Notes Toward a COVID Cinema
An addendum to The Grey Lady
I woke up this morning to discover an interesting package from The New York Times opinion page breaking down 17 pieces of culture from TikTok to Ted Lasso that comprise an emerging “COVID canon.” Naturally, like the single-minded person I am, I went searching for the movies. It did not come as a great surprise to find very few given the marginalized role they’ve taken in whatever is left of the monoculture, but getting only about one-and-a-half between Tenet and Bo Burnham’s Inside was a bit disheartening.
As someone with a background in both sociology and cinema studies, I’ve always been fascinated to observe how big events — the financial crisis, the election of Donald Trump, the pandemic — ripple outwards into the stories we tell about ourselves. If you've been reading my work for a while, I hope you’ve picked up on this investigative thread. I tried to chronicle some of it in my first year of COVID newsletter The Distancer as it unfolded in real-time, and it’s often been an angle in various reviews or interviews I’ve done over the past few years.
But with three or so years behind us in a COVID world, I decided to try to create some kind of time capsule with the movies that I think define the era. The first five films were conceived long before the pandemic but struck a nerve when they were released into a world defined by it, while the final five films are ones more clearly defined by the questions and concerns raised by the virus. Together, I hope they form a preliminary corpus that can illustrate how COVID concerns refracted through cinema.
THE INCIDENTALLY RESONANT
Palm Springs, Hulu
Genuinely shocked this one didn’t make the NYT list! Palm Springs was arguably the first pandemic movie that really did capture what it felt like to live in the lockdowns — the same day again and again. This ingenious comedy frames the time loop as alternately freeing and frustrating but then tasks its two central characters, played by an irresistible Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, to prioritize what actually matters to them.
She Dies Tomorrow, Hulu
A contemporaneous Contagion, Amy Seimetz’s oblique lo-fi sci-fi She Dies Tomorrow imagines a world where a fear of imminent death proves as contagious as an airborne virus. The film reframed a physical threat in psychological terms, capturing the overall COVID vibes as a threat both literal and existential.
Time, Amazon Prime Video
A number of works dealing with racial injustice, ranging from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe saga to Judas and the Black Messiah, took on increased gravitas as a viral pandemic forced a reckoning with an untreated case of racial discrimination. It feels safe to say now that COVID was a necessary condition for the outrage around George Floyd’s murder to go, ahem, viral. The film that best captured that sense of stacked timelines, both an immediacy and a grandiosity, was Garrett Bradley’s decade-spanning documentary Time. This poetic blend of archival tapes with contemporary footage captures just how elusive and uncontrollable time really is for a family separated by the carceral system’s draconian sentencing policies. Reunion with the ones we love feels palpable in Bradley’s edit, but always just out of reach … and never recoverable.
Nomadland, Hulu
I’ve already said my piece about how I think Nomadland is not going to be relegated to the dustbin of Academy Awards miscellanea, as its randomly appearing detractors now seem to suggest. (Where were they when this film was released to near unanimous praise?!) Chloé Zhao’s tender, aching ode to those who wander America in search of a place and a people to call their own possesses a resonant grace. It reminded homebound cinephiles what they belong to — a world and a wonder that could not be contained.
The Father, rental
The flip side of Nomadland was, of course, The Father. This surprising puzzle box of a drama about a dementia-addled aging man (Anthony Hopkins) took on additional gravitas against the backdrop of a disease that disproportionately affected elderly people. But it was just one among many films, like fellow Best Picture nominee Sound of Metal, that really caught a foothold in the cultural imagination for the way it framed characters forced to come up against their physical limitations — and thus their mortality. It’s easier to distill the wider experience through just one person or character than grapple with what it means on a collective scale.
THE INTENTIONALLY RESPONSIVE
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Hulu
When Radu Jude’s film premiered at the 2021 Berlinale, COVID was barely a year in the cultural imagination. And yet already he had the foresight to see in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn that the societal adaptation to the virus was not something entirely newfangled. Rather, it was an extension of how even small acts carry a political valence. In the film’s final sequence where a schoolteacher faces a tribunal of parents after her sex tape hits the internet, the “mask wars” maps neatly onto the other cultural divisions that already cleave the group. Jude recognizes that, rather than avoiding or ignoring COVID, the constant bickering and policing of mask etiquette only adds to the farcical dimension of the show-stopping scene.
Vortex, MUBI and rental
Death looms large and unavoidable in Dario Argento’s Vortex, the French provocateur’s most subdued film to date. Made just as vaccines began rolling out, the film charts the tragic decline of one-half of an elderly couple as she begins succumbing to dementia. The film’s split-screen aesthetic is more than just a gimmick — it shows how it’s possible for people, even a married couple, to share the same space but inhabit entirely different experiences. And yet amidst the bleakness of disease’s march toward a terminal condition, there’s a surprising sense of compassion. Some of that’s supplied by the filmmaker, but other bits of it do seem to originate from the audience leaning in and filling in the gaps with their own pandemic experiences.
Crimes of the Future, Hulu
The body’s transmogrification into something unrecognizable — and perhaps beautiful — has long been a thematic concern for genre filmmaker David Cronenberg. Perhaps Crimes of the Future would have always felt like a raw yearning for our evolution into something marvelous and monstrous. But as the world crumbles around the characters in the film as they find a new meaning inherent in the phrase “inner beauty,” it can’t help but illuminate the silent strivings for meaning in a COVID-addled world.
The Fabelmans, rental
I’m using The Fabelmans as a proxy for any number of projects that could be described as navel-gazing autofictions released in 2022: Armageddon Time, Bardo, The Eternal Daughter. The influence of COVID feels obvious — with the world shut down and time seemingly stuck, where did we have to look but into ourselves and our past? It’s notable that Steven Spielberg, who can seemingly get any movie made that he wants, took the opportunity to finally face down his own origin story.
Enys Men, now playing in select theaters
What happens when routine turns into entropy? Horror film Enys Men captures the true terror of isolation as an unnamed ecological volunteer, alone on a remote island, begins to lose her bearings in reality. Though set 50 years ago, Mark Jenkins’ remarkable film — which feels unlike anything you’ve seen and heard given the way he shoots images with no synchronized sound, adding all noise in post-production — captures the twinned sensations of tedium and terror that defined the early days of the pandemic.
Now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest, hope everyone has a great holiday Sunday — or just a nice weekend! Talk to you again next week.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall