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Amid all this media-generated controversy, it could be difficult for a creative work itself to stir up the culture. In 1994 Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction generated volumes of discussion about movie violence. In 2003 Kill Bill Vol. 1--which made Pulp look like Toy Story--landed nearly as softly as villainess Lucy Liu did when she collapsed bloodily into the snow in its climax. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, involving a theory that Mary Magdalene may have been Jesus' wife and the mother of his child, intrigued readers and sold millions of copies, but it was ABC News that really took religious fire when it raised the same question in a prime-time special. In fact, it was easier for a work to provoke discussion if no one saw it. Possibly the most debated works of 2003 were The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's unfinished movie about the Crucifixion; The Reagans, a TV biopic that no one outside CBS saw before the network canceled it under protest; and Daniel Libeskind's World Trade Center rebuilding design, which spent most of the year on the redrawing board.
This dichotomy--between the buzz culture and the culture we actually consume--also created two kinds of celebrities: those we wanted to see on the screen or hear on the radio and those we just wanted to read about in Us or PEOPLE. Occasionally, the categories overlapped, as with Beyonce, who conquered the news racks and the CD racks. But in other cases--notably Ben and Jen and Gigli--fame and commercial fortune were, if anything, inversely proportional. And whereas 2002 gave us famous has-beens, like Ozzy Osbourne and Anna Nicole, 2003 was the year of famous never-weres. Ally Hilfiger and Jamie Gleicher of MTV's Rich Girls, for instance, seem to have been created out of thin air so we could envy and sneer at them at once.
Notoriety still paid in 2003, to an extent. Rapper 50 Cent parlayed a tabloid-lurid story--he has been shot, he claims, nine times--into the year's top-selling album. And Demi Moore helped her celebrity profile by hooking up with Ashton Kutcher--more, probably, than she helped her summer flick, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. But whom did we actually want to see in a movie?
We'll have the fish, please.
Finding Nemo was the kind of exception that proves that just when you're ready to declare the mainstream dead, it swims up and bites you on the tush. The year's top-grossing movie was also an example of just what it takes--in a culture broken down by tribes and ages and demographics--to make an across-the-board hit. People flocked to Nemo because it was a good movie, of course. It was moving, it was beautifully animated. And who doesn't like a good ink-spurting joke? But more important, it was about easy-to-agree-with universals: loving your family, learning to live with risks. (It was the sort of movie that, before the statute of limitations expired, we would have called "post-Sept. 11.") And it had a cast whose appeal was not laser-targeted toward young urban males or moms over 40. Black or white, young or old, liberal or conservative, we all feel pretty much the same about fish, except that some of us don't like tartar sauce.