Art and culture in a time of crisis

Has the Fourth Turning arrived? Did Katrina bring it? Some posters over at the discussion forum at FourthTurning.com think so. Of course, many also felt that 9/11 was the flaring of the match. To be fair, it’s an event that will only make its full meaning known in retrospect. But you don’t have to know anything about theories of generational cycles of history to feel -- and to have felt for several years now -- that we were heading to some sort of... something bad. As Strauss and Howe say in their book The Fourth Turning, we’ll know the Fourth Turning -- a crisis on a par with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/WWII -- is at hand when "Americans will have had enough of glitz and roar, of celebrity circuses, of living as though there were no tomorrow. Foreboding will deepen, and spiritual currents will darken..." Granted, I’ve been depressed and pessimistic for, oh, a couple years now, but things feel that way to me at the moment.

So it feels, on the one hand, in rather poor taste to continue talking about movies and TV and pop culture and other mere entertainments, while people have died and are dying by the thousands along the Gulf Coast, and entire cities and towns are being wiped off the map, and the long-term repercussions to the American economy and society haven’t even begun to make themselves felt. But on the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything "mere" about "entertainment" -- the underlying foundation of my film criticism has always been that movies tell us important things about ourselves, as people and as a society, maybe even sometimes things we weren’t aware of, maybe sometimes things we’d rather not hear. And sometimes they’re just a necessary diversion from hard realities.

Oh, sure, the "celebrity circuses" are ridiculous, and I won’t be sorry to see them go away. (Perhaps the American success or failure of the British celebrity gossip magazine OK!, newly arrived on these shores, will be an indication of whether the American people are ready to leave such silliness behind or prefer to keep wallowing in it.) But one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place was to explore and document the coming Second Golden Age of Hollywood that I’ve been sensing on the wind for a few years. The year 1999 was an extraordinary one for film, a harbinger of what’s to come. As I wrote in early 2000:

Many of my top 11 films [of 1999] were written and directed by under-40 Generation Xers -- and some were the work of under-30s -- and most reflect positive influences of television, music videos, computer games, the point-and-click interconnectedness of the Internet, and an embracing of the dangerous and exciting spirit of the 90s that older folks decry.

The first Golden Age of Hollywood coincided almost exactly with the last Fourth Turning crisis era, which began with the October 1929 stock-market crash and ran through the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. It’s nothing mysterious or supernatural -- just a convergence of social and cultural forces that produces both great civic endeavors and great art. And the next round of both is upon us.