To be sure, there have been plenty of scenes chilling enough for any pandemic film. Cruise ships filled with sick and well passengers seeking port like the Flying Dutchman; families saying farewell to the dying through hospital windows; governors begging for more ventilators and getting broken ones or none at all; medical staff intubating patient after patient before going home to strip and sleep in basements and garages to avoid infecting their families.
But most Americans are not members of the medical profession or of emergency response teams. Mercifully, and may this remain true forever and ever amen, most of us have not experienced a COVID-19 infection firsthand. At least not yet. The numbers are boggling, the maps on which the infection blooms globally are horrifying, the firsthand accounts being shared on all media platforms are terrifying but the streets, though silent and eerie, are not filled with zombies or people felled on the spot.
All those fast-moving, survival-skill-celebrating “what if” world-ending films and series we loved to deconstruct as metaphorically insightful or even prescient now seem, at best, superfluous. Which may explain why, despite all those “best films about pandemic” lists that were blithely posted in early days,Real horror, as any horror fan knows, is uncertainty.
Turns out the most relevant metaphor for apocalypse isn’t a zombie staggering around, or a rage monster rising from the dark or an identifiable cloud of death creeping across the planet. It’s the quiet vacuum filled by Zoom meetings and far too much time on social media as we wait to see how bad things are going to get — watching through sleepless hours as the degrees of separation between our families and COVID-19 count down.
As our days of confinement pass, the dramatic choices of near-instantaneous epidemic, or undead monsters, and certainly the narrative use of comas, begin to make perfect sense. Pandemic movies are, at heart, action flicks — things need to move fast. But for those of us fortunate enough to remain, thus far, at least several degrees removed from infection, life has instead slowed down to an increasingly interior balancing act of worry, vigilance, uncertainty and yes, boredom.
I expect to see that image on ABC LIVE
Maybe because all those apocalyptic films & shows last an hour or two (or more if you're binging) but you always know you can change the channel if you want. Or watch something less depressing. If only we could change THIS channel...
The only thing they missed...at the start of every apocalypse, give $2T to Wall Street
A aa a aaaa CHOOOOO (evil laugher)
are you running out of actually important things to write or do you just not have the capacity? I do defend the paywall but sometimes i wonder if it’s really worth it when journalists are this mediocre.
Ya cuz at least those are exciting
If that's why we were watching, then we deserve this
how old are you ? 12?
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