Flasz On Film

Do you remember when some movies were set in some kind of a generic reality that looks like our own but is distinctly manufactured for the purpose of the story? You know what I mean – all those rom-coms and middle-of-the-road dramas set in a big city like New York, or maybe even in what John Rambo would have called Jerkwater, USA. Those stories that, crucially, were rendered locally timeless because they would look more or less contemporary enough for at least a decade to pass as “set in present day”.  

Yeah, those movies don’t really exist anymore, do they? I mean, they probably do because there are filmmakers out there who will write and direct stories set in such vague and non-descript universes. But the point is that they no longer work as intended. This realization hit me a little while back while watching Dumb Money, a sort-of-biopic about the infamous GameStop squeeze, which took place while the entire world was gripped by the COVID pandemic. Therefore, the reality of the film appropriately reflected what we all remember the world was like, from social distancing and masks to furloughs, boarded-up shops, and abandoned public spaces. It wasn’t exactly a revelation because the pandemic being a colossal event is kind of self-explanatory, but nonetheless it occurred to me that the impact of this event extended well beyond the reaches of the natural world and made irreversible changes in our culture in more ways than one.  

In a way, it became impossible for storytellers of any kind to pretend COVID never happened and continue to write their stories in a reality where life was completely virus-free. If you wanted to set the movie in the post-COVID era, you have to somehow reference it because our own reality has changed in its wake in a profound way. Even the refusal to acknowledge the pandemic in any tangible way became an indirect acknowledgement in its own strange roundabout way. Why?  

Well, it would seem that in the current era we can either make the pandemic a central part of the narrative and several films, some more tasteful than others (think Locked Down, Host or Songbird), attempted to use this unique predicament as a setting, a gimmick or a combination of both. Alternatively, a movie can acknowledge the post-COVID reality of lateral flow tests, vaccines, masks, social distancing and everything else in between. Thus, such a movie can never be set in a generic reality, because its own reality is distinctly informed by the pandemic. By extension, by examining the extent of the film’s own references to the COVID era we could perhaps pinpoint how far removed from the pandemic it is with reasonable accuracy. We can only expect that movies set in 2027 will make sparing references to COVID, but they will still inevitably make them, just as a movie set in 2022 will be teeming with them. Until such time arrives where we have lived for long enough to effectively distance ourselves from the pandemic – I don’t know, a decade or two? – it is frankly inescapable.  

Without a doubt, the COVID pandemic was a momentous period in our history whose magnitude can easily rival World War II, or the 9/11 terror attacks. This has permeated into how movies are made just as the simple idea of showing or not showing World Trade Center towers in a film – after a period of collective mourning during which it was considered tasteless or even offensive to broach the subject – ended up becoming a de facto timestamp for filmmakers, whether they liked it or not. Therefore, if anyone chooses to pretend the pandemic or post-pandemic reality is in any way irrelevant to their storytelling, they are left with only two choices: (1) setting their film in a fantasy world where it never happened, which is what many blockbusters choose to do anyway, or (2) setting it before 2020. There are no other alternatives, just as there were no other alternatives in the post-WWII era which determined if movies took place in a reality you could recognize or in a neverland of Hollywood escapism. 

Consequently, we are now left in a predicament where a significant portion of Hollywood movies set in an ambiguously generic reality must make a choice between embracing its own escapist fantasy or becoming a period piece. Failure to do so is not allowed because such refusal is a de facto acknowledgement of opting to become a fantasy by default.  

One question remains. Even though there is a time restriction imposed on this phenomenon – as I explained above, I can only expect that enough time will pass eventually before COVID will be distant enough to be just a historical event whose cultural impact will have been effectively priced into normality – we are now bound to live through a considerable period of fantasies and period pieces with nothing in between and I wonder if we are going to lose anything valuable in the process. What is more, are we then going to experience a period of ambiguously generic love stories, rom-coms and middle-of-the-road dramas once this fantasy-period-piece binary dissipates into oblivion? You know – because the pendulum is likely to swing in the other direction eventually… 

I can’t tell. Or maybe, has COVID inadvertently reinforced the current Marvel-powered era of blockbusterist escapism because it is simply easier to embrace the fantasy than it is to wrestle with capturing the legacy of an incredibly tumultuous and traumatic time in recent history? After all, it is perhaps more lucrative and less problematic to dress your characters in Spandex and hide their faces underneath superhero makeup, as opposed to covering them in N95 masks. And this realization somehow frightens me even more.