Plague Cinema

There’s a new wave of film that’s emerged since the onset of this global pandemic: films to watch under quarantine. Unlike most film waves or movements, this is not something that’s taken the form of new film productions but the revisiting or reworking of pre-existing films for a time of crisis and isolation. Thus this new plague cinema refers to the new patterns of viewership that have arisen during the coronavirus, and, more specifically, the sheltering-in-place that has taken place in response to the pandemic.

David Bordwell writes:

We’re in the midst of a wondrous national experiment: What will Americans do without sports? Movies come to fill the void, and websites teem with recommendations for lockdown viewing. Among them are movies about pandemics, about personal relationships, and of course about all those vistas, urban or rural, that we can no longer visit in person.[1]

Bordwell cites an Atlantic piece by David Sims called “Escape from Quarantine with a Western Movie”. Sims says he was looking for “the least claustrophobic movie possible, one with sweeping vistas and a potent sense of danger and adventure”, adding “Westerns offer pure cinematic escapism—from our hermetic homes to landscapes that are wild, exposed, and boundless.”[2]

On the other hand, Bordwell’s piece, “Stuck Inside These Four Walls: Chamber Cinema for a Plague Year”, suggests the opposite:

we’re now forced to pay more attention to more scaled-down surroundings. We’re scrutinizing our rooms and corridors and closets. We’re scrubbing the surfaces we bustle past every day. This new alertness to our immediate surroundings may sensitize us to a kind of cinema turned resolutely inward.[3]

As the tension between recommendations of interiority and exteriority suggest, cinema has an innate capacity to both reflect and defy our current state. The age-old debate between escapism and realism finds a potent battleground in times of crisis.

Meanwhile, there exists the outbreak film: a genre uniquely suited to tell us about our current times. There’s Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, a film that suggests “how thin the line can be between the apocalyptic and the banal.”[4] Wesley Morris at The New York Times calls the film “an instructive worst-case scenario of our current freak-out”.[5] Megan Garber at The Atlantic discusses instead Wolfgang Petersen’s film Outbreak (1995), saying of the film, “It’s bluntness manages to capture some of the extreme contradictions of this moment—a situation some are treating as an emergency and others are treating as a Monday … It understands that, in America, one of the biggest threats to public health can be American culture itself.”[6]

Speaking of threats to public health, I’m thankful that a piece by Noel Murray mentioned George A. Romero’s The Crazies, a personal favorite of mine that details the violent response on all sides to a disease event.[7] The Crazies is as pessimistic as this sort of film can get. The film highlights that humans can be their own worst enemy, something we’re seeing (to a less extreme extent, perhaps) in the current pandemic as people flaunt social distancing, with deadly consequences.

I’ve written a piece on the role of physical home video releases in getting me through isolation and the mental illness it triggers in me. For me, it’s not even any specific film that strikes at my core. What makes my plague cinema is the ability to touch and feel the film — or its packaging, anyway — in my hands. I’m reminded of an anecdote in Caetlin Benson-Allott’s book Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: “As she rewound [a VHS of Dawn of the Dead] and placed it back in its case, it occurred to her that the zombies were in some sense still with her, shrunken and hiding in the cassette.”[8] The mysticism of physical release formats may yet finds its apex in quarantine.

At the same time, streaming takes on new meaning as apps like Netflix Party enable viewing together across great distance. If our tangible releases bring media within our walls, then streaming is a much-needed portal to something outside of them. Hence, David Sims’ comment on the Wester genre: “its main therapeutic power for anyone lies in opening a window to a world far removed from our own.”[9] Streaming takes us places.

Theaters are closed, but for once it’s a civic duty to stay at home and watch movies all day. For the moment, film has moved inward, encroaching on our homes as it paradoxically allows us an escape from the confines of social isolation. I miss my friends and family, but at least I have David Cronenberg to keep me company. As we revisit old films through new eyes and look to cinema for some answers on the current crisis, I turn (as I often do) to the wisdom of Videodrome: what we watch matters, but more importantly, how we watch matters too. Nothing is the same anymore. All cinema is plague cinema in 2020.

[Please take a moment to express your gratitude to those people working on the front lines of COVID-19, who don’t have the luxury of sheltering-in-place. If you are one of those front-line workers, thank you for your service.]

1. David Bordwell, “Stuck Inside These Four Walls: Chamber Cinema for a Plague Year”, davidbordwell.net, April 1, 2020
2. David Sims, “Escape from Quarantine with a Western Movie”, The Atlantic, March 30, 2020
3. David Bordwell, “Stuck Inside These Four Walls: Chamber Cinema for a Plague Year”, davidbordwell.net, April 1, 2020
4. Megan Garber,“The Problem of the Pandemic Movie”, The Atlantic, March 16, 2020
5. Wesley Morris, “For Me, Rewatching ‘Contagion’ Was Fun, Until It Wasn’t”, The New York Times, March 10, 2020
6. Megan Garber,“The Problem of the Pandemic Movie”, The Atlantic, March 16, 2020
7. Noel Murray, “Want to Understand How a Pandemic Upends Everyday Life? The Movies Can Tell You”, Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2020
8. Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, p. 23
9. David Sims, “Escape from Quarantine with a Western Movie”, The Atlantic, March 30, 2020