The trouble with 2017 was that, as the relentlessness of significant, impactful news refused to slow — as bombarding us with way too much to process and react to became a political strategy — it became hard to tell if an act of resistance was a response to decay, or the decay was a necessary byproduct of the resistance. Take the biggest cultural story of the year: the sexual harassment charges against powerful men that tsunamied, taking with them Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and Russell Simmons, among others. I can think of more than a few instances where the culture itself seemed presciently cued in: The Art Institute of Chicago had an insightful show on Gauguin, who has long been a kind of Exhibit A of our ongoing debate on what to do with great art made by bad people. Inversely, Kerry James Marshall painted a 132-foot-tall mural on the side of the Chicago Cultural Center that honored 20 Chicago women, some famous, some not. Did you pick up on the side-eye and smirk that Laura Dern throws a boundary-stepping Oscar Isaac in “The Last Jedi”? It looks well practiced. Just as Daniel Day Lewis’ impervious fashion designer in “Phantom Thread” (opening here Jan. 12), a man who treats women as canvases, matter-of-factly explains to a muse: It is his job to provide her breasts — that is, if he chooses to give them.