In the 1987 film Overboard, directed by Gary Marshall, class serves as a fluid cultural identity that vilifies and dehumanizes the rich, while fetishizing the poor. Elements such as mise-en-scène, means of wealth, and names reaffirm the cultural differences between classes while highlighting the signifiers of taste that are produced by class. But class is also seen as a quality that allows for self-betterment, self-fulfillment, and economic mobility. Through her amnesia, kidnapping, and domestic labor, Joanna/Annie is granted sympathy and motherhood due to her reassignment as a consumer and product of the lower class. With the aide of Joanna/Annie, Dean is able to regain his masculine role as provider and achieve upward class mobility by establishing a successful business. However, upward class mobility can only be achieved through Dean’s manipulation and exploitation of Joanna/Annie. This suggests that the lower classes can only transition from roles of manual laborer into roles as entrepreneurs through brainwashing of the upper class. Moreover, these transitions simply merge characters into different forms of consumerism that again restrict and define their identities. These themes mirror the work of 1930s screwball comedies that also function to safely contain women within gender norms, while granting suitable males passage into the upper class. This paper will use the works of Bourdieu, bell hooks, and Guy Debord to examine the role of class mobility, cultural tastes, and the use of consumer identity in the film.
About the presenterJenny Platz
Jenny Platz is a PhD student in English at the University of Rhode Island. She earned her M.A. in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University in 2011. She has presented at conferences in areas such as gender and video game studies, fairy tales and modern film, music and anti-nostalgia in television, Buffy Studies, and the biography film. She has presented at the Popular Culture Association in 2010, 2011, and 2013. Her scholarly work has appeared in the 2012 issue of Enthymema, titled “Return to the Grindhouse: Tarantino and the Modernization of 1970s Exploitation Films” and as a chapter titled “The Woman in the Red Dress: Sexuality, Femme Fatales, the Gaze and Ada Wong” in the 2014 book Unraveling Resident Evil: Essays on the Complex Universe of the Games and Films. She currently teaches coming of age literature at URI and film history at NOVA Community College.