21 pop culture moments in 2017 that spoke to the zeitgeist

LOS ANGELES, CA – SEPTEMBER 17: Actor Elisabeth Moss (L) and author Margaret Atwood with cast and crew of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ accept the Outstanding Drama Series award onstage during the 69th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards at Microsoft Theater on September 17, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

This year, fiction often collided with real life in striking and varied ways. We compiled a list of 2017 popular culture that felt all too relevant.

Hollywood takes pride in being an escape route. It conjures dreams from magic, whisking people away from the monotony and mayhem of everyday existence like Cinderella’s stagecoach. When you are ensconced in the flickering glow of a screen, the outside world dissolves into background noise, distant and unreal.

In 2017, however, escape was virtually impossible. For one, the onslaught of sexual harassment accusations against prominent industry figures, from Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K., provided a dispiriting reminder of the ugliness beneath Hollywood’s glittering surface. As New York Times writer Amanda Hess points out, the dream factory is still a factory.

The products lost some of their mystique too. Although the boundary between fantasy and reality has always been porous, in the wake of the most recent American presidential election, it seemed to collapse entirely, its strength as deceptive as that of the Wall in Game of Thrones. No longer can you huddle in the dark and lose yourself in spectacle; echoes of front-page headlines and hot-button issues ripple through every corner of the pop culture universe, hitting you at inconvenient times with the tingle, or shock, of recognition.

Of course, not all these projects succeeded, either as commentary or as entertainment. In fact, a great deal of them came across as shallow, opportunistic, or ham-fisted. And I suspect things will only get worse once the efforts at relevance become bolder, more calculated; self-awareness was never among Hollywood’s strong suits.

Regardless, you can’t deny that politics played an integral role in our relationship to pop culture this year. So, as Culturess reflects on the past 12 months, we want to acknowledge stories that said something meaningful about the world around us. Here are 20 movies and shows — and one novel — from 2017 that particularly resonated with us.