One of the things that's always interesting to me when I watch movies and television shows is how the characters do--or don't--engage with literature and music on-screen. Sometimes, one or the other is critically important. One of the reasons I thought In Her Shoes was so much better than I expected (other than Toni Collette's traditional bringing of the awesome) was that I thought they did a lovely job with Cameron Diaz's illiteracy. When she recited "i carry your heart with me" at her sister's wedding, it felt earned, affectionate, as much a gesture of her love for her sister as her first deep engagement with a piece of poetry she could finally read on her own. Music & Lyrics did something similar, even if the songs and books the artists in questions talked about were themselves fictional.
The third season of Spooks does an absurdly good job of this. Harry Pearce, who runs the team of spies who are the basis of the show, gives his estranged daughter a copy of William Butler Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter,"and cries when she begins to read it out loud. In a subsequent episode, Malcolm, a tech, placing a bag of poisoned diamonds in a brief case for delivery to a hacker, declares that he feels "like Gollum," and Harry declares that Frodo and Sam have arrived when Danny Hunter and Adam Carter walk into the room to pick up the diamonds for delivery (in an especially entertaining touch, Andy Serkis shows up as a punk rocker whose infant son is kidnapped the evening he's knighted). Ruth Evershed goes to a choral sing to flirt with a man who MI5 has under surveillance--and the music she and Malcolm (who is posing as her brother) make serves as a soundtrack to Danny's assassination of a rogue bioweapons expert. These people live in a world in which they read, and sing, and rock out to bad punk. In other words, a world much like our own.
So often, pop culture in movies functions as support, or as a device. Music is there to emphasize a mood, or pop culture references are there to indicate that a character is in or out of it. There isn't actual interaction with the texts that are referenced, the music that we can hear, but the characters can't. It's a glaring omission, in a way: we participate obsessively in culture of all kinds as a way to define ourselves. But the characters we're watching, who reflect us, only rarely do the same.