From the way we consume things to the way we interact with people, the pandemic changed everything! So why is one of the most significant events of the world so rarely acknowledged in the media?
It’s been six years since COVID-19 spread around the world and our lives were changed completely. We had to stay in lockdown for months, watching communities being affected and thousands of lives being lost. It’s something that we will never forget and that changed forever the future of the world. But, for something that huge in our history, it’s strange how little it’s shown in the media.
As a society, we love to transform tragedies into emotional and reflective stories. We’ve been doing this for years. Do a quick search online and see how many movies have been made about World War II, or even about the 9/11 attacks, but the pandemic has been hardly mentioned in any major Hollywood blockbuster.
WHY THIS IS HAPPENING
One of the reasons for why this could be happening is that everything is still very recent and the feeling is too fresh in the general mind. “There’s an emotional exhaustion about the subject because we’re still in it. We don’t have perspective and storytelling usually happens in context. That’s why there’s still so many World War II movies”, says Bobette Buster, a Tufts University professor, for Variety.
It was a rough period of loss and a lingering feeling off uncertainty, so now, we want to escape from it. “It’s difficult to sell audiences films that are about what they’re currently going through if it’s not a documentary. They don’t want to see it; they want to escape it.”, says Arianna Bocco at IFC Films, for Variety.
Even movies about pandemic that were being made before everything happened were affected by that. The movie “Pretrov’s Flu”, that pictured a post-Soviet Russia plagued with a flu epidemic, was already done before the facts of 2020, but after the movie’s name became a problem for some distributors who “didn’t want to invite people to see a film with ‘flu’ in the title,” stated the producer Ilya Stewart. He also added that he received a lot of scripts about pandemics, but has stored them away.
HOLLYWOOD HAS DONE THIS BEFORE
This is not the first time that Hollywood has avoided a subject. The most classic examples are the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic. Despite the magnitude of its impact and the number of lives affected, it took several years to make it to the big screen.
The 9/11 attacks mentioned early are also a great example of that. Even though there are now thousands of movies about it, there was a time in which the Twin Towers were digitally removed from the New York City skyline in films to avoid re-traumatising audiences.
OTHER FORMS OF MEDIA
When it comes to other forms of entertainment such as TV shows, it has been a little bit different. Some of them incorporated that period into their scripts very quickly, like Grey’s Anatomy, which made a whole season focusing on the crisis and was released between 2020 and 2021. This happened because of the faster development time of television shows.
Literature was also less affected by everything, and that’s because writers didn’t have to deal with lockdowns and with the Hollywood writers’ strike, which caused an even longer delay for the film industry. Another issue is that books are cheaper to publish, so it’s less risky to mention the pandemic in them.
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE FUTURE
As we move further and further away from the early 2020s, the traumas of that period are fading into the past, the fear of going back to lockdown has gone away and the idea of revisiting that period through the media is becoming less and less scary each day.
In the end, it’s still something that is very recent and that we are recovering from. It will probably be a few years before the media will properly talk about it. So for now, we’ll have to settle for metaphors and satirical approaches.
The article above was edited by Rafaela Navarro.
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