Pop culture helped pull us together through the highs and lows

If you felt uncommon hope and unprecedented despair this year, join the club. Really, join the club, because for the first time in a long time, we're all members. Following years of deepening cultural fragmentation, a historical election and a crumbling economy that spanned red and blue, black and white, and rich and poor made 2008 the year of unity.

We watched together as a woman and a black man vied for the Democratic presidential nomination and, no matter your party affiliation, marveled at Barack Obama's triumph. We trembled en masse (and continue to do so) while the stock market crashed, mortgage companies failed, financial giants folded, and the future, once reasonably certain, began to blur into something resembling the Blob. That's right. Our collective financial profiles are frightfully reminiscent of a B horror movie. Where's Steve McQueen when we need him? Robert Downey Jr. (praise be) is back, as Iron Man, no less. But superheroes — and superpowers — just don't wield the same clout these days.

Lord knows we needed a good laugh. Humor and politics, an evergreen mash-up, took it to the next level, and television was the sacred vessel. We were riveted as Sarah Palin and Tina Fey danced a perversely gripping duet. A pair of satirists fronting as news anchors — for those just joining us, that's Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart — turned Comedy Central into the primary news source for a significant swath of youth culture, and added blessed levity to the longest campaign season in history for the rest of us. Against all odds, Paris Hilton found a constructive outlet for her skill set when she responded — lounging poolside in pumps, natch — to a John McCain campaign ad mocking Obama's celebrity.

Paris, and everyone else, sooner or later made their way to YouTube, which became the 21st-century village green. Missed David Letterman's withering rebuke of no-show McCain? Sarah Silverman's "Great Schlep"? Katie Couric's must-see interviews with Palin? No problem; we caught up by the light of the village screen. Then we hightailed it back to our living rooms to participate in that time-honored communal pastime: rocking out. How much do we love Rock Band and Guitar Hero? The multi-player video games have replaced the record label as the music industry's marketing and distribution powerhouse.

If he does nothing else (kidding!), Obama singlehandedly rescued the topical song. He inspired more than 800 of them this year, amateur and professional, most memorably "Yes We Can," a stump speech artfully transformed into a star-studded viral video sensation from will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. Other artists celebrated the opponent's maverick spirit in more traditional style — country star John Rich with a song, "Raisin' McCain," and singer-songwriter Jackson Browne with a lawsuit, over use of his music in a campaign ad.

Optimism and gloom, history's great unifiers, flowed in startling proximity this year. Street artist Shepard Fairey's series of iconic Obama posters, stamped with inspirational words like Hope and Progress, may well be decorating walls in homes that are in foreclosure. Despite a fistful of feel-good hits like "Billy Elliot" and "Shrek the Musical," Broadway — long heralded as recession-proof — is reeling like the rest of us, which may translate to a long-overdue lowering of exorbitant ticket prices. At the movies, a soulful robot named WALL-E galvanized audiences in a deceptively winsome cautionary tale about the terrible toll of greed and consumerism, and the pressing need for a collective response.

But the year's biggest blockbuster was a still harsher interpretation of the species' troubling trajectory. "The Dark Knight" gave us pure evil in the late Heath Ledger's Joker, a decidedly hamstrung savior in Batman, who is not at all sure what's expected of a hero these days, and society in a perpetual state of anxiety. It's the blind leading the helpless in a war against irrational terror. Sound familiar? Ledger's accidental overdose on prescription medicine several months prior to the film's release added an extra shot of bleakness and urgency to the movie. In short order "The Dark Knight" became the highest-grossing film of all time after "Titanic" — whose two stars reunited for the period piece "Revolutionary Road," which opens locally this week.

Alas, Kate and Leo, the future has arrived (Hope! Progress!) and our appetite for peering into the past at the cineplex may have waned. We turned up our collective noses at "Australia" and "Changeling," but give us an impoverished 18-year-old orphan in Mumbai who triumphs on a television game show and we'll hand you the sleeper hit of the year. Nasty, oppressive, unjust world? Check. Happy ending? Check. "Slumdog Millionaire" is the rousing fairy tale that reminds us why we invented fairy tales in the first place.

Yet our hunger for certain strains of reality persists unchecked on the small screen, and who can blame us. At the end of a long day at work (assuming you've still got a job) watching has-beens, C-Listers, and athletes rhumba on "Dancing With the Stars" is surely preferable to watching our 401(k)s shrink. And reality programming is cheap to produce, which means the gravy train won't be slowing anytime soon. For a glimpse of real real life, though, a growing cult gazed into the sociopolitical mirror of "Mad Men," which led cable TV's ever-gathering charge against the networks' deepening irrelevance. To wit, NBC launched the first lob in the Great Corrective with the announcement that next year the network will give the coveted 10 p.m. slot to Jay Leno. Risky business, indeed.

Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin might beg to differ, but women were victorious in 2008. Tina Fey ascended the comedy throne, Katie Couric regained her hard-news credibility, and "The View" was the everywoman's epicenter of political discourse. Female-centric feature films of "Sex and the City" and "Mamma Mia!" were box-office gold, with bustling groups of galpals lining up at theaters like teenage boys at an action flick.

Finally — in a triumph of gym over time — a newly-chiseled Madonna made 50 the new 20.

Her marriage didn't make it, but Madge nailed this year's generational role reversal. Grownups took up social networking and kids gorged on the kind of wholesome fare the 'rents are always trying and usually failing to feed them: the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, and Taylor Swift ruled the tween roost, and the vampire-romance "Twilight" ranked as 2008's full-on pop-culture obsession.

Older kids embraced (or didn't) heroes returning from one form of exile or another. In this year's comeback stakes: AC/DC roared, Britney scored, and Guns N' Roses tanked. What we really wanted was Lil Wayne — who proved that giving it away really does pay by selling more than a million copies of "Tha Carter III" its first week of release, after most of the tracks had already been distributed on mixtapes — and Bon Jovi, the biggest touring act of the year.

In the throes of recession and gripped by uncertainty, what could be more apt than millions of us coming together and raising our lighters for another chorus of "Livin' on a Prayer"?

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.