We shopped. Then we dropped. Then we started making culture again -- dancing on the rubble of our own excesses, stitching together art from the ragbag of our desires.
Every generation or so, throughout modern American history, the culture of hardship has followed hard on the heels of the culture of consumption and prosperity.
The financial shifts and shafts of the late 1800s spurred Mark Twain's skeptical wit ("He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty") and Thomas Nast's savage caricatures. In the 1930s, the banks panicked, the Champagne bubbles burst and our ancestors went from black tie to bib overalls, dance crazes to down-home hootenannies, “Blue Skies" to “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and “decadent" modern art to the reassuring pictorial homilies of Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell.
The inflationary oil shocks of the 1970s sent many Americans scurrying backward in time to “The Waltons" and “Little House on the Prairie," to mind-numbing “soft rock" and patriotic uplift like “Rocky." On the dark cultural flip-side of the stagflation era, Kurt Vonnegut, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis satirized a consumer mind-set that had come to resemble crack addiction. Urban life and the American city were vilified as agents of corruption and symbols of national decline in neo-noir Hollywood offerings such as “Taxi Driver," “Death Wish" and “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three."
(An opportune Tony Scott remake of the latter, with Denzel Washington and John Travolta, is slated to open this year. Striking the retro-rebel outlaw pose one better, Johnny Depp will star in Michael Mann's upcoming film about legendary Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger.)
When good times go south, Americans typically either have turned for relief to defiant gallows humor or, conversely, sought comfort in idealized visions of a purer, resilient, close-knit Heartland, far from the scoundrels on Wall Street and their political enablers in Washington.
So now that unhappy days are here again, some commentators are predictably predicting a coming “culture of restraint," a resurgence of thriftiness, self-reliance and homespun values, as if Americans were going to ditch their flat-screen TVs and gas-guzzling vehicles and take up quilting and reading Emerson by candlelight.
Tony Scott remakeOthers say the barbarians finally have reached the gates and we're basically living out a remix of the Roman Empire's waning days, so we might as well just enjoy what's left of the bread and circuses. Enter The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces Blog, a deadpan, online montage of some seriously stressed-out financial wizards.
But neither the aesthetics nor the attitudes that underpinned previous cultures of boom and bust apply in quite the same way today. Britney Spears isn't likely to put out a CD of Woody Guthrie covers. Louis Vuitton probably won't sign up Annie Leibovitz to shoot the photo spread for a “Migrant Mother" fall fashion collection. Yet scattered hints exist of a future culture that might hold mindless acquisitiveness in check.
No shared culture
What's different this time around from previous recessionary periods? For one thing, as University of Texas professor Richard Pells points out, the mass culture of the 1930s and '40s (when 75% of all Americans went to the movies at least once a week) has been balkanized and splintered into a thousand niche markets.
“We don't have the sense of a shared common culture that we did in the '30s or after World War II," says Pells, author of “Radical Visions & American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years." “Movies were always, with radio, the common culture. There's nothing comparable today."
Bye-bye, Frank Capra. Hello, Gizmodo.com.
