(no subject)
A while ago I was reading a lot of these 19th century novels of various sorts -- Madame Bovary, Bros. Karamazov, Moby Dick (though that's less important to my current point), and it reminded me of something I always notice about novels from before the modern era: they really talk about money, and housekeeping, and personal finances, in these intensely specific terms. Hell, think of any Jane Austen novel you've ever picked up; everyone knows how much a year so and so has, and the great big fear is falling into debt--RUIN! In Count of Monte Cristo, every single aristocrat can calculate off the top of his head the annual income a given lump sum of money could produce. And I don't even have to start on Dickens.
Why did this go away? Well, it seems awfully coincidental that we stopped seeing this sort of thing as soon as there stopped being an aristocracy, when the war for supremacy of the middle class was nice and won. At the same time, especially for social crusaders like Dickens, I think that most novel-writing countries got themselves a welfare state of some kind or another, along with, later, some predatory lending regulations (certainly by the Depression), and that maybe your average semi-successful family just didn't see that kind of ruin as quite a ragingly pressing concern--especially ESPECIALLY after WWII.
Ever since the early modern era, except in the occasional diary-of-a-Beat-dropout kind of book, we've been in a place where our popular entertainments, and certainly not our popular entertainments that aspire to a little artistic merit, don't touch on the troubles of everyday living--I don't mean the emotional troubles, which we see all the time, but the material problems of trying to stay out of debt, find jobs, get some security, make dinner, all that shit. When's the last book, or TV show, or movie, or play, that deals with any of that?
Now this rapidly approaching era we see, this "ownership society" where none of our safety nets work anymore, where income volatility (the idea that people radically jump around year to year in terms of how much they make, and that a great run of a couple years will probably be followed by a layoff and some much worse job, before maybe finding something good again, etc.) is going through the roof, and where there just aren't enough service jobs to go around, seems to me to be a perfect example of the kind of society where those simple life-preserving concerns might really find some resonance again in literature and entertainment. So where are they? I suggest that the wild success of the computer game The Sims, where for all its awesome cartoony magic-realist fantasy, worries about just keeping a house running and a job on the up-and-up and a cash flow positive are all over the place, and where those kinds of things can make your favorite little people die off much quicker because they never reach their life aspirations -- well, I might suggest that such a game's success, for all its other merits, is pretty compelling evidence that people don't merely want their escapism carefully trimmed of any reference to what they're actually going through in their everyday lives.
And I wonder, when's the first great novel, or movie, or TV show, or something, about credit-card debt coming out? When do we get a Grapes of Wrath about MBNA? Or when does anyone in Hollywood bother to make a movie (in our theoretically socially conscious movie moment) about the kind of stuff Barbara Ehrenreich writes about? Do it right, do it not too purely preachy, and maybe people will have something they identify with more than bad event action movies and the Da Vinci Code.
Why did this go away? Well, it seems awfully coincidental that we stopped seeing this sort of thing as soon as there stopped being an aristocracy, when the war for supremacy of the middle class was nice and won. At the same time, especially for social crusaders like Dickens, I think that most novel-writing countries got themselves a welfare state of some kind or another, along with, later, some predatory lending regulations (certainly by the Depression), and that maybe your average semi-successful family just didn't see that kind of ruin as quite a ragingly pressing concern--especially ESPECIALLY after WWII.
Ever since the early modern era, except in the occasional diary-of-a-Beat-dropout kind of book, we've been in a place where our popular entertainments, and certainly not our popular entertainments that aspire to a little artistic merit, don't touch on the troubles of everyday living--I don't mean the emotional troubles, which we see all the time, but the material problems of trying to stay out of debt, find jobs, get some security, make dinner, all that shit. When's the last book, or TV show, or movie, or play, that deals with any of that?
Now this rapidly approaching era we see, this "ownership society" where none of our safety nets work anymore, where income volatility (the idea that people radically jump around year to year in terms of how much they make, and that a great run of a couple years will probably be followed by a layoff and some much worse job, before maybe finding something good again, etc.) is going through the roof, and where there just aren't enough service jobs to go around, seems to me to be a perfect example of the kind of society where those simple life-preserving concerns might really find some resonance again in literature and entertainment. So where are they? I suggest that the wild success of the computer game The Sims, where for all its awesome cartoony magic-realist fantasy, worries about just keeping a house running and a job on the up-and-up and a cash flow positive are all over the place, and where those kinds of things can make your favorite little people die off much quicker because they never reach their life aspirations -- well, I might suggest that such a game's success, for all its other merits, is pretty compelling evidence that people don't merely want their escapism carefully trimmed of any reference to what they're actually going through in their everyday lives.
And I wonder, when's the first great novel, or movie, or TV show, or something, about credit-card debt coming out? When do we get a Grapes of Wrath about MBNA? Or when does anyone in Hollywood bother to make a movie (in our theoretically socially conscious movie moment) about the kind of stuff Barbara Ehrenreich writes about? Do it right, do it not too purely preachy, and maybe people will have something they identify with more than bad event action movies and the Da Vinci Code.