The storyline of this recession in California has yet to find its place in California literature. It will over the next decade; and it will be a storyline very different than those of the previous economic downturns over the past 70 years.
Our thinking about California recessions and depressions has been greatly influenced by novels and movies. When we think of the Depression we think of the Joads, uprooted from their land by economic forces beyond their control, driven from Oklahoma to California to be part of a reserve army of other uprooted farmers.
The Grapes of Wrath, first as a novel published in 1939 and later as a 1940 movie directed by John Ford fixed the Depression as due to the uncontrolled workings of the market economy, and helped cement the Keynesian consensus that has governed California and the nation for most time since.
As the California economy boomed after World War II, unemployment faded in popular fiction and movies and the storylines of work became the spiritual emptiness of the jobs. In books and movies, such as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Apartment, unemployment was not a factor, but rather the compromises and hollowness of the corporate world.
Similarly as unemployment remained low in the California of the 1960s and 1970s work meaning rather than unemployment was the main theme. The concern was not of no work, but of work that was without significance. A gem of this genre was the 1976 movie, Lifeguard, staring Sam Elliot as lifeguard Rick Carlson. When "Lifeguard Rick" goes to his 15-year high school reunion, he is encouraged to leave the beach, and take a more adult job as a Porsche salesman in the San Fernando Valley. After trying out this job, Lifeguard Rick sees he must do his own thing, and returns to the beach, where he can make a contribution.
The economic downturn of the early 1980s brought California to 11% unemployment, the highest rate since World War II, and unemployment returned to fiction and movie. This time the face of unemployment in popular culture became the manufacturing worker laid off from a middle-class paycheck and forced to seek work at McDonald’s or Burger King.
Unemployment declined in California for nearly a decade or so after 1982, but when it returned in the early 1990s, the laid off defense industry worker became the storyline. The 1993 movie, Falling Down, had Michael Douglas as a laid off defense engineer in his forties, who in his own words is no longer "economically viable". As he abandons his car on a gridlocked freeway and walks from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica, he engages in a series of violent encounters and angry denunciations of the everyday unfairnesses and humiliations of life for the middle class.
Though it is still too early to say what will be the storyline of this recession, I believe it will not be the laid off farm workers, manufacturing workers, or defense engineers, though each has been a part in today’s unemployment.
Instead, this recession will be defined by two groups: laid off aging construction workers, and the laid-off college-educated workforce, ranging widely from administrative assistants to loan officers to lawyers to marketing professionals. Particularly, the storyline will be of laid off white collar workers of all races, women and men, over 45 years of age, who find that tens, even hundreds of applicants are going after each job, and their education, experience and even accumulated wisdom is not valued.
Is this correct? Paging Steve Nissen, Virginia Hamilton, Kevin Starr…