Gwyneth Paltrow in Contagion

Journaling the Coronavirus, Sunday April 26: the horror, the horror edition

The virus continues to wend its way through the populations of the world. In the past five weeks, more than 982,000 Americans have become infected and more than 55,000 have died. This time in March, one in ten Americans knew someone infected with coronavirus – now, that’s increased to one in three, according to research by navigator, a real time pandemic opinion poll. 

We know now that the disease is spread by both asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic carriers. It is communicated by droplets of saliva which can survive surprisingly long indoors and in dry conditions, spreading as far as three feet and hanging around in the air up to three hours. It can even survive for three days on plastic and steel surfaces like those on trains and buses. On surfaces, bleach will kill the virus in five minutes; isopropyl alcohol will kill it in 30 seconds.

Another contaminant of the virus is media driven – you are what you watch. Researchers discovered that “Greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of Covid-19 cases and deaths, finding  “a one-standard deviation increases with approximately 30 per cent more Covid-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more Covid-19 deaths on March 28.”

I think there is something to this; as a veteran watcher of horror movies, I recognize the plot line that is unfolding before us. Decades of watching zombie outbreaks, alien abductions, monsters from the deep deep ocean or in deep deep caves, and the antics of Freddy, Michael, Jason, Chucky, and Annabel, provide clues as to what will stop the horror or make it worse.

Why do you watch that junk? a friend asked. I looked pointedly at his World of Warcraft 3 monitor setup, but he ignored me. As long as I can remember, I’ve always been drawn to horror. It’s an attraction-repulsion thing; I don’t watch horror for enjoyment, I watch it as a kind of training. Watching, I’m as scared as anyone else, maybe even more so, and frequently watch through my fingers or squinched-shut eyes and hands over my ears. But I have an equally powerful pull to see how the last survivor survives. The world on its surface can be a beautiful place, but it is also an indifferent and unfair place, and there are infinite ways to die in it. Even during this terrible pandemic, there is the shock of unexpected death –  the woman who paddled with her son onto the bay to quickly retrieve a ball only to be overtaken by rough water and never seen alive again, a couple dying in a one car highway crash earlier this month, leaving behind three young children. Right now, as I write this, there are people who are hurting other people, unable to stop making the world a worse place.  I’ve always seen watching horror movies as sort of training for the world. It might be unlikely that long-buried aliens rise up to vaporize us, or a shark takes multiple victims from the same beach, a demon takes possession of a little girl or a virus infects everyone it comes into direct contact with, but if any of these things do happen, I’ll know what to do. Or so my reasoning has gone.

But already this pandemic has blown a hole in this horror-movie-as-preparedness theory, because the one thing that increases survival in a horror movie is for everyone to stay together, which of course is the exact opposite of what increases survival in a coronavirus outbreak.

Still, an intimacy with the horror genre has given me a lens through which to understand what is unfolding. Although ‘horror’ is too broad, there are many sub-genres that contribute to the canon of chaos: there is alien abduction horror which is closely related to but not the same as demonic possession horror; there is body horror and slasher horror and franchises like Saw that straddle both. Asian horror is a sub-genre with sub-genres – Japanese horror (The Ring, The Grudge) is very different from Korean horror (Parasite, Train to Busan, The Host). There’s monster horror (all werewolves, vampires, Frankensteins) and demonic witch horror (Blair Witch, Paranormal Experience). There is ironic horror: Scream, The Rise of Leslie Vernon. There is dreamlike horror that crosses genres, Pan’s Labyrinth has a creature, Nightmare on Elm Street has a slasher, Insidious has a demon. There is doll horror (Chucky, Annabelle) and haunting horror (Christine, The Haunting of Hill House). There’s virus horror (The Stand, Contagion, Outbreak and the Korean horror film Flu) and zombie horror which are of course related (28 Days Later, Night of the Living Dead). There’s humor horror that by definition crosses genres – Shaun of the Dead is a funny zombie flick, Teen Wolf is a funny werewolf pic). There are horror directors whose names evoke specific genres, expectations and reactions: Eli Roth’s bougie comeuppance horror (Saw), Dario Argento’s moody buckets of blood (Suspira, Jenifer), George Romero’s consumers from beyond the grave horror (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead).

“We’ve done a hell of a job, an incredible job, with great ratings, like Monday Night football level, like Bachelor finale level.”

Interestingly, though we are in fact in a pandemic, the pandemic genre is not the most applicable horror sub-genre to the situation.  That’s because, in the virus sub-genre, the medical establishment is almost always heroically American, prepared and swift acting. They’re never wearing garbage bags and yesterday’s PPPE and having to elbow their way through confederate-flag waving protesters to get into the ER with a dying patient. Think of it – even the far-out imaginations of the directors of the pandemic movies didn’t allow for incompetence like we’re seeing with the Trump administration’s response because it wouldn’t be believable. In pandemic horror movies there is always  a lot of medical experts in top shelf PPE, shields and all, coordinating the virus response. In Contagion, Gwyneth Paltrow’s death by virus is scary but not made worse by an incompetent nincompoop president on the television reassuring bewildered husband Matt Damon “It will go away like magic, I hear light and disinfectant might help, or even hydroxychloroquine, what could it hurt?” Apparently director Steven Soderbergh’s imagination for the fictional horror of pandemic didn’t extend to include the actual horror of an incompetent leader with an insatiable appetite for television ratings in charge of scientists and doctors and saying  “I don’t think we need so much testing, the Democrats only wants so much testing so they can get Trump.”

If the pandemic sub-genre isn’t particularly helpful in limning this disaster, the rampaging monster sub-genre offers insight. In rampaging monster horror there is a moment between creature arrival and creature destruction in which someone – usually teenagers, or a drunk guy, or a couple making out in a car – sees the arrival of the danger and warns others. In our situation, the Steve McQueen character in The Blob is played by Dr. Fauci, Tony to his friends. “You gotta warn the town people, there’s a monster on the loose,” Steve McQueen begs the Sheriff, much like Tony must have painted the picture for President Trump. “Tell everyone to stay inside!” Steve/ McFauci pleads but at first the Sheriff isn’t inclined to believe a bunch of kids led by a smartass troublemaker. It’s not until people start dying that Steve McQueen is able to convince the Sheriff, which is not unlike what it took for Tony to convince the President, who chided a reporter “I couldn’t start closing things when there were no deaths.”  I’m still kind of amazed no one made a bigger deal when he said that. I mean, the whole point of containment is to prevent deaths.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers  |  Credit: MGM/UA

Our current reality contains echoes of another horror movie sub-genre: alien abduction. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers and it’s filmic offspring The Invasion (with Nicole Kidman) and Body Snatchers, people are taken over by aliens and going around saying things that sound off-kilter in reassuring tones. and leaving everyone with the uneasy impression they are living with facsimiles of their friends and family. Listening to the task force members repeat their long lists of numbers of beds and Air Bridge flights with millions of masks and the the low and high throughput machines that will double testing capacity always in the same unchanging tones of optimism is a daily trip through the Uncanny Valley. Are they still our leaders, or have the pod people gotten to them too? It’s hard to tell.

“If heat is good and sunlight is good that’s a great thing, as far as I’m concerned.”

Federal health officials estimated in early April that more than 300,000 Americans could die from COVID-19 if social distancing measures are abandoned too soon.  If the trajectory of the Spanish flu suggests a playbook, it is that prematurely relaxing social distancing  will bring the pandemic roaring back, like a grassfire that died to embers would with a tablespoon of gasoline thrown on it. It doesn’t take much – back in 1917, people were tired of social distancing and didn’t want to wear masks. Some politicians thought that a war bonds parade might be just the thing to perk people up, a decision that ironically set off a chain of events ensuring the flu killed more American soldiers than the war itself.  Tired of being cooped up sheltering in place, people came out by the thousands to support the war effort, setting off a  killer tidal wave of flu deaths – 100,000 people died in the month of October alone.

As Georgia and Tennessee get busy re-opening and people begin trekking to the beaches in large numbers, the feeling in my stomach is akin to watching an installment of Final Destination, or It Follows, movies in which people are being stalked by a silent killer that follows its own terrible rules.

“That could be setting us back,” Dr. Fauci warns when he hears what the Massachusetts Governor has planned.  “It certainly isn’t going to be helpful.” But the Governor, not to be deterred by public health officials or even the president, green-lighted the opening of hair salons, spas, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys this weekend. You can almost hear the Twilight Zone music playing in the background, and a voice over in Rod Serling’s intensely hushed, conspiracy-promoting voice: Why is Georgia, whose state motto is wisdom, justice and moderation, rushing to be the first state to open up the lockdown orders? Is Governor Kemp a pod person? If President Trump is also a pod person, does this make Kemp’s defiance the equivalent of a double negative and therefore a positive?

Where does the buck stop, you might be wondering, if not with the president? President Trump is taking the tack of giving the governors guidelines he recommends they follow but won’t stop if they don’t. So if the buck doesn’t stop with the governors, then where does it stop? “The people themselves are primarily responsible for their safety,” said South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.

 “I’m not a doctor. But I’m, like, a person that has a good you-know-what.”

There are a few politicians leading the charge – safely, from their Zoom app – to make sure that people who want to not believe in the virus, coupled with people who believe in it and want to be protected, can all get back to work and hopefully not infect more than one person apiece. Hope is pretty much the strategy, as the only way opening back up now can be accomplished without risking a deadly second surge of infection is through rigorous testing, isolation and contact tracing, something no city in America is, as yet, set up to do.

The drum beat to ramp up testing is loud and ever-present, and maybe there is actually progress being made in pockets here and there around the US, but generally the feeling is, we squandered the time when we could have contained the virus, and instead of responding with the massive coordinated testing effort that is needed,  we have been too busy putting out the fires of overcrowded hospitals and not enough PPE are causing. This past Thursday testing tents went up in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco, targeting an area of eight or so city blocks. As far as just needing to know where to go to get a test, that’s a question the vast majority of San Franciscans and Americans still don’t have an answer to, even as countries like South Korea and Taiwan take the world to school on how pandemic preparedness is done.

Working from home
In a strange plot twist, I’ve worked from a home office for more than a decade, using video conferencing platforms, remote online presentations and project collaboration applications as part of my daily routine.  It will be interesting to see which apps pass the sudden stress test of user design they are getting with million of new users overnight. So far Zoom gets a D, for allowing trolls to exploit a weakness in the software, hack into meetings and do the kinds of things fourteen year old boys (both the literal and metaphorical variety) find amusing, like draw penises onscreen.  Zoom stock is soaring. We’re getting a view of reporters we’ve never had, seeing which ones have big libraries and what their taste in art is like and who has good audio and video (I use classic Sony Dynamic Stereo headphones) and who has shitty wifi.

One wonders what Zoom will do with its big head start.  My personal recommendation, a series of questions on a screen you can click yes/no before the meeting starts, establishing your settings before you join. Those of us who remember when AOL was synonymous with the internet, when Lotus 1 2 3 came preinstalled and Excel was still just a verb, we know being first to catch the wave doesn’t predict who will ride it longest. And we’re definitely in a long haul situation here, working from home and video conferencing will be increasing just as surely as air travel and WeWork stock will keep decreasing.

Pssst, have you heard
Did you get the message? I did,  passed along by a former colleague. He said he got it from a current colleague, whose brother-in-law worked for a government agency.  The messages said the Trump administration was about to lock down the entire country; the National Guard was being deployed.