The final image of Paul Schrader's directorial debut, Blue Collar (1978), is a freeze-frame that bookends a series of freeze-frames that opens the film. Set to “Hard Working Man,” a blues song with the growling vocals of Captain Beefheart, the opening credits explore a Detroit factory floor, periodically freezing to stress the pulsating sound of the machinery and focus on different individual images of workers during their laborious daily routine. It is a series of shots of both white and black bodies, moving along with the machinery pace of the score, exploited yet functioning together as a working class. In contrast, the freeze-frame of the ending accentuates chaos as a disordered racial mix of bodies surround the film's interracial pair of protagonists, Zeke Brown (Richard Pryor) and Jerry Bartowski (Harvey Keitel), as they lunge toward each other. The shouting that precedes the freeze conveys that the once friends have now crossed a line where their racial identities can no longer peacefully coexist. Zeke screams, “You don't care about nothing but your own dumb Pollack ass!” Jerry rejoins, “I ain't the one that sold out, nigger-shit. You are!” When the frame freezes now, the rhythmic machinery is not heard and there is only silence. Then we hear the words of the murdered Smokey James (Yaphet Kotto), who warns, “They pit the lifers against the new boys, the young against the old, the black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.”

In terms of what constitutes the “they” in Smokey's words, the film focuses on the Detroit chapter of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) as its chief antagonist, showing the union in league with the exploitive practices of capitalism. This negative depiction of union politics appears less as a pro-capitalist critique than a commentary, generally, on the nature of corruptible institutions on the individual. An enthusiastic write-up upon the film's release in Human Behavior, a short-lived social science publication, recognizes this larger social critique, stating, “Every scene is a piece of a jig-saw puzzle that reveals a frightening picture: all our respected institutions—unions, companies, police, the government—are corrupt and in collusion to keep the working stiff ‘on the line.”’ Even the progressive, pro-union publication The New Republic, after bemoaning the depiction of corrupt union leadership, had to admit “only the extremely nervous will see Blue Collar as anti-unionist.”