Waging a Living connection to Media Magic

Waging a Living is a film about the costs of survival. I choose to use the word “survival” because of the weight that such a word carries. Surely we are all “surviving” if we are living, but more often than not when we hear “survival” we think “struggle”. We envision someone who has made it through or is currently trying to make it through hardships that have been thrown their way. That is why I choose to use survival when discussing this film because that’s precisely what these folk are doing. They are trying to live and fight through. They are struggling but they are still with us.

Now, I point out that the film is about the costs of survival because so much of the film deals with the ways in which these folks, and others just like them, are being held between a rock and a hard place. As Barbara, a woman followed in the documentary, says she feels like she is “hustling backwards. The harder I work the harder it gets”. How would the proponents of the bootstrap philosophy argue with that? What would they say in response? Barbara, and the many others like her, are working very hard but because of their positionality things just get worse. Barbara, because of her raise, lost a great deal of aid she was receiving and her rent went up. The amount of money she lost in aid was more than she gained by getting a raise. This is a system that forces people to be “survivors”. They are born into struggle and must constantly fight with every ounce of them, not even necessarily to get a so-called “better life” but to simply exist in the life they have.

People, even those who don’t see themselves as hardcore “bootstrap” philosophers, appear to be blind to the fact that Barbara’s story is all around them. People like Barbara and the other folks in Waging a Living are not unique. In fact, it does us a disservice to think about them simply as individuals. We need to recognize that this is a structural problem. And yet, many people do not see the individuals nor the structure. Why is this? In “Media Magic” Mantsios offers a great explanation. He argues that the American Public “maintain(s) these illusions [about living in an egalitarian society], in large part because the media hides gross inequities from public view. In those instances when inequities are revealed, we are provided with messages that obscure the nature of class realities and blame the victims of class-dominated society for their own plight” (100). We cannot even use this documentary as an example of the media doing the opposite of what Mantsios has described. While Waging a Living is certainly not trying to hide inequities from view it is not enough to counter the countless messages people have taken in over their lifetime. This is why people can watch this documentary and fixate on Barbara’s acrylic nails and the fact that she must spend money to get her nails and hair done as a way of finding a way to feel less sympathy/empathy for Barbara. If people can find a way to feel like a marginalized person has created, or added to, their situation then this allows them to continue to not really see the person’s plight nor the structure behind it. Many people seem to only see those who are struggling long enough to blame them for their struggles before those attempting to survive are rendered invisible again.