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Michael D. Dwyer, "Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt" (Oxford UP, 2025)
01:11:48
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B
Welcome to New Books in Media and Communication, a podcast series on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Corey Barker. My guest today is Michael D. Dwyer, an associate professor of media and communication at Arcadia University and the author of Tinsel and Rust How How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt. The book was published by Oxford University Press in 2025 and is available now. Michael, welcome to the show.
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A
Thanks. Good to be here.
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B
So, before we dive more specifically into the book, one of the opening questions we like to ask guests is can you tell the audience a little bit about your research path and how it led you to this project more specifically?
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A
Yeah. So I think it might show in my work, but I didn't start as a film or media studies person. That was not my goal when I started university. It was not. It wasn't even my goal when I started my graduate program.
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So I started my undergraduate career as a marine science physics double major and quickly found out that that was an idea I had when I was 12. It wasn't the work I was actually doing and I did not find that out until I was at the University of Miami's School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, when all of my classmates were much better at doing that work and I was good at writing project descriptions. And so I wound up changing my major to just English with a history minor. After my undergraduate career, I applied just because it was in Pittsburgh to. Which was where I'm from, to Carnegie Mellon University, which I did not know. But their program in literary and cultural studies turned out to be the kind of approach to. At the time, I was. I thought I would be a literature scholar, an American literature scholar, but I wasn't great at literature scholarship. What I was interested in is how history and politics and stories all work together. And it just was dumb luck that I wound up at Carnegie Mellon where I did a master's program and then I wound up in there at another cultural studies program at Syracuse University. But it wasn't until two years in where I took my first film class ever in my life. Um, so I took. I wound up taking a class on Hitchcock in America with Stephen Cohan. And within two weeks, I knew that the best work I would do, I would do for Stephen Cohan. Um, and so I just decided I will be a film person. Uh, it's. And a series of mistakes and, like, accidents wound, like, brought me to that class. And then I just knew right away I was like, deeply terrified of him. I really wanted to impress him. And every lecture was so awesome. So I wound up working with Steve on a project which I thought would have. At first I thought it was going to be about, like, teenagers. And it wound up being about 50s nostalgia in the 1980s, particularly in 80s film. And that turned into my first book, back to the 50s. And I can tell you the exact date. This is long. I apologize, but the exact. The exact date I was. It was in. I'm not going to look it up, but it was in 2009. I was watching the film Reckless, which is this film starring Aiden Quinn and Daryl Hannah, because it. Aiden Quinn was like, marketed as the new James Dean. And there's a chapter in my. In back to the 50s about all these new James Deans. And I was watching this movie, Reckless, which was filmed in Western Pennsylvania. And I thought, there's something going on with these Western Pennsylvania narratives in the 1980s. Oh, that's interesting. And I just set it aside. And then when I finished back to the 50s and that came out in 2015, I started thinking about these Western Pennsylvania narratives again. And then the presidential election in 2016. Google search terms in right after 2016, the Rust Belt came up, and I was thinking about the ways that I felt that the Rust Belt was sort of both.
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Caricatured and blamed for our reactionary nation.
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And, and, and just where does the idea of the Rust Belt come from? Being a person who grew up and was educated in the Rust Belt, but wasn't born there. So I had always sort of thought about that, and then that became a fascination and that turned into tinsel and rustic.
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B
So I think a big, A big question and something you wrestle with, like early on in the book, of course, is where is the Rust Belt? Like, what are the geographic boundaries? And obviously that is of a decent amount of debate as you go through in the book, depending on who you ask. So, you know, you don't have to go through all of that, but from your vantage point, how did you work through, you know, defining those boundaries of what is the Rust Belt? And maybe a related question is like, why is it so contentious? Or why is that so difficult for people to agree upon what we actually are talking about when we throw out the phrase Rust Belt?
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A
Yeah. So that is a. It's a difficult question. And even in the way that you've phrased it, it points to two different ways of. At least two different ways of approaching it. So the first question is, where is the Rust Belt? And the second one is, what is the Rust Belt? And it partially because I had.
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Some familiarity through my partner who had done a dissertation. Her name is Rachel Collins, and she had done this dissertation in what is called the geo humanities. So it's taking cultural geography and applying it, in her case, to American literature.
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She had worked with this geographer at Syracuse named Don Mitchell, who had this history of being on English PhDs.
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Dissertation committees, and geographers would be in our reading groups and things like that. So because I had some familiarity with, like, the kinds of questions that geographers wrestle with when defining a place or defining a space, I had already started to think about why I felt dissatisfied with every time somebody tried to map the Rust Belt. It. And I feel this way. It. It is like the, the quickest way to just like, for a social media person to make me mad to call Pittsburgh the Midwest. I just hate it so much. It's not, It's. It's a secret third thing. But yeah, I find that the sort of drawing the maps and boundaries around the Rust Belt profoundly dissatisfying. You can't define it in relation to states. Right. Like, so Cleveland, for me, obviously a Rust Belt City, Columbus, not.
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Even though they are, or a.
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Wheeling, West Virginia Rust Belt city is much further from a great lake than say, well, Columbus or, or something like that. And every attempt, and there are a lot I worked through in the introduction, every attempt to like draw a map of the Rust Belt, it left me feeling dissatisfied. And I, and I just came to decide that the better question is what is the Rust Belt? The Rust Belt as a culturally legible idea, and in some ways it's a symbol for it emerges in the 1980s, right. The rust Belt. The same places they referred to as the Rust Belt were called different things at different times. So in the mid 20th century, these same places were called the arsenal of democracy because they generated such great wealth and military force to.
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Make America a world bestriding hegemon. But in the 1980s, they came to stand for something else and that they came to serve this role as a symbol of malaise or rot or decline. And these, these narratives of decline in malaise, I mean this, these are, it is present even today in our political discourse. So I spent a lot of time just sort of ask, thinking about what is the Rust Belt? And then a final question. Why, right? What purpose does the Rust Belt serve in all these different stories? And just to, to use a quick illustration of that is that in a lot of ways when people were googling what is the rust belt? In November 2016, they were trying to, many people trying to understand why that the United States had elected Donald Trump to be our president. And the sort of like mythical diner dwelling former steel workers or former, former auto workers or rubber plant workers in the Rust Belt became the reason. Even though if you look at demographic information like locales that had steam steel mills in them, for example, never have voted for Trump in majority universally. And it's just not the narrative is more important than the facts.
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That's, I guess how I shifted my approach to those questions and what I try to do in the book and how this concept of the Rust Belt shifts over time and in different places and with different inflections and et cetera.
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B
Yeah. And I think one of the great anecdotes from the introduction, something that I had never heard, was it Dukakis when he was running and initially referred to it as the, or refer to the Rust bowl, obviously trying to hearken back to the Dust bowl era. So thinking about the way that even in the late 20th century, political figures are starting to combine these different locations and economic conditions and sort of social changes into sort of an imagined idea of what was happening in the United States, trying to evoke, you know, bad times from the past, but not necessarily totally identifying it as these specific places. It's more of just kind of this imagined evocative thing that's like happening in America. Right?
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A
Yeah. So that was WALTER Mondale in 1984. Right. And even before that there was a Time magazine cover. I think the, I think the COVID story is Boom, Bust and the birth of the Rust Bowl. And the other sort of reference behind Rust Belt is that is less, it was supposed to be a reference or a response to the Sun Belt, which were these emerging, this emerging sort of economic force that firms that were, well, defense contractors and then other firms looking to get away from the power of unionized labor in what became known as the Rust Belt. So union. Yeah, but there's this, that over and you can look at, you know, and as I do in the film, you can look at, say. Well, I, I, I don't talk about this in the book, but you can look at something like the Deer Hunter. Right. The, so that that film predates the concept of the Rust Belt, as a culturally legible phrase, put it that way. And when you look at the depictions of the mill workers in the Deer Hunter, there's no indication that the mill's going to close. However, there's this deep dissatisfaction with like, or it, the film expresses a deep dissatisfaction with or portrays these mill workers as having these stultifying lives. Same thing with a film like Blue Collar. The end of Blue Collar is so amazing partially because the end of, it's like the end of the octopus or something. The notion at the end of Blue Collar is that the line's going to keep running forever. It doesn't matter. It's going to destroy these men. But that's not 10 years later. The stories that are told about these places or these industries or these workers.
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B
Yeah, that's a great way to sort of transition into Hollywood's role in this process, which is obviously central to the book. Right. We can see how in sort of journalistic discourse or politicians starting to evoke these ideas in the 80s. But as you allude there examples of it that, that kind of idea or those attitudes certainly visible in films that predate the concept. So how, you know, speaking very broadly, how has Hollywood, you know, I think the word you use has trained us to, to view the Rust Belts over you know, the last 40 or so years.
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In the sort of symbolic power that the Rust Belt has in narrative or even just of course, visually. Right.
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A
Yeah. So I mean, the Subtitle of the book is How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt. And that's meant to be sort of provocative.
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But I think it points to what we were talking about in the sense of the Rust Belt is a cultural idea. De Industrialization is an economic process. But the Rust Belt is really a cultural concept. And one of the ways this cultural concept has been, has, like, become. So I would even argue central to, like, our cultural discourse is through filmic representations. Right. So you can think about a film like even something like the opening to the Blues Brothers, which is this helicopter shot. I almost said drone shot. It was not a drone helicopter shot of all of the steel mills outside of Illinois and Indiana as just quickly setting a. A, A setting, a frame which we understand the Blues Brothers or Jake Blues or Elwood Jake Blue gets out of prison and things are worse. Right. And like just the visual language of the opening that film is you show the steel mill and automatically we know we're talking about decline. And I think that happens through, through these. I, I think that has been contested. It's not like one singular, you know, like Paramount executive saying, now I'm going to demonize Cleveland or whatever. It is contested and uneven. But I think that partially what we're looking at is a political, sort of a trend in political life of the United States interested in unmaking the power of both organized labor and majority minority cities like Detroit, like Cleveland. Well, they weren't majority minority at the beginning of the process. That's sort of part of the history. But so there's this, this political move that's interesting, sort of cracking the power of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, political power of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago.
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And these stories that are very. That are very compelling and in some cases even celebrated for cutting against the myth of American prosperity and American singularity and etc. Right. So, like, the Deer Hunter is an example of that. Right. Like when people talk about the Deer Hunter in the American myth, they often talk about it as part of this reckoning with what does, you know, imperial violence abroad due to the soul of America, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera is true. But it also just depicts these workers as absolutely soulless in their communities as stultifying and et cetera. And this has changed over the, say, 40 to 50 years where this concept of the Rust Belt has developed. I mean, I think I talk in the book about, you know, Cleveland being sort of a punchline to jokes and my hometown of Pittsburgh being like the Renaissance story and Detroit as being a warning. Right. All of these. There are There are inflections that are sort of historically influenced in the Rust Belt story that are reflected and in some cases, like influenced by these Hollywood depictions. Then the other half of the book, sorry to go on and on, but the other half of the book is these, these cities sort of responding to that and understanding that film. And now it's more important for television for like, industrial reasons, but that drawing film productions, drawing media productions to your locale generates economic activity and also has this sort of secondary effect of changing the vision of your city for national consumers, international consumers. So Hollywood has this sort of dual role in the formulation of the concept of the Rust Belt. One, in sort of circulating images, but two, as like in their look, in their, you know, eternal search for lower production costs and dodging the Hollywood unions, um, they are looking to find cities that are interested in drawing their productions through tax incentives, et cetera. Um, so that's sort of the second half of the book is. Is that industrial history?
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B
Yeah, and I, I think one of the things that I was really taken by about the book that you talked about that just in your answer there, that this idea of like runaway Hollywood productions going elsewhere in the country as this sort of parallel to runaway factories. Right. That, that major corporations that increasingly buy up, you know, the smaller companies that might run factories and company towns and things like that, seeking cheaper, more efficient, less, you know, sort of organized, unionized, as you said, labor. And the way that. That is really interestingly paralleled by some of the things that Hollywood is able to do. I think what's, what's extra fascinating about that is the way in which, you know, the, the sort of storytelling piece of that for Hollywood allows, you know, individual artists, filmmakers, directors, whomever, to sort of speak about, you know, going into these places and telling their stories there as this really important kind of moment of like, authenticity. Right. Like that we're, we're trying to speak to or tell stories about more working class figures in the new Hollywood era in the 70s, which you talk about in the introduction. And so, but for obviously, like potentially for studios, right. There's all sorts of economic benefits that they get from, you know, tax incentives and things like you. So there's kind of multiple things happening there where creatively artists are able to sort of tell this story about telling different types of stories about different types of people outside of, you know, the glamour of the major cities in America. But some of the, you know, the corporate benefits of that are really visible as well.
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A
Yeah. And not only the corporate benefits, but also the political benefits.
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Within these locales. And there's this great book called Manufacturing Decline by Jason Hackworth. And he makes this argument about deindustrialization in the United States that often what you have is conservative controlled state legislatures using what he calls conservative city limits, using legislation, state level legislation to confine the political power of cities to, you know, determine raise revenues or, you know, determine policies, et cetera. Like, you know, like Detroit had its right to self determination taken from it, from its state government. What this city went into conservatorship, but that allows state officials to take credit for job creation in these cities while denying tax base for those cities. And that's the, the debate over tax incentives for film productions is very, very, very complicated and difficult. And I, I don't think they're just one thing, but I, I am, I do find it, I feel totally safe saying one pernicious thing about them is that these tax incentives are transferable, meaning that a production can sell their tax benefit to the local electric company or whatever, which means that you're not only not making, you're not collecting taxes on the expenditures for the film production, you're actually lowering the taxes you're getting from the gas company or whatever. So this becomes like a revenue base for the production, which I think is bad, but it's another thing that the state can take credit for job creation and then also reduce the amount of tax income for the city. So there's, yeah, there's industrial, there's aesthetic, and then there's also this political maneuvering which Hollywood is just like a contested field and also a player, I guess. Yeah.
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B
And this is not something you directly cover in the book, but I'm just thinking as I was reading it and as we're talking here, the way in which, you know, some of the larger cities in the United States that had become production hubs over the last 10 years, right. Atlanta most notably.
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A
Right.
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B
That's gotten a lot of coverage probably in the last like 18 months. Right. About the ways in which, you know, Hollywood moved in there, took tons of tax incentives, build up these big production, you know, centers there, and now have decided that like that's not economically viable or not profitable enough. And the kind of fallout of that happening in these other places.
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A
Right.
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B
That I think is really.
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Indicative of the ways in which, you know, the Hollywood production model outside of L. A, you know, we. Obviously that has its own complications where people are trying to bring more production back to L. A has a really serious impact in a potentially negative way on what's happening. In these communities when they decide, well, you know, we've kind of mined the resources that we can in this area and now we need to move on to another place. Whether that is the locations that allow us to depict like blue collar, declining conditions in the country or places that give us the most space to just, you know, shoot films on an innocuous big soundstage. Right?
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A
Yeah. I mean, I, I found that I find the entire process of writing about. I, I've never done industrial sort of approaches, media industries, approaches to.
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To scholarship before. And you know, you read something like Vicki Mayer was like almost Hollywood, New York, nearly New Orleans. And I felt like a fraud, like even digging into a. That approach a little bit because that's. It was so thorough going, thoroughgoing, and the research so intense. But the broad dynamics of this are. The thing that I found very interesting is that the broad dynamics of this are essentially a recurrence of the same process in which factories were established in these places, damaging their environment, breaking people's bodies. And when it was no longer financially advantageous for these firms, they took off and left. Left a hulking hole in their, in their wake. You know, and this is, you know, I went to high school in a former company town and the block next to it was a super fund site because some firm, some industrial firm moved out and, and just left like toxic waste under the ground there. So that, like, it, it wasn't just that the jobs left, it was that development, redevelopment there was. You were actually at a negative benefit. Right. And, and it, and left a sort of like spiritual scar on many of the people in that community as well. Um, so I don't. Fortunately, although, who knows? Fortunately, the, the, the, the runaway productions that are running, whether they're running back to LA or they're going to Vancouver or wherever, they're not leaving toxic waste behind to, to, to, to. To my knowledge. But it, it is interesting that it's a sort of rhyme, a historical rhyme. At Capella University, learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care.
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B
About Bronx and his dad Ryan, Real United Airlines customers.
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A
We were returning home and one of.
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B
The flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew.
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B
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A
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B
Deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way. Yeah, and even that some of the production, you know, the, the reporting has beared out that in cases like Atlanta. Right. A lot of those productions have moved, like abroad. Right. That, like Marvel, for instance, and a lot of the big sort of Disney sub studio operations have moved, you know, out of the United States entirely. And Netflix obviously does a lot of that as well.
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A
And what.
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B
So there is even more parallel of literally taking it out of the United States. So let's talk a little bit about. Obviously, you mentioned kind of the structure of the book and some of the different coverage areas there.
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Each chapter focuses on one city. Obviously there's a lot of potential cities to discuss when we're even talking about a concept like the Rust Belt. So can you walk us through a little bit, you know, how you made those decisions and.
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What other cities maybe you even consider to potentially focus on in an individual chapter?
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A
Yeah, so I thought I was so clever. I. And you know, I, I had, I thought I was so clever in conceptualizing the structure of the book because I was interested in sort of looking at the way the concept of the Rust Belt was influenced both historically and by different, I guess, like. Or inflected by different concepts that I was drawing from. I guess you could call like the geo humanities geography, its intersections with humanities approaches. So the chapters are Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit. And those. The sequence of the chapters is roughly chronological. So the Johnstown chapter, Johnstown as a, as a city, experienced its deindustrialization earlier than Chicago and Pittsburgh, et cetera. So it's roughly chronological. But I also was interested in these different concepts. So whether it is Segregation, whether it was the concept of the creative class, whether precarity and Insecurity after the 2008 financial crisis, I was interested in, like, how these dynamics, like, work themselves into the stew of this cultural concept of the rust mill. And so choosing the cities was. I wanted to see how these dynamics were working in different places. I was also interested in, like, what films were available. So Buffalo, for example, I spent a lot of time trying to make a Buffalo chapter work. And for. There's Buffalo 66. There's the Bruce Almighty films. There's not a ton of Buffalo productions. There's the Fourfalls of Buffalo, the documentary about the Buffalo Bills. Say hello to my friend John Cenchin, Buffalo Bill superfan. But largely because the incentives on the state level aren't in. Aren't in place to benefit Buffalo.
- [32:20]
B
Right?
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A
Like, all the. The incentives on the state level, all the crews, all the. All the locals of, like, Iatsi, et cetera, are not in Buffalo. So there's just these sort of, like, industrial impediments and political impediments to more films being made in Buffalo also, like climate.
- [32:41]
So, yeah, Buffalo. I thought about it and then I just couldn't make. I couldn't find the films that would be clustered enough and speak to a particular issue. And I spent a lot of time wondering about Chicago. I went back and forth in the planning stage whether or not Chicago would be included. And. And one of the things that I remember is my, uh, My grandparents lived in Chicago. And I remember going to Chicago in the mid-1980s and how a lot of the posters that my uncles had hanging up in my, like, grandma's basement for, like, you know, the 1986 Chicago Bears or the Blues Brothers, et cetera, they had a lot of Rust Belt. What I recognize now is Rust Belt iconography on them. Um, but by the 90s, nobody was talking about rust. Chicago is a Rust Belt city. And I was interested in, like, what happened, how. How Chicago sort of avoided the. The association with decline that Saint Cleveland got. Cleveland became a joke, and Chicago is just a great American city. And so I was interested as to. When I. When I started thinking about that, I started to think about the. The role of race in our association of the Rust Belt and how housing segregation actually prefer. Provided some kind of buffer for Chicago's deindustrialization. So that's what that. That's where Chicago came from. I didn't think it was going to be in. When I was in, I knew I was going to write about Pittsburgh because I'm from Pittsburgh and the films happen in such. This. Such tight cycle. Right. And I had been at Carnegie Mellon where Richard Florida had taught, where the film Wonder Boys was filmed. So that I knew I was going to do from the beginning. And then I knew I had to talk about Detroit as a Rust Belt city. And I wanted to do it in a way that wasn't focused on the concept of ruin porn and then thinking about insecurity and precarity. It just. Those all sort of came together right at the end. And I think like there are other places that people have claimed as Rust belt cities. Milwaukee. That makes sense. Not a lot of film productions in Milwaukee. There's like, you know, television and some people say, like Philadelphia. As a Philadelphian now I love Philadelphia. It. It experienced tons of de. Industrialization but it wasn't culturally denigrated and didn't experience the population collapse. The same thing in New York City lost more manufacturing jobs than anywhere else. But nobody would claim New York was a Rust Belt city because deindustrialization is different than what I. This process I call rusting. Just real death status and sort of symbolic value of the place. That's. That was a long answer again.
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B
No. Amazing. Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit more about the, the. The concept of rusting and how that's, you know, sort of merged for you and the ways that you're, you know, working through that, through these various cities or the particular films that you felt, you know, best sort of personified these different ideas in relationship to those places.
- [36:02]
A
Yeah. So I mean, that's a. Let me, let me think about that for a second. I don't know if I ever systematically committed that to print and I probably ought to have. So I don't know, something for the 20th anniversary edition perhaps? Yeah. I think that one of the things that, that I'm referring to when I talk about resting as a process is this sort of redefinition of the places.
- [36:33]
Sort of prestige that coincides with a remaking of its economic base and massive demographic changes. So like Cleveland was once the sixth biggest city and the most populous city in the country when the steel and auto. Auto parts. And.
- [37:00]
To a smaller degree in Cleveland, to a greater degree in Ohio. The rubber industry was dismantled in that region. Cleveland experienced the exact number is in the book, but upwards of 40% population decline in a very, very, very fast time period. Very similar for Detroit. Even more so for Detroit. And the racial composition of those cities radically changed as well. So this, so it. So rusting the process I would define it as like this sort of symbolic change coupled with these demographic and economic transformations all at the same time. And in these, in these films that I talk about in the book, sometimes the rusting is depicted as happening. So that's a film like all the Right Moves, right? In all the Right Moves, one, one of the sort of scenes is workers actually taking a factory apart. Not a factory mill. But in other. In Flapshot, rusting is not happened, but it's going to. And there's no way around it. In, I don't know, in Adventureland, it's already happened. So much so that you don't even need to speak about it. It's sort of like a mythic past. Adventureland is wild because it is never. Or Perks of Being a Wallflower, even more so. The Pro the Perks of Being a Wallflower is based in Pittsburgh in the 1980s. It's written that the original writer was the child of a US Steel executive. And it is never acknowledged that deindustrialization is happening in the novel or in the film. So the rusting process isn't present in all of these Rust Belt films because to talk about it as a process is also to talk about it as something that could be contested or changed. It's talking about. I mean, even the phrase. I make this point to the book and I was so pleased when I thought of it. But rust, that's a chemical process that happens when man made materials are exposed to the elements. Right. It's chemical and sort of irritating that one of the things about steel is that it doesn't rust. But whatever.
- [39:24]
For the metaphor, that's irritating for me. But there's no agent to that to say this, these places rusted or when the industry collapsed was such a thin. When, you know, metal rust, the structures collapse fails to acknowledge. This is the nicest way I can put it. It fails to acknowledge the agency of the companies that intentionally planned to dismantle these industries in these places. So you can look at workers in this period. They are noticing that upgrades are not being made to their mills decades before the process of rusting becomes culturally visible. They notice that mills are being built other places that new kinds of technology like based like. Yeah, like oxygen furnaces in steel mills are being, you know, built in Japan. You know, these communities knew that there were agents of what was this transformation. But the process of rust portrays these changes as more or less neutral and natural in a way that I. I think this is just ideological. It is part of the process of making These things seem natural or even good. Right. It is good that we're destroying these industries because. And they are ecologically, you know, disastrous, or they're spiritually stultifying, or these people are crude, or they're backward or they're reactionary or whatever. And I, I think we gotta be conscious of that when we talk about the rest of them even today.
- [41:04]
B
Yeah. You know, thinking about some of the things that come up in individual chapters, something that you, you touch on in a few different chapters and you mentioned it in a little bit ago, is just the way in which deindustrialization obviously impacts different groups of people differently and obviously then sort of gets depicted in, you know, popular discourse and media differently. One of the things, I think that comes up in the second chapter, and correct me if I'm wrong, but thinking about the racialized differences of de. Industrialization. Can you walk through that a little bit in how you were thinking of it? Maybe in some of the. The films that came to mind is sort of different depictions of that.
- [41:47]
A
Yeah. So just historically speaking, in these industries, um, you know, from the emergence of.
- [41:55]
From the emergence of industrialized manufacturing in the United States, workforces were multi ethnic and multiracial. And that was on purpose, multilinguistic as well. That was on purpose. You can see this even in something like. Oh, like in Deadwood.
- [42:20]
The ways that. Or McCabe and Mrs. Miller or whatever, where like industries come in and having multilinguistic workforces prevents them from speaking to one another, which is. Or going to different churches or being different races. Have you seen Matewan, the John Sayles movie about coal miners? Oh, man, it's so good. Yeah. This is present from the beginning of industrialized manufacturing in the United States. The way that it worked when these so. And yet still heroically, these organ. These industries, the workers in these industries did organize, did form unions that included different kinds of workers. Never equally, never without internal friction and inequity.
- [43:12]
So that's present from the start. When deindustrialization happens or begins to become visible, it impacts different workers in different ways, partially because of the staged and managed dismantling of these industries. So workers in different positions within the sort of. With different amounts of years or with different skilled positions, they were able to maintain their employment earlier and disproportionately in steel, in auto and et cetera, workers of color or were less protected by their unions, they lost their jobs earliest and younger workers too, lost their jobs earlier, had had less sort of cushion to manage the transition, et cetera. So within the actual workforce that impacted different workers differently within the communities. One of the things I talk about in the Chicago chapter is how housing segregation allowed for large scale industrial manufacturing like from, from International Harvester which produced agricultural machines to you know, the, the meatpacking plants. Chicago south side, they all had this enormous amount of environmental pollution. And it just so happens, what a, what a shock, what a surprise that the racialized others, black people especially, but also Hispanic people also in the earliest stages, like there's Irish neighborhoods and Jewish neighborhoods in Chicago that just so happened to be next to these enormously loud, stinky, noisy, polluting industrial factories. So when those places became the word that the real estate industry would use and their like allies in, in politics would use blighted, it was those people's neighborhoods who were primarily affected. So if you, the argument I make in this chapter about Chicago is that you can see deindustrialization happening in the 1970s in a film like Cooley High. And it's, but it's understood nationally as a race problem rather than an economic transformation. In Cooley High, the factory that exists right across the river is already gone as an option for the people living in this public housing project. The reason that the public housing project is available is because there's a factory right across the way and the real estate industry doesn't want this real estate at that time. Now of course, you know, the luxury shopping ahoy. So that's, that's part of the, that's part of the story that I look to tell. And this is also true about the disproportionate impact of the foreclosure crisis in 2008 in places like Detroit that it was black mortgage holders that were disproportionately affected by the financial strategies of these lenders. And if you read coverage of the 2008 financial crisis, it's those borrowers who are blamed for their like, irresponsibility.
- [46:47]
Rather than, you know, the lenders.
- [46:51]
So that these are which justified all kinds of things for like let Mitt Romney saying let Detroit go bankrupt in the wake of 2008. So there's, it's this ongoing process of who's not just whose jobs but which people are worth saving and who gets to be a victim of macroeconomic and political processes and who gets to be just a sort of like collateral damage.
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Rules and restrictions may apply. You mentioned Detroit there at the end. So that brings up a couple of questions that I had about, you know, your chapter about Detroit, which I feel like is.
- [49:04]
Maybe, I don't know, I feel like that's the, the number one city that gets brought up especially in the, the kind of post.
- [49:13]
You know, Great recession era of like whatever we're imagining the Rust Belt to be. And I thought it was a really great choice of yours to, to focus on the, the horror films that are set there because that's just not something, or horror thriller films. That's not something that I had, I guess really thought about having seen a couple of these movies. I've never really kind of put the pieces together that there were multiples. Right. And what, so how do you, in working through those films and all the different ideas about Detroit, how do you feel like, you know, these films reflect the kind of precarity that you talk about in that chapter and that we've obviously heard a lot about since, you know, the late 2000s. And I think one of the things you write is that it, that they reflect picarity as more than just like an economic condition. So what do you mean by that? And can you kind of walk us through how you came to some of these films and ideas.
- [50:11]
A
Yeah. So I knew I wanted to write about Detroit, and I knew I wanted to write about the 2008 financial crisis.
- [50:20]
And I was really uncomfortable and anxious about writing that chapter. I'm uncomfortable and anxious about writing everything, to be honest. But particularly so for. For that chapter, partially because I felt that.
- [50:39]
Detroit holds this particularly potent sort of cultural status as a Rust Belt city, that it is most associated with failure. So Pittsburgh, where I am from, is, I think, among Rust Belt cities most celebrated for its ability to remake itself. And. And Detroit is a war, and Cleveland is a joke, and Detroit is a warning. And I have to. And. And one thing that was ultimately clear to me is that Detroit is the blackest of these cities and that that can't not be a part of this story. And interestingly enough, all these films, all these horror films are not very black at all.
- [51:31]
There's this absence of it. So I felt. And I'm not somebody, just even as a movie fan, who has ever really been drawn to horror. And there's so much. So there's. I know there's people who care deeply about horror. There's such rich scholarship on horror. And I felt as somebody who's not from Detroit and who is very white, I felt I needed to really find a way to address these issues in this cluster of films that just happened to be made in Detroit at this particular time. I don't know if it's just happened. I mean, there's a lot of copycatting, and there was, you know, industrial incentives for film production to come to New York, to Detroit. One of which is that partially because of the sort of. The geographic size of Detroit means that a lot of its.
- [52:23]
A lot of its, quote, unquote, blighted properties haven't been redeveloped. And so, like, when I talked to people at the Pittsburgh Film Office, they continually reflected on how production companies would call them looking to film in a steel mill. And there are no steel mills within Pittsburgh anymore. There's one operating one in the region. There's no, like, abandoned ones anywhere. There's a furnace that is historical, but. Yeah, so places that want to film in, like, Decay go to Detroit, which is part of the discourse of ruined porn, which is extensive, and some of it is very valuable. And I also just didn't want to duplicate it. So I felt very concerned about writing about Detroit, about my ability to do so. When I looked at these films, I thought about how in a majority minority city that is so associated with blackness, how. And this is present in some of the scholarship on these films, how what that meant. And one way to talk about it is that it's indicative of.
- [53:34]
A fail, a failure to understand the impact of deindustrialization on people of color, which is absolutely fair.
- [53:44]
And I thought what I could add to the conversation was to think about segregation and racist violence in Detroit on the part of the state to be, and, you know, sort of like benign neglect to be a structuring absence in these films. And that, that, that is important because it's almost this sort of like, it's almost as if these films articulate or reflect this terror in white America that the monster of capital is coming for it. It's already come for black people, and we know it has, but it's also coming for us now. It's coming for our, for the, for the white girls who live across 8 mile. Right. Like it's, it's in the case of It Follows, which is great.
- [54:35]
That part of what makes these films this kind of unsettling at this historical and political moment is the unacknowledged role that white America has. Fear of the racialized other, and also fear of acknowledging what we've done to racialize others culturally, politically, socially. That. That's always been present, it's just been under the surface. And these economic and historical conditions are now sort of bringing it to the surface. So that's what I found in looking at a film like It Follows or.
- [55:15]
To some degree Don't Breathe. And, and that's the role that Detroit plays, right? Detroit is this sort of, it's the.
- [55:26]
It'S the politically in our political discourse, Detroit stands for what happens if you get, if you let unionized labor get too big and if you let your cities get too black. Right. It's. And, and I think this could happen to you too. That's the feeling of insecurity, the feeling, feeling of precarity, which is different than, and I think this explains so much about our politics right now, is that you can look at who, demographically speaking, on economic levels, who votes for, for, let's say, our most violently reactionary politics. And you can look at that and see that those demographics tend to be upper middle class people, right? Like the, the sort of, you know, used car dealership, regional used car dealership titans with or like ski do salesmen or whatever. Right? And that's one way of saying that this question about economic insecurity is a canard, right? What we really got to look at as racism, which is, you know, what I would say is that we do need to look at racism and that economic insecurity is not necessarily about your wealth. It is, it's a feeling. And this feeling of precarity, whether it's justified or not, it's a political force. Right. And I think for our politics, if we. And you know, it's a book about movies, but, but I'm interested in these things because they matter more than I, you know, I'm, I'm not trained and I'm not inclined to write about films just as they are and interested in thinking about what they say about where we are, what they say about what we're thinking, but can't articulate. And for me, I think it's important for us to understand this age old racism, slash sexism versus economic insecurity as sort of like a false choice and that we can think about it in more careful and productive ways.
- [57:35]
B
That would be such a great place to end the conversation. But I actually have a couple of more questions for you, if you don't mind.
- [57:41]
A
Let's. Let's end it at a worse place. That's good.
- [57:45]
B
Not that this is fitting, but given how many times you've said this, like, speaking of worse places, like, what is up with Cleveland becoming the sort of butt of the joke of this type of story, right? Either in sort of broader comedic popular discourse or within specific films that you talk about. Like, what is it about Cleveland that either generates this type of, you know, or these type of attacks, I guess I should say in a, in a sort of light way, but. And how has.
- [58:21]
Cleveland sort of dealt with that as it's also become one of these more modern, you know, production hubs, or at least it was for a bit, right. Where it does get a lot of blockbuster film productions to come, at least shoot there partially and sort of working through those kind of resentments even, you know, about like being the butt of the joke, but also a place that Hollywood wants to come to shoot to do some of these, you know, 100, 200, $300 million films.
- [58:47]
A
Yeah, I think that's, it's a really fascinating question. And I think based on what I've been able to read particularly, this is a question that people in Cleveland have really asked themselves. I think it's true of every person who's been bullied. They ask themselves, why me?
- [59:06]
And so I think partially it happens to. It's just a series of like historical accidents, Inc. In that these tremendously sort of strange and gripping and some cases like literally spectacular events that happened in Cleveland during this process of rusting happened at the same time as the height of a certain brand of sort of topical comedy was on television. And that for whatever reason, there were writers in these joke rooms, like on Laugh in or who were from Cleveland and were interested in telling Cleveland jokes.
- [59:54]
So I think that's part of it. But like some of the stories that, you know, the mayor. The mayor's wife of Cleveland was cited for in a mooning accident. And then, of course, the. The Cuyahoga river igniting after which had happened multiple times. But.
- [60:16]
It was on the COVID of. I can't remember the magazine. It's in the book.
- [60:22]
Right after the sort of environmental movement had sort of gained public purchase. So the river catching fire in. And all these, like, sort of like, ridiculous, spectacular, clownish local political events happened at the time that these, you know, whether it's laughing or SNL or Letterman had this sort of place in the. In, like, cultural discourse. I think it's just a. I think it's just dumb luck. But, I mean, I will. I will say that Cleveland being. If it would have happened in Detroit, it would have been sort of like.
- [61:05]
Culturally pathologized because of the issue with race. Cleveland isn't associated with blackness to the same degree that Detroit is. And their leaders weren't. Were still white, which is a big change for, like, Detroit. A big a difference with Detroit, rather. Yeah. So, yeah, they like the. I remember this just because I was the sort of person who like, watched SNL skit vhs, but like the Bill Murray bit, like swill the water dredge from Lake Erie or. And I watched. I watched Major League so much on VHS when I was a kid, and sort of like the pathetic sort of loserdom of Cleveland becomes this sort of like a sort of, like, trope in comedy in the 1980s that the people of Cleveland were deeply resentful of. And that's sort of captured, I think, in the. In the story I tell about RV P. Car and his appearances on the David Letterman show throughout the 1980s.
- [62:13]
B
Yeah, you mentioned Major League there. I was thinking, as you were talking, like, the way in which sports does play into this. Right. That all of the major sports franchises in Cleveland have had their long stretches of being pretty pathetic or the respective, you know, jokes of their league. And obviously the.
- [62:33]
A
The.
- [62:34]
B
The Cavs winning the title in 2018 being this massive, you know, deal for the city because they have all these major sports teams and they're all. They've all struggled to win a championship. And I think that kind of plays into it as well that there's this sense of like no one ever wins there. Right. And that then kind of feeds into the types of easy jokes you might see on late night TV or SNL or on sitcoms that are making, you know, 25 episodes a season where people who are from the area also have that kind of like, you know, self reflexive like embarrassment of like, man, even all of our sports teams are bad. Right?
- [63:14]
A
Yeah. The, the, the derogatory nickname that I as a person growing up in Pittsburgh heard about Cleveland. The derogatory nickname was the Mistake by the Lake.
- [63:26]
And interestingly enough, that nickname was first used to describe the location of Cleveland Municipal Stadium. So which was a mistake by the lake because it got a lot of insects and the weather coming in on the off the lake made for and the sight lines were terrible. So like it was first used to describe this stadium and then it sort of expands out and becomes a name for the city itself which usurps the, the, the nickname that the local city was attempting to establish for its reputation. Which was the best location in the nation. So you want to be identified as the best location in the nation and then you become referred to as the mistake by the lake. And to think about this sort of like, which is, you know, solid burn. But if you think about the ways that these cities felt of themselves, that they were, they were the thing that won the war for the United States, the product, the power and the like, raw materials producing battleships, producing munitions, producing equipment for the military in the 20th century, like our ability to do that won a global conflict and built a middle class in the United states. And within 30 years you're being treated like a joke.
- [64:52]
You can imagine why people wouldn't want to after, you know, a decade plus of this. You don't, you, you're experiencing this sort of economic pain and people are clowning on you at the same time. You can imagine, you can understand how resentment, resentment for the coasts becomes a thoroughgoing sort of like and particularly for media, how that becomes part of the culture of the city. And that's true of Cleveland, it's true of Pittsburgh, it's true of Detroit, I'm sure, although there's racial politics that are, that are more common.
- [65:26]
B
If I can ask a more reflective question here, in doing this book and thinking about these cities and their history and this, you know, cultural idea of, of the Rust Belt, what do you think has changed most about the, the depiction or representation of the Rust Belt over time since its kind of origin point in the, in the late 70s or early 80s? To now, what do you think has evolved the most? Whether that's sort of a more positive or complex representation or a calcification of that, you know, kind of stereotypical idea of decaying mills and you know, factories and the way in which those things, you know, those, those clear ideas that we might have in our head of like what the Rust Belt might be.
- [66:13]
A
That's a great question and difficult to answer. Um, I would say there was a period in which there was a period in which the dismantling of, of these industries and the impact on the communities that surrounded them was positioned as something worth at least mourning and a Beth struggling against. Um, and I think partially because of the association, which I think is unfair, but partially because of the association with, of the Rust Belt with the rise of Trumpism, I think people have, they identify this trope of the diner dwelling white working class man and they're just tired and of made be in their minds being made to feel like they need to have sympathy for these reactionary assholes. Sorry to swear.
- [67:17]
And I think that I understand that and I think that that miscasts who is living in the rust belt in 2025 and what the, the Rust Belt is, is remains much, much more than those diner dwelling white guys. I mean they're not at work, they're just sitting at the diner. Right.
- [67:43]
So there's a great book called the Next Shift by Gabriel Winant that talks about how our image of the working class has not caught up with who is actually what the working class looks like now. And the working class now is in the, in these Rust Belt cities is a person of color who works in healthcare, right. An orderly, a nurse, an X ray tech, et cetera. Those people are less protected by unions or they're, they're working grounds at a university and they're not even employed by the university or part of some contracted out firm that isn't prevent providing them dental care, et cetera, et cetera. So I think there's this backlash fueled by the 2016 and 2024 elections that wants to write these places off as not worth saving. And I think an inclusive and truly sort of.
- [68:46]
Popular politics needs to confront the range and it and the range and the dynamics within the Rust Belt today. Not to the exclusion of like say the south of course, but I think there's particular things that are happening there that a real democratic movement needs to respond to.
- [69:11]
B
That's a great answer. Thank you so much. As we wrap up here, we like to ask our authors about the future. So is There something that you're kind of working through that's related to this project or something, you know, completely unrelated, that's on your mind for the. The next stage of your research.
- [69:30]
A
So I have been telling everybody that I am enjoying so much not writing a book. I'm very proud to have done it, and I. I feel good about it, and I think it's as good as it. It could have been. But I wrote this through.
- [69:46]
You know, it was due in May 2020, and some things happened. Some things happened globally, some things happened personally. So I had a very difficult time writing this. And. And I am very much enjoying the feeling of being done. And I think there's partially because of some work I've done with some other scholars who are interested in deindustrialization. I'm interested maybe in doing a little bit of work on what the Rust Belt looks like in other. Whether it's smaller locales or international locales, what these dynamics of, like, the cultural process of rusting. So I don't know what that'll turn into, if anything, but I'm interested in pursuing it a little bit. And then I'm also interested in a different thing entirely that I've. I'm sort of entertaining in the back of my mind, which is that I teach classes along with my partner that, because of my university, makes study abroad a big part of its identity. So I think something like three quarters of our students use their passports as part of an academic experience. So I have regularly taken students to, along with my partner, to Paris to talk about the tradition of Americans in Paris. And just by historical accent, we happen to.
- [71:12]
We happen to get placed in this hotel on the Rue de Guerre, which was essentially three houses down from where Agnes Varda's studio was. So I've returned to this neighborhood quite a few times, and I'm interested in sort of doing some sort of spatial mapping country in the City project involving Varda that is, as of yet, undefined. And I'm not putting the pressure on myself to define it too clearly, but that's. That's a thing I'm interested in as I've now done all this research into geography. It's like I could put it to work somewhere else. Oh, that.
- [71:52]
B
Those both sound really cool. Thanks for sharing. Thanks again as well, Michael, for talking to us about your book today on the show.
- [72:00]
A
Yeah, thank you so much, Corey, for your interest and for your questions, which were really generative, and I hope that I was able to respond to them in a coherent way.
- [72:10]
B
Oh, absolutely.
- [72:12]
A
So folks.
- [72:12]
B
Once again, the book is Tinsel and Rust. And it's available now from Oxford University Press. Michael, thanks again, and take care.
- [72:19]
A
Take care, Corey.
- [72:35]
And Doug.
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B
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