"In 2005, Mr. Lapham wrote and appeared in 'The American Ruling Class,' a documentary-style film featuring fictional characters as well as interviews with real celebrities, including Bill Bradley, Walter Cronkite, Pete Seeger, Robert Altman and Barbara Ehrenreich."
Unfortunately as described it doesn't capture quite how unusual, innovative, and special this film is.
It's a "dramatic-documentary-musical." A mixture of dramatic filmmaking, documentary filmmaking, and even some elements of musical.
Its main topic/idea is to show two promising college students on graduation day, one pursuing a career of money and power (in high finance) and the other pursuing art (via writing). Lapham uses this lens to analyze all aspects of American society from a class and power direction. Mainly to show the draw of power and conformity for the college-educated elite, and the way a struggling working class subsidizes their ambitions with their labor.
In the film, Lapham himself is both a narrator and a principal, acting as a mentor to one of the two "characters," who are played by actors, but thrown into conversation with real people, including some people holding powerful positions, and some intellectual celebrities.
Ehrenreich, who had recently completed the book "Nickel and Dimed" (2001), in which she goes "undercover" as the working poor, has a role in the film, too. She "plays" the role of a worker at a restaurant, and she and the other workers, at one point, break out in song, a song titled "Nickel and Dimed." I read a review of this movie that called this scene "divine madness," and I agree.
This is one of a small collection of movies I have on DVD, because it's so small and interesting as a film, that I rewatch it from time to time. I sometimes struggle to find it on streaming networks or online. It acts as a little bit of a life decoder for me, since I grew up as a public school educated child of immigrants with not-that-much class awareness, graduated from a top college around the time the film was made, got recruited to work on Wall Street (much as the film portrays in its opening scenes), then left a Wall Street job after 3 years to co-found and work on a tech startup for many years.
Anyway, I was influenced by a lot of Lapham's work, especially his moral clarity in anti-war writing during the Iraq War years. But this one little film really stuck with me. RIP, Lewis Lapham.
Interesting. Uploaded on: 2023-11-27. I wonder if that's actually a legal upload, though. Also seems to currently be available as a $3 rental on YouTube US in SD quality:
I read Harper's Magazine for years without knowing who was behind it. The mixture of literary criticism, political analysis and in-depth reporting Lapham shaped was hard to top in terms of informativeness and calm inquisitiveness, something sorely missing from online media. The one piece of writing by Lapham that is etched into my mind is his introduction to McLuhan's Understanding Media [1], which helped me at last grasp how fundamental and unavoidable the "medium is the message" dictum is. RIP.
I first encountered Lapham in the Notebook column of Harper’s while avoiding studying in the magazine room at Uris Library. often Learned more about understanding the world from his missives than my coursework. He will be missed, the cliche of understanding the past is key to understanding the future was never more true.
A couple people (myself included) vouched for your comment. You should email the mods (contact link at the bottom) since you seem to be shadowbanned. This was probably because your first actions after creating your account was to submit a link to (your own) substack. You probably got caught by the spam filter.
As a Harper's and Lapham's Quarterly subscriber, I have been a huge fan of his quirky editorial style.
Specifically, I'd like to call out his podcast ("The World In Time"). Its past episodes remain treasure troves of wisdom, with LL's resonant voice asking the kind of engaging questions that are a rarity these days. Highly recommended.
RIP. His opening essays in Laphams Quarterly were forming for me. I have quite a few of them on my bookshelf. Thank you for your contributions to our world.
He wrote the "Notebook" column in Harper's magazine regularly for many years, and one of the very admirable things about Harper's is that the entire history of the magazine is (for subscribers) available in PDF. Here's everything Lapham published there: https://harpers.org/author/lewishlapham/
And when I say entire history, I mean back to 1850 something. It's also indexed, subject tagged and searchable. If you search the archive for "Dickens" you'll see that several of his novels were published there originally in serial form, but you'll also find random non-fiction essays he published, as well as his contemporaries writing about him. It's kind of an extraordinary resource.
Readit News
"In 2005, Mr. Lapham wrote and appeared in 'The American Ruling Class,' a documentary-style film featuring fictional characters as well as interviews with real celebrities, including Bill Bradley, Walter Cronkite, Pete Seeger, Robert Altman and Barbara Ehrenreich."
Unfortunately as described it doesn't capture quite how unusual, innovative, and special this film is.
It's a "dramatic-documentary-musical." A mixture of dramatic filmmaking, documentary filmmaking, and even some elements of musical.
Its main topic/idea is to show two promising college students on graduation day, one pursuing a career of money and power (in high finance) and the other pursuing art (via writing). Lapham uses this lens to analyze all aspects of American society from a class and power direction. Mainly to show the draw of power and conformity for the college-educated elite, and the way a struggling working class subsidizes their ambitions with their labor.
In the film, Lapham himself is both a narrator and a principal, acting as a mentor to one of the two "characters," who are played by actors, but thrown into conversation with real people, including some people holding powerful positions, and some intellectual celebrities.
Ehrenreich, who had recently completed the book "Nickel and Dimed" (2001), in which she goes "undercover" as the working poor, has a role in the film, too. She "plays" the role of a worker at a restaurant, and she and the other workers, at one point, break out in song, a song titled "Nickel and Dimed." I read a review of this movie that called this scene "divine madness," and I agree.
This is one of a small collection of movies I have on DVD, because it's so small and interesting as a film, that I rewatch it from time to time. I sometimes struggle to find it on streaming networks or online. It acts as a little bit of a life decoder for me, since I grew up as a public school educated child of immigrants with not-that-much class awareness, graduated from a top college around the time the film was made, got recruited to work on Wall Street (much as the film portrays in its opening scenes), then left a Wall Street job after 3 years to co-found and work on a tech startup for many years.
Anyway, I was influenced by a lot of Lapham's work, especially his moral clarity in anti-war writing during the Iraq War years. But this one little film really stuck with me. RIP, Lewis Lapham.
It's currently on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/the-american-ruling-class
https://youtu.be/4uGSmnRYe48
Dead Comment
[1] https://worrydream.com/refs/Lapham_1994_-_The_Eternal_Now.pd...
15 minutes you won't regret!
Specifically, I'd like to call out his podcast ("The World In Time"). Its past episodes remain treasure troves of wisdom, with LL's resonant voice asking the kind of engaging questions that are a rarity these days. Highly recommended.
And when I say entire history, I mean back to 1850 something. It's also indexed, subject tagged and searchable. If you search the archive for "Dickens" you'll see that several of his novels were published there originally in serial form, but you'll also find random non-fiction essays he published, as well as his contemporaries writing about him. It's kind of an extraordinary resource.