Of "Middle Classness" and Popular Culture

I have recently been giving some thought to the idea of what it means to be "middle class."

The criteria for middle class status vary from time to time and place to place, but these days, at least, to be a middle class adult seems to mean their one's being a college-educated, salary-earning white collar worker with a career rather than a mere job, affording that worker a certain standard of consumption providing a minimum of comfort, mobility, security and opportunity for their children (home and car ownership, health insurance, college for the kids, retirement, a few extras here and there like a night out or a vacation).

Crunching the numbers it seemed to me that the percentage of Americans who have the full package in even basic form is probably in the single digits; and especially if one insists that, as the mid-century expectation had it, the household gets it on one income, in the low single digits, and likely declining with incomes stagnant and much of the package becoming ever more exorbitant. (Given what college now runs, even those one might judge to be very well-off at a glance can looking needy.)

Considering that it seems there is a great difference indeed between middle class and "middle income" (mixing of which two very different categories does not always seem a slip-up on the part of those who do it).

It seems, too, that popular culture is way off the mark in presenting what is in fact wealth as mere middleness is a universal norm with anything less (the actual norm) a shabby aberration popular culture is way off the mark. This makes the obvious question just why it does it do so.

Obviously popular culture, as Thorstein Veblen already had occasion to note a century ago, caters above all to the upper "affluent middle class," which is, after all, the group living something like this for which all this is not so remote as it is to others. Significant, too, is the extent to which the people who make pop culture in Hollywood and elsewhere have generally inhabited a bubble of privilege for generations, with all that implies for perceptions. (When Chris Pine speaks of his background as "blue collar" I do not get the sense that he is being ironic.) And there is the dramatic convenience that people who have little money find the range of possible activity they can undertake very limited--too limited for a TV writer's convenience, certainly. (That working class, really blue collar family? We won't be seeing an episode about their wacky adventures on vacation anytime soon.)

Yet it seems to me undeniable that we would not see so much of this were audiences not receptive to it.

Simply put, there are stories and characters people follow because they relate to them, because they see themselves in them and connect with them--and others they are attracted to because they represent a fantasy of what they wish they were, how they would like for their life to be, and I think the latter is what is relevant here. In reality the viewer may not have a very attractive home--but when looking at the screen they would rather see the spacious, lavishly appointed house rather than cramped and less appealing surroundings like those in which they actually live. Indeed, it may well be that the worse off they are materially, the more they want the escape.