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Social Psychology and the Labor Union in American Cinema

Uploaded by harlanw on Mar 26, 2007

Why is it that an American film always ends in the same way? The good guy always gets the beautiful girl. The man in the white hat always comes out on top. The underdog team wins the big game. Good always wins out over evil. Are these cinematic stereotypes engrained into our psyche for a reason? The purpose of this essay is to explore the psychological and sociological ideas of various thinkers and writers, including Gustave Le Bon, Walter Lippmann and Gabriel Tarde, and see how their tenets apply to labor unions as they are depicted in American cinema.

Some of the most thought-provoking dramas to come out of the American movie scene involve the labor union, either as a “central character” or protagonist or as a backdrop for the story. An American audience couldn’t ask for a better person to root for or empathize with than the working man or woman. The dock worker, the brick layer, the carpenter, the factory worker, the miner, the teacher, the fireman and, yes, even the cops, all have one thing in common. They probably belong to a labor union of some kind. Let us examine a quotation from the Introduction to Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd:


“The masses are founding syndicates before which the authorities capitulate one after the other; they are also founding labour unions, which in spite of all economic laws tend to regulate the conditions of labour and wages.”
(Le Bon, pp. xv - xvi)


There is some truth that unions do tend to regulate “the conditions of labour and wages” as do different forms of government. However, sometimes either the corporation or firm that the union laborers are employed by is corrupt, or the union delegates are on the graft or both. Films that portray a labor union usually have a theme of suppression with threads of corruption and greed woven into the celluloid tapestry, tainted with the colors of anger, rebellion and, in some cases, death.

On the Waterfront (1954)

Corruption runs deep in the 1954 union drama, On the Waterfront. Filmed in Hoboken, New Jersey, the Waterfront Crime Commission is about to hold public hearings on union crime and underworld infiltration. As workers are turned against each other, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) inadvertently participates in the murder of fellow longshoreman, Joey Doyle. Union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) orchestrates the murder along with other illegal dockside activities. Ironically, the character...

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Uploaded by:   harlanw

Date:   03/26/2007

Category:   Film

Length:   7 pages (1,641 words)

Views:   2792

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