21 pop culture moments in 2017 that spoke to the zeitgeist

22 of 22

Tower

Fine, I’m cheating here. Tower technically received a limited theatrical run in New York City last year after screening at several film festivals. However, I and the majority of the public didn’t find it until it arrived on Netflix earlier this year. And frankly, a list of pop culture that represents 2017 would feel incomplete without Keith Maitland’s documentary.

On August 1, 1966, a man ascended the Main Building at the center of the University of Texas, Austin campus with several rifles and pistols. For next hour-and-a-half, he rained terror down on passersby, ultimately killing 14 people and injuring 31 others. Based on the 2006 Texas Monthly article “96 Minutes”, Tower chronicles the tragedy — the eighth deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — in near-real time. We hear each bullet, see each body fall. Even more uniquely, it’s animated, using the Rotoscoping style favored by director Richard Linklater (coincidentally, an Austin native). The animation, which switches between color and monochrome, has a distancing effect, all fluid lines and tinted shadows, imbuing the proceedings with the glaze of memory.

Toward the end, Maitland inserts a series of news clips from recent mass shootings: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook. The footage is overlaid with audio of Walter Cronkite, who, in the aftermath of UT Austin, delivered a blunt indictment of America’s culture of violence to his CBS News audience, concluding, “It seems likely that Charles Joseph Whitman’s crime was society’s crime.” In a film that largely avoids political commentary, the brief montage is startling and sobering — stark evidence of how little has changed in the past half-century. Watching it now, what stand out are the absences; between June 2016 and November 2017 alone, there were 555 mass shootings, including the two deadliest in modern U.S. history.

Ultimately, Tower has little interest in stoking outrage or wallowing in carnage; the gunfire that kills Whitman (whose name is never mentioned outside of the Cronkite snippet) is resoundingly anticlimactic. Instead, it turns its eye to the victims, survivors, and witnesses, locating instances of humanity amid the destruction. As mass shootings and their casualties dwindle into statistics, pushed out of the news cycle by the president’s incoherent tweets or Congress’s latest attempt to alter massive things like taxes or healthcare, that’s more than heartwarming; it’s vital.

Here’s hoping that 2018 has some equally powerful pieces of pop culture.

Home/Movies