BY JAKE COYLE
Associated Press
NEW YORK -- In hard times, entertainment either grinds it out with the rest of us, or it waltzes.
During the Depression in the 1930s, there were stories about the plight of the nation's unemployed, like John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," alongside the extravagant musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In the '70s, gritty films like Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" coincided with disco.
As much as people want to see their experiences mirrored in pop culture, they also want to escape them. A year after the Great Recession began, it's clear that the same historical dichotomy is laced throughout today's movies, TV shows, pop songs, books and plays.
Most art takes time to produce, so it may be another year or two before the economic meltdown is fully ingested into culture. Nothing yet could be called the equivalent of E.Y. Harburg's classic 1931 song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"
But the spirit of Harburg's lyrics is finding its way into our Recession-era entertainment, as artists have begun filtering today's experiences into their work.
Bruce Springsteen has performed passionately through the year to "bring a healing" to the thousands who have lost their jobs. Springsteen has made Stephen Foster's Civil War-era "Hard Times Come Again No More" a concert staple.
"The thing that links [the escapism and realism] is an interest in ordinary people," says Morris Dickstein, author of "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression." "In hard times, people identify very intensely with people who do extraordinary exploits."
The Cinderella story of Susan Boyle, Dickstein says, is a "typical Depression kind of thing." The 48-year-old British singer became an overnight, global sensation after singing "I Dreamed a Dream" from "Les Miserables" on "Britain's Got Talent."
Arguably the TV show most informed by the recession is HBO's "Hung," a comedy about a Detroit high school basketball coach who turns to male prostitution to make enough money to fix his house and provide for his teenage kids. Ray Drecker, played by Thomas Jane, is constantly worried about his job; his ex-wife's wealthier new boyfriend complains about losing "a third" of his savings.
The show's creators, Colette Burson and Dmitry Lipkin, refer to Drecker as "a $1.50 coffee guy in a $3.50 latte world."
"All the characters are grappling with their economic reality," Burson says. "Each of them are asking, 'What is my worth?' Self-worth connecting to economic worth is one of the axes we operate on."
