Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men
Class in 1970s American Cinema
Derek Nystrom
Reviews and Awards
"Breaks new ground by raising questions about the portrayal of masculinity on the screen...Essential." --Choice
"A thoroughly winning piece of literature: an invaluable companion piece to the films of postclassical Hollywood and their varied depictions of the working and professional-managerial classes. Brisk, frequently witty, and not too steeped in academese to ward off the nonprofessional cinephile, Nystrom's book demands a spot on your bookshelf somewhere between Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and that well-thumbed copy of Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness." --Cineaste
"It has long been a source of amazement that, even as class warfare plays out so brazenly in U.S. domestic and international politics, media studies pays so little attention to class structure and to class-specific ideologies in corporate industrial culture. Derek Nystrom interrupts this repression by reading the representation of the working class in seventies' cinema as the imaginary resolution of crises within the professional-managerial class; in doing so, he has made an enormously lucid, nuanced-and courageous-contribution to film and indeed cultural studies generally."-David E. James, editor, The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class
"Discovering a surprisingly deep, conflicted fascination with working-class masculinity at the heart of emblematic movies of the 1970s like Deliverance, Saturday Night Fever, and Cruising, Derek Nystrom offers a fresh, persuasive account of how social class operates in American popular culture."-Carlo Rotella, author of October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature