Entertainment

POP CULTURE: The year's disasters and their never-ending coverage further blurred the line between fact and fiction

04:27 PM CST on Tuesday, December 20, 2005

By TOM MAURSTAD / The Dallas Morning News

365: We saw Paris in the springtime. We saw Paris in the fall. At times, 2005 seemed like the year we all turned into paparazzi, scrounging for the tiniest glimpses of a certain heiress. But that silliness aside, the world of arts and entertainment provided moments more beautiful, more powerful, sadder. For the next two weeks, we'll explore those in "365," GuideLive's look back at 2005.

Some years are trickier than others. You need to take a few steps into the future, let the present recede into the past, before you can get a fix on What It All Meant. But when it comes to branding, 2005 was a big, easy year, summed up by the swamping of the Big Easy. 2005 was The Year of Disasters.

Opening with a tsunami killing tens of thousands in Southeast Asia and concluding with a record-setting hurricane season that flooded much of the Gulf Coast, with a massive earthquake in Pakistan thrown in, life in 2005 imitated an epic disaster movie playing on TV screens and magazine covers everywhere.

But real life wasn't the only place the disaster pandemic was spreading; all across the 24-7 media theme park known as CelebrityLand, bombshells kept exploding. The will-they, won't-they saga of Nick and Jessica, the tragic triangle of Brad, Jennifer and Angelina, the baby-makes-three tale of Britney and K-Fed – it all morphed into one big soap opera that was on all the time.

Our universe may have been created by the Big Bang, but our pop culture universe is being formed by the Big Blur – between news and entertainment, fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. In an era of reality TV, computer-generated imagery and so on, this blurring of boundaries is nothing new. But the next-step new thing that emerged in 2005 was something let's call the media's Reality Industrial Complex, the confluence of communication technology, consumer trends and natural events that have transformed what we quaintly refer to as reality into endless varieties of entertainment products.

With cellphone cameras and digital camcorders, we live in a world where everyone is, potentially, a one-person media outlet. Professional journalists didn't shoot the first images we saw of the tsunami; terrified tourists did. If a tsunami had struck halfway across the world in ye olden days, say, a few years ago, Americans would have experienced it as a word in a headline. But now eyewitness video of it is instantly disseminated on Web sites and cable TV broadcasts.

And then came Katrina and its disaster-movie sequel. The rooftops, the Super Dome, the desperate and the dying, it all gave a new meaning to the notion of "must-see TV." 2005 was the year we watched tragedies in real time.

Meanwhile, on the entertainment side of the media moon, consumers showed a lot more interest in the real lives of celebrities than in the movies or TV shows or albums they were marketing. If as many people who read about or watched a blurb on the together-forever breakup of Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson actually bought a record by either of them, they would be bigger than the Beatles. And what about Brad Pitt's "I did-not-have-sex-with-that-woman" affair with Angelina Jolie? The on-screen romance they starred in, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, did OK at the box office, but their behind-the-scenes romance was a smash hit, inspiring countless magazine cover stories and entertainment news buzz.

At least one manifestation of this year's big-blur trend is sure to grab some headlines next year. Following on Jamie Foxx's Oscar-winning performance as Ray Charles last year, the nominees for the upcoming Academy Award for best actor are likely to be dominated by actors who portrayed real people – Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote and David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow.

It seems that this year, in the midst of all this ultra-realistic computer trickery and fake-news funny business, what we wanted more than anything else was to keep it real. Whether "it" was real or not.

Hollywood mashups

AP

Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey

Now that celebrity-couples are like corporate mergers, they get their own ExxonMobil-styled brand names. What began with Bennifer has multiplied into TomKat and Brangelina and ... Just wait. Nick and Jessica somehow got through their marriage without a mashup name. Maybe they'll get one in divorce: SiccaNick.

Supernova stardom

Which brings us another celebrity-related trend: overload, too much, all the time, everywhere you turn. Pop culture has turned into a 24-7 tabloid giving us endless details about rich celebrities and famous rich people. Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Tara Reid and, of course, Nick and Jessica. They could be the cast of a new reality show, a spinoff of But Can They Sing? – But Can They Do Anything?

DVD theater

Technology and consumer trends have reversed the old Steely Dan song: It's no longer everyone but "No one's gone to the movies." Hollywood is holding out hope that King Kong can turn around a yearlong slump in ticket sales, but don't bet on it. In the meantime, if you're looking for a place to get away from the crowds and spend some quality time alone, just go to see a movie in a theater.

Scary-skinny

Yet another reminder that the rich and famous are different from us ordinary little people: As the rest of America is getting fatter, celebrities are getting skinnier. In the wake of all those puffy-lipped, wrinkle-free products of plastic surgery comes a new subspecies of stars: Girls gone gaunt. Nicole Richie, Christina Ricci, Jennifer Tilly, Lindsay Lohan have all caught skeletal fever.

Star bores

20th Century Fox

Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker

With Revenge of the Sith, the Star Wars saga finally groaned to an end. "It was better than the last two" was the desperately-seeking-something-positive spin put on it, but that's like comparing strains of influenza. Maybe in his own Yoda-like-master way George Lucas was trying to help us achieve closure by making the last trilogy so boring and overblown, we're just glad it's over.

Bleep-bleep marketing

More and more clutter to cut through, more and more viewers taking the TiVo plunge; let's face it, advertisers entered uncharted realms of desperation this year. So we had the latest gambit: quasi-crude commercials. Burger King tried to sell a new burger by having "Dr. Angus" introduce America to the concept of power sitting, declaring, "Now you are full of sit." And then there was Dish Network's "My TV sucks" campaign. Perhaps foreshadowing quasi-crude's fate, public outcry forced Aspercreme to change its new slogan, "You bet your sweet Aspercreme."

Sellout stars

The year opened with medialand still buzzing over Robert DeNiro's American Express ads, and it closes with George Clooney narrating a Budweiser commercial. It used to be that big-name stars would hide their sellout shame by going to Japan to do TV commercials, but no more. For a funny/sad example of this trend, check out the current campaign in which John Lithgow is shilling soup – Third Rock suddenly seems light years away.

Customized culture

MP3 players, digital recorders, satellite radio, not to mention the Internet – thanks to technology, we live in a world where everyone can be his/her own editor/DJ/program director. You can block ads, program your own must-see-TV network, create your own playlists or tune into your favorite commercial-free micro-niche music station. When you add the ability to choose your news sources to suit your perspective – the blogs you read and the cable stations you watch – you can now wear your culture like a custom-made suit. Huzzah. But is all this communication power and interactive freedom turning us into a community of cocoons?

Accessorized life

Of course, we know all these technological wonders by their brand names – iPods, TiVo, Sirius. One of the hot tech-toy gifts this year is plasma TVs; another is video iPods. So which is it? Do we want supercool big screens or supercool small screens? The all-American answer is both. In the ongoing marketing of the ultimately cool lifestyle, electronic gadgetry is the ticket required to gain admission. And everything has to be the latest something. Unlike clothing fashion, there is no classic gadget fashion; it's either cutting-edge cool or leg-warmers lame. Whether it's a cellphone or a gaming console – the day after you buy it, its next-generation replacement is announced. Technology is a fast-forward treadmill, and we've become George Jetson, scrambling to keep up, yelling for someone to "Get me off this crazy thing."

AP

Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise

The year of the TomKat

By turning his midlife meltdown into a media spectacle, Tom Cruise went from American idol to Hollywood weirdo. His Tasmanian-devil performance on Oprah – clapping, whooping, grabbing Oprah, jumping on the furniture, all in the name of love – was a moonwalk moment. You remember where you were when you saw it and couldn't believe what you were seeing. And then he went pit-bull on Matt Lauer ("You're being glib, Matt"), not to mention lecturing Brooke Shields on postpartum depression. It's been a fun fireworks display for the voyeuristic, and all the attention hasn't seemed to hurt Major-Star Tom. Hey, he was one of Barbara Walters' Top Ten Most Fascinating People of 2005. That's one word for it.

E-mail tmaurstad@dallasnews.com