Who do Barbie, Taylor Swift and the Matildas have in common? Us

Apparently, ticket sales for Barbie dip when the Matildas are playing. I suppose that makes sense: you’d expect a fair overlap between these two audiences, and Matilda fever is running hot. But it’s also astonishing because we so rarely see anything like this anymore, where our cultural landscape is so defined by a few colossal monuments dominating our vision wherever we turn that they can exist in this kind of relationship. We can only observe the effect Matildas games are having on Barbie because both are so huge.

That is, we’re in this highly aberrant moment where our society seems to have a common cultural focus. We got the first glimpse of this in late June, when tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour were released, and getting them became a national sport. And to complete the picture we’d have to add Oppenheimer, the junior partner in the Barbenheimer phenomenon, which suddenly put cinemas at the centre of cultural life.

This used to happen a lot. In fact, it used to be the way popular culture worked. The first example that comes to mind from my adolescence is when Jurassic Park came out, and it was all anyone wanted to talk about, but every year there seemed to be a film or two like that. It was the same across all popular art forms: whatever Michael Jackson or Madonna did in their pomp, whether album, tour or book; the Seinfeld finale. Feel free to provide your own examples from your vintage. You didn’t even have to have taken in these things yourself to know the references. They were just in the air. I must have watched three episodes of Friends in my life, but I know what “we were on a break” means. I don’t even know how.

If you’re older than, say, 35, you’ll probably recall this phenomenon of unified popular culture, where you could have stopped anyone on the street and had a decent chance of striking up a conversation with them about the thing of the moment. But when did it last feel like that? Maybe when Patrick died on Offspring? That was a decade ago, before the Netflix onslaught. Since about then, culture has become so fractured that our randomly struck up conversations are far likelier to peter out after a minute or two when we realise how few cultural experiences we have in common with people outside our bubble.

That’s why, if you’re a casual observer, you can read the list of nominations for the Oscars, Grammys or Emmys, only to find that you’ve never heard of most of them. And even where we might think some nominees truly are enormous, like Succession or Game of Thrones, that sense is really amplified by online communities, which are themselves actually subcultures. Choose a random sample of Australians, and you’d probably be shocked at how few will have seen these shows or could talk about them. Conversely, people you’ve never heard of might sell out arenas or routinely clock up millions of views online.

The end result is that simultaneously everyone’s famous and no one is. That simultaneously everything’s big and niche. A fractured popular culture is a culture that cannot produce stars in the true sense. Today’s Tom Cruise is, well, Tom Cruise. He’s never really been superseded because the cultural machinery to do so no longer exists. This is an inevitable consequence of having practically unlimited choice in entertainment, available on demand. Common objects have given way to curated personal choice. We no longer do things in concert. Which is to say we no longer do these things as a public.

About the only thing in popular culture to defy this trend is sport. Olympics, grand finals, world cups (if Australia is doing well). Maybe – maybe – the occasional Ashes series. The present enormity of the Matildas therefore makes perfect sense. It’s a world cup on home soil in the world’s most popular sport. It might come across as a bold new moment, part of the women’s sport revolution, and that’s true. But it’s also true the Matildas are such a cultural landmark because they’re in a rare sphere that still plays by the old cultural rules.

What, then, of Taylor Swift and Barbenheimer? Cinema is meant to be dead, given over to endless Marvel iterations, and otherwise abandoned, yet here we are. Tay Tay has surely straddled our fractured cultural environment to achieve stardom at least on par with peak Madonna. Might this be evidence of a re-emerging public; of the continued possibility of genuine popular culture? I confess I would like to think so. Not because I value stars, particularly. But because I think the concept of a public is precious, even essential to human life, and that popular culture, for better and for worse, has always been one of the signs that a public exists.