The Culture Comes Home

By James Poniewozik

Over the past two months, it has become tempting--and too easy--to mark Sept. 11 as the day life turned bad and we turned good. The Great Before, goes the myth, was a time of peace, plenty and triviality, when we coasted in blissful self-absorption, drunk on day trading, egged on by a selfish, amoral popular culture. The period has become as instantly stereotyped as the '60s: just replace acid with half-caf lattes, Charles Manson with Gary Condit, and Woodstock with Survivor. It's a response that is both self-loathing (smacking of the Falwellian idea that we somehow brought disaster on our frivolous selves) and comforting (if so much was taken from us, shouldn't we get a sense of moral superiority in return?). It's also, in one important way, wrong. Of course our collective near-death experience changed many of us. But if our popular artists know anything about us, we were ready to change long before.

Consider: An elderly woman tries to reunite her dysfunctional family for Christmas. Successful urbanites quit their stressful jobs and stream back to their hometowns. A generation of ordinary young folk are called on to risk their lives for their country. These are not examples from a social-trend story about our world after Sept. 11 but the subjects of some of the most popular entertainments created before. The same social changes we are seeing in real life--reconnecting with family, regaining respect for institutions and community, fleeing the rat race--were already rampant in books, in movies and especially on TV, to an extent that suggests the real-world longing for change may be deep-seated enough to last. When it comes to changed priorities and renewed purpose, popular culture has been there, done that and bought the bowling alley.

That bowling alley is the setting of TV's Ed, in which a New York City lawyer quits his high-powered firm to move home to Stuckeyville, Ohio, woo his high school crush and buy the local Stuckeybowl lanes. Today half the stressed-out skyscraper workers in Manhattan have a comparable escape fantasy, but Ed and its newly resonant theme of fleeing to the past debuted more than a year ago. And we have seen similar homecoming stories on Providence (L.A. plastic surgeon moves home, works in clinic), Judging Amy (big-city lawyer moves home, becomes a judge) and this fall's Crossing Jordan (medical examiner moves home, solves crimes with Dad), to name a few.

Nostalgia shows like The Wonder Years appealed to adults by re-creating their childhood past. But this gaggle of series offers the greater, reassuring fantasy that you can re-create your childhood today, right down to, as on Ellen DeGeneres' The Ellen Show, moving back into your old bedroom. "The characters experience a new beginning but also have an anchor and things that are familiar to them," says Ed creator Rob Burnett. "There is a certain feeling of trying to recapture youth that we find appealing."

And many characters are not just recapturing their childhoods but resolving them. Even before the terrorist attacks moved families to enter counseling, artists were rejecting the easy, cynical contemporary assumption that estrangement from your family is as much a rite of adulthood as buying your first legal beer. Take Jonathan Franzen's best-selling novel The Corrections, a multigenerational saga about--remarkably, for an erudite postmodernist who dissed Oprah's Book Club--the wholly Oprah-esque topic of family reconciliation: three neurotic, grown children are reunited by their traditionalist mother, Enid, for one last Christmas before their father succumbs to Parkinson's dementia. Two major fall movies, Life as a House and the upcoming The Royal Tenenbaums, likewise involve parents facing death and trying to set things right with their families. Suddenly, the notions of family and connection seem a little less unhip and middlebrow. "The community is a palpable reality at a time of crisis," says novelist Joyce Carol Oates. "People need their friends, they need one another, and they need their families."

Pop culture's families have hardly become idyllic again; there's just a greater sense that they are worth the effort to salvage them. The WB's teen soap Dawson's Creek, which became a hit in 1997, was a prime example of pop culture's dysfunction assumption. The show's parents, when they were not absent altogether, were cold, abusive, philandering or in jail. The teen-friendly message: All your problems really are your parents' fault. But this season has seen the lead character dealing seriously with his father's death in an accident, and last season the same youth-oriented network debuted Gilmore Girls, in which a single mom renews her strained relationship with her parents after 16 years. Even ABC's slick new spy thriller Alias centers on a young double agent trying to reconcile with her dad, also a double agent, and come to terms with his personal duplicities. "To me, it is the most important story in the show," says creator J.J. Abrams--all the more so after Sept. 11. "Sometimes it takes a traumatic event to reprioritize and understand that some differences aren't worth holding a grudge over."

Thinking about doing community work, getting involved, quitting that all-consuming job? Again, pop culture got there first. Last year the holiday hit Cast Away tore Tom Hanks from his hard-charging career as a FedEx manager by stranding him on an island, and Kevin Spacey's Pay It Forward preached the gospel of philanthropy. (In fact, with 1999's satire of suburban materialism American Beauty and this year's carpe-diem K-PAX, Spacey has made a kind of millennial change-thy-life trilogy.) The most popular new TV drama this fall, The Guardian, features a cynical corporate attorney who finds purpose doing community service as a children's lawyer.

This money-isn't-everything vogue probably originated as a backlash against the long boom years of the '90s. (Conveniently, Americans, real and fictional, tend to start rethinking the fast track just when the economy stops paying off like a rigged slot machine. The early-'90s recession saw downsized professionals pursuing the simple life and a New York City doctor finding quirky meaning in Alaska on Northern Exposure.) But this backlash isn't about just money. It's about a general cultural exhaustion, about moving from post-Vietnam mistrust of institutions (The X-Files) to respect for them (The West Wing), from surrogate families (Seinfeld) to flawed but richly explored ones (The Sopranos). Above all, it is about rediscovering community in a culture that lionized the individual. Even the dark drama Six Feet Under features a gay character finding solace in, of all uncool places, his church. Most conspicuous is the World War II mania, from Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw's encomium The Greatest Generation right up to this fall's HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, which has rolled boomer reconnection with parents, guilt over easy prosperity and a longing for communal purpose (be careful what you wish for) all into one trendlet.

And yet, as much as all these works anticipated the changes that would come after Sept. 11, in a way Sept. 11 changed them too. Band of Brothers debuted on Sept. 9. Two days and 5,000 lives later, its tag line about ordinary people in extraordinary times was no longer a mere historical reference. On its release, the jacket art of The Corrections--a clean-cut family sitting at a holiday table laden with turkey, cranberry-jelly slices and radish rosettes--seemed like a Lynchian dig at Norman Rockwell Americana. Today the image just seems, well, nice. And before Sept. 11 a literate reader would most likely have identified with the novel's neurotic, sophisticated grown children. Today it's hard for even the most jaded not to feel more like Enid, hoping against hope and reality for one more normal holiday.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York