“Main Character Energy.”
That’s what we call confidence today, that’s how we describe the self-centering of our lives in our personal narratives. As slang, “main character energy” was not one of the breakout phrases of 2024 — its popularity got traction during the in-your-own-head days of quarantine — yet it seems more useful now, heading into 2025. Sometimes the best way of picturing a future is by casting yourself as the lead in an epic. The production can get interminable. The role may be thankless.
But there’s sweep, twists that lead down unexpected paths, unexpected villains and allies, maybe even resolution. Many of us have come to recognize this feeling in the early days of a new year: We look back, and inch forward to the unsteady first episodes of an unsettling new season in a very familiar ongoing series that promises new characters and unforeseen conflicts.
Goodbye 2024.
Hello … who knows?
So sue me if I ended the year unable to stop imaging the ennui-laden final images of “The Empire Strikes Back.” A lot has been lost. A feeling of dread sits heavily, stomaches twist, alongside faint hints of hope and resistance. I also couldn’t shake an image from John Carpenter’s paranoia classic “The Thing”: Those main characters, exhausted, scared, shivering in the cold, look around themselves at the people they thought they knew and wonder who they actually are. I can’t speak for you, but whoever you are, you feel that, right? Even Clint Eastwood, at 94, has left us a stomach knot in recent weeks: “Juror #2,” possibly the last movie he’ll ever direct, is largely about the uncertainty of our commitment to our fellow Americans.
Eastwood, the lifelong pianist, fades out the year on a plaintive, summarizing note.
The song of 2024, though, could be heard all around us, if you listened. The year began with Elmo putting out an open question on social media: “Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?” That generated 20,000-plus comments on X, from the optimistic (Chance the Rapper replied, “Honestly, I’m in a really good place”) to many, many more expressions of existential dread. Twelve months later, there was a good reason many of us were picturing The Saga of Luigi Mangione. However unwritten, the story of the man charged with shooting a CEO is a finger in the cultural winds. Some see a grim watershed moment in the country’s direction. Others on social media seem to imagine themselves standing alongside a dusty road in a 1970s antihero film, cheering on an outlaw. For most of the year, the Art Institute of Chicago was showing artist Bruce Nauman’s perfectly titled “Clown Torture,” a video installation described by the museum this way: “With both clown and viewer locked in an endless loop of failure and degradation, the humor soon turns to horror.”
Sounds like 2024 to me.
Absurdity went mainstream. Am I the only one unnerved, and unsurprised, that Crocs came out with “Squid Game”-branded shoes? Or that “Pacific Drive,” one of the best video games of the year, had players steering old station wagons around environmental collapse? Cultural resonance once meant having a degree of shared experience, so why did “The Substance” with Demi Moore — as an aging actress whose spine cracks open to unleash her younger, hotter self — work better as a contemporary satire than sci-fi? “Say Hello to My Little Friend,” a word-of-mouth 2024 cult hit by Cuban-American writer Jennine Capó Crucet, told the story of an immigrant who becomes a Pitbull impersonator in a sinking Miami, pivots to living life as Al Pacino’s Tony “Scarface” Montana, then becomes friends with an orca in a Florida aquarium.
After 2024, you may wonder: Is this fiction?
The answer is yes, just barely.
The satirical Chicago-based newspaper The Onion made a not-at-all-satirical (eventually unsuccessful) attempt to buy Alex Jones’ defamatory Infowars website, a seeming bid to cleverly show just how thin the line between satire and reality has become. Consider this: Despite great efforts, neither the 2024 Chicago Bears nor the 2024 Chicago White Sox (statistically, the worst major-league baseball team in history) were rebranded as satirical sports organizations. Indeed, after Australian breakdancing catastrophe Raygun competed at the Olympics, viewers took to social media to show the gulf between hubris and actual talent. Fake it and you might still make it became a running theme all year. In politics, of course. But the smartest illustration was Chicago comic Conner O’Malley’s remarkable breakthrough special, “Stand-Up Solutions,” released on YouTube and crafted as a hapless (yet enthusiastic) bro’s pitch for an artificial-intelligence robot to make comedy more efficient.
“The A.I. space is on fire!” O’Malley screamed. “We’ve hacked slavery!”
That he played the role so convincingly lent weight to a year in which Sotheby’s sold its first A.I.-made painting (for $1 million) and the podcast Dudesy was sued for creating an A.I. George Carlin. That the podcasters later admitted most of the material was written by themselves (yet even Carlin’s estate wasn’t sure at first) was telling, and kind of chilling.
In my own personal 2024 narrative, the main character doesn’t scratch at reality for long before the artifice flakes off and one’s nerves turn electric. Chicago was voted the best large city in America by Condé Nast Traveler for the eighth year in a row, and hosted a mostly successful Democratic National Convention that impressed a lot of out-of-towners. But also, last February, Chicago had an average temperature of 50 degrees (the warmest on record) and just before the DNC, the city had 32 tornadoes in a single day (another record). The Chicago Symphony Orchestra named 28-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä as its new leader, its youngest ever (succeeding then 82-year-old Riccardo Muti). But what does it mean that the Chicago rat hole got more attention? I kind of looked forward to the much-feared Chicago cicada invasion, but unless you lived in a suburb, the reality was crickets. Percival Everett’s award-winning bestseller “James” was greeted by some critics as even better than its hallowed inspiration, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” — albeit at a time when the adult literacy rate in this country is actually somewhat lower than it was when “Huckleberry Finn” was first published in 1884. How does a nation continue when, of those 79% of literate adults, 54% read below a sixth-grade level? We had a presidential candidate with a name that a chunk of the country made no willing attempt to pronounce correctly.
Don’t even get me started on Barry Keoghan. (Also known as BARR-ee key-OH-gin.)
Chicago, politically, culturally, felt more alienated. We retreated into arguments about the best breakfast sandwich in the city. We took mental-health days. To blow off steam, one social media trend was setting up a camera, putting your child in a room and allowing them to swear then (and only then). As cultural critic Ted Gioia recently wrote, the fastest growing segment of the culture is now distraction. But then how else would we have discovered TikTok phenom Jools Lebron, a Mariano’s employee in Chicago whose use of the phrase “very demure, very mindful” became the catchphrase of the year? Merriam-Webster chose “polarization” as the word of the year. Editors at the Oxford English Dictionary decided on “brain rot.” Somewhere between those is us.
My favorite phrase of the year? “Touch grass” — as in, “We need to touch grass.”
As in, return to reality.
Did all the incessant scrolling, flipping, never settling or paying attention to much of anything suggest a nation turning away from a situation demanding attention? On Jan. 1, 2024, an Illinois state ban on book bans took effect, and by December, some counties actually rejected state library funding if they had to take a stance against book bans. Comforting to some, alarming to others, was an online trend driven by influencers called “trad wives,” homesteading women embracing antiquated gender roles. There were explicit urgings for us to please touch grass again, from Barack Obama, who spoke openly of resistance at the Obama Foundation, and from the Chicago History Museum, now showing a history of design in local activism (through May 4).
Sometimes the plea for normality came from within the art itself. Beneath the showy bawdiness of music by Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan (whose ginormous crowd at Lollapalooza in August officially certified her for stardom) were sincere humanistic impulses to stay relatable. Drake and Kendrick Lamar spent the year sniping, but it was Charli XCX and Lorde, with the song “Girl, So Confusing,” who bravely, and bracingly, addressed mutual animosity to each other’s faces: “You might still wanna see me / falling over and failing / at least we’re closer to being on the same page. Girl, it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl …”
In this storyline unspooling in my head, Beyoncé (of all people) touches grass with an excellent quasi-country album, “Cowboy Carter”; Google (of all things) brings us closer to reality, stripping away the glass from the Thompson Center in the Loop, reminding us what holds up architecture; the extremely funny Cole Escola touches grass as an anxious John Waters-esque Mary Todd Lincoln in the Broadway hit “Oh, Mary!” (which, in a way, brought us closer to the anxious real woman than her historic image); and Chicago’s John Mulaney briefly revitalizes talk shows with Netflix’s “Everybody’s in L.A.,” six live episodes that were more civic portrait than celebfest.
Was it a dream?
For only these moments, was the future bright and hopeful?
Reader, so confusing: No matter how relatable and earthy that explosion of female pop singers may appear, the cost to see them live is prohibitively expensive for most. That petty Kendrick song about totally hating Drake (“Not Like Us”) was also … great. Angel Reese made a lot of enemies of fans of Caitlin Clark, and made the Chicago Sky a local must-watch. Illinois got just a few weeks to catch the luminous “Illinoise” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater — yet New York City got almost four months? Lollapalooza looks stronger and bigger than ever, but the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park (which has acted like an annual preview of Lollas-to-come since 2006) won’t continue in 2025?
There’s so much to worry about — what will be the future of Chicago public broadcasting, now facing a White House widely expected to defund PBS and NPR — I find myself clinging to what matters: Mock Francis Ford Coppola and “Megalopolis,” but wild ambition still counts for something. Bemoan the drift to IP-friendly productions on Chicago stages, but I am still not sure how Harry Potter — live, in front of you — gets sucked into the coin slot of a pay phone in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” A crumbling film business seemed at times to be putting more energy into popcorn buckets than films — yet, the “Dune” sequel and “Wicked” were satisfying.
One of the last things I did before the year ended was go to “Every Brilliant Thing” at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. It tells the story of a woman — processing her mother’s suicide attempts, as well as her own depression — who spends decades jotting down reasons to live. One of the lovelier things I’ve seen this year was the enthusiasm of its audience members who leave the theater and find themselves staring at Post-It notes that invite them to write down one or two reasons that they find life worth living.
People wrote grandchildren and snails and ponies and vintage Halloween masks and new sneaker smells and dogs licking your face and true love and toddlers who look serious and snuggling and side two of “Abbey Road” and Mozart’s Symphony No. 40.
They left a long, long wall of reasons.
To those I would add Denzel Washington chewing scenery in “Gladiator II” and the Magnetic Fields at Thalia Hall and saying goodbye to “What We Do in the Shadows” and Mavis Staples turning 85 and Buddy Guy turning 88. I would add the fact, though three major music producers Quincy Jones (“Thriller”), Steve Albini (Nirvana) and Shel Talmy (The Kinks), each Chicago bred, died this year, you lived at the same time that they did.
Let’s not make this an apocalyptic campfire chat.
You’re going to need your main character energy for 2025. The next chapter begins, and what awaits will be difficult, and wonderful. Somewhere between “Clown Torture” and “Every Brilliant Thing” — that would be the sweet spot, and is that too much to ask?
