The spirit of the times

26 days remain in 2008, but those like me involved in surveying the pop culture landscape are waist deep in evaluating the year's best and worst. Films rolling into theaters over the next few weeks are screening like crazy and showing up with regularity on the doorstep. Shortlists are assembled in hopes of giving preliminary shape to one's final canonization for the year.

While I don't have any links handy, many of my colleagues believe this has been a bad year at the movies. I agree completely. Even awards season, the time when the prestige pictures get paraded in hopes of earning plaudits and statuettes, has been mostly uninspiring.

When all is said and done, I'll have seen around 300 new films released in 2008. I can't say that there's been a lot that's elevated me. Rachel Getting Married was the last one. The Dark Knight and WALL-E are no-brainers, but those are in short supply. Light may shine through the darkness at some points in these films, but there's a good deal that's bittersweet in them all.

Tonight I was messing around in iTunes to flex my old radio programmer inclinations and put together a CD-length playlist of the year's best music (or songs from my favorite albums). I didn't necessarily have a difficult time doing this as we live with music differently than we do with films. Favorite songs are like family and friends we see or hear from on a regular basis while favorite films are more like people we see once or twice a year.

What stood out, though, was that many of the songs are in a minor key, downbeat, or both. "Love Lockdown", "Mykonos", and "Joke About Jamaica" are thrilling listens and provide catharsis, but I don't know that any of them are going to get a party started.

There's a priori convenience in proclaiming pop cultural glumness as an indicator of the economic downturn and country's mood. Really, I think it's impossible to draw any overarching conclusions purely on the basis of there being so much out there to support any number of theories. It also overlooks the fact that a good deal of the art was conceived and made before financial woes lumbered onto the scene. Nevertheless, this stuff isn't made in a vacuum, and the recession's roots are long enough to have influenced creative endeavors.

So, is the collective unconscious producing work that mirrors the zeitgeist, or is finding pop cultural uneasiness ascribing intention that wouldn't be given if times were better? I don't know.

(Tip of the hat to Donna and Noel for this entry's inspiration.)