics of migrants on ‘the beast’ force a renegotiation of identity as well, in which the least poor are the most powerful while instances of solidarity between various migrants on top of the train sharing food, praying, and talking with each other are occasional opportunities to bridge national and class divisions.
The overview of wealth and poverty in the United States amongst undocumented immigrant communities normally did not include the physical crossing of the border itself. Of these three films, El Norte is the only film in which the actual crossing is a significant act. While the storyline of Sin Nombre focuses predominantly on the dynamics of wealth and poverty relative to both the travels of migrants and their arrival in the United States, Ya No Estoy Aquí delves into the life of a teenager from northern Mexico living undocumented in Queens, New York City. The film, made in Mexico by director Fernando Frías de la Parraand released to American audiences under the name “I’m No Longer Here,” provides a more immediate and direct context of what wealth and poverty look like for a teenager making attempts to reconcile his new life alone with his memories, hobbies, and family of his home in Monterrey. The story is about a seventeen-year-old named Ulises, who has to flee Monterrey after being caught in the middle of a violent misunderstanding between two rival gangs and putting his entire family at risk. He arrives in the United States, more secure of his physical safety but unsure of his ability to find work and be economically secure. The portrayals of Ulises, who attempts to bridge his economic challenges with his desire to return home, are expressed through his interactions with other Mexican and Colombian immigrants who offer words of advice. One of them, acknowledging his challenges, states “but in this country, you’re not the first nor the last.” Similar to instances from El Norte and Sin Nombre, this single phrase is interconnected with Yajaira M. Padilla’s description of being “subsumed within the ranks of an exploitable and invisible labor force” and Zilberg’s refutation of individual poverty pathology.
For each main character in the films, they must ultimately choose between economic security and physical safety. Enrique, in El Norte, must decide between taking a well-paying job in Chicago or being with his sister in Los Angeles while she is gravely ill. Sayra contacts distant acquaintances in New Jersey to establish herself in the United States, but loses all of her company on the beast, including her friend Willie. Ulises, unable to achieve economic security and feeling isolated while living alone in Queens, ultimately returns to Monterrey despite the physical danger it puts him in. Not all undocumented immigration experiences involve this rigid dichotomy between physical and economical security. However, these films did attempt to make a clear argument to their audiences; economic exploitation and uncertainty could be as intimidating as instances of physical violence. The threats of economic instability are absorbed by characters such as Rosa, who has her view of well-kept lawns with sprinklers, waxed cars in a driveway, and the Good Housekeeping magazines of her godmother more gradually shattered while, simultaneously, the nostalgia of her hometown erodes away when she accepts she cannot return home as an accused political dissident. Ultimately, these characters are portrayed as either having to bend under the economic exploitation they endure or return to the hometowns they fled. The lived experiences of undocumented immigrants cannot always be reduced to that ultimatum. These films did portray how a lack of citizenship created fewer opportunities for economic security. They attempted to dispel the myth of individual poverty pathology that was projected onto undocumented immigrants, heavily popularized in the 1990s that blamed each individual migrant for their own economic problems.
Bibliography:
Ettinger, Patrick. Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882-1930. University of Texas Press: Austin, Texas (2009)
Frías de la Parra, Fernando, dir. Ya No Estoy Aquí, 2019. Panorama Global, PPW Films, distributed through Netflix (2019).
Fukunaga, Cary, dir. Sin Nombre, 2009; Mexico City, Mexico: Focus Features LLC.
González, JesusÁngel. “New Frontiers for Post-Western Cinema: Frozen River, Sin Nombre, Winter’s Bone.” Western American Literature: A Journal of Literary, Cultural, and Place Studies. The University of Nebraska Press: Volume 50, Number 1, (Spring, 2015)
Maciel, David. El Norte: The U.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema. Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias. San Diego State University: San Diego, California (1990)
Nava, Gregory, dir. El Norte. 1983; Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California, USA: PBS American Playhouse. Archived edition (2017)
Oliviero, Katie E. “Sensational Nation and the Minutemen: Gendered Citizenship and Moral Vulnerabilities” Signs, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 679-706. The University of Chicago Press (2011)
Padilla, Yajaira M. “Central American Non-belonging: Reading ‘El Norte’ in Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre. The Latin American Road Movie: Edited by Verónica Garibotto and Jorge Pérez. Palgrave Macmillan US (2016)
Padilla, Yajaira M. “The Central American Transnational Imaginary: Defining the Transnational and Gendered Contours of Central American Immigrant Experience.” Latino Studies 11.2: pp.150-66 (2013)
Zilberg, Elana. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis Between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Duke University Press: Durham (2011)
Select articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post attached below:
When we see conversations about the Middle East on the news or in articles, the discussions are usually riddled with violence, terrorism, and fear. However, when we see Israel mentioned in the same broadcast content, we usually see positive reports, like business developments or diplomatic relations. Israel is at the heart of the Middle East, but why is its media attention and portrayal different than that of the rest of the Arab world?
This juxtaposition is illuminated in the American media during the Six-Day War, fought between Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Major American newspaper outlets, like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post glorified Israel for winning. While American viewers saw the new, powerful role of Israel as a champion of the Middle East, the Palestinians and Arabs in the surrounding area were not portrayed as strong and successful, rather, they were portrayed as poor refugees who would come to be dependent on Israel. How do we explain this phenomenon?
To do so, we must analyze how the American media portrayed Arabs and examine how these portrayals were possible. To do so, I will conduct a brief case study of articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. I will analyze two newspaper articles from each outlet written between June 8, 1967 to June 15, 1967, and illuminate how each article “others” the Arab. Discussion of the “other” is crucial here because it allows us to further understand the complexity of the varying portrayals. The type of “othering” that I will refer to will be one of racial and cultural differences as produced by poverty knowledge, and Edward Said’s theory on orientalism. Focusing on how Arabs were framed as “others” indicates that in the face of global wealth and poverty, American media sides with the global force that is aligned with itself.
Historical Background
Although the Arab region surrounding British-mandate Palestine was rocked with instability, its shakiness intensified in 1948 when Israel was officially declared and recognized as a state. As a result, the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts emerged. The conflicts have manifested into three major wars: the War of Independence, also known as the Nakba (1948), the Six-Day War (1967), and the Yom Kippur War (1973). Of these three wars, the Six-Day War was the most detrimental for the conflict – especially in regards to Palestinians and the surrounding Arab countries. In a military feat, Israel managed to annex the Golan Heights, West Bank, and Sinai Desert, thus expanding the Jewish state while disrupting the Arab states. This expansion and disruption was heavily reported in American print media, but the way that the Israelis and Arabs were portrayed were massively different. For example, the Israeli Defense Forces did not win the war through military triumph, but won through a U.N.-mandated ceasefire, requiring all sides to stop the violence. Since the Arab army was well-trained and responded well to Israeli attacks, this Arab strength was not portrayed in American print media, rather, they were portrayed as weak, poor, and dependent.
Poverty Knowledge and Orientalism
The differing depictions of Israelis and Arabs in the American media are attributed through the phenomenon of the “other”, where this Arab “othering” can be explained through poverty knowledge and orientalism.
Coined by historian Alice O’Connor, poverty knowledge is an academic concept where characteristics and behavior of impoverished groups are measured, which became “a project of twentieth-century liberalism, dating from the 1960s and the Great Society, but more deeply rooted in the rise of the new liberalism that enveloped European-American political culture”. This “new liberalism” here refers to individual rights, such as free speech and religion, but the newest right here is: welfare. Studying the characteristics and behavior of the impoverished led poverty knowledge scientists to determine that welfare status was crucial in deciding what poverty was and how it could be measured. So when poverty scientists analyzed the groups that were on welfare and receiving assistance, they found that black Americans were the most dependent, giving poverty knowledge a racial component. O’Connor tells us that the “‘race problem’ within the black and white paradigm traced roots of racial inequality to a wide range of social and cultural disadvantages rooted in white prejudices, and embraced integration and assimilation as desirable social goals” – meaning that blacks were encouraged to assimilate into white society, but were unable to due to white cultural prejudices. Therefore, poverty knowledge is the study of poverty, but this study emphasizes that racial “others” are prone to being poor and dependent.
What is the connection between the American study of poverty knowledge and Israeli-Arab media portrayals? First, the American black experience is not comparable to the Arab experience in American media, as the two groups are completely different and endure their own types of biases and prejudices. However, what connects the two groups – especially in the American sense – is that they are labeled as the “other”. In her book, Epic Encounters, historian Melani McAlister indicates that the Arab and black “othering” is quite similar. She tells us that when the Middle East was being discussed more in American media, many reporters and Americans struggled to define what an Arab is. Were Arabs considered white? Were Arabs considered black due the Middle East being geographically in Africa? Could Americans associate black Muslims with Arab Muslims? Here, McAlister emphasizes the important yet ambiguous racial distinctions amongst Arabs and blacks, and that the struggle to effectively label Arabs made it easy for the American media to coin Arabs as another “other”, where the Arabs were a threat to Israeli wealth and success while blacks were a threat to American wealth and success. Therefore, McAlister emphasizes that the racial component of the “other” further allows for negative disparities to be made.
The “other” is almost always portrayed negatively by American media because they do not align with what an American is supposed to be – they are not how an American looks, acts, and works. Although blacks and Arabs do not fit the American image, Israelis do. It is crucial to note though that not all Israelis are Jews, and many Jews are also considered as “others”. The difference between the othering of Jews and Arabs is that Jews are consistently portrayed with the rich, business-domineering stereotype, while Arabs came to be portrayed with a poor, degenerate stereotype. The American media seemed to have associated Israeli identity with the common, yet misconstrued stereotype that Jews are rich and successful, and the media did so by latching on to Israeli cultural familiarity. American media felt comfortable reporting on Israel because Israeli culture and politics provided a sense of familiarity, while Arab politics and culture were completely foreign and “other”. Many Israelis spoke English, making it easier for Americans to report on Israeli news and politics, while the surrounding Arabs spoke Arabic, making it difficult for an English-speaking American reporter. Many Israelis even looked familiar to Americans – most of them have European heritage and look like a large component of Americans, while Arabs look different, with darker skin and hair, and features. Here, the racial component kicks in because not only are Arabs “others” for some Israelis, they are “others” for Americans.
The key term here is “familiarity”. Since Israelis were portrayed as familiar to Americans, it was easy to “other” the Arabs, but we can understand this lack of familiarity through Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s theory on orientalism states that orientalism is a way of seeing that distorts how the West understands and portrays the East, also known as the Orient. The east consists of the Middle East and Asia, and western cultures associate Oriental peoples as being exotic, backwards, and uncivilized, where this view has a long tradition of being the lens that the Middle East is seen through. Therefore, the common representation of Arabs was that although they looked and acted in a certain spectacular, exotic way, their looks and attitudes were attributed to their backwardness. This “backwards” association with Arabs immediately “others” them from the modern Israeli. Western cultures, like Israeli and American, associate backwardness with barbarity and dependency, and this dependency further emphasizes the racial and cultural differences between Arabs and Israelis. The unfamiliar, “other” Arab came to be dependent on the modern, innovative Israeli, thus depending on Israel to become more progressive. Essentially, orientalism confirms the view that since Arabs were seen as backwards, they were also seen as poor and dependent.
Therefore, this backwards association with Arabs – in conjunction with the understanding of poverty knowledge – allows us to see how simple it was for the American media to designate Arabs as poor and dependent. Arabs were historically viewed as uncivilized and backwards, and with the familiarity of Israeli culture to Americans, it was essentially easy for the American media to further push and adopt this portrayal, and we see this portrayal in newspaper articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.
The “Other” Arab in American Newspaper Outlets
For this brief case study, I will demonstrate how these six articles, two each from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post respectively, display how Arabs were depicted as the “other” through poverty knowledge and orientalism. Of the two articles each from the three newspaper outlets, one article discusses the refugee problem caused by the Six-Day War and the other discusses how the Arabs lost the war. The articles discussing the refugee problem are a direct application of how poverty knowledge creates the poor, dependent, racially different Arab, and the articles discussing the Arab military loss exemplify orientalism’s contention of the backwards Arab.
The three articles dealing with the refugee problem are the NYT’s Arab Refugees Moving into Jordan by Dana Schmidt, the LAT’s Arab Refugees Stream into a Reluctant Jordan by Ray Moseley and Joseph Grigg, and the WP’s Refugee Relief. All three articles focus on the same problem, which is that Palestinians displaced from their homes amidst the Six-Day War have become refugees, where they moved quickly into Jordan. Each article indicates that Jordan was reluctant to accept these refugees, but each differs in how they describe aid to the refugees. In Schmidt’s NYT article, she indicates that although Jordanians were reluctant to accept refugees, the Israeli Defense Forces supplied buses to transport thousands of refugees into neighboring Jordan, or else they would have no other mode of transportation there. Therefore, Schmidt indicates that the refugees have become dependent on the IDF for movement – something that should be done freely, but the refugees were so poor and so lost that they needed external assistance.
Moseley and Grigg’s LAT article mirrors the same concern as Schmidt where Jordanians were reluctant to accept refugees, but the two indicate that the IDF have been air-lifting food and water to Palestinian refugees and surrounding Arab communities affected by the war. The two also emphasize that “Uncle Sam will pay most of the bills since the Arab refugee relief work is handled by the U.S.-financed U.N. Relief and Works Agency”, telling us that not only do these Arab refugees depend on the IDF for necessities, they depend on the U.S. and U.N. funding to cover their costs – insinuating a type of welfare-based relationship.
The welfare-based relationship between the U.S. and the refugees is also discussed in the WP’s Refugee Relief. The unnamed author states that “The immediate welfare of the refugees is a problem of a quite different magnitude from their eventual settlement” and that “Washington must treat its relief contributions as a temporary palliative and not a permanent role”. Here, the author tells us that although Washington must provide welfare to Arab refugees, this welfare must not be a permanent endeavor, as permanent welfare could encourage further dependency.
In each of these articles, the theme of the dependent Arab is prevalent. In the NYT piece, we are told that the refugees depended on the IDF for buses to travel to Jordan, in the LAT piece, we see that the U.S. is obligated to support the refugees, and in the WP piece, American welfare to the refugees is required but must not be extended. All three articles highlight the trope of the poor, dependent Arab who needed external forces like the IDF and the U.S. to function. It is significant to note that in each article, the refugees are referred to as Arab refugees although they are clear Palestinian refugees. The journalists in each of these pieces did not differentiate between Palestinian and Arab, and compiled the various Palestinian refugees into one general Arab refugee group. This simplifying of the refugees generalizes the wider Arab refugee group, which comprises Syrians, Egyptians, and Jordanians, and associates the wider group with being poor and dependent, thus expanding the portrayal of the poor, dependent Arab. Therefore, not only are Palestinian refugees viewed as dependent, the wider Arab refugee group is viewed the same way. Here, poverty knowledge’s welfare and racial component is evident and cooperative because Arab refugees, racially different than IDF soldiers and American aid providers, were dependent on these groups.
In the remaining articles, orientalist attitudes are apparent. These articles are NYT’s Why Israel Prevailed: Her Spirit and Modern Organization are Contrasted with Arab Feudalism by Hanson Baldwin, LAT’s Israel Insists She Will Win the War, and the WP’s Israel to Hold Sinai Until It’s Assured of No Blockades. These three articles discuss Israel’s military feat in the Six-Day War while emphasizing that their military prowess overpowered the backwards, old-fashioned Arab armies. In each article, we not only see poverty knowledge’s making of the poor, dependent Arab but we see orientalism’s confirmation of the backwards Arab. In Baldwin’s NYT article, he outlines the military triumph of the Israeli army over the Arab army. He explains that the Israeli army is modern and well-organized, which led to their win, while the Arab army was stuck on feudalism and disorganization. He makes the effort to explain that when the Egyptian army was British-trained in the 1940’s, it was strong and powerful, but when Nasser claimed presidency in the 1950’s and instituted socialism, the Egyptian military went downhill, thus giving the Israeli military the upper hand. Here, Baldwin demonstrates that the aggressor is the Egyptian military which was stuck on “feudalism”. Feudalism is a system of land ownership where a king, or in this case, Nasser, controlled all of the land, but dispersed it to those who fought for him, a.k.a., the Egyptian military. Baldwin’s referral to Nasser’s Egyptian army as feudalistic degrades the Egyptian army, pushing it back into the middle ages while the Israeli army soared as a modern archetype. Here, orientalism is evident because the Egyptians and wider Arab army are spoken about as backwards and weak, and dependent on the Israeli military as a new model.
The LAT article reflects the same idea of the backwards Arab. In this article, by an unnamed author, it is emphasized that the Six-Day War was strictly for Israelis to claim and enforce their new rule in the Middle East. The article states that the war was fought so that the surrounding Arabs could “…recognize Israel’s permanent existence…[and enforce] security against the Arab guerilla raids that helped bring about the war”. Here, the article illuminates the Arab refusal to accept Israel as a new state, assuming that Arabs needed to attack and wage a war to fight against this new, emerging power. Although it is not as overt as the previous article, traces of orientalism are present here because the article contends that Arabs cannot fight against or accept the new direction that the Middle East is headed in terms of Israeli politics and culture. Since Arabs cannot accept this move forward, they are stuck in the past – fighting a war to ensure their place in the past is untouched.
The WP’s Israel to Hold Sinai Until It’s Assured of No Blockades combines the concerns of the NYT and LAT articles while managing to uphold the trope of the backwards Arab. In this article, with an unnamed author, Arab military actions are highlighted. In regards to the Arab military, the article makes sure to emphasize that during the war, members of the Syrian army shelled down Palestinian villages in the West Bank, where the Syrian army was ruthless enough to attack their own fellow Arabs – emphasizing the uncivil Arab. The article tells us that some Arabs donated blood and raised funds for the IDF, while the IDF ensured that all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, holding refugee status or not, was being supplied well with aid and proper food – also emphasizing the backwards Arab because these Palestinians were so out of touch with the new reality, that they depended on the IDF and UN aid for help, which also emphasizes poverty knowledge’s dependency creation. This article’s two contentions of the backwards Arab, whether we look at how the Syrian army attacked Palestinian villages or how Palestinian refugees and non-refugees accepted western aid, displays how easily Arabs are framed as backwards and un-modern.
Clearly, each of these articles accentuates how Arabs were portrayed as backwards and uncivil. Baldwin’s NYT article blatantly calls the Egyptian army “feudal”, indicating that they were so backwards that their military strategies were medieval, the LAT article emphasizes how Arabs were reluctant to accept the new direction of the Middle East, and the WP article affirms the Arab army’s uncivil belligerency and dependence on Israelis and other western aid. It is crucial to note that in each of these articles, the IDF or Israelis were never to blame for the war. Each article confirms the Arab as the violent aggressor while the IDF fought back to maintain their country’s safety, although Israel’s national agenda was to expand. Essentially, it was easy for the American media to pin the Arab as the aggressor because since they were already traditionally viewed as backwards, uncivil, and sometimes barbaric, it was impossible to portray the modern, American-associated Israeli as the aggressor.
Conclusion
This phenomenon of the Arab “other” in American media did not end with the Six-Day War though, rather – the negative portrayals just began. The decades after the Six-Day War marked turmoil in the Middle East, with the Yom Kippur War (1973), Gulf War (1990), and most recently, the War on Terror (2001). With continued unrest in the Middle East, American media, such as news broadcasts and popular media, like television shows and movies, continued to propagate twisted views of Arabs. For example, when Saudi Arabia was developing its oil refineries and establishing itself as one of the richest countries in the world, documentaries were premiered that showcased Saudis, especially Saudi women, as poor, veiled, and oppressed – instilling feelings of fear about Saudi Arabia to lessen its appeal to Americans. Instilling fear in American audiences continued with television shows, like Looney Tunes’ Ali Baba Bunny, where Bugs Bunny escapes from a barrel of boiling oil owned by an Arab sultan. This cartoon short indicates that oil-money Arabs are vile, doing whatever it takes for one to not steal their riches. Essentially, the negative news media allowed popular media to adopt the same trope of the “other”, and now violent Arab, and popular media reached a far wider audience, further perpetuating this view. Therefore, this continued cynical portrayal of Arabs tells us that in relation to wealth and poverty, the American media will degrade other national identities and their strengths in order to uphold America’s image as the world’s richest, most powerful nation – although that may not be the case.
Through O’Connor’s poverty knowledge and applying Said’s theory of orientalism, we see how Arabs were designated as the “other” through racial, cultural, and historical lenses, and these lenses indicate that American media portrayals usually have complex racial elements. Race in American media is used as a separator and distinguisher, and when race is combined with cultural and economic facets, the three help perpetuate the victimized, “other” aggressor.
Ultimately, from 1967 onward, the American media’s juxtaposed portrayal of Israelis and Arabs was detrimental. Israel’s achievements were always highlighted, while Arab achievements like military development and developing oil refineries, were pushed under the rug. It seems as if the American media sought to ensure to Americans that Arabs were backwards and not aligned with America’s forward, modern mentality. Therefore, American media’s sharp distinction between Israeli and Arab portrayals succeeded through “othering” the Arab. The concept of the “other” is a complicated, complex one, but for the purposes of this blog, it is crucial to analyze and understand how racial and cultural components work together to convey a sense of otherness in order to maintain a public image.
Bibliography
Ashcroft, William. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Routledge, 1994.
McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. University of California Press, 2007.
Ghareeb, Edmund, Peter Jennings, Ronald Koven, James McCartney, Lee Eggerstrom, and Marilyn Robinson. “The American Media and the Palestine Problem.” Journal of Palestine Studies 5, no. 1/2 (1975): 127-49. Accessed January 3, 2021. doi:10.2307/2535687.
GOODMAN, MICAH. CATCH-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-day War. YALE UNIVERSITY Press, 2019.
Ibrahim, Dina. “The Middle East in American Media: A 20th-Century Overview.” InternationalCommunication Gazette 71, no. 6 (October 2009): 511–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048509339793.
O’Connor, Alice. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History. Princeton University Press, 2009.
Shaheen, Jack G. “Media Coverage of the Middle East: Perception and Foreign Policy.” The Annals of theAmerican Academy of Political and Social Science 482 (1985): 160-75. Accessed January 3, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1046388.
