Can you remember the movie Breaking Away? From 1979, and set at that time, in my current home town of Bloomington, Indiana. Four lads just out of high school, all lacking a sense of purpose. It’s a terrific movie, highly recommended.
This week Alex Usher (you should follow him on Twitter @AlexUsherHESA) suggested we ought to rewatch to understand something about the recent US Presidential election, which to a large degree turned on the Midwestern states going with Trump. So this is a riff on that suggestion, which I think is excellent.
In the film, our hero Dave is a smart kid, obsessed with cycling (he’s very good), but otherwise lacking identity. His dad used to work as a “cutter”, working in a mill cutting the great pieces of limestone you see all around this region into blocks, for building, but now works selling (or trying to) used cars to the primarily student population of the town. Not a happy life for him. There are town-gown tensions, felt acutely by Dave and his friends, resulting in posturing and the occasional fight.
In one scene, filmed at night outside Indiana University’s main library, Dave tries to convince his dad that he, Dave, is a “cutter”. But his dad corrects him: he’s not, and he won’t be. There is no future there, and he must make his way on some other path. In the end (this isn’t much of a spoiler) two of the four end up going on in education. For the other two, that’s not going to happen – they are not cut out for it – but we know that already; at that young age, their best years are behind them.
Check the date of the movie – 1979. The contemporary analysis of the Midwest – the white working class is disconnected from work and opportunity – that’s all here. It’s not new. Outside of urban areas, or for the highly educated, there has not been progress in the chances for those without educational credentials or connections, and for those who might once have had a shot at a job cutting limestone, or any other manual-skills job.
Candidate Hillary Clinton promised free college – college being the route in these times to getting ahead. But we know that can’t work for everyone, or even most people. Donald Trump, as Usher notes, in promising to “make America great again” was to a large degree promising to “bring back jobs that don’t require college again.” He won’t – he can’t – but it was a seductive idea, enough to help him win election in this part of the country. But he was tapping into something that didn’t just happen last year.
So, have another look at this wonderful, and very smart, movie.
Yes, the beginnings of the Rustbelt go back to about 1970, and probably even earlier, but its evolution was cemented in place by Ronald Regan. One example is in 1980, when he replaced Fed Chairman Paul Volcker with Alan Greenspan, who was literally a student and acolyte of Ayn Rand. Free trade, deregulation, privatization, and pseudo-small government became ruling policy for the next 46 years. And this will remain unchanged under Trump. All those Midwest whites have been totally duped.
I think we can relate this to the arts world, in some ways. Hillary spoke of some of Trump’s followers as “deplorable” people due to their bigotry, aggression, and hatred. Is it fair to say that if people had even a small amount of culture or refinement, they wouldn’t have voted for Trump? And that they might have seen that he is a flimflam man?
One might counter that 45% of college grads that voted cast their vote for Trump, but this leaves open the question about how cultured our college grads actually are. Numerous factors indicate that they aren’t particularly cultured.
I think that the arts and cultural community has to take a significant part of the responsibility for the creation of the “deplorables” – and especially the college educated deplorables. In short, we left those people so uncultured and one-dimensional in their thinking that they voted for Trump. This symbolizes a massive failure on the part of the cultural community.
Much of the problem, of course, is systemic. We fund the arts by donations from the wealthy, so our funding is concentrated in a few urban financial centers – exactly the areas that voted for Hillary. Until we figure out a way for the arts and culture to reach all Americans, we are going to continue creating a “deplorable” citizenry – one, for example, with a limited capacity for understanding other people, and one that can’t distinguish between destructive economic policies and bigotry.
BTW, I saw that movie long ago and enjoyed it. Sadly, our media industries, which benefit greatly, if not hegemonistically, from neoliberalism, probably won’t produces many movies that help folks in the heartland gain a deeper understanding of our country’s economic policies. They could if the wanted, but they won’t.
I also remember Dave’s dad being xenophobic and wondering what all this newfangled food that ends with the letter “I” is all about–this Eye-Talian food like spaghetti and linguini.
Michael, A great post. To complete the bookends, or to fast forward in time, one could watch the movie “Medora,” which tells the story of a small town several miles south of Bloomington where, unlike Bloomington, the departure of the key industry destroyed the place. In Medora, it’s been more than 30 years since the jobs left, and the lifestyles of the people are stunning in their hopelessness as well as in their (usually unsuccessful) determination to try to adapt. Unlike a lot of places, Bloomington, perhaps because of the dependable anchor of Indiana University, has been able to reinvent its local economy several times, but it’s surely an exception to what has happened to most small towns in the region.
Gary, Indiana is a classic example of neoliberal economics. Unregulated imports collapsed the city’s steel industry. Unemployment created a host of problems such as rising crime, white flight, and a massive loss of population. One third of the buildings in Gary are unoccupied. Due to our racially informed class system, the impoverished city became 84% black – one of the highest ratios in the USA.
Gary is only one of countless Rustbelt cities in the same predicament. That this went on for so long before the current backlash is a testament to the dysfunctionality of our political and economic systems as well as our media. It also illustrates the impotence of the arts community which should have been among the first to respond.
These delays led to the ill-advised response we are now seeing.
Clearly national politicians were not paying attention to this problem, which certainly wasn’t unknown. I’ve read many articles about the Rustbelt. But I’m wondering why state and local officials didn’t make more efforts on the national level to call attention to the problems and demand solutions. No doubt state officials didn’t have the powers needed to solve the cities’ problems themselves, but they could have done more to make the cities a national issue.
My family and I just watched Breaking Way, up here in Canada (adults, children); the adults had watched the movie when it first came out. It has haunted me ever since. And so I found your column here search for “”breaking away” (movie OR film) “hillary clinton”, for reasons that will become apparent.
Concerning your review, you get what you look for I guess. I liked the part where Dave’s Dad visits the stone cutting workplace and chats with his now-aging co-workers — and expresses the satisfaction he got from the work. The idea of work itself appears in multiple ways in this movie; but not in your review. Your comment about “the best years of their lives already gone” is poignant and sad. But I think you dismiss the town and gown conflict too quickly.
As well some of the comments above are unsympathetic. Ms. Clinton’s “deplorables” comment captures the whole dynamic here. And the idea (expressed several times in post and comments above) that the “arts could make a difference in building better people”, or words to that effect, is rather elitist. The concept is on the spectrum with the Soviet idea of “new Soviet man”. And the idea of “art-as-religion” utterly deprives the working class of agency.
The facts on the ground of course are the loss of jobs. And the glib, simplistic answer is to blame — uh Reagan and Greenspan. I recall that Pres. Clinton was quite a fan of globalization too. The intersection of economics, class, automation and culture is toxic. Peter Yates movie captured Clintonesque disdain for workers rather well in the persona of the entitled, nasty frat boy.
We have a plan to start watching “The Middle”, where apparently the father is the first character in a working class serial (e.g. All in the Family to The Simpsons etc.) who is not a buffoon.
JHM
Toronto, Canada