The Culture Comes Home

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 Two days and 5,000 lives later, its tag line about ordinary people in extraordinary times was no longer a mere historical reference.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.