Serving the Bourgeoisie

The UK version of AskJeeves

         In the interview with Slavoj Zizek, roles of power are discussed. Reading Zizek’s comments on the Revolutionary Communist Party, the proletariat, servants and slaves, sparked an interest in characters of lower class people have played in media. The lower class is underrepresented today in TV and movies and it is rare a poorer person is the hero in any mass-produced plot. In Marxist theory, he believes the bourgeoisie, the upper class of society, having an upper hand over the proletariat, the working class. The limitations the proletariat faced upheld through out history, and can be seen today. Let’s take a closer look of the icons of the proletariat to examine how our popular culture has defined them.

Steven Fry as Jeeves on the Left

            When I think of someone serving someone else my mind goes to a Butler, and to my chagrin the first butler I think of is Jeeves, from the old AskJeeves.com. Now AskJeeves.com is now just Ask.com but the UK version still has the character Jeeves on it's website. Looking further into the Jeeves character, he was a butler as the search engine was supposed to retrieve answers for the user like a butler would retrieve anything. Jeeves was based off of a largely known fictional British butler, Reginald Jeeves. He was the butler or valet to Bertie Wooster in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse. Since him, Jeeves has become the quintessential name for a valet or butler and now Jeeves is in the Oxford English Dictionary. Another famous butler is Alonzo Fields, a White House Butler for 21 years. Fields wrote a book after he retired, My 21 Years in the White House, which explained his experiences of working for four different presidents and their families. Fields must have known he was experiencing a large part of history, and came out on the other side with a books full of knowledge of the workings of the white house. Fields is obviously a bright man, but ended up spending his life serving others. Can we take his word when we read, “Alonzo found White House employment suited him?” Rousseau raises some of the same issues, and asks us how the strong come to obey the weak? Whether stronger or of the same caliber, how does one man assert power over another? Marx would respond that men were born into the roles, either of laborer or capitalists, starting off the race of life in different starting blocks.

Alonzo Field

            Thinking of other men in waiting, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was a skilled American dancer and actor whose most frequent role was Shirley Temple’s butler. Robinson excelled in the vaudeville era, and his public role became a smiling, dancing, dapper man watched by both blacks and whites. Most of his films were intended for white audiences causing black and white audiences to have different opinions of him. The whites nicknamed him "Bojangles," while black artists Tom Flatcher said it was slang for "squabbler." He was the first African-American male to be shown on film dancing with a Caucasian girl, Shirley Temple, in 1935. His role in the Shirley Temple moves was to wait on her and cater to anything she needed while smiling and dancing along. Robinson’s role, like Jeeves, is to serve; a career most modern day American’s can’t image spending their whole lives doing. Here is a video of Robinson dancing with Shirley Temple in one of their movies. You can see he is put on the same level as a young girl, showing some racial discrimination, while at the same time seeming as happy as one can be. 

                          Looking at these Proletariat examples we can consider, were these men forced into these degrading positions? Are they degrading? Looking into Fields’ actions of writing his book after retiring from The White House, did he hold power now over the American “Bourgeoisie.” Would Zizek see these men as powerful when characterized into a Proletariat rebellion or could they be perverts, with just the answers and no questions asked.