The Deconstruction of Middle-Class Identity in Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Released at a time when conservative hegemony was coming to an end, Planes, Trains and Automobiles can be contextualised as an example of a cinematic expression of an ideological conjuncture, between an established cinematic mode rooted in conservative values and capitalist ideology and an emergent, liberal critique of this kind of American society. But the film is ultimately incapable of fully delivering this critique, due to its failure to examine the wider societal structures that contribute to Neal and Del’s circumstances and their respective class positions.

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Introduction

Although Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) has been acknowledged for its portrayal of class relations, the film’s lasting popularity is rooted in its comedic treatment of this subject matter. Its sentimental and traditionalist depiction of the family unit and its Thanksgiving setting have also allowed it to become established as a comforting feature of the winter holiday season, being regularly replayed on television at this time of year. But the film also presents a pessimistic image of American society, characterised by disorder at the institutional level and great economic disparity within its population. In this article, I explore contextual factors, both cinematic and social, that underlie these contrasting sides of the film. I also argue that within its comedic portrayal of the dynamic between middle-class Neal Page (Steve Martin) and working-class Del Griffiths (John Candy), the film delivers a critique of American middle-class identity, displaying its dominant position within American society while exposing it as a peculiarly vulnerable and precarious construct. I finally argue that although the film fails to commit to a fully articulated critique of class in American society due to its reliance on an established set of cinematic conventions, it draws on growing public discontent at the time and a shift toward liberal sensibilities to gesture toward the post-conservative society of the following decade. This article contributes to scholarship on the films of John Hughes and ’80s American cinema more generally, as well as analyses of the representation of class in American cinema.

The State of American Society

Planes, Trains and Automobiles presents us with an American landscape in the grip of a bitter cold and battered by a storm that has incapacitated sections of its transport infrastructure. As well as a central narrative conceit, influencing the main events of the film, the weather metaphorically evokes the embattled state of the country at the time of the film’s release. By 1987, the US was experiencing dramatically high levels of unemployment1 and homelessness,2 and confidence in Ronald Reagan’s vision for America had dropped. Public attitudes toward financial institutions, the corporate world, and the Reagan administration more generally had been significantly affected by a series of crises and scandals: the Iran-Contra affair had undermined the moral integrity of the administration; financial institutions were rocked by insider trading scandals and the eventual crash of the stock exchange; laissez-faire economic policy had facilitated corrupt financial practices and caused a widening of the gap between the wealthy and the poor.3 The initial optimism of the early Reagan years had thus transformed into a sense of pessimism amongst the general population about the state of American society and a lack of faith in its organising institutions.

This context permeates the atmosphere of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Throughout the film, there is a prevailing sense that things aren’t working properly: the roads are chaotic, the airports are overcrowded, planes are grounded, trains break down. In terms of mise-en-scène and cinematography, much of the built environment and the physical landscape appears run down, tired and exhausted from use, and this feeling of impoverishment in the wider physical landscape is complimented by a sense of dysfunction within the social landscape and at the institutional and organisational level in particular. In the opening office scene, for example, we observe a group of homogeneously suited advertising executives, including Neal Page, seated around a boardroom table as they wait obediently for the company CEO to make a decision on a brand advertising strategy. This is a space of corporate power, but the aura is punctured by the actions of individuals in the scene, in particular the CEO. He slowly regards two potential campaigns, sleepily dithering from one to the next, before finally and slowly leaning forward to announce his decision. Before we hear what he has to say, we cut to the next scene, where we learn from an exasperated conversation between Neal and his colleague that no decision was made and the meeting was adjourned.

In addition to incompetence at the leadership level, interactions between various characters throughout the film place this institutional dysfunction alongside a more fundamental corrosion of civic values within wider society. This is presented explicitly when Neal attempts to barter with an attorney who has successfully hailed a taxi on the streets of New York:

Neal: I’m desperately late for a plane and I was wondering if I could appeal to your good nature to let me have it.
Attorney: I don’t have a good nature.

Neal eventually has his arm twisted into handing over $75 for the taxi.

Neal: You’re a thief.
Attorney: Close, I’m  an attorney.

He pays the man, but before he can pick up his briefcase, someone else slips into the taxi and it drives off without him.

A similar sense dominates Neal’s conversation with a flight attendant at the entrance to the first-class cabin, who informs him his ticket is only valid for coach, despite Neal’s protestations that he booked a first-class ticket over a month ago. While impatiently claiming that first-class is full, she warmly welcomes another handsome male passenger who slides past Neal and greets her with a familiar kiss on the cheek. With a warm smile, she tells him he can sit “here, there, anywhere’s fine,” while Neal can only stare on with impotent frustration.

This dysfunctional and hostile landscape contrasts with the highly sentimentalised image of Neal’s wife, children, and family home in the affluent Chicago suburbs, which we catch glimpses of throughout the film when Neal calls home. The middle-class domestic sphere functions narratively and ideologically as an aspirational ideal, a secure and boundaried space away from the world of urban civilization,4 that is in conflict with a ruthless capitalist work environment that demands either the kind of cutthroat competition we see on the streets of New York or the kind of passive obedience displayed in the company boardroom.5 This point is highlighted during a conversation between Neal and Del in a diner, midway through the film:

Del: Did you call the wife?
Neal: No one was home. Probably at my daughter’s Thanksgiving pageant.
Del: Hmmm . . . you missed it. I’m sorry. Those . . . those are the precious moments too. They don’t come back again.
Neal: I’ve been spending too much time away from home.

As well as a traditional, conservative cinematic trope, this valorisation of the white, middle-class American family is a common feature of Hughes’s films,6 from National Lampoon’s Vacation through to the Home Alone series. But Planes, Trains and Automobiles approaches this in a manner that is distinct within Hughes’s filmography; as I will argue in the following sections, while the film valorises the middle-class American family, it simultaneously undermines the integrity of the middle-class American identity.

Class in John Hughes’s Oeuvre

The films that Hughes produced during the 1980s as either writer, director, or both, in particular the teen-focused films that established his reputation as a filmmaker, have been acknowledged and praised for their presentation of differences and conflicts between social classes.7 But rather than presenting class through a critical lens, in these films it largely functions as a narrative device, most often connected to a romantic conceit. In Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), the teenage protagonists typically experience their class identity as a barrier to the expression of their true selves, and class conflicts are present as romantic tensions,8 with the message that a working-class background can be transcended through romantic connection with someone from a higher class.

In this way, these earlier films display their rootedness in a narrative of American individualism and the belief that class differences are analogous with individual characteristics and individual choices, rather than structural features of American society.9 They also display their adherence to a set of cinematic conventions established at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, at the time of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency, referred to by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner as an affirmative tendency in American cinema,10 that generally focused on positive themes largely rooted in conservative values and an aspirational message that aligned with capitalist notions of material gain and upward social mobility. But there is a change over the course of Hughes’s teen films, which Geoffrey Baker argues can be located between the releases of Pretty in Pink in 1986 and Some Kind of Wonderful in the early part of 1987.11 As Baker discusses, the original ending to Pretty in Pink saw the protagonist Andie (Molly Ringwald) getting together with Duckie (Jon Cryer), her admirer throughout the film and her social class peer. But after this ending proved unpopular with test audiences, it was reshot by Hughes to reunite Andie with Blane (Andrew McCarthy), her wealthy romantic interest throughout the film. In Some Kind of Wonderful, which repeats many of the basic plot dynamics of Pretty in Pink, the original ending of the latter is essentially maintained, with the working-class protagonist Keith (Eric Stoltz) choosing to be with his working-class peer Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), albeit after being rejected by Amanda (Lea Thompson), a girl who has transcended her working-class background through romantic affiliation.

This change in formula for the ending becomes more significant when contextualised within the wider social and cultural shifts of the second half of the 1980s and the reorientating of public attitudes toward a rejection, or at least a critical examination, of prevailing Reaganite conservative values, with Hollywood similarly developing “an increasingly cynical cinematic portrayal of class, wealth and social mobility.”12 In this context, the ending of Some Kind of Wonderful and the original ending of Pretty in Pink represent something of a rejection of the narrative of upward social mobility, and the pessimistic portrayal of American society in Planes Trains and Automobiles can be understood as a logical progression of this representation of class relations, class identity, and American society more generally in Hughes’s films, nested within these wider rhetorical shifts in American cinema and developing attitudinal shifts in American society.

Representing Social Class

Planes, Trains and Automobiles maintains the Hughesian trope of focusing on the relationship between two individuals of different classes, but instead of a romantic engagement between teenagers we have a chance encounter and an alliance of convenience between two middle-aged men: Neal Page, a wealthy, uptight, middle-class advertising executive, and Del Griffith, a friendly, blue-collar shower-curtain ring salesman. Although Steve Martin and John Candy enjoyed joint top billing in the advertising and promotion for the film, much of the narrative is framed from Neal’s perspective. The previously discussed office scene that opens the film immediately engineers empathy for Neal, through his relatable plight – needing to catch a plane – and the frustration he feels at being on the receiving end of his boss’s dithering and incompetence. It also places us more literally in his predicament, with the camera seeing the world through his eyes as we glance at his airplane ticket and focus in on the time of his flight. A similar device is repeated at points throughout the film: in the airport departure lounge, where Neal and Del meet properly for the first time, we experience Neal’s flashback to the New York City street as he places Del as the man who stole his taxi; and on the Chicago “L” train at the end of the film, we reminisce with Neal as he thinks over the events of the journey and experiences his revelation about Del’s circumstances. This kind of positioning of the audience with the character does also happen with Del, for example as he sits outside the second motel they stay in, alone in their burnt-out car in the falling snow, speaking wistfully to himself and to the memory of his wife, but not to the same extent as it happens with Neal. The film therefore presents events through a middle-class frame, with Neal emerging as the classic, upstanding American citizen who must negotiate managerial incompetence, bureaucratic obstruction, and bad actors, as well as simple bad luck. From this perspective, the introduction of Del Griffiths is experienced as a disturbing, albeit humorous, intrusion into a “normal” middle-class world.

By the time they meet properly in the airport departure lounge, Del has already disrupted Neal’s world by “stealing” his taxi, and Neal’s realization of this pits the two men into immediate conflict. The casting of Steve Martin and John Candy means there is an immediate physical contrast between the two men – Del’s bouncy, expansive, overflowing physicality vs. Neal’s neat, self-contained, angular lines – but, as Holly Chard discusses, the “extratextual image” of these two comedic performers is also instrumental in defining these characters. Although established as a subversive and unorthodox comedian, press coverage of Martin’s personal life at this time had revealed a more “muted” personality with bourgeois interests, including modern art, and many of his film roles up to this point evidence an attempt to “reconcile his rebellious style of comedy with his more bourgeois lifestyle.”13 By contrast, Candy’s early film career typically saw him playing gregarious, unrestrained characters with “excessive appetites for food, drink, tobacco and/or women.”14 These extratextual character traits underlie this first interaction and preface emergent class distinctions.

Although Neal is moved to confront Del about his taxi theft, it is more of a gesture of civil admonishment, and once it is complete he wants to be left alone to his reading, signaling this through his closed body language. But Del persists in the interaction and proceeds to deliver a series of contextualization cues15 in an attempt to define the situation as a friendly encounter based on an honest misunderstanding: he ignores Neal’s barely repressed resentment and tries to play the incident for laughs, smiling and wagging his finger while he exclaims, “you’re the guy who tried to get my cab! I knew I knew you!” When he sees Neal is unresponsive, he tries a different tack, instead projecting deep sorrow and contrition and offering a reconciliatory drink. When this doesn’t work either, he relents. Contextualization cues like this function by using conversational implicatures to signal to a listener the nature or type of an encounter and how the semantic content is to be understood.16 The failure to register this on the part of the listener can be read in attitudinal terms, and this is in fact the case with Neal: he refuses to engage in conversation because he doesn’t like Del and doesn’t want to speak to him. But the signaling mechanisms of contextualization cues are also deeply rooted in social groupings, such as class groupings.17 Neal’s unwillingness to engage, and Del’s failure to acknowledge the signals of Neal’s unwillingness to engage, therefore also function as signals of class distinction. The film also works to code Del and Neal as working class and middle class respectively in this first meeting through their dress and possessions: while Neal wears the refined uniform of the corporate world, the grey suit and the Trilby hat he has worn thus far, Del displays the garish, mismatched colours and knitted patterns of a more haphazard working-class world, together with a flat clap that he will don at points throughout the film – the symbolic headwear of the working classes. Similarly, while Neal reads Time magazine, Del reads a crass, presumably sexualised novel, The Canadian Mounted. The cinematic coding of class distinctions on-screen and within the text of the film therefore works in concert with both actors’ established extratextual personas.

These emergent distinctions are expanded on when they are seated next to each other on the plane, through each man’s differing attitude toward social conduct and physical space. Del talks relentlessly, leaning over and spilling into Neal’s seat, and eventually eases the pressure on his tired, stinking feet by taking his shoes and socks off and spinning his socks around. He engages in “backstage” behaviour here, a type of physical indulgence and self-involvement typically reserved for the privacy of your own home and for those you are more intimately familiar with.18 It’s possible to read this as another attempted contextualization cue by Del, designed to engineer a point of commonality between the two men through the attempted imposition of a “backstage intimacy.”19 It could also be a simple display of ignorance about codes of conduct and the boundaries of acceptable behaviour for this environment. Both cases, however, work to further define the class status of each man and, through the camera’s close-ups on Neal’s disgusted reactions at this intimate encounter with Del’s body and behaviour, reinforce the film’s middle-class frame as the reference point for what is normal and acceptable.

An Inconvenient Landscape

As well as featuring one if its most quoted and celebrated comedic moments, the Wichita motel room scene is also a key turning point in the film’s portrayal of class identity, toward a critique of the tropes it has so far represented. The middle-class perspective underlies the first parts of the scene. With both men having to share the room’s facilities, including a bed, there is a further encroachment of the boundary between their two bodies, and the notion of disgust at the working-class body20 is again foregrounded, particularly through Neal’s reactions as he negotiates the mess of used towels that Del has left in the bathroom. Neal eventually snaps at the sound of Del clearing his sinuses as they try to sleep, jumping out of bed and unleashing an explosive tirade that both insults and ridicules Del. But he loses momentum as his comments become more personal and he is faced only with Del’s silence and visible upset. Del’s eventual response is not confrontational:

Del:  You want to hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better. I’m an easy target. Yeah, you’re right, I talk too much. I also listen too much. I could be a cold-hearted cynic like you. But I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings. You can think what you want about me. I’m not changing. I . . . I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. ’Cause I’m the real article. What you see is what you get.

The film employs a different set of extratextual elements here. As well as the gregarious persona Candy had cultivated through his prior film roles, interviews and television appearances at the time had established his reputation as a warm, open, and likeable person, a kind of “everyman.”21 These elements contribute to Candy’s powerful, emotional delivery in this scene, and his reply to Neal’s outburst works to create a challenge to the unreflexive presumption to moral superiority of the middle-class world view that has so far framed events. Moreover, the audience’s complicity in its propagation is also challenged: in the way the audience has so far been invited to share in Neal’s disgust, it is also now invited to share in his shame.

The film’s principal challenge to the integrity of the American middle-class identity is, however, achieved through the contrast between Del’s worldly know-how and Neal’s repeated displays of social and practical incompetence. Prior to the motel room scene, when they land at Wichita Airport and their flight to Chicago is cancelled, both men take different courses of action. Neal makes a phone call to his wife and, like many of the other passengers, attempts a last-minute call to local motels, without any success. Del, meanwhile, exhibits a familiarity with negotiating this kind of situation. Having predicted the plane would land here, he read the situation, saw the flight cancellation coming, and booked a motel room as soon as they left the plane. The two men chat after Neal’s unsuccessful round of phone calls, and Del offers to help Neal with a room for the night. Neal’s impulse is to refuse the offer, but after glancing at another disheveled commuter, sleeping rough with his suit blazer as a blanket on the dirty floor of the departure lounge, he nods his head quickly and agrees to follow Del. In contrast to the opening scenes, where Neal’s negative experiences are framed as resulting from a mixture of bad luck and wider dysfunction beyond his control, the expression that descends over his face at the moment he sees the man sleeping on the floor is the sudden, terrifying realisation that he is in uncharted territory and does not know what to do.

In these earlier stages, the fact of his incompetence is only tacitly registered by Neal and still possible to explain as resulting from isolated incidences and peculiar, unfortunate circumstance. Over breakfast the morning after their motel stay, the two men discover they have been robbed during their sleep. During a montage sequence in which Del sells shower curtain rings to generate some money for their journey, he employs his openness and likeability to connect with customers and make sales. But this makes no impression on Neal. He simply sits impatiently waiting for Del to finish. Although Neal is rendered powerless without his money, at this point there is no acknowledgment of this. Rather, his behaviour and body language show that he regards these events simply as more trivial, annoying inconveniences that he wants someone to deal with so that he can get back home. In a diner scene afterward, Del attempts to draw some attention to his success, exclaiming, “At least we’re still sitting on over one hundred beans from my idea.” Neal’s response is, however, brief and somewhat flippant; he quickly tells Del he is “a terrific salesman.”

Del’s performance during this sequence and his general ability to engage with others stands in contrast to Neal’s attempts at doing the same and serves as another point of distinction between the two men. Neal’s rhythm is repeatedly out of step with others, something captured neatly when the two men meet the character of Owen (Dylan Baker). They take turns in shaking his hand, Del first and then Neal, but Neal does so just at the wrong moment, after Owen has used his hand to clear a glob of spit and phlegm from his mouth, depositing their remnants in Neal’s hand. This sense is elaborated on when the two men catch a greyhound bus to St. Louis. With the whole bus engaged in a sing-along coordinated by Del, Neal finds himself getting into the spirit of things and volunteers a number of his own – Frank Sinatra’s “Three Coins in a Fountain.” But nobody joins in, leading Neil to helplessly trail off after the first few lines. Reacting quickly to salvage the mood, Del picks up the slack, bellowing out the opening words of the theme to The Flintstones, which gets everyone singing along again. Neal is once again unable to connect, with the key factor this time being his apparently poor taste in music. But it is, of course, only poor in this context; Neal’s conception of popular music – his cultural taste – is at odds with the rest of the bus. As originally described by Pierre Bourdieu, preferences for styles of music, art, and other aspects of culture also function as forms of capital that confer social status on the bearer of those preferences. But rather than being fixed, the cultural capital of a cultural artefact will depend on the social context and the relations within that context. Cultural capital is  “an energy which only exists and only produces its effects in the field in which it is produced and reproduced.”22 Although more recent discussions within the sociology of music have contested and problematised Bourdieu’s original system for classifying musical tastes in relation to class position, pointing to more nuanced distinctions and hierarchies animating music consumption,23 Bourdieu’s original, basic principle can be recognised in this scene. Neal’s stock of cultural knowledge and his taste in music have been acquired from conditions of existence that are different to the rest of the bus, conditions determined by his class position. The fact that Del is able to instinctively read the mood and resume the sing-along displays that he is in possession of a stock of cultural capital whose quality and type is more of a piece with this context, and this in turn affords him a higher social rank amongst the passengers on the bus. The observable distinction between the two men in terms of their social competence is therefore not due to individual characteristics but instead shown to be another marker of class distinction, and in these situations the effect is the reverse of the earlier scenes on the airplane and the Wichita motel. In these scenes, markers of class distinction are used to frame Del positively and Neal as inferior.

The problem for Neal in this respect, then, is not specific to him. It is rather a problem for middle-class Americans in general: the greyhound bus is not some peculiar, marginal space within American society; it is the ordinary world of everyday working-class Americans. Neal’s social and physical incompetence is indeed circumstantial, but the circumstances where it manifests are multitude and widespread. This is the landscape Neal is forced to encounter during this journey, an inconvenient landscape he is constrained to inhabit after the robbery in the motel removes his access to his singular and most powerful resource – his financial capital. It is this landscape that lies between the privileged middle-class enclaves of his office and his home, and, as Neal and Del’s journey has demonstrated, it is in fact a vast landscape.

The Fragile Construction of Middle-Class Identity

Neal’s disinterested, dismissive reaction during and following the montage of Del selling shower curtain rings is due to the fact that he still retains a notion of his own agency and control over his circumstances. He attempts to exercise this by once again extricating himself from this relationship with Del, explaining that they would both be better off if they went their separate ways, but he is quickly disabused of this notion when he tries to acquire a rental car. When Neal discovers that his allocated car is missing from its allocated space, it’s reasonable to attribute this fact to bad luck or the previously established themes of organisational mismanagement and/or incompetence. But Neal then proceeds to display his own physical incompetence through his haphazard journey back to the rental car office, where he slips down a snowy bank and lands in the muck by the side of the road. He also displays his lack of worldly knowledge by throwing away his rental agreement in anger and subsequently his lack of social tack, again, through his angry, expletive-ridden speech to the rental car receptionist. Both of these mean he is not able to acquire a replacement rental car. When he eventually releases his frustration at the manager of a taxi rank, he is punched in the face and left lying on his back in the road.

After these scenes, a physically battered and broken Neal essentially gives in to Del’s authority, but his physical state also signals the breaking of his middle-class pretensions. As a consequence, over the remaining section of their journey, Neal displays greater humanity, empathy, and affection toward Del, culminating in his inviting Del into his home after his revelation on the Chicago “L” train that Del is widowed and homeless. But it is also signaled in the change in his appearance, which, by the end of their journey, is a disheveled, mismatched accumulation of his and Del’s stained and creased clothing. Gone are the briefcase and the trilby hat, the signifiers of his class position; his underwear now days old, his reverence for decorum and order gone, it’s a different man who urges Del to make a hasty getaway after they destroy a portion of the second motel they stay in, by accidentally reversing their car into its façade. Neal’s transition is summed up by the image of the two men driving down the highway in the burnt-out skeleton of their hire car, happily singing the Bill Monroe standard “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Written in 1945, the song is a bluegrass waltz with its roots in America’s rural population, both in its musical genre and in its reference to the folk beliefs surrounding the appearance of the blue moon.24 By singing this song, Neal engages in a performance of cultural and class positioning that shifts him some distance from the cosmopolitan Roman holiday of Frank Sinatra’s “Three Coins in the Fountain.” Like the skeleton of their hire car, it would appear that the last vestiges of Neal’s middle-class identity have been stripped away.

By stripping these things away and allowing Neal to be reconstituted in the form of the working classes, the film exposes the contingent nature of class identity and its relationship to material conditions of existence. Moreover, by contrasting Neal’s office and home environment with the greater, working-class landscape of the journey, the material conditions that foster the construction of the privileged middle-class identity are presented as relatively restricted. In this way, the middle-class identity is revealed to be a precarious, threatened, and vulnerable construction within the landscape of America at the time.

Cinematic Dissonance

The final shots of Hughes’s earlier films (as writer, director, or both) generally serve as effective and coherent punctuation for the events that preceded them. Some Kind of Wonderful ends with a shot of Keith and Watts walking off together into the night; Pretty in Pink ends as Andie and Blaine kiss in the parking lot outside the prom; The Breakfast Club ends with Bender’s fist raised triumphantly in the air. Each of these present a fitting parting image for the themes and messages of the films they belong to. By comparison, it’s difficult to know what to make of the final image of Planes, Trains and Automobiles: a freeze-frame on Del’s face as he smiles benevolently at the Page family’s embrace. In one sense it is a simple grab at the heartstrings: through a combination of extratextual elements, John Candy’s physical performance, and what we now know about Del, there is something straightforwardly emotive about seeing the reaction of this widowed, homeless man at a family embrace. But this still raises questions about the choice of ending a comedic holiday film on an image loaded with sadness and some ambiguity. The moments leading up to this are coded as a happy ending and a hero’s return. As the two men make their way up the avenue toward Neal’s house, holding Del’s case between them, the streets are picture-perfect, snow-covered, sacred white, unspoiled, and empty of people. Neal’s grand home reaffirms values of middle-class aspiration, and the image of his final family embrace, to the emotional strains of Paul Young’s “Every time You Go Away,” reaffirms the importance of the family unit. The scene is therefore constructed on hallmarks of earlier conservative cinema, specifically the valorisation of the middle-class American family and the presentation of the family home as a private, secure, and boundaried space away from the world of urban civilization. But these final scenes are also weighted with dissonance. The journey back to this location echoes notions of upward social mobility and transcendence from the working-class world, but it has occurred here in a mundane and literalised form, as a physical move from a working-class landscape to a middle-class one. No actual transcendence has taken place, at least not for the working-class Del. Moreover, there has been no heroism; if Neal’s heroism is to be found in his having returned home, than this is undermined by the fact of his reliance on Del throughout the journey. If his heroism is in a kind of middle-class altruism, through his inviting of Del into his home, then this and the sense of happiness in the final scene are all undermined by the final freeze-frame on Del. He is framed by himself, excluded from the frame of the family embrace, an other on the other side of what is shown to be an unbreachable class boundary. And while we can assume that Keith and Watts find contentment together in acceptance of their class distinction, it’s not certain that the same can be said about Del.

The result is that the final scene in its entirety, and the final freeze-frame as such, does provide some meaningful and fitting punctuation to Planes, Trains and Automobiles: it captures the film’s dialectical handling of established cinematic conventions, in particular the relationship between the affirmative content of these conventions and how their underlying conservative values have negatively impacted society. Therefore, while the Page family embrace is an affirmation of the family unit, it is also an affirmation of the importance of social bonds over the ruthless, individualistic competition of neoconservative capitalist America. And with the final freeze-frame, the film extends this notion outward, toward groups that exist beyond the privileged boundary of the middle-class family unit.

Conclusion

The popular reading of Planes, Trains and Automobiles as a comedy with heartwarming, sentimental, and traditionalist elements is in part facilitated by the anchoring of its cinematic language in the established conventions of early ’80s cinema and the affirmative tendency of films from this period. This is most obviously present in the middle-class perspective the film employs from the beginning  and its representation of middle-class American family life as an aspirational ideal. In this article, I have aimed to demonstrate how, although these aspects certainly dominate, the film also breaks with this tendency through its critical portrayal of American society and through the critical lens it places on middle-class identity, in particular the precarious nature of its construction as well as its relatively disconnected, secluded, and vulnerable position within wider American society. In this way, the film enacts a social critique that can be understood as of a piece with an emergent critical awareness within wider American society during the time of the film’s production.

Released at a time when conservative hegemony was coming to an end,25 Planes, Trains and Automobiles can therefore be contextualised as an example of a cinematic expression of an ideological conjuncture, between an established cinematic mode rooted in conservative values and capitalist ideology and an emergent, liberal critique of this kind of American society. As Holly Chard has argued, the film is ultimately incapable of fully delivering this critique, due to its failure to examine the wider societal structures that contribute to Neal and Del’s circumstances and their respective class positions.26 In a gesture common to earlier liberal films,27 the film predominantly looks for solutions within the actions of individuals: the problems of society are presented as problems with people, as a consequence of bad actors, rather than symptoms endemic to the system of capitalism itself. Neal’s character arc, his empathy toward Del and his redemption as an individual are instead offered up as a form of solace against these wider ills. Despite this, in its final section, and through the choice of a smiling Del as its parting image, the film takes a step further toward a broader social message. The final moments highlight the importance of the traditional family unit above all else, but after the family’s embrace, the final freeze-frame reminds us of the other who remains excluded on the other side of the class boundary. In this way, Planes, Trains and Automobiles communicates the growing desire within American society for outward-facing community and empathy.

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All images are screenshots from the film.