Blue Collar (1978, Paul Schrader) (Patreon)

92/100

Spoilers ahoy.

Second viewing, no change. Feels like New Hollywood's last gasp—astonishingly blunt and despairing, yet also bursting with style and energy right from the opening credit sequence, in which a freeze-frame accompanies each breakdown in Captain Beefheart's "Hard Workin' Man," the song's stop-time beat retained solely by the sound of clanking machinery. Schrader gets us to drop our guard via plentiful humor, letting Pryor semi-improvise his way through the IRS dude's visit and giving the trio hilariously dopey disguises (which we don't see or even hear discussed until they're donned) during the robbery. For a long time, Blue Collar plays like a genial stick-it-to-The-Man comedy with an undercurrent of genuine outrage, which makes its abrupt plummet into hell all the more potent. It's typical of this film's complexity that the turning point doesn't involve malevolent outside forces taking steps to neutralize/eliminate our heroes (though that certainly occurs); you feel everything shift when they agree that they can no longer hang out together, as that would attract too much attention given public knowledge that the burglars were two black guys and a white guy. (Jack Nitzsche's score even provides a slow, mournful, twangy-guitar variation on the "Mannish Boy"-style theme as they prepare to drive off separately.) Was also reminded of how remarkably insignificant their gripes are, and how easily management could have placated them. Just fix Zeke's fucking locker! There's something uniquely infuriating about the union rep pretending to call someone about it—it's such a raw, grotesque exercise of power to lie and do nothing about such a trivial matter. "You're nothing," that says.

Obviously things get much more horrific than that. Not sure there's a torture-porn horror film scene that upsets me as much as does Smokey's death by paint fumes, which Schrader shoots for maximum gasping, smeary pathos. And the efficient way that an unseen figure (whose voice is pretty clearly that of the same union rep) lays out what to do—intimidate one man, co-opt another, murder the malcontent who'll neither buckle nor play ball—could hardly be more chilling. But it's the speedy disintegration of Zeke and Jerry's friendship that really draws blood, culminating in a climactic (yet distressingly casual) use of the n-word that must have been shocking even in 1978. Thematically, Blue Collar is the film that Parasite ultimately backs away from being (thereby disappointing me a bit): a portrait of the exploited underclass struggling to turn the tables on their oppressors, only to wind up devouring each other instead. I could live without the final shot's reprise of Smokey's speech laying out the company's divide-and-conquer strategy—plenty clear without that little nudge, Paul—but few dramas of that era dared to let a black star as huge as Pryor then was come right out and say "You're my friend, Jerry. But you're thinkin' white." Especially not as part of his character's justification for caving. On the one hand, Zeke's decision seems naïve at best, reprehensible at worst; on the other hand, everything he says about the impossibility of his situation, his lack of realistic options, is absolutely true. Usually it takes an entire season of The Wire to reach such a credible, sorrowful impasse.