Trainspotters and bullet boys: Race and class in British underclass movies, 1980-the present

British urban underclass films•Adhere to the culture of poverty thesis.•Stress class as an explanatory variable with white characters and a mixture of race and class with black characters.•View the state as indifferent to the poor when it is not actually hostile.

Since 1980, the rediscovery of the urban underclass has dominated a good deal of the British public discourse on cities. British movies, which had begun to depict the working class realistically a few years earlier, at first focused on poor, alienated whites, usually with an emphatic class analysis. As non-white immigrants, particularly Afro-Caribbeans, achieved a certain notoriety among the public and the media, they began to be featured in underclass films that were often derivative of African American films; here, the explanatory variable of class was mixed with race. Notwithstanding their differences, both types of underclass movies adhere to the culture of poverty thesis, assume that the underclass is an urban phenomenon, and view the state as ordinarily indifferent to the poor when it is not actually hostile.