It’s been nearly eight years since Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 19, 2008. As a college senior at the time, I saw the immediate effects of the collapse in the diminished size of our school paper. The pages of the Daily Princetonian--once bulging with full-page ads from Bear Stearns, J.P. Morgan, Goldman-- quickly deflated overnight as Wall Street closed its doors to thirsty Ivy League grads. I knew the recession would be big--after all, it was all Barack Obama could talk about in his 2008 campaign, but I still thought about it in terms how it would affect Wall Street, and the aspiring I-bankers I knew. I thought the Great Recession would be the Plight of the Highly Educated.
I was naive--even self-centered. In September 2008, barely days after Lehman collapsed, I wrote a column in The Daily Princetonian in which I declared that a silver lining of the financial crisis was that it would force highly educated elites like my classmates and I to consider alternative careers to investment banking. Because the recession was all about us. But as time passed, most of my friends who sought a job in finance found one. I was unsuccessful in my search for a media job after college, but easily secured a consulting gig in D.C. Indeed, five years later, the recovery has been uneven. Many high income earners are even better off than they were prior to the recession; the number of households worth $1 million or more have increased, while “most workers’ wages have fallen.”
While I was short-sighted in my 2008 #hottake, I’ve since turned to wiser commentators and writers to process the lingering effects of the recession. As with any generational-defining event, it has taken several years for creators to digest the significance of the recession. Now, in 2016, we appear to have reached peak recession culture. The list of plays, books, and films I’ve loved over the past year that tell the stories of individual struggles in the aftermath of the downturn--either directly or indirectly--is long. Some favorites include: The Humans, a Broadway play about a family’s financial struggles after the father loses his job and pension; Hir, an off-Broadway play about a young Afghanistan vet's return home; 99 Homes, a movie where Andrew Garfield is an evicted construction worker; and Magic Mike XXL, a buddy movie about a bunch of semi-retired male strippers.
One thing all these narratives shares is that each features a straight white male central character. Hir--the most diverse one that also features a transgender character, still stars a male soldier (Cameron Scoggins) returning from Afghanistan as its audience stand-in. Yet, this focus on people who look nothing like me doesn’t bother me at all. I was drawn to each of these stories as illuminating a contemporary America that I have been too sheltered to experience first hand.
The most affecting fictional depictions to come out of the recession are the stories of straight white men because the story of the past seven years is the story of the dissipation of white male privilege. Perhaps for the first time in our country’s history, non-college educated white men are at a relative disadvantage on the job market, and are the most dissatisfied with the state of the economy as a whole. While other groups--women, African-Americans, immigrants, the LGBTQ community--have endured even greater strife in American history, it’s the first time that the non-college educated white male has found himself on a permanent downward trajectory. It’s not surprising then that artists have chosen their stories to stand in for a national narrative.
A scene from Hir
This isn’t to say that all the fictions coming out of the recession are homogenous. On the contrary, there is a lot of diversity in geography, tone, and message. One of the most ambitious of the works, Hir, is written by Taylor Mac, who uses “judy” as a gender pronoun. Judy’s play is a dramatization of 2015 identity politics. Twentysomething Isaac comes home from a stint in Afghanistan to find his house in disarray and his dad dressed as a clown. It turns out that while he was gone, his father lost his job, had a stroke, and now relies on his wife to take care of him. Isaac’s father’s debilitated state is of course a metaphor for the debilitated state of his demographic. Meanwhile, Isaac learns that his sister Maxine is now his brother Max. Max goes by the pronoun “hir,” (pronounced here). These changes compel Isaac to confront his own male identity. Who is he if the father he always looked up to is no longer the provider?
In contrast, the lighthearted Magic Mike XXL provides a more hopeful depiction of masculinity. Here, several down on their luck--perhaps past their prime--former male strippers go on a road trip for one last hurrah at the a national competition. Along the way, they meet up with ex lovers and show off their routines. Many critics have lauded the Magic Mike sequel as an homage to female pleasure. The movie suggests that in a world where traditional masculinity has been eroded, men can still preserve their masculinity by focusing on female pleasure.
Andrew Garfield in the aftermath of his eviction
The moralizing 99 Homes asks whether desperate straits justifies sketchy actions. When Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) and his family get evicted from their home after a foreclosure, Dennis reluctantly accepts a job with the real estate broker (Michael Shannon) who orchestrated the foreclosure. Dennis quickly learns the shady tricks of the trade, including cash-for-keys, deed forgery, and stealing appliances from abandoned homes. When he is asked to evict a friend, Dennis has to decide if it’s worth it.
The Humans is the most emotionally resonant play I’ve seen in the past year. It takes the straightforward premise of a family gathered around Thanksgiving Dinner and turns it into a thoughtful exploration of upward mobility--or the lack thereof--for middle class Americans. Brigid, an aspiring composer, hosts Thanksgiving in her rickety Chinatown apartment for her parents, grandma, and sister. The parents, Erik (the white male in this story) and Deirdre, are proud that they’ve put their kids through college. Now that their kids are grown, they want to bask in successfully giving their children the freedom to follow their passions. But the celebratory occasion is dampered by revelations that neither Brigid, her sister, nor their father are as stable as they appear. The Humans was a well-deserved 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama. I hope its Broadway run continues.
These four works are only a sampling of recent recession culture featuring the stories of white folks (see also, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Hungry at the Public Theater). Of course, the recession has affected Americans across the country, regardless of gender or race. (For some of their stories, check out There Goes the Neighborhood, or Evicted). But fictional depictions do appear to overrepresent white men. For once, I don’t have an axe to grind.