Sometimes it seems impossible to believe that the COVID-19 pandemic has held the world in its snares for nearly two full years now. At other times, it feels as if we will never truly escape its devastating grasp. But as vaccine rates rise around the globe and powerful new treatments continue to be developed, there is promise that our post-COVID future will soon be here.
And yet, we know that our reality in the aftermath of the pandemic will not look the same as in our age of innocence. We are forever changed. But what, exactly, that means for us, for the people we love, for the world we live in remains to be seen.
As usual, however, it is the artists who are leading the way in helping us make sense of our new normal and begin to process the traumas we have all endured. Filmmakers, for instance, are already at work on discovering how we might commemorate and memorialize the most lethal pandemic in modern history.
Chronicling Plague Times
Films chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic will by no means be the first to explore life and society in plague times. Indeed, some of the most important and powerful films in recent history have addressed such themes. Tom Hanks’ Academy Award-winning turn as an attorney battling discrimination and homophobia in the feature film, Philadelphia illuminates important parallels between the early years of the AIDs epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic today.
A central theme of the film, for example, is the destructive toll that fear and misinformation may take on patients and their loved ones. At the height of the AIDs crisis, such misinformation led AIDs patients to lose their jobs, to be expelled from school, to be feared and shunned by their community, as powerfully illustrated in the film.
In the face of the COVID pandemic, such fear and misinformation have taken a different form, but with effects no less lethal. For example, fears concerning the safety and efficacy of the vaccine have led large segments of the population to forgo the jab. Filmmakers are exploring this phenomenon, looking in particular at the role of public health experts in defining health policy and promote community safety and compliance.
The HBO documentary, In the Same Breath, for example, recently appeared at the Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews. The film examines the early months of the pandemic, as researchers struggled to understand the novel virus, to treat the sick, and to protect the well. The film illuminates the chaos and the uncertainty of the period and the impact that such uncertainty has had on the global response to the disease, including the detrimental impact on community trust in public health officials as guidelines shifted in the face of the experts’ increasing understanding of the virus.
Unlikely Heroes and Unexpected Hindrances
When the 1995 film, Outbreak, debuted in theaters, audiences received it as little more than an entertaining thriller. But as the coronavirus took hold, the film surged in popularity, suddenly recognized not only for its entertainment value but for its seeming prescience.
The unlikely heroes of the film were the doctors and scientists whose most powerful weapons against the scourge were their training and their intellect. In 2020, those brainy warriors stepped out of the big screen and into our real lives. In the wake of COVID-19, epidemiologists have become our modern cult heroes, even as the most esoteric epidemiological terms began to trip off people’s tongues as familiarly as their favorite order at Starbucks.
And documentarians are taking notice. For example, David France, director of the 2012 documentary on the AIDs epidemic, How to Survive a Plague, is currently at work on a film for HBO. The documentary will center on healthcare workers and epidemiologists as they struggle to save the lives of the infected and contain the spread of the disease, while also navigating the deficiencies of governments and global health systems in addressing such crises.
France’s film, then, is expected to be a celebration of the researchers and care workers who have sacrificed untold quantities of blood, sweat, and tears to save humanity from this devastating plague. At the same time, it is anticipated to pillory the mindless bureaucracy that stood in the way of such heroic efforts and, in the process, contributed to the loss of nearly five million lives worldwide.
The Takeaway
Plagues are nothing new to humankind. For all of our power, all of our science, all of our technology, we remain the easy prey of organisms we can neither see nor touch. But the COVID-19 plague has been unlike any other infectious disease outbreak in modern history. For many of us, the virus has not only changed the way we live our lives, but also the way that we see the world, ourselves, and our future. It has shaken our sense of security. It has reminded us how vulnerable we are. And, as ever, it has fallen to the filmmaker to help us contend with this new awareness, to enable us to define our new normal and to equip us with the narratives we need to make sense of what we have experienced.