Blue-collar / working-class Sci-fi flicks: List them here

In my recent viewing of a lot of Weird West flicks, I came upon 'Outland,' having never caught it before. Got me wondering. Sci-fi flicks have been the realm of space opera or clinical science since the beginning, but how many of what could be termed blue-collar stuff is out there? James Cameron has(had) a thing for them, probably coming from his truck driver past.

Examples I can think of:

Outland
Alien
Aliens(very much from a grunt-level perspective)
The Abyss
Moon

Armageddon

though it's a TV show and not a movie, red dwarf definitely has a working-class/blue-collar vibe about it.

And I want to narrow this to films, b/c stories & novels don't nec. need that high glamor aspect to them to get sold, I think.

Dark Star, surely. Buncha bored working stiffs in outer space going nuts, etc.

Firefly/Serenity probably would go into this category.

Holy crap, Dark Star is up for free streaming in its full version. I love this world:

http://www.amctv.com/videos/b-movies/?bcpid=13332913001&bclid=14056329001&bctid=14095584001

don't forget the late Dennis Hopper in Space Truckers.

The first part of Otomo Katsuhiro's Memories (available for streaming on netflix)

Silent Running

star wars

And SpaceBalls!

"They Live", surely?

Also The Thing. Carpenter has a lot of form here.

Tremors

SHit I didnt even realise They Live was a Carpenter joint, ha.

But yeah. thats def his vibe.

Saturn 3?

Nah, the 3 protagonists in that are all kinda exotic iirc

Def agree on Firefly btw, which is what I loved about it.

I suppose you could tenatively put Babylon 5 in this category. They certainly allow a lot of working/homeless classes in the show.

Primer

eh, it has a gritty vibe but they is educated white-collar engineers.

They're working out of a garage. It's about as blue-collar as technology startups get.

They're wearing white shirts so they have white collars CASE CLOSED

I think we're waltzing right into a big grey area here.

It's humorous the way they wear their whit collared shirts everywhere and always. It's not just their clothes, it becomes like a costume. There's a definite commentary about class intended there, I think.

They're blue-collar and in deep denial.

I wouldn't put this on the list, but it makes me think of the way that Goldblum in The Fly has several sets of identical clothes. He does it do save the time he would spend deciding what to wear; they do it because it's what guys like them wear.

xp Do they work their glistening, taut muscles almost daily in practical application? No? Then they're white collar. (See unusual details wikipedia thread.)

Grey area. Grey collar. (ew.)

OK now you guys are just being nerdy pedants.

and?

touche my dear.

He does it do save the time he would spend deciding what to wear; they do it because it's what guys like them wear.

I hope I'm not the only guy on ILX this describes perfectly. I'm pretty sure it covers a pretty high % of guys irl anyway.

Brazil has a clerical worker hooking up with a truck driver

Terminator. Sarah Connor just a hard workin' waitress, Kyle just a hard workin' resistance fighter, T-101 just a hard-workin' killer robot.

Gordon Gocko's pretty hard workin, is he blue collar?

Gordon Gocko, whatta guy huh

http://oakey.net/decals/images/Elvis%20TCB%20Band.jpg

"A Clockwork Orange"

No.

Eh?

Poshos

Yarbles

Tom D., I'd be interested to hear your case for that. But it seems clear to me that Alex is supposed to be an over-privileged little snot.

Repo Man

In fact, the whole movie takes place in this vaguely futuristic place where almost everyone is over-privileged, and if you're not, you're living in a tunnel waiting to get the shit kicked out of you by snots like Alex. It's kind of part of the plot. At any rate, it ain't blue collar.

Repo Man is excellent, yes.

Tom D., I'd be interested to hear your case for that. But it seems clear to me that Alex is supposed to be an over-privileged little snot.

Lives in a tower block. Parents seem fairly w/c. Northern accent. One of his friends is Warren Clarke!

There are British-specific overtones that I do not understand, clearly.

In fact, the whole movie takes place in this vaguely futuristic place where almost everyone is over-privileged

Writers, intellectuals, politicians still more privileged though.

There are British-specific overtones that I do not understand, clearly.

Probably. The accent is quite important... though only Alex and his family have Northern accents, Dim + Georgie are Cockney.

But Alex also speaks a made-up language that's half Russian.

argh beat me to Brazil

At any rate, I do not believe that the intention was to portray Alex as economically put-upon.

I agree. You're probably right that he is relatively pampered and privileged but then that's what crusty social conservatives (like Anthony Burgess?) invariably said about juvenile delinquents in the 50s/ 60s

Ok are you defending Alex? This ain't Rebel Without A Cause, dude's a dangerous sociopath.

LOL. He is the hero of the book after all!

Yeah I never saw the droogs in CW as working class, tho tbh class wasnt really relevant in that film, but they did have a spot of educated cruelty about their persons.

Dim? Educated?

they did have a spot of educated cruelty about their persons.

Prep school rapists, yeah.

alex always felt like a bit of an aspirational dandy to me, pretensions that went beyond whatever small ambitions were harbored by his droogs - i.e. he was working class through and through

Alex = classic Mod taken to its logical conclusion, tbh.

xp Yeah, I can see that, actually. It's the perfect makings of a bully, really.

Indeed, written before mods even existed!

Well there just weren't as many zings back in those days, you didn't need mods

x-post Yeah just about every John Carpenter joint.

"Gattaca" is about class, isn't it?

Almost more about eugenics, really?

Eugenics is about class.

But isn't Ethan Hawke a janitor or something who aspires to more?

Stretching a point maybe, but Tetsuo is definitely examining Japanese middle-class identity, albeit through the medium of a white-collar guy's penis mutating into a giant rotating drill. I guess that's class-based sf though, rather than specifically blue-collar.

Fifth Mothertrucking Element

^ too often ignored

Total Recall

Nah Ahnold is pure executive

But Quaid is way gritty.

Dude... he's actually a

CONSTRUCTION WORKER

(didn't mean for that to be two posts, oops.)

A Clockwork Orange the book strongly suggests that Alex's family is fairly comfortably off (can't recall exact details, but parents baffled cz they'd provided everything for him, think they bought him his shiny top-of-the-range hi-fi though maybe he, uh, acquired it). But, they do live in a small place in a giant towerblock and not a big-assed house like the mad old cat-lady's.

So he seems fairly well-off middle-class to me, but maybe a high-rise garret stuffed with a giant state-of-the-art stereo is the 60s-future equivalent of "why are these working class people not content when every council flat is full of DVD players and Playstations and in my day we only had (etc etc)"

Read the book a) first and b) again much more recently than the film, so not sure what the film implies.

(Sorry to go back to old subthread)

Salvage 1! (Andy Griffith as the Astronaut Sanford, builds a rocketship of out scraps in his junkyard)

Matrix!

A "why are these working class people not content when every council flat is full of DVD players and Playstations and in my day we only had (etc etc)"

Well it's late 50s/ early 60s so it's more "Why is this generation, who have so much more money and freedom and opportunity than we had, so feckless and ungrateful and destructive?"

So, yes, decent hard-working w/c parents baffled by delinquent offspring

Matrix!

maybe some of the later ones where zion is a utopian industrial disco for hard working free men with taut glistening muscles, but neo and trinity are str8 white collar.

Starship Troopers is all about rejecting upper-class comforts and becoming a common grunt. Well, that and bug brains.

Neo is busted down though from fake white collar programming job to real gritty resistance movement on board a bust up ship where all they eat is gruel.

he's a nerd who becomes the messiah

Dozer RIP

Starship Troopers is all about rejecting upper-class comforts and becoming a common grunt.

Uh... so's fascism. Watch it again.

Yeah, man, Starship Troopers is a big sucker punch.

Starship Troopers is all about if the Nazis won WW2

"It's afraid!"

xxxxxp nothing more working class than a messiah

Blue collar, white halo

Aye, nothing more working class than an anointed king who will usher in an age of peace and prosperity!

Maximum Overdrive
The Last Starfighter?

Mad Max duh

star wars!

doh, been said

Metropolis

farmboy = son of landowners.

probably raking it in from Empire grants tbh

Wall-E

A Boy and his Dog

(Haven't seen the film but the short story certainly qualifies)

Thanks, guys, I was previously unaware of the subtle satiric content of a Paul Verhoeven movie.

Aye, nothing more working class than an anointed king who will usher in an age of peace and prosperity!

gruel, man gruel.

Damnation Alley

not a film, but the old Sierra "Space Quest" series.

alien 4 too

i wouldn't say alien 3 because all the prisoners seemed like they'd just come out of an english acting school, and thus they had to SHOUT VERY LOUD THEIR LINES. except Dance, he just quietly mumbled his way through his scenes.

lol came here to post Space Truckers but I see EZ Snappin beat me to it

"nobody jacks my load!"

Ice Pirates

and every other low-budget Star Wars rip-off

Ned thankig u for that link, I have been wanting to see Dark Star for quite a while.

Thanks, guys, I was previously unaware of the subtle satiric content of a Paul Verhoeven movie.

This post was inevitable, deserved, and now we can all move on. :)

Avatar!

Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn!

Battle Beyond the Stars!

anything with JCVD

How is Star Wars blue collar? The heroes include princesses, members of a galactic elite class (the Jedis), and a British upper class android. The only notable blue collar character in the whole double trilogy is Han Solo.

Exactly, Luke's story is the whole "prince" raised as a pauper. zzzz

Solo's a fucking spiv, not a blue collar guy. The D2 units are properly blue collar tho.

Also just cos Threepio has been programmed with a Received Pronunciation accent doesn't mean he isn't an oppressed prole too. Robot class is no way = upper class

Fucking aristocracy makes him carry their secret messages up his arse for a start

Yeah, but C3PO is a "protocol droid", i.e. built for a white collar job. Can you imagine him doing manual work?

(x-post)

Plus in a Galaxy where the aristos speak like Luke/Leia who's to say Threepio's accent isn't a signifier of servitude?

Well, it's quite obvious that all the droids are built for servitude. But within the internal classification of the droids, C3PO most certainly is white collar and not blue collar.

Come to think of it, in what way are robots worse off under the Empire? They're like slaves being conned to defend their own slavedom by the patrician Rebels who will then turn round and say "cheers for that guys, now stfu and get my dinner ready"

you don't really find out all that shit though until the second and third movies. in the first one luke is just a moisture farmer done good!

fyi next three Star Wars movies are about C3P0 and R2 killin all humans

3pio is clearly a class-climbing whore like madonna -- racist against wookies, too.

are cops blue collar? because there's a whole set of -cops things: timecop, space cops, robocop

actually, it's a lot harder to think of SF movies without a blue collar hero!

man NV is doing some real hardcore nietzschean reversing of the magnetic poles right now

You can't have a white collar/blue collar distinction in slavery, just cos as far as we know the Threepio units don't get their hands dirty doesn't mean they aren't pawns of The Man just as much as their spaceship-fixing bros

Plus remember that C3PO wasn't just a regular ol' protocol droid, he was a protocol droid working for a genuine princess!

I've never watched these movies properly, is there much evidence of the bits of the galaxy that aren't Rebel scum being mismanaged or oppressed by the Empire? Whole series is some kind of counter-revolutionary bullshit imo

You can't have a white collar/blue collar distinction in slavery,

Oh, I'm pretty sure during Medieval times those servants who worked for the Queen/King thought of themselves being much higher in the hierarchy than servants working for some small-time Lord.

is there much evidence of the bits of the galaxy that aren't Rebel scum being mismanaged or oppressed by the Empire

they killed a bunch of teddy bears iirc

xpost

Feudal system was v. different from slavery, sunshine

Star Wars clearly shows that Threepio had been abused by his "owner" and denied his basic rights to a hot oil bath for example

I've never watched these movies properly, is there much evidence of the bits of the galaxy that aren't Rebel scum being mismanaged or oppressed by the Empire?

They did blow up that one planet, but other than that, the original trilogy doesn't really show any of the Empire's supposed oppression.

one planet was home to the rebel princess tho

my favorite fanboy argument about star wars is the claim that by blowing up both death stars, the rebels are just as guilty as the empire is of committing mass murderer, since think of all the janitors/maintenance workers/blue collar dudes who are working on the death star keeping it running & functioning, they probably had no ill will towards anybody and were just conscripted by the empire, won't somebody think of the children!!

3po would have sold his droid bros out -- total class traitor -- did you see how quickly he maneuvered himself into exploiting ewok religion to make himself queen of the ewoks? don't weep for 3po.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw

Feudal system was v. different from slavery, sunshine

The only evidence for a supposed slavery of droids is the scene in the A New Hope where they're selling the droids on the market, but maybe Luke just lives on a backwater planet that hasn't yet abolished droid slavery. Nothing in the movies suggests Leia thought the droids were her slaves.

my favorite fanboy argument about star wars is the claim that by blowing up both death stars, the rebels are just as guilty as the empire is of committing mass murderer, since think of all the janitors/maintenance workers/blue collar dudes who are working on the death star keeping it running & functioning, they probably had no ill will towards anybody and were just conscripted by the empire, won't somebody think of the children!!

^isn't this from Clerks?

xpost

She did solder a HAYYYYYULP message into his guts

have never watched clerks xp

since think of all the janitors/maintenance workers/blue collar dudes who are working on the death star keeping it running & functioning, they probably had no ill will towards anybody and were just conscripted by the empire

The prequels supposedly explain this away by revealing that they're all clones. Though why a sentient clone's life should be worth less than anyone else's, I have no idea.

She did solder a HAYYYYYULP message into his guts

So you think all those bike messengers on the streets are slaves?

they used boba fett clones to clean toilets? seems like a waste

xp

xpost

they have to swallow their messages?

oh wait, they probably had droids to clean toilets

xp

Now you're being antropomorphic. R2 didn't "swallow" anything, it was just its version of a messenger bag.

The prequels supposedly explain this away by revealing that they're all clones. Though why a sentient clone's life should be worth less than anyone else's, I have no idea.

not enough midichlorians

http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/b/b9/Lobot_btm.jpg

This guy has the worst of it -- looks human, but named LOWbot.

I heard they almost got him to star in death of a salesman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zd_khk6zXo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFKhV_X6-cg

apparently George Lucas addressed the matter in the DVD commentary to one of the prequels.

Jay and Silent Bob are not in Clerks. Well, ok, except for kind-of.

I can understand the confusion there, certainly.

Isn't it Lobot? As in lobotomy?

You're right! Poor lobot! Why they gave you a lobotomy? Maybe you wanted too much freedom.

I heard they almost got him to star in death of a salesman

― real eyes realize real truffle fries (dyao), Friday, June 4, 2010 1:52 PM

more like Death Star of a Salesman

Yeah, but C3PO is a "protocol droid", i.e. built for a white collar job. Can you imagine him doing manual work?

"My last job was programming binary load-lifters, very similar to your vaporators!"

the original trilogy doesn't really show any of the Empire's supposed oppression.

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/1/14/OwenBeru_dead.jpg

"My last job was programming binary load-lifters, very similar to your vaporators!"

c3po just bragging how l33t his coding skills are, but whenever they need to hack empire security, notice it's always R2 who steps up.

3po would have sold his droid bros out -- total class traitor -- did you see how quickly he maneuvered himself into exploiting ewok religion to make himself queen of the ewoks? don't weep for 3po.

― Philip Nunez, Friday, June 4, 2010 1:40 PM Bookmark

But 3PO initially demurs, claiming it would be against his programming to impersonate a deity. He gets browbeat into this idea by, if I recall correctly, the princess.

Thread probably needs some distinction between "has blue collar character in it" and "blue collar sensibility." Like, it's hard to find ANY Hollywood picture where every character is a rich snot who only occasionally tips at restaurants.... whereas Alien is really interested in imagining what the bold new future really looks like to the delivery people and Marine draftees.

"My last job was programming binary load-lifters, very similar to your vaporators!"

Me at every job interview ever.

which one is Aunt Beru and and which one is Uncle Owen?

xxxp

Posted this thread as a response to Star Wars, as a sense, which is space opera only in a scruffier universe. Ridley Scott took that look and mixed it with the 70s bits of trucker films, Dark Star, Silent Running, et al, and did his own.

"My last job was programming binary load-lifters, very similar to your vaporators!"

Me at every job interview ever.

― Eighteen straight. I think that's a record. (kenan), Friday, June 4, 2010 3:28 PM Bookmark

LOL

"They Live" is the ultimate blue collar scifi film.

'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' - i.e. Richard Dreyfuss' character.

Non blue collar sci-fi = Wyndham

I haven't seen it since it aired in 1993, but I remember Space Rangers as going for an Alien inspired blue collar atmosphere

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/Space_Rangers_cast.JPG

Does 12 Monkeys ever tell you what Cole's job was before he was put in prison?

I think Starcraft 2 fits in this category. Interesting mix of backgrounds, too, as you have the hero with his southern/hick/redneck drawl vs the lambchopped mechanic with a strong NY accent

You can't have a white collar/blue collar distinction in slavery

In the pre-Civil War U.S. south, there were house slaves and field slaves.

I suppose someone should mention the Planet Express delivery team.

Hmm, true, tho the vibe I always got from them is more white collar/90's corporate/kinko's/fed-ex like

but I guess Scruffy would have harsh words for that

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Scruffy_2_9337.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5cAwTEEGNE

this was a solid thread, well done everyone

"the island", while indefensibly shitty, was ultimately pretty working class

"indefensibly shitty, was ultimately pretty working class"
haha that's all of michael bay's movies.

Playing Borderlands 2 this weekend and realized that both this game and Guardians of the Galaxy(much like Starcraft I & II) had great depictions of sci-fi rednecks/hillbillies. Yet again, I posit that Michael Rooker will probably never get the full credit for what he contributes to GotG.

Ha, and I completely forgot this thread had this exchange:

Yeah, but C3PO is a "protocol droid", i.e. built for a white collar job. Can you imagine him doing manual work?

"My last job was programming binary load-lifters, very similar to your vaporators!"

I guess we can add Elysium / Total Recall(remake) to this list, and also Edge of Tomorrow, which pointedly highlights the contrast between grunt & pretty-boy officer

I'm watching Snowpiercer right now. Definitely counts.

that repo men flick from a few years back. terrible, but working class, even trying to say something abt it.