“Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn’t,” wrote Philip Roth in his cautionary tale “The Plot Against America.” “Except when it does.”
“It was the end of the world,” says the character Cliff Bradshaw in the epilogue to “Cabaret,” “and I was dancing with Sally Bowles, and we were both fast asleep.”
“I’d go back to December,” sang Taylor Swift. “Turn around and make it all right.”
Movies, TV shows, song lyrics, memoirs, histories, novels, all kinds of storytelling really, rely on delineating moments. These can just be dates on a calendar — say, chronicles of the bacchanalian sexuality of the 1960s or the greed of the 1980s, even if the events don’t fully match up with the turn of a decade. They can be organized around the comings of new presidents or governments, economic revivals or collapses, the beginnings and ends of ages and movements, the arrivals and departures of war or peace.
Once there is some historical perspective, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 will take its place in narrative and it will come to function as both a beginning and an end. Maybe for decades. Quite possibly for centuries.
But the end of what? The beginning of what?
It’s just so hard to know when you are living it. (Did those who lived through the industrial revolution know they were living through the Industrial Revolution?)
But it’s worth trying.
It surely will be tempting for not-yet-born writers to see our current moment as the end of complacency.
Late-century films will be made depicting 2020 as the moment when we all realized that life-threatening crises can and do happen on global scales: wealth can get destroyed, jobs can be lost, vibrant humans can end up, en masse, in hospital beds through neither war nor any fault of their own.
Zoom meetings all across the planet are filled with people saying some version of the statement that everything we now are going through was impossible to predict, that there was no way to plan for this, that the sudden change in a few short weeks is shocking, eye-popping, stunning, unbelievable. This will remembered as the moment when we came to see that worst-case scenarios have referents in reality.
These scenes will be rewritten and redramatized by moralistic screenwriters on Netflix; there is a likelihood that the era now ending will be seen as a time of lost focus, of concern with absurd detail, of pointless civil conflicts that didn’t matter as much as we thought, of a catastrophic disinclination, or inability, to plan for the worse and to do so together.
We may all look like people either working, or partying, or complaining on Facebook as the world blew up in our faces and we had no idea what to do, and no agreement on how to do it if we did.
And if further crises follow hard on this one in these early decades of the 21st century — more viruses and pandemics, environmental catastrophes, global unrest — this narrative will only be bolstered. This may make us look incredibly stupid to future generations. It’s a good bet.
On the other hand, more nostalgic writers might take a mournful tack, depicting the spring of 2020 as the moment when self-imposed isolation took full command of humanity, when digital facsimiles made such massive advances over human interaction that they gained an advantage that turned out to be permanent. This is the nadir of carbon-based humans, you might say.
Or a moment of sudden digital dominance that will be a metaphor too delicious for future digital storytellers to resist.
That approach would paint, say, 2019 as the last gasp of cheerfully flying off to a face-to-face meeting, the final season of a worry-free “Big House” watching football at the University of Michigan, of ordering boutique lattes in packed Starbucks everywhere, of crowds in Times Square, of shared bodily fluids, or breaths, on St. Patrick’s Day, of our preference for WeWork office space instead of the basement. These narratives will focus on what we have lost — and how dominant they become surely will depend on how much of what we now are living, and fearing, turns out to be permanent, or at least linger for some years to come.
Take, for example, social distancing, our newly learned ability to cross the street when we see someone coming, our improved reflex when an unexpected someone comes too close. Does that go away? Or will it be retained as a sense memory? No one even combined the words “social distancing” before 2020, outside of epidemiologists anyway.
But we know that phrase now, as do our children. The words would seem like a death knell to a widely assumed cultural trend of the 2010s that has informed lots of different kinds of planning: Our need for human interactivity on an intense, Lollapalooza-like, multiday scale.
Cultural thinkers have widely assumed we want to enjoy our three-dimensional lives in concert with our phones; 2020 might be the end of that combination, the phone having proved safer than the selfie.
We might also read stories depicting this moment as the end of a certain kind of human freedom, of a time when governments across the globe took advantage of the crisis to assume more power, putting democracy in a scared retreat. Maybe that is what will be seen to be over.
But what about the Chapter Ones? The opening scenes? The first words out of a singer’s mouth?
Maybe she will sing of the beginning of a new compassion for one’s fellow human, of a moment when older people stopped being an “OK, Boomer” joke and started to be a vulnerable demographic to cherish.
Maybe she will first sing of the discovery of human fragility. Of spiritual renewal. Of a reordering of priorities. Of the end of so much time-wasting. Of a new respect for competence, science and data.
Maybe he will write of the beginning of genuine global cooperation, of a new valuing of essential workers, of a reordering of wealth and inequality, of people staying closer with their families, having discovered them anew in 2020 and vowing to still spend some time playing board games in the basement.
Or maybe they will spin stories of a coiled-up populace, freed from their isolation and buoyed by a miraculous vaccine, returning to each other either with renewed appreciation or merely relief.
Then again, this could also turn out to be a blip, no more than a moment of colossal overreaction, self-destruction and panic. But even if that’s true, and there is evidence to the contrary, it’s still a different story now.
Maybe the final scene of Hollywood’s coronavirus epic “2020” will depict our first night out in a summer crowd, freed from quarantine, teeming through the streets of a beautiful city, hand in hand, arm in arm, all headed off somewhere into the future.
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(Chris Jones is chief theater critic and culture columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He also serves as Broadway critic for the New York Daily News. His latest book is “Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from ‘Angels in America’ to ‘Hamilton.’”)
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