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.
Exit West (cover image via Riverhead Books)
Exit West
Let’s begin with the novel. Full disclosure: I’m not nearly as good at keeping up with literature as I am with film or television. No doubt, there are tons of other books that belong on this list; I just haven’t read them.
Still, as far as lone representatives go, Exit West is more than worthy. Don’t be fooled by its slim length; Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 Man Booker Prize finalist tells a story of epic proportions. It starts small, with two strangers meeting. Nadia and Saeed are university students in a nameless city in a nameless country ravaged by turmoil. As their love blossoms, civil war engulfs their home, and they eventually flee. Instead of taking a traditional land-and-sea route, however, they discover a strange passageway “of complete darkness” that transports them to Greece. Similar doors appear all over the world, enabling anyone to travel to anywhere from anywhere.
With crystal-clear language and flowing sentences, Hamid recounts the shattering repercussions of these doors, which render national borders obsolete. Cities bulge with refugees. Xenophobia flourishes, and riots erupt. Individuals — both native and migrant — grapple with their place in the changing world.
Don’t call Exit West apocalyptic fiction, though. Over time, the feverish sketches of societies unmade by globalization crystallize into a nearly utopian vision of societies remade from the ruins. It’s what the author describes as radical optimism. Courage, he suggests, requires a willingness to not only face the present, but also imagine the future. We all end up there, whether we like it or not.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Few works of fiction in 2017 hit a nerve like Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. In the show, the United States government has collapsed, hijacked by a faction of Christian fundamentalists and replaced by a theocratic military dictatorship. Called the Republic of Gilead, the new regime exercises rigid control over women’s lives, prohibiting them from reading and denying them financial independence. Elizabeth Moss’s heroine, Offred (as in, “of Fred”), serves as a handmaid, tasked with bearing children for her assigned master.
The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t prescient. As Margaret Atwood explained in a New York Times essay, her original 1985 book lent its dystopia authenticity by studying the past (it’s no accident that the action takes place in New England, with its Puritan roots) as well as contemporary trends (the ‘80s witnessed a resurgence of conservatism that infiltrated even feminist circles). Misogyny and religious fanaticism are ingrained in the country’s DNA; Offred’s tale simply exposed what’s already there.
That said, I doubt the television series would have roused quite the same level of fervor had it arrived during the Obama administration. In the Trump era, Gilead suddenly seems vivid rather than abstract, familiar rather than nightmarish; it is our reality, maybe not in the particulars of its rules, but in its general culture of paranoia and repression.
The change in medium also helped. Images wield a power that words, no matter how eloquent, lack, closing the distance between the audience and the narrative. There’s a kick to seeing the handmaids assemble on a field in their identical red robes and white bonnets. It’s only natural that protesters used the costume, turning a symbol of modesty into an act of defiance.
Get Out
When I pressed “play” on the trailer for an upcoming horror movie directed by Jordan Peele, I had low expectations. Even aside from my squeamishness about the genre, horror movies tend to bring out the worst in trailer editors, all loud noises and abrupt cuts — the visual equivalent of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho theme. By the time the words Get Out appeared onscreen, though, I was thoroughly rattled.
Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is nervous about meeting his girlfriend’s family. Not only might they disapprove of him, but they might be actively hostile toward him. See, he’s black, and Rose (Allison Williams) is white. Although she insists that her parents aren’t racist (her father would’ve voted for Obama a third time if he could!), he knows good intentions can be deceiving. This being horror, his suspicions turn out to be well-founded, as the visit goes from awkward to sinister.
Frankly, when I saw Get Out in theaters, I left underwhelmed; the trailer had me braced for terror, but the movie provided mostly suspense and off-kilter humor. Only on rewatch did I come to appreciate the cleverness of Peele’s satire, from the casting of Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener as Rose’s parents to the use of deer symbolism, and the fury seething underneath.
There is a conspicuous tinge of irony to the attention that awards ceremonies are (deservedly) heaping on Get Out. For one, it skewers benevolent white liberals with a viciousness that feels tailor-made for the Obama era but still stings at a time when the KKK and neo-Nazis can openly march in the streets. And among other things, the film is a meta narrative about cultural representation — the dehumanization that occurs when people are denied the ability to see and control images of themselves. In essence, it is about the experience of being black in Hollywood. Watch Peele very patiently explain racism to talk show hosts and tell me you don’t get flashbacks to the Armitage garden party.
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.
T2 Trainspotting
Twenty years after it first hooked moviegoers, Trainspotting seems dated. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way; the 1996 cult favorite remains as stylish, energetic, and seductive as ever. Rather, like a handful of other classics (Giant and Network come to mind), it belongs so completely to its era that removing it feels like an act of theft. It’s as much an artifact as a piece of entertainment.
I suspect the same will be true of its sequel. As in real life, 20 years have passed in the world of Trainspotting. Last time we saw Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), he kicked his heroin habit and stole £16,000 from his friends. T2 Trainspotting brings him back to his hometown of Edinburgh, now as a 46-year-old exercise nut who’s going through a divorce and on the verge of being fired from his midlevel finance job. Naturally, he reunites with his friends, none of who are especially glad to see him, and hijinks ensue.
Nostalgia flows freely in the form of recycled images, lines, and song cues. Yet, the film never permits the audience to take pleasure in it, or indulge in the illusion that they can relive the good old days. Unmistakable signs of time’s passage are everywhere, from the ramshackle buildings that litter the cityscape to the actors’ weathered faces. When Mark recites an updated version of his famous “choose life” speech, gone is the devil-may-care defiance that made the original so endearing. Instead, it conveys seething bitterness — not at how the world has changed, but at how the world hasn’t changed. This, T2 observes, is the essential hypocrisy of modern civilization: our obsession with progress and new things is really just a desire to find different, more efficient ways to stay the same.
Of all the entries on this list, T2 is the one that feels most deliberately and specifically tailored for 2017. With no overt references and startling clarity for a movie about middle-aged junkies, it presents a snapshot of Europe in the age of Brexit that, as ScreenCrush critic Matt Singer says, ought to be put in a time capsule. Stateside, it barely caused a blip (no doubt, people dismissed it as another unnecessary sequel), which is oddly fitting. No one likes looking in the mirror.
Twin Peaks: The Return
TV has never been a stranger to weirdness. Way back in the ‘50s, Rod Serling invited viewers into the fifth dimension with his anthology series The Twilight Zone, which merged sci-fi/horror pulp with social commentary. In the ‘90s, The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave the procedural format a paranormal twist, while The Sopranos punctuated its psychological study of a mobster with fanciful detours. The 2000s gave us Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Six Feet Under and Pushing Daisies.
Still, Brian Tallerico’s assertion that the medium reached new heights of WTF-ery in 2017 rings true. This was the year of Legion and The Young Pope, American Gods and The Leftovers, Mr. Robot and Riverdale. On the comedy side, Bojack Horseman staged a miniature apocalypse, and The Good Place extracted mirth from ethical dilemmas. And to top it off, David Lynch returned to the small screen.
Almost three decades after it first vaporized the boundaries of television, Twin Peaks was at it again, twisting minds into knots for 18 episodes (albeit now on Showtime, rather than ABC). The trappings are familiar: the secluded Pacific Northwest town; the quirky characters, led by Kyle McLachlan’s FBI Agent Dale Cooper; the hip soundtrack; the damn good coffee. But The Return refuses to settle for its former self, trapping its audience in a rabbit hole full of doppelgängers, monsters, apparitions, and symbolism. Long gone are the days when “who killed Laura Palmer?” was the show’s most pressing question.
For some, the sedate tempo and convoluted plot (not to mention the callous treatment of women) proved too frustrating. Others were bewitched, discerning in Lynch and Mark Frost’s ramblings a kernel of profound truth that could only be satisfyingly articulated through heightened emotion and dream logic. Somehow, with reality spiraling increasingly out of control, this — and only this — made sense. Because, despite its cryptic presentation, Twin Peaks: The Return is a morality play at heart. It peers into the murky soul of America and discovers darkness within darkness — a nightmare within a nightmare. And there’s no way out.
Wonder Woman
Historically, superheroes wore politics on their sleeves. Originating in the late 1930s, when the United States stood on the cusp of World War II, they were models of patriotism, with their combination of physical prowess and moral fortitude. The first Captain America comic featured the star-spangled soldier punching Hitler on its cover; Superman fought for “truth, justice, and the American Way”, whatever that entailed.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and costumed crusaders practically run the world. On the silver screen, though, they feel as remote from our world as Asgard. With a few exceptions (most notably, The Dark Knight), modern superhero movies treat politics like window-dressing: a front for gratuitous explosions and glib one-liners. They want credit for being smart and relevant, but not the responsibility or risk.
Can you blame people, then, for bursting into tears at the sight of Gal Gadot charging across No Man’s Land? Yes, Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman smashed box office records partly due to the sheer novelty of being a female-led and directed action tentpole. But it left a lasting impression because it has something to say; there’s substance to its thrills. For starters, not since Mad Max: Fury Road has a big-budget film addressed sexism so openly. Between battles, Diana deals with culture shock, as she leaves Themyscira, an island populated entirely by warrior women, for the patriarchal society of WWI-era England. The gender dynamics at work are simple, yet effective. Like all myths, superhero stories distill complicated ideas into comprehensible language.
Even as it shows her lifting tanks and stopping bullets with magic bracelets, Wonder Woman lets its heroine’s complexity shine through. Over the course of the film, Diana realizes that humans are neither noble nor innocent, and her righteousness falters. She faces a choice that is familiar to all of us (too familiar lately): succumb to cynicism, or keep hoping and fighting. The true fantasy of Wonder Woman is that the latter wins out. It imagines that a powerful being might choose to help the less powerful instead of asserting dominance — and, perhaps more radically, it dares us to believe we’re worth helping. Wonder Woman isn’t just the hero we wanted; she is the hero we need right now.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JUNE 01: (L-R) Actors Carrie Coon, Justin Theroux, Amy Brenneman and Scott Glenn attend the ‘The Leftovers’ FYC New York Screening at Metrograph on June 01, 2017 in New York City.
The Leftovers
The Leftovers has always been timely. Its inciting incident — 2 percent of the world’s population disappears into thin air — offers a blank slate onto which viewers can project an array of tragedies and traumas. For his 2011 book, Tom Perotta looked at 9/11. When adapting the book for an HBO series that would debut in 2014, co-creator Damon Lindelof and director Peter Berg visited Newtown, Connecticut. There, they found a community still reeling from the elementary school shooting that killed 26 people, including 20 children.
Newtown loomed large in my mind as I watched the pilot. Back then, many found the persistent sadness overwhelming or off-putting; even glowing reviews talked about it. I found it sublime. While most entertainment sought to pretend things were okay, or at least capable of being okay, here was something that saw the world in crisis and refused to turn away. It felt as though I’d been screaming into the void and suddenly heard a voice answer: “I believe you.”
As the show went on, a more intricate tapestry of loss formed. Season 1’s raw anguish subsided into a delicate ache, as characters fumbled for direction. The humor tipped into absurdity, even silliness (bless the source of infinite amusement that is “Kevin Harvey”), though its morbid edge stayed razor-sharp. Liv Tyler terrified us, and Justin Theroux crooned Simon & Garfunkel. In the final season, the apocalyptic subtext became text. With the seventh anniversary of the Sudden Departure approaching, doomsday prophesies run rampant, and society teeters on the brink of chaos. Twice, missiles arc toward the screen — an especially alarming spectacle in light of rising tensions between the U.S. and North Korea.
Contrary to how it probably sounds, The Leftovers resists nihilism. In fact, it is shockingly life-affirming, salvaging meaning from madness, grace from cruelty, beauty from desolation. (Under Mimi Leder’s eye, the Australian wilderness looks like paradise). After all, we follow not the Departed but those who remain, the people burdened with the daily ordeal of surviving. Every so often, it seems the world is about to end, or the world did end, and the fact just hasn’t caught up to us yet, like light from a distant star. But, for now, we’re here. Maybe that’s enough.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
The news that Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh was making a movie about police brutality immediately sent a red flag up. On one hand, In Bruges is one of my favorite comedies. And I’m fond of Seven Psychopaths, despite its messiness. However, any fictional work dealing with a subject this weighty requires tact — a quality not among McDonagh’s strong suits.
As it turns out, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri isn’t really about police brutality. Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a divorced, out-of-work mother whose daughter was raped and murdered. Mildred mourns the way any parent would: by renting three billboards and shaming the local police chief for his failure to catch her daughter’s killer. Unfortunately, not only is Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) popular with the townsfolk, but he has terminal cancer. When a hotheaded cop named Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell) gets involved, the hullabaloo around the billboards escalates into violence.
Dixon, you see, achieved notoriety for assaulting a suspect who was black. Rather than vilifying him, though, Three Billboards grants him a redemption arc of sorts. It results in a movie that’s as polarizing as its titular signs, with admirers praising it as challenging and poignant and critics denouncing it as tasteless and shallow. Does the marginalization of people of color complicate or invalidate its celebration of righteous female rage? What exactly should we take away from all the ugliness?
I can’t pretend to have all (or any) of the answers; a month later, I remain conflicted. But whatever its merits or failings as a political statement, McDonagh’s neo-noir captures a mood of anger, uncertainty, and grief that feels very 2017. The last line, so simple on the surface, lands like a knife. (Of course, it helps that it’s said by McDormand.) Besides, what’s more appropriate for this political climate than a movie no one agrees on?
Stranger Things 2. Image: Courtesy Netflix
Stranger Things
When Stranger Things won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble at the SAG Awards, actor David Harbour used his acceptance speech as a “call to arms”. He spoke passionately about the importance of art, kindness, and unity, and the celebrities in attendance responded with a rousing ovation. My response was: “Huh?” Like, I admire your enthusiasm, buddy, but Stranger Things is flagrantly retro ‘80s pastiche. It couldn’t be less relevant.
Oh, how things changed.
I don’t know if it’s because the show drastically improved, or I was just in the right mood, or I read too much into escapist pop culture nowadays. But after the first season left me indifferent, Stranger Things season 2 devastated me. Suddenly, every character and relationship seemed precious, like the essence of goodness. (Don’t even talk to me about Bob.) The nostalgia, which I previously dismissed as trite, now felt honest, shot through with exquisite melancholy; it wasn’t a means of retreating from the present, but a means of confronting it.
Like most genre fiction, Stranger Things deals in metaphors. In season 2, a monster seemingly made of pure darkness invades the sleepy town of Hawkins, Indiana, causing pumpkin patches to rot and unleashing an army of demon-dogs. Other than a somewhat on-the-nose comparison to mind flayers, Dungeons & Dragons creatures that view themselves as a “master race”, there’s no attempt to explain the monster. You can see it as an incarnation of trauma, or depression, or evil; it doesn’t really matter. All we need to know is that it’s bad.
Rather than diluting the threat, this elusiveness makes it all the more urgent. How do you fight something you can’t define? For once, a sequel raises its stakes, and it pays off. An individual Demogorgon is scary. A shadow hive mind that infects the earth and possesses people’s psyches and keeps growing is downright terrifying. Deep down, you know this is the sort of story where the good guys win in the end, but for a while, things look pretty freaking bleak.
Watching Harbour’s speech now, I want to weep.
War for the Planet of the Apes
In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that Planet of the Apes evolved into Hollywood’s most thought-provoking franchise. Sure, it features apes that ride horses and shoot machine guns, sometimes simultaneously. But the 1968 original turned its fantastical concept into a lightly satirical allegory about racism, nuclear conflict and the (then still-hot) creation-evolution debate. Political commentary is a fundamental component of the series.
Miraculously, 20th Century Fox’s reboot — at first glance, an obvious and unnecessary cash grab — kept that spirit intact. 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes buried a cautionary message about animal rights and scientific hubris in its origin story. Dawn explored the difficulty of maintaining peace between competing groups (interpreted by some as a reference to Israel and Palestine) and presented a case for gun control that even extended to the promotional material.
Last but far from least is War for the Planet of the Apes. Matt Reeves’s 140-minute epic isn’t the only 2017 tale revolving around simians that alludes to Apocalypse Now (this year also gave us Kong: Skull Island and Legends of Tomorrow’s “Welcome to the Jungle” episode). But it is the only one that also alludes copiously to the Bible, and it’s the best.
Instead of creating a veneer of seriousness, the references illuminate the film’s underlying concerns, which are timeless yet feel current. How can sentient beings survive? Why do we survive? What are we willing to sacrifice? Not long ago, these questions might have made for a heated theoretical debate. Now, as nations increasingly seclude themselves in the name of survival, they hold the key to our future.
Plus, War has an ironic use of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a flag-burning, because subtlety is overrated.
SUPERSTORE — “Viral Video” Episode 308 — Pictured: America Ferrera as Amy — (Photo by: Jordin Althaus/NBC)
Superstore
Season 1 of Superstore ended with the employees of a big-box store called Cloud 9 organizing a walkout. Although I enjoyed NBC’s blue-collar sitcom since the beginning, “Labor” was the moment I fell in love with it. In addition to being genuinely moving (a few tears were shed), the walkout serves as a kind of mission statement: this show will be political — and proudly so.
To be clear, it’s hardly unusual for a sitcom to take on serious topics. Norman Lear essentially built his career on social issue comedies, from All in the Family in the ‘70s to Netflix’s One Day at a Time reboot. But Superstore feels unique in its approach. Created by Justin Spitzer, a writer on the American version of The Office, it shares that show’s acerbic sensibility, taking care to avoid the feel-good geniality that sitcoms tend to gravitate toward. As anybody who has worked in retail will tell you, employees are typically more preoccupied with getting through the day than getting chummy with their colleagues. So, while others use “issue” episodes to offer earnest moral lessons, Superstore uses them to generate rapid-fire jokes. No one changes their opinion, and no one learns anything.
It isn’t wishy-washy, though. On the contrary, the gags and quips are often laced with satire. The show is set in St. Louis, Missouri, right in the middle of so-called flyover country. Despite rarely venturing beyond the store, it provides a strong sense of place, both through its ethnically diverse ensemble that rebukes every stereotype about “Middle America” and its general atmosphere of aimlessness. Season 2’s finale managed to surpass its season 1 counterpart, demolishing Cloud 9 with a tornado. When the storm passes, the characters emerge their hiding spots and see a gaping hole where the store’s roof used to be. Besides being an awe-inspiring scene worthy of The Leftovers, it neatly encapsulates the sensation of having your life upturned. One minute, you are going about your normal, boring routine; the next, everything is a mess and Brett might be dead.
Production still from Mudbound. Image: Steve Dietl/Netflix
Mudbound
If you need proof that diversity behind the scenes matters, look no further than Mudbound. For her adaptation of the award-winning 2008 novel by Hilary Jordan (who is white), writer-director Dee Rees (a lesbian black woman) employed women in several positions normally occupied by men. They include cinematographer Rachel Morrison; editor Mako Kamitsuna, who worked on Rees’s directorial debut Pariah; and composer Tamar-Kali. Although their influence might not be evident in the narrative, which stays faithful to the source material, it shines through in the care and warmth with which the film treats its characters and their world.
On the heels of World War II, two families cross paths in the heart of rural Mississippi. Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) has bought a farm and moved there, his reluctant, Memphis-raised wife Laura (Carey Mulligan), their children, and his bigoted father (Jonathan Banks) in tow. Among their new tenets are the Jacksons, descendants of slaves who’ve lived and worked on the land for generations. Fraught from the start, the families’ interactions turn violent when Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund) and Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell) return from war and strike up a tentative friendship.
Similar to Ava DuVernay’s biopic Selma, Mudbound revitalizes a musty genre (in this case, the historical epic) by presenting a fresh perspective. Rees portrays the South as a sort of wasteland — a place of sweat and blood, heavy silences and thunderous passions, where sinners and outcasts wage biblical battles and ghosts wander. Think less Gone with the Wind, more As I Lay Dying.
In fact, this South, rooted firmly in the past despite its mythic aura, reads like a reckoning of the painterly, insular figment of popular imagination. As the ongoing debate over Confederate relics shows, it’ll take more than a story to undo a century of nostalgia. But Mudbound does its small part.
Fargo
I’m convinced that if you watch all three seasons of Fargo in order, you’ll see that the show’s arc mirrors the trajectory of American politics in the last five years with eerie accuracy. Season 1 is a fairly optimistic foil to Breaking Bad-type antihero shows; decency triumphs, and the crooks get their comeuppance. Then, season 2 complicates the order = good/disorder = bad dichotomy, effectively predicting the conservative backlash that would follow the Obama era, à la Reagan’s rise in the ‘80s.
By season 3, the moral compass became unmoored from the magnetic field and spun wildly. At first, it seemed farcical to the point of frivolity. Plots involving valuable stamps, shady business dealings and mistaken identities piled up, and none of them amounted to more than a fart in the wind. Yet, the “unfathomable pinheadery” slowly coalesced into a coherent narrative. What began as a petty brotherly rivalry grew into an international conspiracy that implicated society itself.
The season is rife with stealthy topical references. In Emmit Stussy (Ewan McGregor) and V.M. Varga (David Thewlis), it presents a pair of figures that could stand for competing perceptions of Trump. Emmit is Trump as a bumbling dimwit, too self-absorbed to realize that he’s wreaking havoc. Meanwhile, Varga is Trump as a malevolent con artist, manipulating the public with false promises, fear-mongering, and lies that everyone sees through but no one with authority cares to set straight. The truth probably resides somewhere between these extremes, which is the point.
Morality isn’t relative; rather, it’s irrelevant. Fargo used to abide by the karmic philosophy that defines the Coen brothers’ work. Now, it denies its characters any control over their fates. People are merely cogs in enormous bureaucratic systems, from the government to the economy to the universe itself. You can climb the ladder and maybe change the rules, but you can’t escape it. We invent philosophies — religion, the American Dream — to convince ourselves that what we’re doing matters, but it’s really just so much red tape. If you tell a lie, and everyone else goes along with it, it might as well be true. The system always wins.
It Comes at Night
By far the most talked-about element of It Comes at Night was its marketing. A24 released three trailers to promote writer-director Trey Edward Shults’s latest: a rhythmic, attention-grabbing teaser and a pair of more conventional clip compilations. Stylistic differences aside, the previews all sell the same thing: an artsy monster flick, like The Thing but in the woods instead of the Arctic.
To the chagrin of audiences and some critics, the actual movie turned out to be, well, not that. It is horror, and a monster does play a pivotal role. But Shults, who made waves in art house circles last year with his micro-budget, horror-tinged dysfunctional family drama Krisha, plays fast and loose with genre conventions.
Normally, you expect the monster to manifest in concrete form at some point; even in mood-oriented fare like The Shining and The Witch, we see the ghosts/hallucinations and Satan. Here, it remains hypothetical; no monster appears, though neither does the movie dispel the notion that one exists. And, whereas most horror adopts its characters’ perspectives, It Comes at Night keeps its distance. This results in an experience devoid of catharsis, which is both deeply unsettling and wholly unsatisfying. In other words, it’s perfect horror for our present moment.
It Comes at Night reminds me a lot of 10 Cloverfield Lane. As in Dan Trachtenberg’s pulpy 2016 thriller, a catastrophic event transpires, but the action is confined to a single interior space. The plot revolves around a makeshift family held together by a paranoid patriarch. Domestic stability gradually disintegrates, as it becomes apparent that the family’s protector is, in fact, its greatest threat. Both films treat the household as a microcosm of the state, illustrating how leaders control their citizens by exploiting angst about outsiders, whether communists, terrorists, or immigrants.
I don’t blame people for wanting something closer to what the trailers promised. However, if 2017 taught me anything, it’s that fear isn’t always a monster in the dark. Sometimes, it’s just an endless wait.
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow — “Zari” — Image Number: LGN303a_0370.jpg — Pictured (L-R): Dominic Purcell as Mick Rory/Heat Wave, Franz Drameh as Jefferson “Jax” Jackson, Caity Lotz as Sara Lance/White Canary, Victor Garber as Professor Martin Stein — Photo: Bettina Strauss/The CW — © 2017 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Legends of Tomorrow
After a rough freshman year, The CW’s Legends of Tomorrow course-corrected, refining the team dynamic and adopting a more episodic format. In the process, the time-traveling superhero caper became what it was always meant to be: an elaborate excuse for pop culture homages and period outfits. Episodes from 2017 involved cameos by young George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkien, a moon walk, a Singin’ in the Rain-style tap dance number and a Furby-like toy deified by Vikings.
Yet, amid the wacky adventures, there’s still time for poignant musings on the nature of history. The Legends constantly struggle to balance their responsibility to preserve the past with their longing to “fix” it. One week, the show might force respected thespian Victor Garber to utter the phrase “nasty in the past-y” (I’m not even joking when I say the man deserves an Emmy); the next week, it will produce a gem like, “That’s the irony of time-travel: in spite of it, we still find ourselves living with regret.” It never loses sight of where it began: with a bunch of oddballs escaping from dead-end lives and discovering purpose with each other.
Legends of Tomorrow has addressed current events in various ways. This season, it introduced Zari (Tala Ashe), a Muslim-American hacker-activist. “Doomworld” contains a passing joke that implies Donald Trump is the president in its villain-created alternate reality. My favorite hour of the show’s run is “Turncoat”, a Revolutionary War-set arc that depicts George Washington as the sort of person who calls himself a “gentleman”. At the climax, Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell), a vaguely sociopathic arsonist, gives a pep talk about what it means to be American that’s more inspiring than any presidential speech:
"We’re misfits, outcasts, and we’re proud of it. If they attack in formation, we pop ‘em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, you raid their camp at night. And if they’re gonna hang you, you fight dirty, and you never, ever, give up. That’s the American way."
This show is a Beebo-given miracle.
The Big Sick
Pretty much any way you describe The Big Sick, you do the film injustice. If you say that it’s a fictionalized retelling of the real-life relationship between co-writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, it sounds dull. If you say it’s a rom-com in which half the main couple spends most of the film in a coma, it sounds precious. And if you emphasize that it explores Important Issues like health care and racism, it sounds unbearably preachy.
None of these descriptions get at what makes Michael Showalter’s sleeper hit special. They don’t convey how it juggles each element — the sweet (if not quite romantic) love story, the millennial sitcom, the culture clash subplot — with agility that could be mistaken for effortlessness.
The Big Sick doesn’t “tackle” issues so much as incorporate them, simply weaving them into the fabric of its characters’ lives. Kumail keeps his budding relationship with Emily secret from his parents, who support arranged marriage (or, as they say, marriage). While eating at a restaurant, he and his brother notice strangers eyeing them suspiciously. At one point, Kumail, whose stand-up career is floundering, puts together a one-man play that’s basically just him listing facts about Pakistan. It’s cringe-inducing but also, in a small way, audacious. For a person inhabiting a country that might view his presence as a blemish, it takes guts to stand up and declare, “This is who I am.”
And, lest it be forgotten, The Big Sick is hilarious. In particular, it has a 9/11 joke that made me cry with laughter and sticks a verbal middle finger in the face of American foreign policy in the 21st century. It’s the most subversive line in a comedy — mainstream or indie, film or television — I’ve heard in ages.
MINDHUNTER production still. Image credit: Patrick Harbron/Netflix
Mindhunter
Television is crowded with criminals (just like prisons, eh?). From traditional procedurals to anthology series and even comedies, it seems you can’t flip the channel without running into yet another show about lawbreakers and the people that pursue them. So, I had reservations about trying Mindhunter, Netflix’s latest collaboration with David Fincher. But the prospect of seeing Anna Torv and Jonathan Groff on TV again proved too tempting, and I took the risk.
What a reward I got. Mindhunter pulled me into its chilly post-Watergate hellscape right away, with a bizarre hostage negotiation that goes awry, and never let go; it’s the first streaming drama I’ve actually wanted to binge. Smartly, it shifts the focus away from the lurid crimes, keeping violence to a minimum (though we do get to hear them described in matter-of-fact, often profane detail). It instead examines the psychology behind the crimes — the “why”, rather than the “what” or “who”. Long, nail-biting set pieces unfold in nondescript rooms, as FBI agents Holden Ford (Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) interview serial killers about their motives. In terms of style, it’s more Zodiac than Se7en.
It’s also surprisingly astute as a study of misogyny. Fincher and his fellow directors arrange scenes with painstaking precision, drawing attention at each turn to the relationships between the characters. The volatile power dynamics are most stark in interactions between men and women (see the “kinky” nail file scene), but you also feel that tension when men interact with each other. During any given interview, there are at least four conflicts going on: between the interviewers and their subject; the interviewers, whose methods are often at odds; the people onscreen and the camera; and the show and the audience. In this world, conversations, even between lovers, are never just conversations; they’re also negotiations.
At the same time, Mindhunter exhibits a keen awareness of how larger cultural forces influence human behavior and vice versa. In the premiere, Holden posits that the rash of violence sweeping across the country is a reaction to the social and political tumult that defined 1960s and ‘70s America. “The world barely makes sense,” he says, “so it follows that crime doesn’t either.” No crime is truly incomprehensible, and no criminal is truly evil.
Netflix happened to release the show shortly after The New York Times broke its story about Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment. While the aftermath played out, with more and more allegations coming to light, I kept thinking about Mindhunter. It was strangely freeing to look at the subject from a clinical distance, to put aside my emotions and try to understand. For a second, the way forward seems clear. Ask the hard question: why did he do it? Extract what’s useful, and discard the rest.
Still from Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer. Image via Lucasfilm/Disney.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
There’s no way J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt could have anticipated the political implications The Force Awakens would have when they wrote it. Sure, they modeled the First Order after Hitler’s Germany. Back in 2015, though, most people thought Nazism as a mass movement was safely consigned to the dustbin of history. I remember stifling laughter during the rally scene when I saw TFA in theaters; now, it’s chilling.
2016’s Rogue One evokes similarly accidental reminders with its narrative of rebellion against tyranny. It technically came out after Trump’s election, but production presumably wrapped long before, even taking the reshoots into account.
So, The Last Jedi is the first Star Wars movie of the Disney era whose real-world resonance was likely intentional. Rian Johnson refrains from using obvious iconography like Abrams did, but it is impossible to watch Domhnall Gleeson’s General Hux bluster and whine his way into power and not think of a certain world leader. The writer-director also doubles down on TFA’s portrayal of Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) as an embodiment of millennial male rage, lashing out at those who dare disappoint him. As Slate’s Sam Adams points out, the fact that these villains are sometimes laughable only makes you more wary of them.
Parallels infiltrate the Resistance as well, particularly in the subplot following Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron. Even after receiving a demotion for disobeying orders, Poe is dismayed when Leia (Carrie Fisher) gets taken out of commission and replaced by Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern). His frustration deepens when Holdo refuses to disclose her plan to him, and he proceeds to stage a mutiny. Many critics have interpreted Poe and Holdo’s conflict as commentary on workplace gender dynamics. It struck me more as an analog to the Democrat Party, which devolved into in-fighting after the presidential election.
Either way, what really makes TLJ ideal for 2017 isn’t any specific reference, but the feeling of desperation that pervades it. Throughout the film, the Resistance gradually shrinks, decimated by the First Order’s fleet. No matter how many times they jump to light-speed, they can’t seem to shake the pursuing ships. While not quite as intense, the situation recalls Dunkirk and Battlestar Galactica’s “33”: an army, already defeated, endures constant enemy bombardment. They know they can’t beat the enemy; their goal is simply to survive. I don’t remember any other Star Wars forcing its heroes to spend the entire time on defense.
Underground
On paper, blending escapism and slavery sounds like a recipe for disaster — or at least a major social media firestorm. (Good riddance, Confederate.) So, it’s a small miracle that Underground, a show that could aptly, if crudely, be described as “12 Years a Slave meets Ocean’s Eleven” survived even as long as it did. No doubt, it helped that the show aired on WGN America instead of, say, HBO, where it might have garnered more notice but also more scrutiny. But it was also legitimately good.
To be fair, the enterprise didn’t go off without a hitch. Season 1 was a rocky affair, devoting too much attention to thinly drawn white characters and veering a tad too often into lurid melodrama, even as it supplied gritty thrills scored to the likes of Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead”. In season 2, though, showrunners Mischa Green and Joe Pokaski seemed to discover their true calling. The heist plot gave way to a medley of survival and resistance narratives grounded in the language of Westerns. Scenes of wrenching suffering and loss alternated with fist-pumping showdowns and fiery speeches. While it was always daring, Underground now felt outright subversive, co-opting a historically whitewashed genre to center and empower black people.
Its crowning achievement is “Minty”, an episode that brings Aisha Hinds’s Harriet Tubman into the spotlight for what’s essentially an hour-long monologue. Here, we see a much different version of Harriet from the swaggering gunslinger introduced in the season 1 finale. Speaking to a group of predominately white abolitionists, she expresses vulnerability, doubt, frustration, and, at last, defiance. Slavery, she argues, is an act of war, and in order to end it, you have to fight back:
"If you don’t have it in you to take up arms against the injustice, then you got to pray another prayer, and you got to walk in it with conviction. He will provide, but you got to do your part. You got to find what it means for you to be a soldier. Beat back those that are trying to kill everything good and right and call it “making it great again”. We can’t afford to just be citizens in a time of war. That would be surrender. That’d be giving up our future and our souls. Ain’t nobody get to sit this one out, you hear me?"
At this point, Harriet is speaking directly to the camera — to us. Her call to action isn’t startling just because of the reference (though it certainly makes you sit up), but also because of the way it momentarily collapses time, bridging past and present. It reminds us that our current struggles are nothing new, and we owe it to previous generations as well as future ones to make the world better.
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.
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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.