Remember That? 2024's Top Culture Moments
It’s a struggle to remember what even happened at the beginning of the year — 2024 really whimpered in, culturally speaking. Try it! I’ll give £1 to anyone who can remember what won best film at the Oscars. Alright, fine it was Oppenheimer but would you have remembered that if I hadn’t told you? No.
This cultural amnesia is a symptom of the fact that we reached peak trend cycle in 2023. By the start of this year, the endless churn of memes and vibes had fatigued even the most chronically online of us. What we needed was a big, all-encompassing cultural happening that everyone could agree was uncomplicatedly ‘good’.
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Dune: Part Two. So good it sent me into early labour
And lo, the culture gods gave us Dune: Part Two. What a film! The action, the sexual chemistry, the Machiavelian narrative arc. I saw someone on X saying it was 2 hours 47 mins of Timothée Chalamet battling sand. And what amazing sand! Big, loud, worm-filled sand. Scary sand. Beautiful sand. It was just a really great film, a reminder that culture didn’t have to be all ‘us vs them’ (hello, Barbenheimer).
Admittedly, I was heavily pregnant when I saw it and do now wonder whether the bone rattling, tonal soundtrack sent me into early labour. Still, the worst part about having the baby early was the fact that I missed the chance to see Dune: Part Two for a second time, at the IMAX.
The brief Bratification of, like, everything
Charli XCX debuted her latest album via a series of parties in New York, London and LA. I knew something significant was afoot because there’s a girl I used to work with who now lives in New York and who posted some stories from an early (VIP) brat party to her Instagram. For context, since moving to New York she has become my barometer for all things important in the world of cool (she knows I love to stalk her, I’m upfront in my admiration). If she was at a party for Charli XCX, it meant Charli XCX was about to do something big.
Brat summer officially commenced a few weeks later. The album was a slime-coded paean to living a messy life; it brought cigarettes and cocaine back into the culture and was held up by both Gen Z and the broadsheet newspapers as a more ‘meaningful’ representation of womanhood than, say, hot girl summer or clean girl aesthetic or any of those clickety vibey nonsense TikTok things because it is more, like, complex and feminist (I think? The discourse around it got incredibly confusing).
Anyway, whatever, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that everything became brat coded. As a woman who has experienced a number of party-induced breakdowns, been fired from more than one job after turning up on no sleep, and once broke back into the Mykonos villa party I’d just been kicked out of to steal a pack of cigarettes, it was great to see a messy vibe getting the respect it deserves.
Chic shooters
In terms of ‘moments’ special mention must go to the Olympic opening ceremony — the biggest French fail since the battle of Waterloo? — as well as to the delirious kangaroo hops of Australian breakdancer Raygun. Personally, though, I think 2024 will be remembered as the year pistol shooting became chic - from the slouching insouciance of Turkish silver medalist Yusuf Dikeç to South Korean Kim Yeji, whose ice cool demeanour, piercings and sleek style made her a pin up on lesbian Twitter.
The latter has since gone on to appear in a Balenciaga campaign, while Dikeç has been forced to trademark his image — and if there’s anything more chic than being forced to trademark your own image, I’m yet to encounter it.
The best books of all time according to who?
The New York Times got the internet’s literati all frothy and bothered by compiling a list of the '100 best books of the 21st century' in July.
Number one was Elena Ferrante’s masterpiece My Brilliant Friend. There was a real ‘who do you think you are’ tone to the conversation this list prompted, with many commentators in the media and online speculating on the value of these kinds of lists. Isn’t it all subjective? Isn’t calling an artwork the ‘best’ of its kind, totally arbitrary? The list was, in fact, decided upon by ‘503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review which, in terms of literary pedigree, seems legit.
The list is perhaps symptomatic of a time where the sheer volume of culture on offer means it is increasingly necessary to develop ranking systems - who has time to read all the books, see all the art and watch all the TV shows? Still, Ian Bogost wrote a very funny article about the proliferation of arbitrary ‘best of’ lists in The Atlantic a few months back, which seems relevant here. As he pointed out, ‘bestness assumes a value without naming it: the most moving or accomplished, perhaps, but more likely, the least controversial.’
Personally, the book which I found most resonant this year was Miranda July’s novel All Fours. I said as much on Instagram — because how else will people know I’m clever and cultured — and had many people complain that the protagonist is almost unbearably annoying. To which I say, yes, absolutely, but aren’t we all?
The Oasis ticket queue
The long awaited Oasis reunion was finally announced in late summer and tickets went on sale in September. I joined the throng trying to get a pair of tickets but my heart wasn’t really in it. Anyway, I remained 60-something-thousandth in the queue for about five hours then I went to the pub and forgot all about it.
A friend thought she’d bought VIP tickets but then realised that she had been a victim of ‘dynamic pricing’ — almost £1,000 on a pair of tickets to see the warring dad rockers alongside all the other common plebs! Cue the same hand-wringing that we got over Taylor’s Eras mega-tour which bulldozed into town over the summer, a much needed shot in the arm of our ailing economy.
The fact is, musicians make almost no money off album sales or streaming and so have to extract more profit from live events. Theoretically, they could demand that ticket sellers curb dynamic pricing but that would hit profits for everyone involved — and arguably would impact their relationship with the powerful ticketing companies. I think this is just how it is now, no use looking back in anger. Sorry.
Wish fulfilment boyfriends
I am perhaps one of the only people in the country who didn’t love Sally Rooney’s latest novel Intermezzo, released in September (before all the Sad Millennial Girls come for me, I’m actually a Rooney fan, I was just too distracted to get into it) and one of the things that I found most jarring about the first half of the novel that I did read was the behaviour of the two protagonists, Ivan, 22, and his older brother Peter, 32.
Emotionally aware to the point of saintliness, in one particular scene, for instance, Ivan tenderly kisses away the tears of the older woman he’s sleeping with. I don’t know when Rooney last spent time in the company of a 22-year-old man but the only thing he’s likely to be doing tenderly is cupping his own balls while playing Fortnite.
In a time when Andrew Tate has radicalised half the nation’s teen boys, and incel culture is being mainstreamed on X (thank you Elon), the depictions of masculinity felt flatly untrue. Obviously not all young men are Tate-coded, I’m certainly not saying that, it’s just that none of us, aged 22, have the level of emotional maturity that was written into Ivan.
Or Peter for that matter, or Adam Brody’s Hot Rabbi in Nobody Wants This.
Netflix’s mega hit romcom brought us another example of what I came to think of a ‘wish fulfilment boyfriend’. Compassionate, funny, hot and financially solvent; they find you adorable no matter how strangely you behave and are willing to put up with your family no matter how annoying they are.
The truth re: Brody’s Hot Rabbi is that single men in their 40s are almost always odd. I’m speaking from experience here and, again, I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule but nine times out of 10, if they’re single after 40, they’re single for a reason.
Perhaps it makes sense that in a world where most single women-who-date-men complain that it’s a desert out there, in terms of decent matches, culture is serving up impossibly great romantic prospects to make us fall back in love with the Prince Charming myth. It makes for great entertainment but puts some unrealistic pressures on actual relationships.
A doppelganger world
The BBC recently called this the ‘golden age of the doppelganger’. It kicked off in March when a woman who looks uncannily like Kate Moss walked the Marine Serre Womenswear Fall/Winter show. Then there was a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York, a Paul Mescal lookalike contest in Dublin and a Harry Styles lookalike contest in London. In film, The Substance gave Demi Moore a doppelganger in the form of Margaret Qualley and in literature, Naomi Klein won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-fiction for 2023’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
Interestingly, in literature and film the appearance of a doppelganger — an uncanny double, a lookalike — is generally a harbinger of bad luck, a sign of a rupture in the fabric of the protagonist’s reality. As we careen past the mid-point of the decade, then, on the cusp of a second Trumpian age, at the mercy of various all-powerful algorithms, perhaps we should be asking what the appearance of all these doppelgangers means. Is it all just viral lols or is the very fabric of reality slowly fragmenting around us?
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