EPISODE 637: OLD ACQUAINTANCE 2021, UM, YEAH, BE FORGOT
Seriously.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
2021, you seemed so good at first. Really, those first four months you just got better and better. Seriously, I’m grateful for what you gave us, except now here I am once again hiding from a virus that sounds like a rejected gobot.
Not cool, bro. Not cool.
It’s the week of new year’s, so we’re all supposed to have hot takes on everything. And I AM HERE FOR YOU, Wowsers.
Here’s a bunch of thoughts I have as we (finally) leave 2021 behind.
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THINGS FROM 2021 THAT I HOPE THE FUTURE REMEMBERS FOREVER
Stephen Sondheim. Shrill. Michael K. Williams. Conan. Desmond Tutu. David Gulpilil. Olympia Dukakis. Pose. Nurses. This meme.
THINGS FROM 2021 THAT I HOPE ARE SOON FORGOTTEN
That dude from January 6th with the stupid helmet. Senate Republicans. The Texas Abortion Law. Refusing people communion. Anti-vaxxers. Transphobia. The word “omicron.”
PEOPLE OF THE YEAR
Time Magazine said Elon Musk was the person of the year, because news is dead, I guess. As far as I’m concerned the people of the year are the many scientists that somehow managed in less than a year to create a vaccine for a virus that has killed two million people worldwide.
And hey, Time, if you’re going to be so crass as to give Person of the Year to someone who can sell copies, you should have gone with Britney Spears. She was basically imprisoned and forced to work right in front of us for over a decade, and for the most part most of us didn’t even notice.
WEIRDEST TREND
Look, I’m not a romantic when it comes to Joe Biden, but he kind of saved the country and maybe American democracy and yet everyone hates him.
I get that Afghanistan was a mess, I get that we have inflation, I get that his stances on college loan paybacks and immigration are wanting, in some cases seriously so.
But most of that is not his fault. And after the last four years, the pandemic and all the stimulus that’s come and coming, to get to the end saying “I hate Joe Biden”, I just…
PARADOX OF THE YEAR
2021 saw an ever-more damning portrait of the way that Facebook—oh, I’m sorry, Meta—has skewed what people read in order to enflame their emotions and increase their engagement on their properties. And as much as it is Enemy Number One in this regard, it seems to me like it’s of a piece with a lot of how mainstream media operates today. They survive on eyeballs, and scary/appalling gets eyeballs, therefore terrible stories (or even just headlines) have gotten more and more play.
At the same time, one of the takeaways of the last four years and also the last two years is just how essential the mainstream media is to our democracy. We were absolutely never, never, never going to learn how to deal with the pandemic watching FOX, nor hear the truth about police shootings of people of color, nor understand what actually happened in Washington, D.C. on January 6th. And most of the time the same is true watching CNN. No, we depend on NPR and PBS and BBC and Al Jazeera and the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Atlantic and a handful of other major news sources and a lot of other smaller ones to provide us with actual information.
How can it be true that we both depend on mainstream media and mainstream media is at least occasionally spinning news in ways that are meant to juke our emotions? I have no idea, but it very clearly is.
MOST TRULY ANNOYING TV IDEA
You can tell they’re cool, they all have different color palettes.
2021 saw Marvel release its first set of shows for Disney+. Some of them got a lot of buzz, but until Hawkeye (which is really, really great), the one thing they had in common is that in the end they were somehow simultaneously both completely irrelevant and just there to serve Marvel movie plots. The most heinous example of this is WandaVision, which a lot of people absolutely loved, but in the end left Wanda pretty much exactly where it left her, a total mess. The Falcon and the Snowmansoldier was just the same; yes, Falcon finally takes on the mantle of Captain America, but um, that already happened at the end of Endgame. Loki, which I really enjoyed, actually stopped its story to spend the finale letting some dude we’ve never met but is apparently the new Big Bad of the MCU spend 45 minutes telling us who he is.
With Hawkeye it seems like they’ve finally embraced the idea that a TV show has to be able to stand on its own. I’m glad they were able to figure that out. Let’s hope it continues.
STUFF THAT I’M PROUD OF
I wrote some stuff this year. Here’s a couple pieces that I’m really proud of.
“A Place for Us:” On Being Gay in the Priesthood: This was a long time coming, and it’s something which is still impacting me personally in a lot of different ways. I’m glad I got to write it, and also that NCR trusted me enough to let me tell my story in my own way.
Thank You For All The Hats, Mr. Sondheim: Along with “Place for Us” this is the most personal thing I wrote this year. I’m not even entirely sure why or how that’s true, but it is.
An Oral History of the Legion of Super Heroes: I realize this is pretty niche, but it’s by far the most challenging article I’ve ever done, and the more I worked on it, the more I loved it.
Jimmy McGovern, the atheist with the most Catholic shows on TV: This profile just came out, but it’s something I’ve been working on pretty much since I got to America in July. I’m a huge fan of McGovern, and our conversation has really stayed with me.
The Best Holiday Tradition You’ve Never Heard of, Venezuelans Roller Skating to Mass at Christmas: I think what I love about this is that it wasn’t my idea. One of my bosses asked me to do it, a whole team of us got invested in it, and it ended up just being a lot of fun. (Also, we’re pretty much the only people that have ever reported on this in English. So that’s cool too!)
Joe Biden’s Oval Office Cartoon is Filled with Catholic Hope and Expectation: This, too, was something I was asked to do, and once again I discovered so much fun stuff doing it.
THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO IN 2022
The Zeta variant, presumably. More Euphoria. (Really, just more Zendaya, please and thank you.) So much Star Wars. The return of Julian Fellowes. The mid-terms (lol). More writing. Touch wood, a couple creative projects. Just getting to be in New York.
It’s the Christmas Season. There’s so much to watch, right?
…Right?
…Right?
RUN TO IT, READ ABOUT IT, RAIL AGAINST IT
Spider-Man: No Way Home: RUN—It perfectly captures the hopeful spirit of the latest iteration of Spider-Man, and somehow finishes storylines or fixes mistakes that have been made in every previous Spider-Man series. Honestly, it’s worth watching just to see Jamie Foxx, Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina given better material to work with. And it gives M.J. and Ned a lot of great stuff to do, too.
Only proviso: go early in the day or wait until interest slows down, because omicron don’t play.
Being the Ricardos: READ/RAIL—I disliked the portrayals of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz so much it made me angry. Much more worth reading about that period and these people than spending a single moment indulging Sorkin’s left-wing misogyny.
Matrix: Resurrections: RUN– My nephew Jack tells me Matrix is “so old” and its special effects “super cringey.” Some of the reviews also say if you don’t the series you can’t understand this sequel. I definitely think that helps, and also, that this film doesn’t have the depth of the original. But it is both a pretty cool story and has a kind of fascinating take on what all of us out in the world have made of the series.
Don’t Look Up: RAIL – This film, about some scientists trying to convince the world to stop a comet that’s going to destroy the planet, has an amazing cast. It’ll seduce you hard in the first fifteen minutes. But it turns out to be just a long cynical scream against anti-vaxxers, politics and the media. Maybe that sounds attractive, but to watch it’s just bitter and exhausting. (Also I convinced my parents to watch it on Christmas night, and man do I regret that. This is most definitely not a Christmas movie.)
West Side Story; Tick…Tick…Boom!; Hawkeye: RUN – I mentioned each of these a couple weeks ago, but I’m doing it again because they’re all great.
Okay, well, there you have it. 2021, thanks for the memories. 2022, please ignore how crazy we are and just help a brother out.
I’m going to be off the next few weeks. I’ll be back January 23rd with another season of Pop Culture Spirit Wow. In the meantime, thanks again for all your interest and support of the work I do here and elsewhere. My active readership (aka people who actually open this kooky thing) has actually doubled in the last six months, which honestly kind of blows me away. (Now if I can just convince you all to start telling people about my screenwriting blog! Ha ha ha.)
Seriously, thank you for reading my little messages in a bottle. I hope they entertain you, and that they also help you know you’ve always got a friend out there thinking of you and trying to figure out how to make you laugh (and sometimes how to get you to go hmm or aww).
Stay safe! Happy New Year!
