Iluminace 2025, 37(2):153-175 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1807

“You All Have Such a Wholesome Look.” Class and the Gothic Family in Ozark

Veronika Klusáková ORCID...
Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czech Republic ✉

The paper examines the phenomenon of class in contemporary television broadcasting, which has only recently become of interest for television historians and theorists, as well as for producers and broadcast platforms, and it demonstrates the possibilities of class analysis in the case study of the Netflix series Ozark (Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, 2017–2022). The introduction to the state of research on class in contemporary cultural studies, demonstrated on the recent works of UK and German scholars (James Bignell, Faye Woods, Sieglinde Lemke and others) is followed by a discussion of several class-based categories that play a major role in US popular culture, namely the figures of the hillbilly, redneck, and “white trash.” The theoretical part of the paper also highlights the necessity of thinking beyond the boundaries of “us” versus “them” that are prevalent in class-based analysis, and offers more nuanced methods of approaching the impact of class upon other identity facets and their intersection. In this respect, the paper focuses specifically on the intersections of class and region and class and gender, as these form a strong basis for the analysis of the chosen series. The dynamics of class in its intersection with gender and regional identity are examined in narrative and especially stylistic choices of the Ozark creative team. The analysis of the mise-en-scène, strongly influenced by contemporary naturalistic tendencies, is methodologically underpinned by gothic theory, which forms a relevant bridge to the final analysis of the concept of the American family and its class base.

Keywords: Ozark, Netflix, gothic theory, gender, class, region

Received: December 27, 2024; Revised: June 30, 2025; Accepted: September 8, 2025; Published: November 10, 2025  Show citation

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Klusáková, V. (2025). “You All Have Such a Wholesome Look.” Class and the Gothic Family in Ozark. Iluminace, 37(2), 153-175. doi: 10.58193/ilu.1807
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