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

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

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.