La Peste

Do you remember, oh, roughly five years ago, all the memes floating around with the exhortation that now was the perfect time to write one’s magnum opus?  Last fall the New Yorker somewhat prematurely took a gander at the literature actually produced during the “lockdown” period and declared that y’all are a bunch of slackers.

By way of refutation, here is my short list of recommended COVID-era works worth seeking out:

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021, film) Joel Coen (Director)

Starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand

Visually stunning in black and white, Tragedy’s cinematography reflects the physical and emotional starkness that prevailed during COVID’s second wave, during which most of the production took place.  Macbeth and Banquo stalk the moors as a vacant whiteness, from which the witches emerge like a Japanese ink painting, never appearing in the same frame as the actors who apprehend them.  Interiors are undressed, the stone walls bare and echoing; the Macbeths preside over banquets where neither food nor plates arrive.  (My first inkling that the pandemic was a thing to be taken seriously came when I arrived at my eye surgeon’s office to find it over the weekend stripped of magazines, brochures, coffee machine, any and all amenities that blunt the sharp corners of a clinical space and make it human.)  In the film’s final shot, after Malcolm has been crowned and the succession restored, Ross gallops away in an explosion of crows with the boy Fleance, prophesied the founder of a new dynasty of kings.  For all the talk of peace, Scotland’s future remains long years of bloody war.

Cavaet: the acting is very much of the Shouty Shakespeare school.

Glass Onion (2022, film) Rian Johnson (Director)

Starring Daniel Craig

While the rest of the world chafes at the strictures of social distancing and lockdown, a group of deliciously awful influencers gather on a billionaire’s private island for a murder mystery game that turns IRL deadly.  Like Knives Out, the previous Benoit Blanc episode, Johnson uses traditional whodunnit tropes as a springboard to a more complicated story. There are flashbacks aplenty, POV shifts, and the editing itself becomes an unreliable narrator – or does it?  If that sounds like ponderous going, it isn’t.  The humor is brilliant, the dialog is fire, and the quantity of celebrity cameos gobsmacking.  Johnson seizes the zeitgeist of the summer of our discontent and runs with it right up to the film’s satisfying catharsis.  I saw this in the cinema and the atmosphere was electric with shocked laughter.  No spoilers here, but – Hindenburg! 

The Last Post (2020, podcast) Alice Fraser (Host)

From The Bugle podcast stable

A niche pod definitely worth seeking out.  The premise was ambitious from the beginning: a satirical daily newscast from an alternate dimension similar to our own, but slowly and weirdly diverging over the course of a year.  Enlivened by Alice Fraser’s signature wordplay, a rotating cast of co-hosts, and a faux advertising section featuring Half a Glass of Water and the latest literary offerings from self-published romance (with a supernatural twist!) author D’Ancey LaGuarde, the serial got off to a bang with news of the Atlantean continent of New New Zealand emerging from the waters east of Old New Zealand.  Unfortunately the sinister octopus people bent on world domination found themselves upstaged in March when the pandemic hit simultaneously in both worlds.  From that point on it was a scramble for Fraser and crew to keep the weirdness in the alternate dimension one step ahead of the weirdness running rampant in our own.  By the end of the year the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and its running mate Wayne “The Rock” Johnson had won the U.S. presidential election, despite the former not being a citizen; Piers Morgan and Boris Johnson had jointly given birth to the Dragon of the Apocalypse, and the sole remnants of humanity were a handful of wealthy podcasters (yes, this universe seriously diverged from ours) ensconced in their bunkers or orbiting high above the Earth’s scorched surface.  The Last Post ran daily throughout 2020, with a handful of episodes in 2021 forming a sort of post-apocalyptic coda.

Look also for spin-off  “A Passion for Passion,” a delightful book collecting D’Ancey LaGuarde’s increasingly convoluted and unlikely cover blurbs.  

Doctor Who: The Flux (2021, TV series)  Chris Chibnail  (Series writer/producer)

A destructive force of unknown origin sweeps across the Universe in waves.  In its wake the bereft and sundered strive to reconnect, while Doctor Who’s baddie species – the Daleks, Sontarans, et al – take advantage of the devastation to expand their own empires.  Meanwhile Earth cowers sunless behind a shield wall that eventually fails them.  It’s wild that the Season 13 narrative arc was plotted in 2019, well before COVID-19 was a blip on anyone’s radar.

Filmed over 2020-2021, the fingerprints of the pandemic are all over this production.  The UK’s strict social distancing rules meant that shooting was single-camera only.  Crowds are non-existent, explained away by alien curfews and other plot devices.  Actors double up on roles.  Two conspirators meet – in the middle of a forest – and speak to each other exactly six feet apart.  The sense of a melancholic, depopulated world couldn’t be starker.

What makes The Flux a quintessential pandemic work for me, though, is at the meta level.  Chibnail has an unfortunate knack for introducing plots too complex for their runtime and trying to wrap them up in the last two minutes.  Originally planned for eight episodes, pandemic funding cut this down to six, further compressing the denouement.  When the big red reset button is pushed – as it inevitably is at the end of any Doctor Who doomsday story – it’s not clear what save point we’ve reset to.  Has all the damage done by the Flux, the worlds erased, the lives taken, been reversed?  Or has the destruction merely stopped, leaving the Doctor and companions to wander a now half-empty universe?  Season 14 never answers that question.  Dissatisfied, the fans argue amongst themselves what the hell, if anything, just happened.  And isn’t that the most COVID thing of all.