21 pop culture moments in 2017 that spoke to the zeitgeist

The Vietnam War

2017 was full of surprises. If you told me at the beginning of the year that I would voluntarily watch a 17-hour documentary about the Vietnam War, I would’ve laughed in your face. Yet, not only did I manage to finish PBS’s The Vietnam War (which admittedly took two months), but I liked it.

Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the 10-part series takes a comprehensive view of the controversial conflict, starting with French colonial occupation in the mid-1800s and ending with present-day efforts at reconciliation. It’s dense, jam-packed with names, numbers, and political intricacies that narrator Peter Coyote recites with journalistic dispassion. Somehow, though, the information pulls you in, gradually coalescing into a vivid and immersive portrait of an era. With a mishmash of firsthand accounts (courtesy of both American and Vietnamese soldiers and civilians), video footage, audio recordings, photographs, and retro music cues, Burns and Novick rescue Cold War America from the cobwebs of history. As someone too young to remember, I thought of the events shown for the first time as things that actually happened, to real people.

Part of the reason is that they’re familiar. Although The Vietnam War refrains from referencing current events, parallels reveal themselves like connections in a conspiracy web: wars rooted in imperialism; governments justifying said wars with falsehoods and cover-ups; military strategies dependent on airstrikes; paranoid presidents; societies divided by racial, class, and ideological tensions; a general mood of anger, confusion, and despair. Reading a Washington Post article on the Niger ambush, I immediately wondered if this could escalate into another war. It hasn’t (yet), but the feeling of déjà vu (the title of the series’ first episode, by the way) is hard to shake.