Part 3: Ecology and the working classes
Part 3
The ecological transition can only be democratic if it is embodied by figures from all walks of life. Showcasing an innovative craftsman or a farmer experimenting with new practices broadens the scope of what is possible. Without this, there is a real risk that ecological values will be perceived as alien to part of the population, and worse still: that ecology will be seen as inherently oppressive to the working classes.
Our job as screenwriters is to create heroes and heroines. Through them, we implicitly define who is competent and who is not. What if, without meaning to, we were leaving some of them in the shadows? For it is clear that we live in cities, that half of us have a master’s degree under our belts, that we do not exactly stand out for our diversity of skin colours, and that most of us come from privileged backgrounds. As for diversity, we’ll have to come back to that… We are not seeking to make writers feel guilty, but rather to raise awareness of implicit biases in order to broaden the scope of possibilities.
⚠ Warning:
The first thing we need to do in the long term is to help open up our profession. Because the issue of representation is closely linked to that of access to screenwriting jobs: to represent working-class people on screen, we must ensure that they can write their own stories, and are therefore represented within our profession.
By ‘working classes’, we mean two distinct concepts that should be kept separate:
People without qualifications.
People with low purchasing power.
Yet these two concepts are often confused.
There are millionaires without formal qualifications, scientists in precarious employment, and penniless intellectuals. Highlighting these figures would help to bring greater nuance to our perceptions of a social divide that is often caricatured.
Apart from this confusion, the portrayal of the working classes suffers from biases that are deeply ingrained in the collective imagination:
Competence = qualifications.
Authority = cultural capital.
Ability = high position in the hierarchy.
a. The overrepresentation of graduates
In drama, a hero or heroine is an active character who attempts to resolve situations that appear, at first glance, to be intractable.
Fiction is never neutral. It does not merely tell stories: it casts the light. It chooses which faces will be illuminated and which will remain in the shadows. It decides, without stating it explicitly, who deserves to be at the centre.
Yet in our fiction, educated, urban, culturally sophisticated figures occupy a dominant position in French fiction. This is not just about the very wealthy. The issue is not one of ostentatious luxury or the wealthy, hereditary upper middle class. It is more diffuse, more subtle. It concerns what are commonly referred to as the ‘CSP+’ (higher socio-professional categories), but in a broader sense: those with advanced higher education qualifications, intellectual professions, executives, line managers, and figures of institutional authority: a police commander, a magistrate, a doctor, a criminal lawyer, a professor…
Noyade interdite, 1988
Did you know?
Who is represented?
According to a study on television drama in 2025 carried out by the Observatoire de la fiction, professions in the legal and judicial sectors are over-represented: police officers, gendarmes, lawyers, judges and forensic pathologists account for 31 per cent of fictional jobs, compared with 1 per cent of the French workforce.
These characters are not necessarily wealthy. They may even be overwhelmed, tired or vulnerable. But they possess a high level of cultural and symbolic capital. They have a firm grasp of the codes, procedures and institutions. They speak with ease. They argue their case. They know what they are doing. In the narrative economy, they occupy the central position: they are the ones who understand, who decide, who make the final call, who resolve issues.
Conversely, those without qualifications – manual workers, office staff, care assistants, cleaning staff, technicians, drivers, small-scale tradespeople, workers in precarious employment, and women farmers – appear less frequently as protagonists.
This imbalance is not merely anecdotal; it is structural.
French fiction never explicitly states that intelligence is the preserve of the educated. It suggests as much through repetition. When it comes to environmental awareness, this implicit hierarchy shapes our collective imagination around two clichés:
On the one hand, a working-class character associated with practices perceived as polluting, largely unconcerned by environmental issues, and attached to their habits. A familiar, instantly recognisable figure: ‘the meat-eating redneck’
On the other, an urban, well-informed character with an explicit ecological conscience, capable of identifying the problems and placing them within a global context.
The underlying, appalling idea is this: the more qualified you are, the more eco-conscious you are.
Warning, cliché:
Elite vs. Working class
Pitting the ‘elites’ against the working classes only serves to fuel a certain anti-intellectual and anti-scientific narrative. It is important to give greater weight to the views of scientists and experts so as not to pave the way for climate scepticism. Please feel free to consult our toolkit on scientists, and to feature scientists who are in precarious financial situations and come from working-class backgrounds.
b. The environmental crisis: victims and saviours
People without qualifications portrayed as powerless…
We must also observe how working-class communities are portrayed when they do appear. Often, they enter the narrative through a point of vulnerability: precariousness, hardship, conflict or fault.
They are victims of injustice, suspects in a case, in financial difficulty, or faced with a problem they cannot control. They exist dramaturgically through deprivation or crisis.
Who is a strategist? Anticipating, understanding power dynamics, devising plans, sometimes manipulating, playing by the rules: these are all essential strategic skills. In French fiction, working-class characters are less often portrayed as strategists. When they are, it is sometimes in a way perceived as ‘negative’: a scam, an illegal scheme, or borderline cunning. Conversely, ‘positive’ strategy – that which aims for a collective or moral objective – is more frequently attributed to the cultural elite.
This implies that working-class characters lack education or intelligence
: they may be strategists, but not particularly astute ones. As well as being classist, this is a misguided view. What treasures of ingenuity must be deployed to build social struggles, forge local solidarity and organise collective mobilisations? By failing to incorporate these dynamics into fiction, we miss out on essential elements.
Sans Toit ni Loi, 1986
… which require the intervention of a saviour.
Repeatedly portrayed as educated, urban and privileged characters, these saviours become associated with a particular social class: the elites. The defence of democratic principles implicitly becomes the preserve of the cultural elites.
The wrongly accused worker defended by a brilliant lawyer.
The family in precarious circumstances helped by a heroic social worker.
The employee overwhelmed by an administrative procedure, guided by an expert.
An invisible yet defining hierarchy. By consistently placing privileged figures at the centre of the action, the suggestion is made that the beating heart of the nation lies within these worlds. This shift is crucial. It explains why certain works rooted in working-class communities are perceived as ‘social’ – that is to say, marked – whilst narratives centred on lawyers or doctors are perceived as neutral. This is not a structural inevitability but the product of history, sociology and an ecosystem.
⚠ Warning:
The paradox of universality.
When the majority of heroes belong to the same social category, that category becomes the universal norm.
The working classes, though numerically in the majority, thus become symbolically marginalised. For a viewer from a working-class background, a vague feeling may arise: these stories speak about me rather than to me.
“We country folk are nowhere. It’s a strange state of affairs, being invisible. You can reach a point where you need to make as much noise as possible just to feel alive.”
Barbara Kingsolver, *They Call Me Demon Copperhead*
Warning, cliché:
The ‘Dark Water’ archetype: the working-class character as a victim.
Directly exposed to the consequences (illness, pollution, deteriorating living conditions), they remain on the periphery of the action. The narrative shifts towards other characters better equipped to understand and react: a lawyer, a journalist, an expert.
Warning, cliché:
The ‘Erin Brockovich’ model: the working-class character in the fight… who becomes a class defector.
Erin Brockovich uncovers a scandal, understands the stakes and implications, then commits herself to exposing and confronting the institutions.
Between these three figures (the discredited redneck, the victim and the ‘enlightened’ character), there is, however, a space that is far less frequently depicted.
Characters who do not define themselves as activists, who do not make speeches, who do not seek to theorise about what they are experiencing, but whose lives are directly affected by these issues.
📌 Plot ideas
The farmer who knows that current seeds will not do the job in a warming world, but whose words go against too many vested interests.
c. Bias: the ecology of the rich vs. the ecology of the poor
The simplistic dichotomy of ‘the end of the world versus making ends meet’, frequently used in politics, can be dangerous because the reality is far more complex, or even the opposite, since it is the working classes who pollute the least and who suffer the most from climate change.
The working classes pollute less, but are more vulnerable
Resource:
Observatoire des inégalités “Report | Environmental inequalities in France”
The working classes are the first to suffer from environmental disruption. It is a double blow: they are less responsible, yet more vulnerable.
This vulnerability can be illustrated in very concrete terms through several factors: health, housing, pollution, food…
📌 Character ideas
On the other hand, the wealthy generally pollute more
…because the more resources one has, the more one consumes, travels and accumulates.
In other words, the more we contribute to damaging what we sometimes claim to defend.
Did you know?
The more inequality there is in a system, the more likely it is that renewable resources will not renew themselves. To put it another way, when one is very rich, the increase in the price of a resource due to its scarcity may have no consequence on the consumption of that resource. On this, see Donella Meadows' fascinating lecture.
Practical leads
Consider the cost of change
Even before discussing convictions, a simple question can guide the writing:
what does it actually cost this character to be virtuous?
It’s not just the economic cost; there’s also the social cost, the emotional cost, the cost in terms of comfort…
Thus, what may seem like a simple gesture for one character becomes, for another, a heavy burden, or even a risk (to their budget, job or daily routine).
Introducing this difference (even subtly, even in a single line of dialogue or a staging detail) alters the perception of situations. The same behaviour does not carry the same meaning depending on the character’s material constraints.
Good marks awarded to the rich…
As environmentalism has translated into concrete measures (electric transport, energy-efficient refurbishment, certified food, low-emission town centres), it has also become a social marker. Thus, the ‘green’ label comes to apply to practices that are less costly for the more affluent social classes.
These solutions require financial resources, home ownership, stability or a location that are not equally distributed:
How can you eat organic when you’re struggling to fill the fridge at the end of the month?
How can you cycle to work when you live 30 km away?
How can you give up your car when public transport is unreliable in the suburbs and rail networks have been dismantled in rural areas?
How can you take advantage of government grants for heat pumps or thermal insulation when you’re a tenant and have no say over your home?
In this context, environmentalism can shift from a collective endeavour to a marker of wealth or poverty: for the better-off, electric vehicles, organic produce and cycle paths; for the ‘others’, cadmium-contaminated potatoes, polluting cars, mass pesticide spraying and energy-inefficient homes…
Yet, even without the ‘green’ label, the working classes practise it just as much.
d. The working classes: an environmentalism that goes by another name
Conversely, certain practices now associated with environmentalism have existed for a long time without being named or perceived as such.
In rural working-class communities: repairing, making things last, reusing, growing one’s own food, eating locally, mutual aid, frugality (whether imposed or chosen).
In urban working-class communities: fighting for decent housing, for green spaces, for clean air, and for the redistribution of unsold goods.
=> We don’t talk about ‘recycling centres’, ‘short supply chains’, ‘upcycling’ or ‘soft mobility’ – yet these practices have always existed, without being labelled ‘green’ by those who practise them. They stem from pragmatism, necessity, habit or tradition.
A character may therefore engage in behaviour that the viewer recognises as environmentally friendly without ever describing themselves as such.
And vice versa.
The gap between what characters do, what they think they are doing, and how others perceive them can lead to misunderstanding, judgement and conflict. Two characters may adopt similar practices whilst perceiving each other as opposites.
Did you know?
What if we (finally) put the marginalised in the spotlight?
Amongst those who are not – or rarely – represented are the ‘marginalised’, those forgotten by the system: individuals craving recognition who navigate a hostile and profoundly unjust world, with no future in sight.
⚠ Warning:
Small gestures VS. Systemic change
Today, environmentalism is still too often portrayed as the preserve of wealthy individualists, relying on micro-actions that have very little systemic impact.
The over-emphasis on small gestures can have a placebo effect, serving to mask a systemic problem on the one hand, and prioritising individualism over the collective on the other.
Practical leads
Exposing a system cannot be achieved through dialogue or theoretical discourse. There are two ways to embody a system:
Show the links in the system (a worker in a slaughterhouse, a Monsanto executive, etc.)
Show the concrete consequences of the system on a character (damage to health, to learning abilities)…
→ Collective action and community organisations can also highlight systems and their consequences whilst shedding light on other forms of engagement: access to healthcare, education, leisure activities…