Working Class Hero
A Review of Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” (2025)
Beginning this month, I will be publishing monthly film reviews here at CLiuAnon in collaboration with Aimee Walleston, who was my brilliant editor at Ocula. As well as her forthcoming work with CLiuAnon, you can read her writing at her own Substack—she writes about art and culture there. Next month, I will review Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers (2025).
Separately: We are accepting guest post submissions. Please forward your submissions to matt@cliuanon.com. And, as always, don’t forget to preorder Traumatized! Stay tuned for details on the promotional tour.
In preparing to write about Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (2025), I asked Claude Pro (which I access through my university) how many American films made since the year 2000 have featured working class protagonists.
Claude found about twelve films, among them the Western noir Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016); 8 Mile (Curtis Hanson, 2002); Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015); The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008); Winter’s Bone (Deborah Granik, 2010); and The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017). The handful of films that did come out about “class” and economic desperation in the 20-teens can be chalked up to the film industry’s brief period of concern about the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis—it would seem that a spasm of guilt got a few projects greenlit.
For 2026, a “Who are some recent working class protagonists in film?” Google search resulted in Jason Statham in Shelter (Ric Roman Waugh, 2026) and Glen Powell in How to Make a Killing (John Patton Ford, 2026), a film about the disowned heir to gigantic family fortune. The search also included Chris Hemsworth in Crime 101 (Bart Layton, 2026), confirming that action/crime/thriller are the only genres that will feature a “working class hero,” and that their version of class warfare will always be illegal, vengeful, heroic and violent. Note that these “working class” stories are shaped by violence rather than romance, vengeance rather than forgiveness: the working class protagonists are read as male. To that point, Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016), Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) and Sean Baker’s Anora (2024) did not show up in my searches, however Claude did “admit” that the search results were incomplete, and suggested further searches on IMDB.com.
