| Lucas Hardwick |

Blue Collar plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, February 7th, through Sunday, February 9th, in conjunction with the Cult Film Collective. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
***Mild spoilers ahead***
My career as a writer is successful only in the sense that I get to do it; my work is published here and there, and maybe a few hundred people read it, chuckle, and manage to get something out of it—some of it right here on this very blog. But, it hardly pays the bills, so to make ends meet, I have to go “break rocks” at the local “Widget Manufacturing State Penitentiary,” as I like to call it. That’s right: I have what the stiffs call a “blue collar” job.
I know, I know; you say, “But Lucas, you should follow your passions and be a writer for a living. Quit giving yourself away to the corporate fat cats and their diabolical capitalist schemes.” Oh, my brothers and sisters in Christ, if only my passions paid the higher end of the median family income. I followed my passions for several years as a technical director for the local TV news—you know, those folks pushing buttons and pulling levers in front of a wall of monitors, behind the scenes of your local TV station—and scraped by. It was the closest I ever got to my real passion: flying spaceships. But alas, my college education and my University of Southern Indiana branded cum laude status never earned me more than $28K a year, and in this economy…
I had to give all that up. After about 10 years of waiting for a TV gig to somehow pay me spaceship pilot wages, I sold out and went to work at the local widget factory and doubled my salary in the first year. At this rate, I could buy my own damn spaceship one day. So now I make widgets, widgets that many of you reading this probably own or have borrowed money at around 5% interest for upwards of 72 months to eventually own.
Oh, building widgets is definitely a great way to improve one’s financial situation in a very short period of time, not to mention the corporate-supported ample health and retirement savings benefits that ask only for 25 short years of your very short life. A government waving a finicky social security check in your face, enticing you to keep taxed income flowing through the bureaucratic infrastructure at the low price of just over a half-century of a daily grind right up until you’re just about dead is the cherry on top. Who needs to fulfill passions when the win/win predicament of the American Dream gets you by the short and curlies?
I know it sounds pretty sweet, grinding out manual labor, perpetuating the capitalist agenda all at the cost of your body and precious time, but besides the steady paycheck and the two PPO options and the Roth 401k that you may never live long enough to use, building widgets comes with a few grueling, classified realities, particularly the oft unspoken, much-abused bathroom break policy.
First, let’s just take a moment to examine the colossal scope of widget manufacturing. Around 10,000 people, including contractors, are part of the widget-making process under about 4.5 million square feet of rooftop across two shifts of production, five and sometimes six days a week. At some point during the widget-making day, a few of us have to go poop. Bathrooms are scattered, I don’t know, at varying intervals throughout the widget plant. I don’t have the exact numbers, but none of them are conveniently located to the widget assembly line. You might say that space is an issue, but it seems more a socio-industrial mind game—keep ‘em further from the bathrooms and maybe they won’t use ‘em. A few hundred steps for either the reliving of oneself or the occasional mental health break afforded by the solace of a restroom stall doesn’t seem to stop anyone. You know how when two alternating current sine waves eventually sync up and are briefly in phase for a few seconds? Well, when enough people are under the same roof, the same phenomenon occurs with bowel movements and more often than you might suspect, many, many people are pooping at the exact same time. “Life finds a way,” as it were.
Company policy is such that team members are encouraged to use their two 10-minute and one 45-minute breaks “wisely,” suggesting, “go to the bathroom when we tell you to.” They clearly missed the part where that involves using company-sanctioned ass-time to walk into the next county to find available facilities. I believe it was the great American poet laureate Emily Dickinson who once said, “Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I poop on company time.” I’m not a smart guy, but it seems to me, if more bathrooms were more conveniently located, perhaps Widget of America could pump the brakes on the toilet break tyranny, but we wouldn’t want them to sell out to the intestinal needs of its profit-earning proletariat, would we.
Because of the astronomical capacity for doing Number Ones and Number Twos by so many people, it’s not necessarily good for business to stop production every time someone has to “go see a man about a horse.” So the vibrant minds behind lean manufacturing devised a tedious protocol for breaking oneself free for a few moments to answer nature’s call.
In the spirit of high school hall passes, production team members signal for help by way of initiating a klaxon or some kind of alarm in their process, alerting a team leader to come to their assistance. Once a team leader is available—hope you didn’t need to go right this second—they swing by your workstation to see what the problem is. You tell ‘em you gotta pee, they huff out an exasperated sigh as though they weren’t just texting stupid memes and scrolling Instagram, say some smart-assed tone comment to the tune of, “Again?,” take your spot, and you’re off to a five-minute pisscation.
But, oh Frodo, your journey has only just begun. Because habitual offenders and a few bad apples have the tendency to go at the exact same time every day for upwards of a half-hour per incident, the rest of us well-meaning bathroom breakers are forced to toe the line and endure further restroom bureaucracy in place in the name of paper trails and hard evidence. The next step involves going out of your way to the group leader’s desk and signing-by God-out with signature, date, and time, branding yourself forever in the annals of Widget Manufacturing of America’s 783rd Volume of Using the Gall-Darned Bathroom.
And then through the Misty Mountains and across the Dead Marshes, at long last you reach a restroom… that’s closed for cleaning. Or if your harried journey is to “take the Browns to the Super Bowl” then your odds of winning back seven bucks from the nine scratch-offs you brought into work that morning may be slightly better than finding an open toilet stall on your first bathroom stop. At any rate, the odds of your closest bathroom—at around one-eighth mile distance—of being your Huckleberry is about 50/50.
Eventually, your Apple Watch or FitBit alerts you that you’ve reached your step goal for the day, and at long last, you’re shaking the dew off the lily. Me, a grown-ass 43-year-old man who pays taxes and cuts his own grass is reduced to the adult equivalent of raising my hand and asking permission to use the little boy’s room in a double-down sell out of my passions and grown-up dignity.
Many industries have organized over the past several decades and established Unions or some type of representation who’s willing to go to bat in the name of bathroom breaks and time off and health insurance. But since everything in the capitalist free world comes at a price, those institutions are susceptible to corruption, selling out, and their own brand of shitty rules too, and that’s the hard lesson Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto learn in Paul Schrader’s 1978 directorial debut feature about corporate apathy and the corrupt organizations pulling the strings, Blue Collar.

Yaphet Kotto, Richard Pryor, and Harvey Keitel apparently did not get along on the set. It is said Richard Pryor even pulled a gun on Director Paul Schrader
On the surface Blue Collar tells a pretty straightforward story of how three Detroit autoworkers with expensive real-world problems cook up the oldest get-rich scheme in the books, and attempt to rob their local Union hall. Rob the Union safe, pay some bills, hang on to the leftover cash, fuck over the suits, and no one is the wiser. What could possibly go wrong? The Union doesn’t actually have any money! Instead our gang uncovers a scant $600 and a ledger cataloging illegal loan operations connected to crime organizations in Vegas, New York, and Chicago, and a simple robbery turns into a blackmail game won by old men swindling the pants off the working class at the cost of friendships and personal convictions.
What Blue Collar eventually gets around to is the daisy chain of selling out from the top down—from the company to the Union, the Union to the mob, and the proletariat to the corporation and Union that “protects” them. It doesn’t exactly call out Unions as pointless or bandy an anti-Union message, but more adequately demonstrates how easily the working class is manipulated by their organizations, and how those organizations are susceptible to influence.
The relationship between the Union and its members goes nowhere fast. Richard Pryor’s Zeke complains to Union rep Clarence Hill (Lane Smith) that his locker is broken and for six months he’s endured injured fingers and a pile of ballpoint pens to get it open, and expects to be reimbursed for band-aids and stationery supplies. Hill demands Zeke to “be reasonable” and that he can’t go to the company for every little thing. This all occurs during a Union meeting asking for volunteers to spend their Saturday handing out Union flyers. Harvey Keitel’s Jerry Bartowski is heard stating he has a second job working at the service station on Saturday. The dynamic of the Union and its constituents is not unlike a cantankerous, sexless marriage that exists expressly out of years of habit.

According to IMDB, Richard Pryor would improvise much of his dialogue. This became a real problem for Yaphet Kotto.
A few moments later at the bar, when Zeke, Jerry, and Yaphet Kotto’s Smokey James are confronted by a “local college student” about corruption within their Union, Jerry gets defensive, says he is proud of his Union, and demands the “student” leave the bar they’ve all convened at.
Throughout the film, there exists the strange adversarial energy of “having your cake and eating it too” among the company, the workers, and their Union. There’s no respect to bind them, but they all need one another to exist.

Richard Pryor blamed Schrader for “putting him back on cocaine” after making Blue Collar.
Schrader portrays a fledgling, corrupt Union as the most powerful institution among the three, not only with blatant fabrications pouring from its leadership as they successfully lie to Zeke about getting in touch with his rep over the locker situation, but also physically. The gang’s company supervisor Dogshit Miller (Borah Silver) dweebishly bullies his workers who defy and mock his leadership. He’s dressed in a button-up shirt armored with a pocket protector and blinds everyone with plaid golf pants hitched up to his nipples as he stomps around a dirty factory floor amongst workers in jeans and t-shirts. He’s not even dignified with a real name: “Dogshit Miller” is how his character is listed in the credits. Meanwhile, Union rep Clarence Hill walks around with a real name and cigars in his pocket and coolly settles negotiations between the company and its employees with bottles of scotch, often forcing Dogshit and the company to do the apologizing.
The backward relationships are the result of opposing forces selling out in the name of their own existence. No one organization is interested in bettering the institution it has made itself a part of.
And if you’re thinking, “Yeah, you tell ‘em Paul Schrader! Fuck the man!” well, hold your horses. Zeke, Jerry, and Smokey may be hard workers who won’t put up with corporate bullshit, but they’re not exactly candidates for Particularly Exceptional Human Awards. They cheat on their wives, lie on their taxes, probably do just a little too much coke for the average working man, and Smokey James is an ex-con who maybe murdered someone. Not to mention their overall standoff-ish dispositions don’t exactly make them approachable. You think Zeke Brown is the kinda guy who’s gonna raise his hand and ask permission to go pee-pee or poo-poo? No one in the film is completely likable. In that regard, Blue Collar truly captures the plant floor experience because how many relationships forged by proximity and small talk does anyone want to endure for more than a few hours.

According to IMDB, Paul Schrader claims the three leads were “coking it up on set.” Sweet n Low was supposed to be a substitute for cocaine in the party scene at Smokey’s place, but the actors were apparently using the real stuff between takes.
We, the viewers, wind up complicit in the sell-out game by rooting for these guys in spite of their flaws, making us also in favor of robbing Unions and being a pain in the ass for the corporations churning America’s industries. We sell out to the sell outs who work for the sell outs who are run by the sell outs who sold out to the mob. And for those paying even closer attention to the extrapolating sell-out scene, our gang works for the Checker Motor Company which for almost 90 years, built taxi cabs used by another organized group of workers who likely resented their companies and representation in much the same way as Zeke, Jerry, and Smokey.
In short: everyone has a price, and Blue Collar’s Union has got everyone’s number eventually resorting to fatally violating OSHA regulations and shelling out cheap promotions to keep the lid on their illicit doings, forging an antagonistic rift amongst the three men who’d set out to undo them.
A little locker maintenance and a cashier’s check for twenty bucks might’ve made all the difference. In the immortal words of Marcellus Wallace: “That’s pride fuckin’ with ya.” In the end, longtime work chums find themselves at odds with one another while a fellow peer winds up on the business end of a corrupt Union. And in the meantime, Detroit Rock City keeps cranking out cars for people with bad credit perpetuating everlasting debt and pumping commerce through America’s veins.
No one says, “I want to make widgets when I grow up,” but pretty much everyone hates their job or finds something absolutely intolerable about it. It’s just part of every American’s God-given occupational pact of being forced to be someplace for someone else’s gain because the price of bread and doctors is always way too high. And when it all shakes out, we do what we have to do to survive. It amounts less to selling out passions to the Almighty Dollar and more to the willingness to give up something for the sake of your living and your family. And in that regard, selling out is absolved by the nobility of sacrifice; we don’t sell out our passions but rather put aside our desires to put roofs on heads, clothes on back, and food in mouths. Of course, leave it to Paul Schrader to take such noble intentions and put his brand of dark irony on it in the shape of Zeke, Jerry, and Smokey knocking over a Union vault. But the core of Schrader’s message in Blue Collar is one about working men and the petty trials they’re forced to suffer in the wake of earning an honest living.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon