Reading the Zeitgeist via Molly Ringwold

Jeremy Beer writes about the economic impact of the "clustering" of creative and intellectual talent in urban environments...

Richard Florida reports that over the last thirty-odd years we have witnessed an ever-increasing concentration of college graduates around “superstar cities” or “means metros”-San Francisco, Washington, Denver, New York, Seattle, and the like. Thus, while 20 percent of the adult population holds an advanced degree in cities like San Fran and DC, the numbers are 5 percent in Cleveland and 4 percent in Detroit.

Florida’s maps show in graphic imagery the hiving of college grads around certain metropolitan areas, a hiving that has emerged most clearly since 1970. Save for a few isolated exceptions, those hives are not located in Middle America, including our many mid-sized middle American cities.

Florida describes this trend as “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places,” primarily because of the high cost of living that results from the Migration of the Talented.

The reasons behind this phenomenon, he says, are economic; if you’re very smart, educated, and talented, it pays to live near others like you. “The most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value,” he writes. Florida foresees a future in which the most talented and creative live among themselves in select city cores, and in which they are “catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.” “Accommodating” this new geographically based cognitive sorting, he maintains, “will be one of the great political and cultural challenges of the next generation.”

Susan McWilliams has pointed out how this geographic sorting takes place at a micro level, as well, with adjacent suburbs increasingly divided cleanly among income and class lines.

This monetary divide entails geographical division as well. Inequality among geographical regions in the United States has risen steadily since the 1980s. It’s not only that the richest people are getting richer; it’s the richest places, too. And even within regions — southern California, say — rich suburbs have become wealthier and other suburbs’ fortunes have declined. “Just as the gap between rich and poor widened at the individual level,” Dreier and company note, “it widened tremendously between suburban places.”

You can see this trend reflected, among other places, in that great bellwether of American life: teen cinema.

Start in the 1980s. Like most of my friends, I grew up sympathizing with Andie Walsh, Molly Ringwald’s character in what was for a long time the standard-bearer of teen cinema: John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink. In that movie, Andie is from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, bent on captivating Blaine McDonnagh (played adorably by Andrew McCarthy). You remember how this goes: Blaine is rich and therefore popular, always hosting and attending keggers. Andie is not rich and therefore consigned to hanging out with other less-fortunate types. These types do not have parties, and they are never invited to partake of the lifestyles of the rich and popular.

Thus, absent a cataclysmic revolution in the high-school order, Andie stands no chance with Blaine. Of course, it is just such a revolution that this film provides. The poor girl and the rich boy end up in each other’s arms at their prom, Andie proudly wearing her hand-sewn dress in a sea of designer labels. We learn in that film, so emblematic of storylines of that era, that classroom politics entail class politics. But in the end, everyone attends the same public school.

More recent teen popular culture has also focused on class, but with an important distinction: They are premised on the notion that rich kids and poor kids do not live in the same school districts, even if they live in the same region.

The hit show of the early 2000s, “The OC,” was in fact premised on the notion that poor kids and rich kids do not grow up in the same place. Ryan is poor and from Chino; the others are rich and from Newport Beach. By accident, Ryan ends up living with a Newport Beach family. Drama ensues, with lots of talk about where Ryan is from, and what that means.

[snip]

They are not merely different; the show suggests they are mutually exclusive. Many of the show’s most powerful scenes involve these worlds colliding: Chino kids, slack-jawed and uncomprehending, in Newport; Newport kids, tentative and uncomprehending, in Chino. And a recurrent theme is the near-impossibility of a Chino kid “surviving” in Newport, or vice versa.

Only a remarkable set of events brings Ryan to Newport (A tough-but-caring public defender sees potential in the young juvenile offender and takes him home to his mansion on the sea) and the only adult characters who weren’t born into money married into it (the deceitful, gold digging Julie gets knocked up to get in, and once in she keeps marrying up). But nobody earns their way into Newport. This city, where no manual laborers need apply for residence, is a far cry from the small-town, apple-pie-bound streets of Pretty in Pink. “The OC” is both much leaner and much meaner.

In other words, as “The OC” (and other recent teen fare such as Bring It On, Gossip Girl, or Save the Last Dance) reflects, Americans are increasingly likely to live class-bound lives, in class-bound places.

[snip]

The show’s not-so-implicit support for class segregation culminates at the end of Season Three, when Marissa is killed in a car accident caused by the drunk-driving of one Kevin Volchok.

Now, in the episodes prior to the fatal car accident, Volchok’s favorite pastime, besides drinking, is extorting and stealing money from the Newpsies. Needless to say, he is not a native. Marissa had been briefly involved with Volchok — “going slumming,” as a number of “The OC” fan sites put it. And Volchok had in fact been Marissa’s date to the Harbor prom. But rather than melting in her arms there a la a 1980s John Hughes movie, Volchok steals all the post-prom party money, drinks a flask’s worth of booze, and makes out with another girl.

With that storyline in the background, it’s hard not to watch Marissa’s death throes without thinking: Marissa never should have gotten involved with that Volchok. You knew he didn’t belong.

Maybe this is all you need to know: Throughout the run of “The OC,” no cross-class teenage romance survived.