Professor's Picks: 5 Ways COVID-19 Will Change Film

In the wake of 9/11, America was left limping after a devastating blow to its sense of invincibility and power. Film custodians frequently attribute the modern superhero craze in which ultra-righteous individuals thwart the bad guy to this injured sense of pride from a country desperately trying to tell itself that it's still on top.

Because film is a product born from and made for the popular consciousnesses, films are natural reflections of the hopes and anxieties of their day. When traumatic events suddenly bend those hopes and anxieties in very large, very specific ways, film takes on recognizable traits in response. There are books full of examples of themes, genres, and styles of film surfacing or even disappearing in response to societal events. 

So what's film going to do with a worldwide pandemic?

When friends have brought up this question to me over the last year, they've been mostly wondering if we're going to get more films about disease and lockdowns a la Steven Soderberg's Contagion. That's a possibility, but I imagine we'll get bored of those rather quickly. The most significant changes will be a lot more subterranean and speak to insecurities that run much deeper than how long we're expected to wear a mask. 

And so here I am offering my own best guesses on what the pandemic is going to do to film. 

There's obviously a lot to unpack from a production and distribution perspective (how will studios approach theatrical distribution?) but in the interest of keeping this specific, I'm going to look mostly at the style and content within film itself.

Anyways, 5 ways film will respond to lockdown and the pandemic.

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1. Quarantine Comedies

Whenever I have this conversation, people seem most interested in all the horror films we're going to get from this period. Again, a lot of people are ready for more Contagion-style thrillers. 

I do think horror will look different over these next few years, and I'll get into that in the next section, but where I think the COVID-19 pandemic is going to get the most screentime is actually in comedy. 

Humor is one means of asserting our authority over something, insisting that it's not scary and not powerful. Very early in the pandemic, we saw attempts to diffuse the terror of the situation with irony and humor, and this attitude never really went away. 

Once the pandemic is in the past we'll only see further effort to use humor to put even more distance between us. This will translate into a lot of films invoking the pandemic directly or subtly for comedic effect. "Ha, ha! Do you remember that one time when we couldn't leave the house for months? That was just the woooorst!" After all, many real-life situations familiar to the lockdown world lend themselves naturally to the world of comedy (families being saddled together for an interminable amount of time, people fighting over toilet paper, etc.) 

No doubt some movies will be seen as insensitive or #toosoon. A lot of this will come down to whether any given film can differentiate between what made the pandemic frustrating (endless zoom meetings) versus what made it tragic (the loss of nearly 3 million lives worldwide). But either way, expect comedy to lead the charge with representation of the pandemic.

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2. So What About Horror, then?

I've mentioned in my essays for both The Wolf Man and A Quiet Place that the fears expressed in horror films are never as straightforward as the fear of being chased through the house with a knife. The thing that makes horror truly scary is the subtext and metaphor. The way a film gives shape to a fear we don't have words for. We'll no doubt see diseased-themed horror films over the next few years, but most if not all of them will feel empty because the sickness itself was only ever the surface of what disturbed us.

The sense of safety and security within America has been compromised ever since 9/11, but the virus is a whole new animal. It's not terrorists that we're scared of now. It's a microscopic organism, an organism made even more frightening because it isn't human. It has no agenda. It's not an attack on any particular ideology or nationality. It just saw global prosperity doing its thing and overnight brought the world to its knees.

Human action will no doubt eventually enter the conversation as we try attributing responsibility to certain behaviors or attitudes that perpetuated the pandemic and lockdown. Perhaps a surge in horror films probing the human pursuit of comfort at the expense of public safety? Our indifference to the loss of human life, as long as it's "only like one in a hundred?"

The most significant horror films born out of the COVID-19 pandemic won't be the ones centering on disease or lockdown; rather, they'll be the films that speak the language of horror to describe a world defeated by something it can't even see.

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3. The Great Depression Makes a Comeback

    Film uses the past to make sense of the present. The relative stability of the late 1990s and early 2000s saw America displacing its own anxieties over plentitude by lampooning the similarly prosperous 1950s with films like Pleasantville, The Iron Giant, and Far From Heaven. 

    Regrettably for us, the world that we're returning to is less reminiscent of the balanced economy of the 1950s and more America's Great Depression in the 1930s, which is likely where film will be turning its attention for the next several years. 

    Naturally expect a surge in straight-up historical dramas in the vein of Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition competing for the Oscars, but don't be surprised to see film go further. I'm also imagining films like Peter Jackson's King Kong, which sets an epic fantasy-adventure against the backdrop of The Depression or even time-machine/love letters for the decade, like Stranger Things for the 30s. (And I know I'm always predicting the resurgence of movie musicals, but I can't help but bring up that it was during the 1930s that musicals first fox-trotted into popularity and wonder what if . . .)

    Psychologically, revisiting periods of social trauma gives the audience permission to view their own circumstances objectively. It's easier to talk about someone else fighting to keep their head above water in a broken economy than it is to talk about us doing the same. Besides, if we got through it then, we can get through it now, right?

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4. Video Conference: The Movie

On a more stylistic note, let's talk about what a year of talking to faces on screens is going to do for the visual aspect of film. 

As the video-conference aesthetic has become more familiar, expect the medium of film to start trying to explore its application for storytelling.

Pre-pandemic, we've already seen some movies play with this format. Aneesh Chaganty's Searching depicts a man looking for his missing daughter, but our only window into the film is a computer screen. The story is told exclusively through video chats, handheld cameras, and desktop views in a 90-minute love-letter to the digital age. Searching tries this out within the thriller/mystery genre, and I'm predicting we'll see this proliferate into other styles and modes as well. 

I expect this to mostly show up within indie-film circles at first, but I can imagine this bleeding into the mainstream. Whether or not this style lasts will largely hinge on whether or not any of these films take on a life of their own.

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5. The Connection Reckoning

 

Over the last several years, not just 2020, we've seen a lot of interest in understanding and combatting loneliness. Did you know, for example, that chronic loneliness impacts a person's well-being as much as obesity or substance abuse? Or that gens Y and Z are the loneliest generations yet? A year of social distancing has only turned up the volume on an aching that's been screaming for our attention for years. Film and its ability to both simulate and deconstruct connection will become an active channel in this conversation.

I'm reminded of Morten Tyldum's 2016 film, Passengers, a movie that presented this need in a "what-if" scenario. Here, a man aboard an interstellar transport is awakened from hibernation 90 years early, and when faced with a lifetime of solitude he chooses to awaken another person to share in his plight. Upon release, audiences were revolted at this decision, and the film became a critical chew-toy. 

From the other side of quarantine though, I've already seen at least one video essay reframing this movie in the context of national lockdown. Maybe after going a year without hugs, a lot more of us can sympathize with a man who would do anything to feel connected to another person. (Pre-pandemic I'd already given my own thoughts about the movie.) I mention this film because whether or not it gets the post-corona reevaluation it deserves, I'm certain many films will use it as a blueprint for how to explore the need for human connection that many of us only appreciated once it was out of reach, locked behind a sleeping pod for a lifetime.

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I drew these observations from studying how film has historically reacted to world events and societal changes. Just so, I will be the first to acknowledge this is all speculative. Right when the pandemic first struck, I resisted the impulse to write something like this exactly because I wanted some distance and perspective. I imagine that further time and distance will only further clear the fog. Who knows what the future holds for any of us?

What I'm more certain of is that things are going to be challenging. Pulling through the wreckage is going to ask a lot of patience and cooperation from us. If we play this right, we'll see future films play this period as a time in which we were surprised to find just how good we could be to each other when shared humanity became more important than individual attitudes or political alignment. 

If we play it right. 

                --The Professor