Have you seen any poor people at the movies lately? I don’t mean on the screen, I mean in the audience. And I don’t mean anyone fitting the description of media caricatures of the poor – you know, the "underclass," "welfare queens," drug addicts, or any of that nonsense.

     I’m talking about people who work, if not quite for a living. People who get $11, $12, or even $13 an hour, who make maybe $30,000 or even less a year. If they get any health benefits, they’re probably limited to the individual worker, and don’t cover his or her family. One spouse stays home to take care of the smallest children, or maybe in extended families, there’s a designated relative who takes care of all the kids, siblings, cousins, and all, so everyone can work.

     For people in these circumstances, an $8.50 movie ticket is a precious thing. And, as anyone in the know will tell you, that ticket is sooner or later going to be $10. So the hard-working poor mostly watch their movies on video, plunking down $2.50 for a two-day rental for everyone in the family to watch last summer’s or last Christmas’s hit a couple or three times.

     It’s true, that for a special treat, parents will sacrifice for a special occasion. But the sacrifice isn’t just a question of money. Remember, there’s no theater anywhere near where they live; the theater chains long ago abandoned their neighborhoods where these people live. And the discount theaters that once thrived nearby mysteriously disappeared all at once a few years ago. (Hey, what was the story with that anyway?)

     Obviously, these conditions aren’t going to improve. With each passing month, they get worse, so we can expect to be seeing less and less of the working poor at the cinemas. As a result, and as with many other commodities, movies are breaking up into three class-oriented categories. These categories dictate how people go to the movies and even what the movies are like these days.

     At the bottom are the working poor. They essentially have been banished from movie theaters. I know you think that you see a lot of poor kids at the theaters – gang-banger types in certain parts of town at certain types of movies. This is a tiny exception. These folks have been corralled into the video market, either as renters or occasional buyers. With local retailers offering low-priced DVD players on credit, they’ll no doubt eventually be tempted into that market.

     The middle class fuels the mass market. Broadly speaking, they spend on everything. They go to the big hit movies, a few of them attend art films, they buy all the new gadgets as soon as they hit some magic low price, and they buy and rent DVDs. A lot of this, a lot of that, and little of this, a little of that.

     The upper-middle class and the rich are the deluxe market. Companies testing reserved-seat venues are targeting this group. The well-to-do like to go to independent and foreign films and pride themselves on their taste. They buy equipment like DVD players well ahead of the pack and usually at the upper end of the price range. They buy rather then rent DVD discs.

     Hollywood caters to the biases and complacencies of each class; that’s one of the reason movies are bad.

     Because on the rare occasion Hollywood makes a movie that’s supposed to depict America, it leaves out realistic depictions of an entire class. The working poor aren’t going to see the movie until it’s on video if they see it at all. So if a movie is going to depict those people at all, it just shows them in the way middle and upper-middle class people experience them, as cacophonous miscreants or objects of charity.

     As Hollywood switches to video transmission of films, the situation is bound to get worse. The wealthy will no doubt be watching new movies at home on high-priced digital receivers with film-like clarity. The middle-class will perhaps be stuck with computers. And the working poor? Well, you don’t think they’ll get screwed, do you?