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The Great
Depression has rolled off many a pundit's tongue of late
as we strain to make sense of the current economic
meltdown. This week marks the 80th anniversary of Black
Tuesday, the day the bottom fell out of the stock
market. Roll the usual mental images. Cue the breadlines
and itinerant farmers.
And try
to expand your view. That's the goal of
Morris Dickstein's
new book, "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History
of the Great Depression." An exhaustive and
invigorating overview of the films, songs, books, plays,
buildings and design that emerged from America's darkest
economic decade, "Dancing" reminds us that
cultural production and consumption is complicated
business. The dark brings its own elements of yearning
and wonderment; the light comes with shades of gray.
Melancholy mingles with hope. As the song that gives the
book its title suggests, we dance in the dark to
"brighten up the night."
There's a
natural tendency to divide Depression culture into art
that provided either penetrating insight ("Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men," "The Grapes of
Wrath") or gleeful escape (the musicals of Busby
Berkeley or
Fred Astaire
and
Ginger Rogers
). But as Dickstein points out, such divisions disregard
the majority of works that fall somewhere in between.
"There's
a misconception that people who didn't want to engage
with what was going on turned to movies or radio shows
to take their minds off their troubles," Dickstein
says in an interview. "People tend to think the
culture of the period was fundamentally escapist or
stupidly optimistic.
"That's
partly true, but it's only a small part of the
truth."
A trip to
Busby Berkeley land is instructive here. As fans of the
movie musical know, Berkeley was famous for using
showgirls as swirling pieces in intricate human geometry
puzzles. On the surface his films, including "Gold
Diggers of 1933," "
42nd Street
" and "Footlight Parade," look like
overindulgent baubles. And they did indeed serve as
entertainment for the masses.
But
Dickstein, a longtime cultural critic and English and
theater professor at
CUNY Graduate Center
, sees greater meaning in both Berkeley's ensemble
choreography and the films' show-must-go-on storylines.
He likens Berkeley's best work, in which the masses
literally form one shape after another, to the early
phase of the
New Deal
, with its devotion to planning and social consensus.
"Despite
the individual success stories, Berkeley's films, on the
formal side, were hymns to collective planning and
precision movement, not to individual initiative,"
he writes.
In other
words, we're all in this together.
The most
haunting sequence in Berkeley's body of work is the
"Remember My Forgotten Man" number that
concludes "Gold Diggers of 1933." The song, by
Al Dubin
and
Harry Warren
, plays over a collage of breadlines and returning World
War I veterans, a series of overlaid images possible
only in cinema. The scene, Dickstein writes, is
"the piercing lament of an abandoned woman twice
deprived of her man — first when he was sent off to
war, then at home when he was stripped of all his
dignity."
So much
for pure escapism.
"When
you look at the escapist art, it's full of either direct
or covert allusions to the Depression," Dickstein
says. "There are still ways you can think about it
as escapist, but it's certainly not escapist by not
dealing with the Depression. On the other hand, if you
look at some of the supposedly socially conscious works,
like 'The Grapes of Wrath,' it's damn entertaining in
all sorts of ways, especially the movie version."
That may
not be the way you've been taught to think about, say,
the iconic photos of
Dorothea Lange
(the subject of a new biography by
Linda Gordon
), or
John Steinbeck's
famous Dust Bowl novel. Those are good for you, but
certainly not "entertaining."
Dickstein's
question, in a nutshell, is: Why can't they be both?
If we
habitually put our escapism and our enlightenment in
separate boxes, we do much the same thing with
overlapping eras. We like to think of decades and eras
as neatly segmented chunks. That's helpful — until you
peel back the edges and realize what we think of as the
'30s actually started in the '20s and seeped into the
'40s, much as our conception of the tumultuous '60s took
root in the quiet rebellions of the '50s and turned into
the self-indulgence of the '70s.
So
Dickstein realizes that much of the art and
entertainment created during the Depression speak
directly to hard times and shattered dreams. But he's
also aware that a good deal of that same art and
entertainment sprang from ideas, sensibilities and even
economic conditions of the previous decade, when
Champagne was flowing and flappers were still hitting
the town.
Take the
Empire State Building
, that art deco symbol of dominion towering over
Fifth Avenue
and
West 34th Street
. Designed by
Gregory Johnson
in the late '20s, it looked down on a completely
different world when it was unveiled in 1931 and became
King Kong's personal climbing structure in 1933.
"Some
of the buildings that were the most iconic for the '30s
were actually conceived in the '20s before the crash and
pushed through by wealthy people who had an iron will to
get them done," Dickstein says. "And of
course, they had a different meaning once they went up
in the '30s. I also think that's true of the popular
songs of the '30s."
Two lords
of that realm were George and Ira Gershwin. As Dickstein
writes, they "infused the 32-bar Tin Pan Alley love
song with the syncopated rhythms of jazz and the
delicious wit of fine light verse to create something
fresh, youthful and contemporary." The Gershwins
were popular in the more carefree age of the '20s. After
that their work, like that of
Cole Porter
, became not just successful but socially vital.
"When
you move into the '30s, the high spirits of their work
suddenly take on a darker meaning," Dickstein says.
"They became parallel to the
New Deal
as a kind of stimulus package in the Great Depression.
That was not a function they had in the '20s. In the
'20s they were part of a devil-may-care culture in which
300 musicals could open on
Broadway
in one season.
"But
by the time they got to the '30s,
Cole Porter
and the Gershwins were working with slightly more
serious material. The wit and brio of their work took on
new dimensions against the backdrop of economic
misery."
And
today?
These
lessons are helpful as we try to forecast the cultural
fruit of the current economic crisis. As we've seen, it
can take awhile for the gears of culture to click into
place. TV moves pretty quickly;
HBO
, for instance, was at the ready with the new series
"Hung," about a generously endowed washout who
decides to make some extra cash as a gigolo. A
documentary filmmaker like
Michael Moore
can rip the bank bailout from the headlines and use it
as the basis for "Capitalism: A Love Story."
But
today's culture machine has a way of consuming good
times and bad and depositing them into the rest of the
entertainment flotsam and jetsam. It's diffuse, but it's
also all-encompassing. "Economic crisis becomes the
background noise of culture today," Dickstein says.
Just as
important, that background noise takes time to travel.
Instead of stating what today's movies say about today,
perhaps we should be asking what they say about 2003,
2005, or whenever they went into development. That would
help make sense of movies like "Transformers:
Revenge of the Fallen" and "G.I Joe: The Rise
of Cobra," which speak more directly to the days of
"
Mission
: Accomplished" than to the here and now.
"I
think we'll have to wait about five years until we see
what kind of works get produced from this crisis,"
Dickstein says.
And by
then, with any luck, we'll have completely different
problems to worry about.
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