One of the closest things to a perfect movie I ever saw was “Breaking Away” in 1979.
People who remember it will see it as one of the better American films about bicycling, concluding with a stirring finish in Indiana University’s “Little 500” bike race.
But there was so much more to it than that. The story is about four recent high school graduates in Bloomington (home of IU) who are trying to decide what to do with their lives. Three of them, played by Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern and Jackie Earle Haley, don’t seem to have big plans or big potential. Quaid was a high school quarterback without the potential to play college ball.
The fourth one, played by Dennis Christopher, has the potential to go to college and the drive to be a successful bicycle racer, but he doesn’t want his friends to think he’s leaving them behind. T/he four spend part of their time swimming in a quarry that once was filled with stone that men from their fathers’ generation cut to build large buildings in Bloomington.
One night Dave is out walking with his father, who spent decades working as a limestone cutter and now owns a used-car lot.
The boy is telling his dad that students at the university (Indiana) call the kids in the town “cutters” to put them down, and his dad tells him he was proud to work as a cutter. There was one thing strange about it, though.
“I was proud of my work,” he said. “And the buildings went up. When they were finished the damnedest thing happened. It was like the buildings were too good for us. Nobody told us that. It just felt uncomfortable, that’s all.”
In a way, that’s sort of the point of the movie. It’s just an example, but it’s a good example of the type of jobs that used to be available to men with strong backs who may not have had much in the way of education. By the late 1970s, those jobs were starting to go away. In the 40-plus years since, the guys who used to do those jobs haven’t just fallen through the cracks. They’ve fallen off the edge of the Earth.
And if they thought the buildings made from their limestone were too good for them, wait till you see how they feel about the country that has thrown them away.
There just aren’t enough janitorial and security guard jobs available.
And anyway, the people who took the jobs away became the worst kind of liars. They told people they needed to be retrained for the new economy. They spoke of how computer skills would stand them in good stead, but what they forgot to mention was that the computer jobs of which they spoke could be done better and cheaper in places like Mumbai and Bangalore.
It turned out that the only jobs that would exist were jobs in so-called service industries. You know, the ones where someone asks you if you want fries with that. Or the ones who clean up the table area when folks are done eating.
Many of the better service jobs have disappeared anyway, thanks to big box stores and the Internet.
Men who cut limestone for did other skilled jobs working with their hands could take great pride in their work. They could look at impressive buildings, and even if they didn’t think they could go inside, they knew the roles they played in putting them up.
It’s a lot harder to take pride in how well you wipe tables in fast food restaurants, particularly if your boss is 22 years old and doesn’t treat you with all that much respect.
There’s a day of reckoning coming, maybe not tomorrow or this month or this year, but it’s coming.
You just can’t rob people of their self-respect and get away with it forever.