It’s all for one

They’re the top of the pop-culture food chain, which isn’t necessarily the same as the cream of the crop. Tens of millions of us have endorsed them with our cash and credit cards, though we may not have embraced them fully with our hearts and minds.

As a group they reside at the profitable midpoint of American taste and opinion: A movie about a guy who romps around in spandex on Manhattan’s rooftops (“Spider-Man”). A twisted hip-hop ode to American values (“The Eminem Show”). A novel that envisions the end of the world in vivid, almost jubilant detail (“The Remnant”). A self-help manual by “Oprah” spinoff celebrity Phillip McGraw (“Self Matters: Creating Your Life From the Inside Out”). A video game whose latest incarnation rewards quick reflexes and low animal cunning with cool cars, hot babes and other people’s money (“Grand Theft Auto: Vice City”).

On first impression, the only quality these No. 1’s share is a knack for making cash registers sing. But look closer and you’ll spot strange affinities among them, echoes of a period that future generations may refer to as the Year of Living Anxiously. Collectively, they represent a moment in time when America alternately swaggered and trembled, flexed its muscles and murmured its prayers.

In our competitive culture, of course, numerical rankings are the cold, hard measure of success or failure, a raw index of national obsessions. We know how easily No. 1 can be tweaked by music merchandisers and Hollywood profiteers. We know that people tell pollsters they’re watching “Masterpiece Theatre” when really they’re tuned into a World Wrestling smackdown. Yet every year we ask: Who’s on top?

“Put it this way: You never see somebody putting a sticker on the package saying it was No. 52,” says Bruce Haring, a former USA Today reporter and the author of books about the music industry’s marketing shenanigans. “We’re a society that craves the newest, the best, the hottest.” Whether it’s a populist stroke of genius or a carny barker’s crass come-on, attaining No. 1 means you’ve somehow convinced the masses to rise up as one and cry: We love it! We want it! We’ll take it!

“In the media age, the information age, lists help us categorize things and make sense out of the chaos, even if they’re not true,” says Lawrence R. Samuel, author of “Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream.” With that caveat, what follows is a look at what we were really buying this year when we shelled out our shekels for No. 1.

Welcome to grim times

Running through this year’s group of chart-busters and bestsellers like a low-grade fever was a sense that bad things were happening and more were likely to come. The clues were scattered everywhere.

Watching CBS’ “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” which took over from “Friends” this fall as the No. 1 weekly TV series, we peered over the shoulders of Gil Grissom and his colleague Catherine Willows (actors William Petersen and Marg Helgenberger) as they bantered over DNA samples and spun ingenious theories in emotionally flat-lined voices.

“Nothing’s absolute, Gil, even forensics,” Grissom’s boss told him in a recent episode. Yet the premise of “CSI” is that each mystery will be resolved within the allotted prime-time hour and the dead can speak to us through their ghostly remains -- that every human body has a story to tell. Set in Las Vegas (which Money magazine ranked America’s No. 1 metropolis), “CSI” is as much about recovering the memory of those no longer among us as it is about collaring bad guys.

On a more apocalyptic scale, that could also be the theme of “The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon,” the latest installment in a serialized fictional account of the rapture, when Christ’s followers supposedly will be summoned up to heaven minus their clothes and dental fillings. Nonbelievers left behind on Earth will face the wrath of the antichrist, fiendishly disguised as head of the United Nations.

The series, called “Left Behind,” is written by Jerry B. Jenkins and conceived by Tim LaHaye, and it’s not only the bestselling Christian fiction work of 2002, but also one of the year’s top hardcover titles. Never heard of it? Better put aside your Stephen King: In half a dozen years, the 10 “Left Behind” books together have sold a stunning 36 million copies.

The trade journal Publishers Weekly says its fiction rankings won’t be definite until after the holiday shopping season ends. But John Grisham’s “The Summons,” about a boomer law professor’s quest to settle some unsavory family business, appears to have the edge over both “The Remnant” and Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” related by a dead girl looking down from heaven, which caught the chill of last summer’s gruesome child-napping and murder incidents.

“My crackpot theory is that it has a lot to do with 9/11,” says Publishers Weekly editor Nora Rawlinson. “The psyche of the country is one that wants stories that talk about grieving and death and give a positive spin on it.”

Which may help explain the “Left Behind” series’ attraction. A future filled with mass disappearances, cities leveled by devastating earthquakes and oceans turned to vast seas of blood might seem unbearably grim. But in the “end times” ideology of “The Remnant,” worldly calamities merely herald the Messiah’s imminent return.

You can save yourself -- or enjoy the chaos. Just take a spin through “Grand Theft Auto III,” this year’s bestselling home video game, or its raunchier offspring, “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” released two months ago.

Set in a cheerfully nihilistic tropical paradise (read: Miami), circa 1985, “Vice City” features a surreal lineup of celebrity voice-overs (Ray Liotta, Dennis Hopper, porn star Jenna Jameson), brutal graphics and a strong sexual pulse. By year’s end, “Vice City” could be outselling its PlayStation progenitor.

What’s the appeal? Maybe it’s the don’t-call-me-guilty pleasure. “So I just beat her and took her money,” says a video game-loving colleague of mine, demonstrating a “Vice City” sequence in which the thuggish main character robs and kills a hooker who has just serviced him. “Morally bankrupt!” he enthuses. “And there’s no cops coming!”

With rants and homilies

Not all this year’s chart-toppers took the path of violence, rough sex and dark social commentary. In music, we flip-flopped between Eminem’s expletive-laced rants against “Ms. Cheney,” Tipper Gore and “white America” (on his overall No. 1 disc), and the vague spiritual yearnings and homespun homilies of Alan Jackson’s No. 1 country CD, “Drive.”

Among the tracks that propelled “Drive” was the plaintive “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),” a post-9/11 lament in which the singer declares himself to be “not a real political man” who watches CNN but isn’t sure if he “can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran.”

Did the world stop turning on Sept. 11, or did it rather seem to be spinning out of control?

While Eminem’s defiant outbursts lately have taken on a self-mocking tone, no such irony inhibits Kelly Clarkson, the Texas cocktail-waitress-turned-would-be-diva after winning Fox’s “American Idol” TV talent contest. Clarkson scored this year’s No. 1 single, “Before Your Love,” a plushly orchestrated piece of generic pop that swamps Clarkson’s croak.

“How did I settle for the world in shades of gray?” she croons in the opening verses. Ambiguity apparently isn’t a good idea if you’re an ordinary Jane or Joe trying to seize the day, get ahead, be all that you can be or (insert your own favorite mental-health mantra here).

“Your authentic self is there, it has always been there, and it is fully accessible to you. You are not the exception to this fact. There are no exceptions,” writes Phil McGraw, a.k.a. Dr. Tell It Like It Is, in “Self Matters,” the pre-Christmas front-runner for No. 1 nonfiction hardcover title.

If you don’t know yourself, you can’t run your own life, he continues. Failing to express your authentic self “renders you nothing more than the eighty-third ‘sheep’ from the left in Row 487,000,946!” he continues.

Step one in correcting this failure, surely, is buying Dr. Phil’s book (Simon & Schuster, $25). You are not the exception to this fact. There are no exceptions. And pay no attention to that bleating behind the curtain.

Self-help no help? There was ample transformation at the movies. Actor Tobey Maguire’s transition from high school dweeb to web-slinging marvel who saves Manhattan and gets the girl (sort of) made “Spider-Man” Hollywood’s top movie. For somewhat younger consumers, there was the small-screen (video and DVD) saga of Harry Potter, another class nerd magically transformed into a hero-savior.

Even Hogwarts wizards might envy the electronic legerdemain of LeapFrog’s LeapPad Books, an interactive read-along “toy” that educators have greeted with hallelujahs. Kids who preferred their playtime mindless and cheap -- the LeapPad platform goes for about $50, the books for $12 to $15 apiece -- stuck with Hot Wheels Basic Cars, which list for less than a buck, the top toy in total units sold. (LeapPad was first in sales dollars.)

Our talent for crafting high-tech playthings and epic escapism translated well beyond our borders. In Mexico “Spider-Man” beat out “El Crimen del Padre Amaro” (The Crime of Father Amaro), a succes de scandale about a corrupt young Roman Catholic priest. One of the few countries to stand up to “Spider-Man” was France, which preferred its own national super-hero, Asterix the Gaul, in “Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra.”

Clever, these French: One minute they’re moaning about “l’imperialisme culturel americain.” The next they’re at the root of another blockbuster exhibition of Impressionist painting. The show “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South” lured nearly 700,000 viewers to the Art Institute of Chicago, making it the year’s No. 1 art show. With the French around, who needs McDonald’s to feel like a cultural colonial?

Energetic anti-globalization move- ments didn’t stop us from making a Japanese import, Toyota Camry, the most-driven passenger car in the country. In the CD player? Perhaps it was Andrea Bocelli, the Tuscan Tenor, whose “Sentimento” was the year’s most purchased classical album.

Beyond numbers

But if consumer choice is all a numbers game, what happens when the numbers only sow confusion, as they do in David Auburn ‘s “Proof,” which leads U.S. regional theaters this season with 29 scheduled productions. Like Michael Frayn’s drama “Copenhagen” and the feature film “A Beautiful Mind,” “Proof” plumbs the connection between genius and lunacy, probability and uncertainty, abstract integers and tangible human feelings.

Numbers, the play observes, can turn treacherous, even for professionals. So we want more than numbers: We want proof. Proof that our lives have meaning, proof of whodunit, proof that things may be better in 2003. Proof that we can somehow save our selves and our planet, short of divine intervention. Proof that the dead will be heard from again, if only in the pages of a slim first novel or a CBS crime serial.

Until proof arrives, however, numbers will have to do. In the days ahead, we’ll tabulate sales figures and award appropriate honors. And as we enter the bright new year, most of us -- all of us -- will keep looking out for good ol’ No. 1.

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We’re sold on these

A sampling of what Americans elevated to No. 1 in 2002:

Movie -- “Spider-Man,” tormented comic-book hero scores big.

Hardcover books -- Fiction: “The Summons,” a John Grisham mystery; nonfiction: “Self Matters -- Creating Your Life From the Inside Out,” advice from “Oprah” regular Phillip C. McGraw; Christian -- “The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon,” post-apocalyptic visions by Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins.

TV show -- “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” the dead speak.

Albums -- Overall sales: “The Eminem Show,” Eminem, rants and raves; country: “Drive,” Alan Jackson, down-home truths and patriotic musings; hard rock: “Weathered,” Creed, pop metal with a messianic frontman; classical: “Sentimento,” Andrea Bocelli, love songs.

Singles -- Overall sales: “Before Your Love,” Kelly Clarkson, pop bonbons; R&B;: “Uh Huh,” B2K, seductive harmonies; rap: “Lights Camera Action,” Mr. Cheeks, sexual braggadocio with a beat.

Video game -- “Grand Theft Auto 3” / “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” -- Western civilization’s low end.

Wheels -- Passenger car: Toyota Camry, dependability for the masses; light passenger vehicle: Ford F-Series pickup, a perennial.

Plays -- Broadway: “The Producers,” Mel Brooks redux; regional theaters: “Proof,” David Auburn’s numbers game.

Art show -- “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South,” Art Institute of Chicago.

Toy -- LeapPad Books, interactive electronic library for tots.

Video -- “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the boy wizard returns.

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Sources: Variety; Publishers Weekly; Christian Booksellers Assn.; Nielsen Media Research; Nielsen SoundScan; Nielsen VideoScan; Autodata Corp; League of American Theatres and Producers Inc.; Theatre Communications Group; the Art Newspaper; Money magazine; NPD Group Inc.

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Times researcher John Tyrrell contributed to this report.