OpinionOscars 2018 This article is more than 5 years oldWhere are all the films about poor Americans?
This article is more than 5 years oldStephen PimpareThis year’s Oscars have highlighted the dearth of films that get to the heart of poverty and its causes
Buried within the Trump administration’s recent budget was a proposal to sharply cut food stamp funding. In its place would be a box of government-provided foods, a scheme sure to be a boondoggle benefiting only the companies who get contracts to produce and deliver these packages. The plan offers yet more evidence of the lack of policy knowledge within the administration, its ignorance of the scale and scope of US hunger and poverty, and its disregard and contempt for the millions who, despite their best efforts, still struggle to get by.
That said, there’s nothing especially novel about the administration’s attitude – disdain for poor people is a longstanding feature of American political culture.
Hollywood has been among the guilty parties. Thanks to April Reign’s #OscarsSoWhite campaign, we are developing the habit of evaluating how well women, people of color and LGBT Americans are represented among the nominees. But the notion that we should also look for better representation of poverty in the movies is still not on our radar. It should be.
Only one of the more than 50 films with a 2018 Oscar nomination dealt in any substantive way with poverty or homelessness in the US: The Florida Project. That film, for which Willem Dafoe received a best supporting actor nomination, tells a largely sympathetic story about the challenges faced by a mother who loses her benefits and the choices she makes – not always good ones, perhaps – to care for her young daughter. But that’s the only nominated film to focus clearly on people in precarious economic straits.
Part of the problem, as it is in most years, is that few movies about poor or homeless Americans were made in the first place. My previous research found that between 1902 and 2015, of all the films made in the US, only 299 of them were in some way significantly concerned with issues of poverty and homelessness.
For 2017, I can identify five films that fit the category: Same Kind of Different As Me, The Glass Castle, I Am Another You, Quest and The Florida Project. The problem is not merely poor people’s invisibility, however, but the fact that when they do appear on screen, it’s typically to reinforce age-old stereotypes. With the exception of The Florida Project, the academy was right not to recognize any of these films.
Take The Same Kind of Different As Me, a movie that presents itself as being about a homeless black man, but is most interested in a rich white couple and the way their volunteerism at a soup kitchen saves their marriage, and their souls.
This is a common pattern. Films that appear to be about poor people are often really about how non-poor people are redeemed by coming to their aid. This film, repeating another old pattern, is careful to give each shelter resident a dramatic story of trauma or tragedy to explain how they became homeless, never offering a hint of the political or economic circumstances that could better explain why so many in the US wind up in such desperate straits.
To make matters worse, the solution to homelessness here is prayer and the benevolence of the rich (not affordable housing, good jobs, or generous, well-conceived social support). It places people’s escape from poverty firmly within their control, which is, for most, simply not the case.
The Glass Castle didn’t do much better. Part of the power of Jeannette Walls’ memoir, upon which this movie is based, was its refusal to tell a tidy story. It was more interested in description than explanation and, as a consequence, offered insight into the day-to-day trauma that living in poverty can visit upon children.
But the film doesn’t convey the privation that haunts Walls’ book, and turns an unsentimental account of growing up poor into a maudlin movie about father-daughter relationships. As a consequence, another opportunity to reveal something about the reality of poverty in America is squandered.
Moviemakers who portray homelessness are typically looking for explanations – the more dramatic the better – and in so doing documentarian Nanfu Wang, in I Am Another You, takes a tale that could have been about a personable, curious and restless young man, and instead gives us another movie whose narrative turns on mental illness (like The Soloist, Saint of Fort Washington, The Fisher King and others).
Rates of undiagnosed and untreated mental illnesses are indeed higher among homeless people, but using that as an explanation for why people are homeless obscures the fact that mental illness, in other rich democracies, does not lead so easily to homelessness. Why does it here?
Finally, there’s Quest, a documentary that introduces us to the Rainey family through scenes of what looks like a pretty ordinary north Philadelphia neighborhood, albeit a poor one. The Raineys worry about their friends, their children, and the young men who have a hard time staying on the “straight path”, struggling with alcohol, drugs and the formidable obstacles in their way.
Near its conclusion, we see the Raineys watching then candidate Trump plead for African American votes, asking, “What do you have to lose?” Christine’a Rainey answers him matter-of-factly: “You have no idea how we live.”
Even so, the film seems less interested in politics or social commentary than in showing us one American family that works hard, cares for each other and for their community, and nonetheless still struggles just to get by from week to week and month to month.
If policymakers in DC (and in cities and state capitals around the country) had the Raineys in mind when making poverty policy, rather than the stubborn, racist myth of the “welfare queen”, they might produce smarter proposals that are more attuned to what poor Americans actually want and need.
And perhaps if others saw more realistic portrayals of poverty in the movies, they might be more receptive to programs that would help them instead of demeaning and punishing them.
- Stephen Pimpare is senior lecturer in American politics and public policy at the University of New Hampshire and the author of A People’s History of Poverty in America and, most recently, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen. He can be found on Twitter @stephenpimpare
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