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2012: The Year in Review
From a deranged Dirty Harry to the rise of Honey Boo Boo, it was a long, strange, sad, and silly trip
By Michael Musto
published: December 26, 2012
Santiago Felipe
Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair representing Obama made the entire nation hide their furniture.
Julia Minamata
Move over, Big Bird. This year, it was Chick-fil-A that was the most highly politicized poultry.
Santiago Felipe
With her cocoa-brown face, Tan Mom is probably lucky we don’t have neighborhood-watch coordinators in Manhattan.
Julia Minamata
With Honey Boo Boo’s Uncle Poodle
along for the ride, there was even a positive message that ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with being a little bit gay.’Julia Minamata
It became clear that the young royals were actually fun-loving
humans with private parts, and
that simply could not be allowed
to happen.
We won! Barack Obama was reinstated as president mainly because the
other guy was so bad. So bad, in fact, that he couldn't even figureout
how to steal the election!
Conservatives found Mitt Romney too moderate. (Sure, he was a hater,
but not nearly enough so for them. Certainly not as much as his running
mate, Paul Ryan.) And a lot of others thought he didn't stand for anything,
because he seemed to keep flip-flopping and pandering like a chameleon
dressed like a used-car salesman. So Mitt's evasiveness came to haunt
him, with various moments in the campaign exuding a "Don't vote for me"
chill that proved ruinous.
There was the creepy convention performance of on-screen gunman Clint
Eastwood talking to an empty chair representing Obama, a stunt that
made the entire nation hide their furniture. (At least it eclipsed
Romney's speech later that night.)
Big Bird also became an unlikely issue when Romney boasted at the
first debate that he'd pull funding from PBS—yes, that's how to save the
country from ruin—while his second-debate contention that years ago he
had to go through "whole binders full of women" to look for qualified
females led to more than a few undecided voters taking Romney out of
their own binders.
On election night, not only did the way more populist Obama get
green-lit again, but gay marriage was approved in Maine, Maryland, and
Washington; a proposed ban on same-sex marriages was rejected in
Minnesota; openly lesbian Tammy Baldwin won as Wisconsin senator; and
there were many other LGBT victories, not the least of which being the
"evolution" of our returning president on gay marriage (he still sounds
halfhearted, though, saying the issue should be left to the states for
now; too bad evolution is so slow).
But move over, Big Bird. This year, it was Chick-fil-A that was the
most highly politicized poultry. LGBTs avidly battled that chain's
gay-bashing and funding policies, and in turn the world got a
Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, with the Bible-toting damnation-mongers
wolfing down chemically saturated sandwiches while declaring themselves
American heroes standing up for freedom. At least they never claimed to
have good taste in food.
Bizarre, entitled behavior seemed to be the order of the day all over the place, lots of local yokels obviously having sprinkled bath salts
into their possum stew. In Florida, neighborhood-watch coordinator
George Zimmerman was accused of the second-degree murder of Trayvon
Martin, a black teen whom the prosecution said Zimmerman confronted
after racially profiling him. (Zimmerman pleaded not guilty, citing
self-defense.) It was one of those explosive incidents that fueled
countrywide speculation and anger all year, mirroring the outrage over
the New York City police's racially charged stop-and-frisk tactics,
which have made life hell for some perfectly innocent people.
Equal opportunity offender ex-football coach Jerry Sandusky was
sentenced to 30 to 60 years after being convicted of serial child
molesting, a true American Horror Story finally getting some payback.
And far less seriously (but still ickily), Patricia Krentcil became
known as Tan Mom when she was thought to have brought her five-year-old
daughter into a tanning booth for an ultraviolet browning. Krentcil
vehemently denied that charge, but the woman seemed really burned
out—or, if you prefer, toasted—when she was the guest of honor at a drag
revue held at the New York gay club xl in August. Krentcil spent the
night falling down, speaking in semi-coherent sentence fragments, and
even turning belligerent and yelling "Fuck you!" at the bewildered
crowd. With her cocoa-brown face, she's probably lucky we don't have
neighborhood-watch coordinators in Manhattan.
In the real celebrity arena, males crawled out of the woodwork
to claim John Travolta had sexually harassed them, with massage the
most-cited form of expression. (Grease is the word.) But Travolta
wouldn't wait for oral arguments on the charges—his lawyers shot them
down—and the actor continued with his fairy-tale marriage to the lovely
Kelly, Scientology beaming down its approval all the while.
That was not the case with Tom Cruise, whose wife, Katie Holmes,
stunned the world by filing for divorce. Why so shocking? Well, a lot of
cynics had assumed this was a deal with the devil that was eternally
binding, Katie having sold her soul for a career break. Maybe her agent
had gotten her an out clause?
Also out of a relationship was Demi Moore, who was reportedly devastated that Two and a Half Men replacement Ashton Kutcher was flouncing around with far younger babes.
Demi was promptly hospitalized for "exhaustion and health reasons,"
which, of course, is code for inhaling whip-its, a form of nitrous oxide
known mainly to mature folk from their school days long ago.
I'm not sure what Lindsay Lohan was inhaling this year, but every attempt at a comeback seemed to be greeted with a setback
(or a stinky Liz Taylor TV pic). She's back on the court docket for
2013. And though he was hot again, singer/rapper Chris Brown got
involved in a brawl with Drake in a New York nightclub called W.i.P. (no
relation to what Demi was taking), with Rihanna the invisible impetus.
The incident led to a proposed city crackdown on bottle service—as if
the poor bottles were to blame!
Bottle-pink transsexual director Lana Wachowski grabbed headlines for
showing off her new look, and so did Stephen Beatty (Warren and
Annette's son) and Chaz Bono. Chaz is now losing weight on national TV
to help people! How giving!
And CNN's Anderson Cooper came out as a gay man, as half the world
said "Duh" while the other half screamed "Finally!" But the U.K. enjoyed
no such relief about their own royalty. Yes, Queen Elizabeth's Diamond
Jubilee was a good-time gala capped off by disco singer Grace Jones
gleefully spinning a hula hoop. But in other corners, when photos
surfaced of a naked Prince Harry and a topless Kate Middleton, it became
clear that the young royals were actually fun-loving humans with
private parts, and that simply could not be allowed to happen. They'll
no doubt never be seen in public again (which is fine with me).
In movies, the jewels in the crown continued to be gleamingly aggressive action franchises, with The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Breaking Dawn, Skyfall, and The Dark Knight Rises raking in the ka-ching. But the dark side of The Dark Knight happened in July, when a Joker opened fire at a midnight showing in a
Denver suburb on the opening night of the relentlessly gloomy film. By
the end, 12 were dead, more than 58 were injured, and a lot of people
watched movies at home that weekend. (The Connecticut elementary school
shooting in December fed even more cries for increased gun control,
though the concept of whack-job control seemed out of everyone's grasp.)
Sad psychos were certainly in tune with the bleak mood that cinema
was reflecting. Most of the big Oscar movies were based on horror,
whether it be a tsunami, shipwreck, plane crash, slavery, 9/11, or
Scientology. Les Misérables indeed, even if the accent was on human dignity and survival against all odds.
The year's real horrors included a sinking Battleship, a schizo Dark Shadows, and an unfunny Casa de Mi Padre. The Paperboy was a wan attempt at satirizing elaborately trashy behavior—it looked way better on paper—while the expensive flop Cloud Atlas was a wildly imaginative exercise in time-spanning and gender-morphing
(partly written/directed by Lana), though as it went on interminably, it
seemed like a movie about prosthetics buried inside an epic about
makeup.
Prosthetics ruled the Academy Awards in February, when The Iron Lady's
Meryl Streep won her first Oscar in 29 years, but she somehow made her
acceptance speech a self-deprecating exercise in "Oh, her again?" What
an actress! But even Meryl was upstaged by Angelina Jolie's leg sticking
out of a slit in her dress, a très Jolie pose that was so bold and
wacky it captivated the world as everyone set about putting the jutting
leg on photos of Betty White and themselves. Quickly, the leg-out stance
began to be seen as the only sensible response to a culture, economy,
and ecology gone amok.
Straight out of The Paperboy, Honey Boo Boo and her family
nabbed better cable ratings than the debates, proving that white trash
is better off running for beauty titles than for elected office. And
with Uncle Poodle along for the ride, there was even a positive message
that "ain't nothing wrong with being a little bit gay. Everybody's a
little bit gay."
In music, a yay-gay Carly Rae Jepsen video ("Call Me Maybe") launched
the year's most unavoidable hookup anthem, while Justin Bieber and the
Brit boyband One Direction also stoked the Clearasil-for-lunch bunch
with looks and ambiguity. The indestructible Madonna got into various
battles with the new her, Lady Gaga, whose "Born This Way" Madonna
mashed into "Express Yourself" to make a point about reduction. But the
older gal put away her hate pom-poms for a moment and asked Gaga to
perform with her, maybe so they could bury the hatchet in Katy Perry.
When Gaga declined, Madonna no doubt started rustling through whole
binders full of other divas.
On Broadway, medium-successful movies like Newsies and Once morphed into large musical hits. But in books, it was big-name sex that
sold, especially if the big names happened to be extremely dead.
Ex-Hollywood-pimp Scotty Bowers's Full Service revealed that virtually every old-time star was gay and ate doody sandwiches, while actor Frank Langella's Dropped Names went for more probing portraits of late legends, while also dissecting a
lot of their sexual predilections (if not always his own).
New York City itself went through a full plate of proverbial crap
sandwiches—probably courtesy of Chick-fil-A—from a shoot-out in front of
the Empire State Building (overreacting police did most of the killing)
to a harrowing death on the subway tracks, which a photographer
controversially snapped for posterity, then "licensed" the photo. A
natural disaster was inevitable, too, one so whopping it destroyed
Halloween while supplanting its fear tactics. On October 29, Hurricane
Sandy traumatized the country and the Caribbean, killing more than 100
people in and across New York. The accompanying blackout caused major
inconvenience while reinforcing our long-running have-and-have-not
divide. Downtown Manhattanites (south of 39th Street) and residents of
the far reaches of certain boroughs found themselves utterly powerless,
while uptowners went department store hopping without even realizing
there had been a problem.
As the affected returned to a state of dry safety—some faster than
others—none of the angst could be washed down with a Big Gulp, since the
board of health had approved Bloomberg's measure that would ban movie
theaters and restaurants from selling sodas larger than 16 ounces. As a
result, we wondered: Is this so Drake won't be able to throw large
sodas? Can't we just order seconds? And won't this be another unneeded
blow to—everybody now—the economy? Oh, well. Cheers (with 15 ounces) to a
better 2013. Tan off, leg out, hand on hip, kick that empty chair away,
and smile. And stop picking on Big Bird! Elmo, on the other hand . . .