For International Workers Month, we travel to the rugged coast of Maine to uncover the revolutionary fury buried in Dolores Claiborne (1995). In this Marxist analysis of Taylor Hackford’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel, we examine class struggle, domestic labor, and generational trauma through the eyes of one of cinema’s most complex working-class heroines.

Kathy Bates gives a towering performance as Dolores—a housekeeper accused of murder, a mother with secrets, and a woman who has had enough. We explore the film’s blistering indictment of patriarchal violence, the invisible weight of unpaid labor, and how capitalism isolates and silences the women it depends on most.

This is not a horror story. It’s a labor story. And sometimes, being a “bitch on wheels” is the only way to survive.

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