Introduction: Making Class Visible in Film and Cultural Studies; PART I: HARD HATS AND MOVIE BRATS; 1 Class and the Youth-Cult Cycle; PART II: REDNECKS AND GOOD OLE BOYS: THE RISE OF THE SOUTHERN; 2 Deliverance, An Allegory of the Sunbelt; 3 Keep On Truckin': The Southern Cycle and the Invention of the Good Ole Boy; PART III: MACHO MEN AND THE NEW NIGHTLIFE FILM; 4 Saturday Night Fever and the Queering of the White, Working-Class Male Body; 5 Extra Masculinity: Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Cruising; Conclusion: Working-Class Solidarity and Its Others
Everywhere you look in 1970s American cinema, you find white working-class men. They bring a violent conclusion to Easy Rider, murdering the film's representatives of countercultural alienation and disaffection. They lurk in the Georgia woods of Deliverance, attacking outsiders in a manner that evokes the South's recent history of racial violence and upheaval. They haunt the singles nightclubs of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, threatening the film's newly liberated heroine with patriarchal violence. They strut through the disco clubs of Saturday Night Fever, dancing to music whose roots in post-Ston