The director Anthony Mann is now best known for the films noirs he made in the late 1940s, and especially the great series of Westerns he made with Jimmy Stewart in the 1950s. His work has long since been rediscovered, and it is currently enjoying a thirty-two-film retrospective at the Film Forum in New York. Men in War (1957), shown on TCM to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Korean War, was his only war movie and surely one of the most grim and depressing combat films ever made in the United States. This little tale seems so numbing and pointless that it’s hard to believe that it dealt with the Korean conflict, not the Vietnam War, which it eerily seems to anticipate. It is set in early September 1950, at a low point in the war, when South Korea had largely been overrun and United Nations forces were reduced to a small perimeter around Pusan. For the soldiers fighting, who seem like little more than enemy targets, survival is the issue, not war aims, individual bravery, or thoughts of victory.

The film tracks the fate of one patrol under the command of a lieutenant (Robert Ryan), and their situation mirrors the dire condition of the war as a whole. The patrol is lost and out of radio contact in no-man’s land, its one vehicle has broken down, and enemy snipers lurk everywhere. Yet somehow they must make it to Hill 465, fifteen miles away, where they hope to link up with other American forces. To carry their weapons, equipment, and ammunition, they commandeer a jeep driven by a sergeant (Aldo Ray) who is trying to deliver his catatonic, shell-shocked colonel (Robert Keith) to safety – that is, out of the war. Ryan upsets Ray’s plans and the visceral tension between them drives the rest of the movie, like the gripping male rivalry at the heart of most of Mann’s Westerns.

Robert Ryan is one of great underrated actors of the period, usually playing insidiously charming or morally ambiguous figures who complicate any easy sense of good and evil. Here he seems like the perfect officer, utterly devoted to his men and mission, always ready to put himself at risk. Aldo Ray, on the other hand, is an officer’s nightmare, a thick-necked bulldog, insolent and insubordinate from the first moment his jeep is stopped. But Ryan’s determination is streaked with fatalism – his knowledge that the mission is futile, that his men are doomed from start. And Ray’s intractable willfulness is powered by his filial devotion to his mute, helpless colonel, the only man who has ever called him “son,” and by his almost preternatural instinct for anticipating and outgunning the enemy that surrounds them. These mixed characters pose moral dilemmas familiar from the best Westerns.

In the end there are no Americans to link up with at Hill 465; the post has been overrun, and nearly all of Ryan’s men are killed in trying to take it, just as he anticipated. The only survivors are Ryan, wounded but still fighting, and Ray, who had lost his beloved colonel when the old man, in a desperate gesture, tried to join the fight. Together Ryan and Ray, using flame-throwers and grenades, rout the remnant of the enemy and capture the hill, a gesture as pointless, futile, and hollow as the war itself, as least as the film portrays it. If we are still tempted to think of the 1950s as complacent, smugly prosperous, and blandly optimistic, yet also Manichean in its cold war sense of friends and foes, this film alone would be enough to disabuse us. Its bleak atmosphere is closer to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” than to any heroic triumphalism. Even its title, pointing to men in war rather than at war (Hemingway’s phrase), suggests entrapment rather than agency. By 1957, the postwar feeling of economic and political dominance, always qualified by an undercurrent of anxiety, was clearly breaking down.

We can see the same kind of breakdown on the home front in Nicholas Ray’s ironically titled Bigger than Life (1956). In his films Ray typically identified with rebels and outsiders, or with people who simply didn’t fit in. Bigger than Life was made soon after Ray’s most successful work, Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean. It is in some ways a continuation of that film, despite its seemingly conventional protagonist: a modest schoolteacher, a good husband and father, who lives a “boring” life in an idyllic small town. All this changes when he experiences some terrible side-effects from a new “wonder drug,” Cortisone, but this clinical theme proved too much of an oddity for both audience and critics. The film was badly reviewed and soon forgotten, at least until the revival of interest in Nicholas Ray, which was propelled by the French, who always took him seriously. Now it has been released on DVD in an impeccable wide-screen print in the indispensable Criterion Collection.

It turns out that the reviewers who dismissed it as a rarefied medical documentary, despite James Mason’s crucial role as star and producer, were not entirely off base. Adapted from an Annals of Medicine essay by Berton Roueché in The New Yorker, the movie seems at times bizarre, or merely relentless, both in the extremity of Mason’s symptoms and in everyone’s obtuseness about their evident cause. Taking Cortisone in increasing doses to relieve a rare and potentially fatal inflammation of the arteries, this Everyman first turns manic, then falls into wild mood swings which develop into a Napoleonic self-importance and god-like contempt for his wife and students. He exerts abusive control over his young son. When the boy falls short of his demands, he decides in his dementia that he must kill him, in the spirit of Abraham binding and sacrificing Isaac.

Gradually we come to see that the medical subject was simply the occasion, the raw material, for a social parable. Ray’s goal, as in Rebel Without a Cause, was to explode the dynamic, the normative innocence, of the nuclear family. In Rebel he shows the stranded kids from unhappy families creating an alternate community until the larger society intervenes and smashes it up. Here he turns the family drama into a horror film, a film noir in lurid color, with dark expressionist shadows projected behind Mason as he looms menacingly over his hapless son.

Like the townspeople who lose their identity in contemporaneous films like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, Mason is transformed from an ordinary paterfamilias playing backyard football with his son to a would-be Nietzschean superman who means to follow through where Abraham, with God’s blessing, turned back. As in a nightmare version of the 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best, he becomes a murderous caricature of the patriarchal authority that supposedly went unchallenged in that benighted decade.

But despite its peculiar angle of vision, the movie itself is just such a challenge. Like Ryan’s entangled mission (and the colonel’s mute helplessness) in Korea, it reflects authority under stress rather than authority in control. It’s important to recall that most of the critical points made about the 1950s were also made during the 1950s, by a legion of social critics, writers, musicians, and filmmakers, all working outside the nation’s official self-image. It was perhaps the most self-critical decade in American history, despite its growing prosperity and boldly confident surface. By the middle of the fifties, the undisputed certainties that followed the war were badly undermined: by the trauma and carnage of the war itself, and new fears stirred up by the cold war; by the influence of psychoanalysis and existentialism, which highlighted neurotic patterns and stimulated introspection; and by widespread dissatisfaction with the new gods of suburban pastoral, consumption, and domesticity. This helps account for the undertone of hysteria in the arts of the period, a foreboding reflected in both these movies, which wash up on our shore like messages in a bottle.

I once jokingly congratulated a young reporter who made his reputation covering the financial meltdown that took New York to the brink of bankruptcy in the mid-1970s. “You must be one of the few people who profited from the city’s financial crisis.” Needless to say, he took offense, as if I had accused him of exploiting the city’s problems for professional gain. Now, with this gratifying award, for which I warmly thank the judges and officers of the English-Speaking Union, I find myself in a like position. Through much of the time I was working on Dancing in the Dark, there was hardly a glimmer of public interest in the Great Depression. During the go-go years of the 1980s and 1990s, when so much of the regulatory machinery set in place by the New Deal was relaxed or dismantled, when the wizards of Wall Street found ingenious ways of getting around the rules that remained, it was confidently assumed that something like the Depression could never happen again. Despite its traumatic effect on our whole society, for many it seemed to be receding into ancient history.

Moreover, my own way into the inner world of the Great Depression was unusual – not through economics or politics but by way of the arts: the books people wrote and read then, the movies they loved, the songs they heard, sang, and danced to, the photographs that awakened their social conscience and brought them grim news about what was happening in their land. “You Have Seen Their Faces,” said the title of one book of photographs, pointing almost an accusing finger at the book’s readers. Yet few imagined the thirties to be a rich period for the arts, though artists and entertainers may have served to prick the nation’s conscience or distract folks from their own troubles. Invariably, the prosperous and ebullient 1920s were thought to be the peak years for the arts in the twentieth century.

But by the time I was finishing the book in the winter of 2008-09, our smug complacency had evaporated: the American economy was in meltdown, fears of a new Depression were on everyone’s lips, and the nation was afflicted by a crisis of confidence, from the credit markets, which had shut down, to the housing market, that was in free fall, from middle-aged men and women who saw their jobs disintegrating to college students who saw no jobs awaiting them. Though the worst crisis has since been averted, our economic doldrums continued. But as interest in the book unexpectedly grew, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I too was profiting from people’s troubles, even as I tried to illuminate them. Soon, to my surprise, in op-ed columns and book reviews, a new received wisdom took hold – that economic troubles stimulate rather than depress the arts, as the arts themselves serve as a morale-boosting stimulus to those who are depressed by their prospects and fear for the future. My book became part of the conversation.

One special source of pleasure to me is that this award is for a book in American Studies, with the goal of creating a better understanding of American culture around the world. This is especially important at a time when a rabid anti-Americanism and a fascination with American culture seem paradoxically to coexist in so many places. In college I never took a course in American literature, which seemed too recent and too provincial for me and my friends, and I took only one very good one in graduate school to make up in part for this yawning gap. Though we all gobbled down contemporary American books, our hearts lay with English literature and continental modernism, with French New Wave movies, German classical music, and Italian opera, not with much that was Made in the U.S.A., except perhaps for the new poetry and fiction, like the Beats and the young black and Jewish writers, that spoke for us so personally.

It was only the social crisis of the 1960s, and my own interest in the intersections between literature and politics, that turned me towards the cultural situation of my own nation, first with the 1960s itself, then with the preceding decades that began to occupy more and more of my teaching and writing.

Without losing my passion for Conrad and Joyce, Mann and Yeats, Kafka and Dostoevsky, or, for that matter, Bergman and Fellini, I came to be intrigued by how the arts had reflected and influenced key turning points in modern American life, from the 1890s to the 1930s to the 1960s. Soon it became evident that the clichés about each era were inaccurate or grossly insufficient – for example, the notion that most artists in the thirties become radical social critics, or that the popular culture was inherently escapist, since the American people were loath to face up to what was happening to them. I hope that this book has yielded a much more complicated picture of both the inner life of the society and the bewildering variety of ways the arts could minister to it, at once exploring the crisis and reassuring everyone that it could somehow be overcome – that there was a future, even when prospects looked dim.

I’m grateful to those who stayed with this project through the long haul, especially my wife, Lore Dickstein, my first and best reader, and my agent of 38 years, Georges Borchardt, a model of unstinting support and good-humored patience. My thanks also go out to those at W. W. Norton who brought such enthusiasm and energy to the publication process, including my incomparable editor, Bob Weil, his assistants, Lucas Wittmann and Phil Marino, my indefatigable publicist, Winfrida Mbewe, and all their colleagues who helped make this an ideal publishing experience

Nothing has delighted me more than the letters and emails I’ve received from readers, some of whom actually lived through the Depression years, others who simply fell in love with the books, movies, songs, and pictures it left behind – its afterlife, so to speak. We can read about the Depression in the history books and draw lessons for our own time, as we can read up on any period, but only the creative imagination of the era, with its powers of narrative, its appeal to the ear and eye, enables us actually to experience it. It gives us momentary access to a culture’s profound dialogue with itself, its eager reach for self-understanding.

Morris Dickstein

Before I begin I’d like to thank President Bill Kelly for the inspired leadership that brought us here–and, more personally, for according me the honor of addressing you on this happy occasion. My thirty-five years of teaching at the Graduate Center, among stimulating colleagues and exceptional students, have given me some of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. During that time the school has grown from a local to a national institution, with students from all over the world, with increasing financial aid and a double-barreled commitment to access and excellence. In the name of my colleagues I’m delighted to extend congratulations to today’s graduates and their families, who no doubt shared many of the trials and joys of completing this work. We on the faculty know how exacting this was, since we’ve gone through similar rites of passage ourselves, which no doubt helped us guide you through them. But many of you now face daunting obstacles that we did not have to confront.

It’s no secret that the academic job market, which took a sharp downturn soon after I joined the faculty in the 1970s, has recently contracted even further, thanks to the recession that has curtailed employment throughout the economy. There have also been major structural shifts in universities as they deploy more part-time faculty, with few benefits and no job security. This dependence on adjunct teaching by doctoral students has seriously lengthened many students’ time to degree; they put in additional years with no assurance of later gaining full-time work. CUNY has fought these pressures with greatly enhanced fellowship support. But the attrition of tenure-track jobs has led some observers to suggest that graduate study in the humanities has become some kind of scam to entice cheap part-time labor. Some graduate students have taken comfort from the notion that they have, if not a secure career path, then at least a high number in the big academic lottery.

Science students have more options than those in the humanities, but the figures show that even our humanities departments have done reasonably well in placing their students, though often in jobs less prestigious than their talents deserve. So who would blame them or their families for feeling discouraged? The cover of the May 24 issue of The New Yorker says it all: a freshly minted Ph.D. is hanging his diploma in what is obviously his boyhood room, as his troubled parents look on anxiously from the doorway. This is perhaps a far-fetched case: unlike recent college graduates, few new Ph.D.s are likely to be moving back with Mom and Dad, in part because they are already long in the tooth, perhaps with families of their own. On the cover instead we see a guy who looks like the ‘50s comic-book character Archie Andrews, someone who never got out of high school, who today, sixty years later, is still trying to decide between blonde Betty and dark-haired Veronica. This pop-art image takes us back to a more innocent era when a high-school degree, not a doctorate, was a prerequisite for many jobs.

Now that a doctoral degree has become just such a credential, with an incentive for overproduction, it turns out too often to be not enough of a credential, a milestone more young people have reached than our society thinks it needs. At this point the predictable role of the commencement speaker, faced with an insoluble dilemma, would be to reassure the graduates of the intrinsic worth of the research they’ve done, of the knowledge and experience they’ve gained, and of the handsome accolade about to be bestowed on them. But having received my own degree in the 1960s, in the twilight of the academy’s golden age, when American society was in upheaval but jobs were plentiful, I’m in an awkward position to stress idealistic goals in the face of adverse economic conditions. In 1967 our world was in flames over the Vietnam War, the draft, and our country’s racial divisions. On the same day I was due to deposit my thesis I joined with 400,000 other people on both coasts in a huge demonstration against the war, which was then tearing our whole society apart. But I already held a tenure-track job. I could afford to be high-minded, with few worries about how to support a wife and ten-month-old son, even on a paltry salary. Students today cannot readily fall back on the luxury of pursuing learning for its own sake, out of their god-given talent, love of their subject, and the noble urge to contribute, however modestly, to the sum of human knowledge.

Yet neither are today’s students faced with the quandary of new graduates during the Great Depression. Higher education then was only a fraction the size it is today, and even the brightest graduates rarely went out for advanced liberal arts degrees. College teaching positions were scarce, especially for the children of immigrants. Instead the best of them wrote seminal books, founded magazines, did politics or journalism, worked for foundations, and took day jobs where they could find them. Only the great expansion of the university system after World War II enabled them to find academic posts, much to their own surprise. Some who would later be numbered among CUNY’s most eminent professors, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Michael Harrington, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, had no doctoral degrees; they made their mark on a larger stage as public intellectuals rather than specialized scholars. They helped turn the university into a more cosmopolitan place, a school that cultivated scholarship yet also interacted fluently with the life of the city, the nation, and the world.

This is part of your heritage today, sharpening the value of the work you have done. Current scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences is typically more relevant to social problems than the kind of Ivory Tower research that was the norm before the war. It is shaped by the contemporary world, even as it explores remote times and places. Your work has honed your skills as writers, trained researchers, and historically informed thinkers. The world needs what you have to offer, though it may not fully understand how much it needs it. So I say to today’s graduates: You are the best and brightest of your generation. You must be especially gifted, or you wouldn’t be here today, but you’ve chosen a difficult path, not to go to law school or business school, where your economic prospects might look brighter, not to go for the money but to pursue advanced knowledge in a field you love, that taps into the best you have to offer. To get this far you had to show not only talent but persistence, stamina, intelligence, discipline, and imagination, qualities that could serve you well, and serve the world, in many different professional arenas, not simply in college teaching.

My own field of literary study, once the province of antiquarians and gentleman scholars, has become far more engaged with present times, partly under the gun of theory but even more because literature itself is so engaged. When I think of the writers I’ve taught this semester alone, writers like James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, Elie Wiesel, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, John Updike, and Philip Roth, I’m amazed that, besides the sheer pleasure their work gives, they shed so much light on issues like race, immigration, genocide, personal and cultural identity, marriage, gender, morality, and the very nature of truth. We don’t study them for practical use but we use them nonetheless. They enlighten us not with didactic messages but with fresh experiences. They introduce us to people and situations we might never encounter, in language at once unexpected and unforgettable. As we engage with them critically and feel their power, their meanings become more accessible to us; they inform and alter who we are. This deeper understanding lights up the best work in history, in philosophy, in psychology, in anthropology, in every field that the French aptly call the “human sciences.” This is the thrill of scholarship that rewards us for the hard labor.

But the methods we use in that scholarship have been immensely transformed in recent years. We live on the cusp of a new era. Like most new technology, the digitization of knowledge offers both a boon and a threat. It’s become a cliché to say that it poses the greatest challenge to book culture since the invention of movable type. Thanks to the Internet, never have we had so much information at our fingertips or so much uncertainty about how to organize and interpret it. As in our daily lives, we risk being overwhelmed by the sheer flow of information, the kaleidoscopic demands on our attention. One benefit of the book is that we read it page by page; it’s like what Keats called his Grecian Urn, a “foster-child of silence and slow time.” If a book proved a boon for reading, the Internet is ideal for searching. It’s better suited to skimming than to careful reading. It speeds us up where books slow us down and give us pause. Books make knowledge seem palpable yet offer space for reflection.

If any search is to be worthwhile, we must know what we’re looking for and how we might explain it once we find it. No search can simply plumb the void; it must be thoughtfully conceived in the first place. If your graduate education has given you anything, it gave you the tools to trawl the new knowledge environment, the skills and instincts to turn information into insight, dumb fact into articulate idea. This power of critical thinking will serve you well in any field you enter, and it will make the difference between journey work and genuine achievement. It will help determine whether society will benefit from what you do and whether you yourself will reap genuine satisfaction from it.

Right now the obstacles for advanced graduates are great and will grow even greater with the budget cuts that are sure to come as government and the private sector cope with the troubled economy. The path before you could prove to be a minefield. The arduous course on which you first set out some years ago may be even more challenging today, despite the proud accomplishments that brought you here. My hunch is that you do what you do because you love it, and because nothing else can be as meaningful to you. Pursuing knowledge today, and especially taking the academic route, in a society that has never valued education enough, requires a leap of faith not unlike the one attributed to the early Christian theologian Tertullian, who said that he “believed because it is absurd,” a leap later described by Pascal as a “wager.” I hope this wager pays off handsomely for you. I wish you all well as you set out on career that combines a sense of social purpose with a deep feeling of inner fulfilment.

Thanks to the narcissism of its central character, who is at once insecure and aggressive, there could hardly be a more cringe-inducing current film than Noah Baumbach’s relentless Greenberg. Roger Greenberg’s only rival at saying gauche or obnoxious things to anyone in almost any situation is the character played by Larry David in the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. But that program, once a refreshing dose of bile and misanthropy, degenerated into a formula after the first season or two, and now each episode seems entirely predictable. Greenberg, on the other hand, which locks us in with the point of view of its disagreeable protagonist, is guaranteed to set one’s teeth on edge. Played with furious intensity by a transformed Ben Stiller, he is plaintively vulnerable one moment, then strikes out furiously the next, especially when someone is being nice to him. He’s in from New York, staying at his brother’s home in L.A. while recovering from a breakdown. He tries with little luck to reconnect with close friends from a band he helped break up fifteen years earlier, when they were on the verge of a recording contract, but he spends much of his time writing letters of complaint to companies (like airlines) whose services have disappointed him. Afflicted with at least a mild form of O.C.D., he’s the Moses Herzog of consumerism, the spoiled idealist or perfectionist turned crank.

Roger’s brother and family are off in Vietnam, leaving behind only a dog, the one creature for whom he feels any spontaneous affection, and his brother’s “personal assistant,” played by Greta Gerwig, a gentle, slightly confused 25-year old, whose life since college has been going nowhere. Recovering from a series of relationships little more than sexual, she is drawn to Roger, though he is fifteen years older, in part because she is a natural caregiver and he seems far more wounded than she is. But Roger is incapable of letting anyone get close to him. He is caught up in himself in a way that prevents him from gauging the effect of his words or deeds on people around him. But no sooner does he repel her than he tries again to make contact, often in the most gauche ways imaginable. Yet Baumbach manages to make something of a May-September romance out of this seemingly intractable material. How does he manage to pull if off?

The logic of romantic comedy, going back to the screwball films and Astaire-Rogers musicals of the 1930s, is to put every possible obstacle between two people who, though very different, perhaps even at each other’s throats, seem destined for each other from the beginning, though they are the last to know it. There’s only a glimmering hope of such an outcome at the end of Greenberg, a hint that Stiller and Gerwig may actually connect, against all odds. But the real key to Greenberg is the other genre to which it loosely belongs, the kind of neurotic Jewish comedy that survives tenuously in stand-up but seemed otherwise to have died with Seinfeld and with middle-period Woody Allen. This sense of not really belonging, of being an awkward outrider, barely tolerated, is where Noah Baumbach’s work comes from. Like Allen he writes comic sketches for The New Yorker, and his first films, Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1997) were charming pseudo-intellectual talkfests of post-collegiate angst. They followed in the footsteps not only of Woody Allen but of Whit Stillman’s similar portrayals of the aimless young, sub-category Wasp, in Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994).

But in his most celebrated film, The Squid and the Whale (2005), Baumbach graduated to a story much closer to the emotional bone, a largely autobiographical account of the effect of infidelity, separation, and divorce on two teen-age boys. Just as Allen had moved from outright humor to the mature emotions of Annie Hall and Manhattan, and later the even more serious Crimes and Misdemeanors and Husbands and Wives, Baumbach has developed the neurotic, self-lacerating side of New York humor while leaving humor itself behind. Unable to drive, barely able to swim, carrying groceries by hand from the local supermarket, Greenberg feels stranded in L.A. like some of Allen’s characters before him. He gazes down at the backyard pool as an alien body of water and glares at the young whose musical culture and sexual mores know nothing of his. Baumbach himself, who like Greenberg, is 40, may be feeling the same concern about the next movie generation, wondering if he has already been left behind, a fear that may be conveyed in the improbable romance between Stiller and Gerwig, between the comedy of humiliation that has become Stiller’s commercial specialty and the physical freedom and loose indie improvisation that marked Gerwig’s earlier, so-called “mumblecore” films.

Great success breeds confidence but sometimes causes artists to lose touch with their roots. But in Greenberg Baumbach offers both Stiller and Gerwig a gift, an archaeological deepening of their film identities, the roles they have already played, showing layers of feeling not previously exposed. And he provides himself with a comparable gift, for he has become our most accomplished and acclaimed younger director without losing touch with the inner nerd, the gnawing anxiety, the empathetic sense of dysfunction and insecurity that made him an artist in the first place.