Is It Possible to Portray the Pandemic?
Plus: An assignment from Hong Kong!
The pandemic hasn’t been a taboo topic in film and TV, precisely, but it’s certainly not a period anyone has been rushing to revisit.
Off the top of my head, I can think of only a handful of examples. A non-exhaustive list of the highlights would include HBO Max’s The Pitt, which dealt with COVID in flashbacks, as series lead and senior attending physician Dr. Robby (Noah Wylie) dealt with PTSD inflicted by the crush of death from the first wave of the pandemic. Bo Burnham’s Inside was shot, filmed, and edited entirely by Burnham during the most stringent phase of the lockdowns; it was a jarringly solipsistic exercise, but one with a key insight I’ll address momentarily. Dumb Money is one of the few movies to be set entirely in this period, focused on things like isolation and masking, and it does a great job of demonstrating how the pandemic drove a lot of the resentment that led to the insane overvaluation of GameStop stock.
Eddington, then, isn’t quite the first real effort to wrestle with the pandemic and What It Meant via film or TV, but it is the most interesting and the best. I will be very curious to see how audiences react to it—if they even do; I get the sense there’s very little interest in traveling back in time to 2020, a deeply messed-up year—but Ari Aster’s film is striking at least in part because it’s not really about the pandemic and Black Lives Matter and Antifa and acrimonious elections and everything else that happened that year.
Rather, it’s about how we experienced it. Or, as I noted in my review, how we consumed it like content:
Eddington is only marginally about COVID or masking or MAGA or BLM or any of the events that marked 2020. The insanity was all window dressing, in a way. The events only mattered because we have changed how we live, how we consume news, how we absorb the world around us and project ourselves into it; 2020 was simply the moment when all that came to a head. Eddington is, ultimately, about [the proliferation of phones and social media]. It’s about that mad prophet stumbling out of the data center in the desert, ranting about control and submission. The little box is an accelerant, one that connects people all over the country: It makes problems in your town problems in my town, it builds bridges between disparate communities of nutjobs. Once upon a time, the town crank had a mimeograph machine or a megaphone; their reach was limited to the people near them, most of whom could smell them well enough to know to stay away. Now the town crank has Instagram, TikTok, YouTube; their reach is limitless.
And we love it. Just make sure to subscribe and smash that like button so the hate machine will feed another nutritional pellet right onto your little box, beaming idiocy straight off the little screen and into your little earbuds. The feed never stops, the algorithm never tires. There’s always more. It never ends. Just a few more videos. You can sleep later. You can never sleep, if that’s what you’d prefer. Who knows what you’ll miss when you’re asleep?
The whole thing called to mind Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet,” from Inside, which is in some ways the defining song of our age.
Seated behind a keyboard, wearing round, mirrored shades, Burnham sounds like Carny Satan, banging out a catchy little ditty asking, “Could I interest you in everything, all of the time?” The key verse for our purposes here:
Welcome to the internet
What would you prefer?
Would you like to fight for civil rights or tweet a racial slur?
Be happy
Be horny
Be bursting with rage
We got a million different ways to engage.
Portraying 2020 is hard not because of the trappings of the pandemic, but because this is how we all experienced 2020, getting everything and anything all of the time, every news clip from all over the country beamed directly to our phones, ratcheting up both the rage and the feelings of impotence until, eventually, we all went a little bit insane.
Eddington is the first movie to really capture that, and as a result, it’s pretty great. But I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to skip it.
If Eddington helps show us why we’re all such miserable jerks, Superman shows us how we could all be a little bit nicer and better. We discussed how the Big Blue Boy Scout has changed over the years on this week’s bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle:
'Superman' as Symbol
On this week’s special bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle, the gang talked about Superman as an idea, as a symbol for something to strive for.
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On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood this week, I talked to Mitchel Berger of Crunchyroll about the increasing success of Japanese animation in America. And anytime someone doubts this is a real thing, I just tell them to check out the manga wall at Barnes & Noble. It’s often one of the biggest individual sections of the store and totally dwarfs the domestic output of Marvel and DC.
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Assigned Viewing: Breaking News (The Criterion Channel)
I’ve been slowly working my way through the Johnnie To catalog over at the Criterion Channel this month. Breaking News is a perfect introduction to the man’s work: A 90-minute crime thriller with a handful of great set piece shootouts between cops and robbers (including an opening crane/tracking shot that goes on for something like seven minutes) and just enough politics/commentary on the state of play between Hong Kong, China, and the media in the early 2000s to pique the interest of folks curious about how Hong Kong filmmakers were dealing with the handover. Highly recommended.
"If Eddington helps show us why we’re all such miserable jerks, Superman shows us how we could all be a little bit nicer and better."
I love this sentence mostly because it seems to beautifully encapsulate our lives online- an environment consistently offering us the choice to be the best or worst version of ourselves. Surely a great prompt for a different post. Thank you for the reviews, with an overwhelming amount of content at our fingertips it's nice to find gems that weren't on my radar!
Ah yes, “Eddington.” Finally, a film that dares to hold up the black mirror inside the black mirror.
Because let’s be honest: the real pandemic wasn’t COVID. It was content. The virus was just the background music—what really infected us was the endless buffet of dopamine-fueled outrage, despair, and self-branding. Mask up, wash your hands, and don’t forget to livestream your existential crisis for the algorithm gods.
2020 wasn’t a year. It was a feed. And now, like good little pilgrims of the scroll, we gather at the altar of Ari Aster, who saw through the chaos and asked the only heretical question worth asking: what if the town lunatic now had WiFi and a ring light?
Bravo to Bunch for noticing the real horror. Not the sickness. Not the lockdowns. But that we all went mad together and called it community.