Politics & Power Quote by Roger Ebert

American movies love a rags-to-riches montage, but they flinch at the system that makes rags so sticky in the first place. Ebert’s line is a quiet indictment delivered with a critic’s deadpan: class in the U.S. isn’t absent, it’s edited out. It slips by as casting, accents, kitchen size, who gets to be “relatable,” who gets to be “gritty.” The camera can linger on poverty as scenery or individual hardship as character-building, yet still refuse the obvious question of structure: who benefits, who gets trapped, who gets forgiven.

The intent is diagnostic. Ebert isn’t just noting a theme gap; he’s calling out a national storytelling habit. American culture likes to imagine itself as a meritocracy, so films often translate class into personal failure or personal triumph. That lets audiences feel empathy without feeling implicated. If the problem is bad choices, then the solution is a better self-help speech, not a union, a policy, or an uncomfortable look at inheritance.

The subtext is also about taste-making: Hollywood’s default viewpoint is middle-to-upper-middle-class, which makes that class position seem like “normal life” rather than one rung on a ladder. When class does show up, it’s frequently imported as costume drama (British estates) or quarantined in “issue films,” kept safely separate from the mainstream pleasures of romance, comedy, and action.

Ebert, writing across the Reagan-to-post-2008 era, understood how cinema can be politically loud while pretending to be neutral. By naming class as “invisible,” he exposes the trick: what’s treated as background is often the most decisive plot point of all.