For obvious reasons, fictional pandemics in cinema, including Songbird’s, are always more like yellow fever: higher stakes, horrific visuals.
Historians of infectious disease argue that past societies had different social responses to the epidemic sicknesses-yellow fever, bubonic plague, smallpox-that were quick to act and did horrifying things to human bodies, and to the persistent endemic killers, like tuberculosis, that were less dramatic in their progression. In Defense of Ted Lasso, the Show Everyone Now Loves to HateĮvery Perfect Little Detail From Kim Cattrall’s Sex and the City AnnouncementĪ Dramatic Upset Has Changed the Face of Britain’s Weirdest SportĪt the beginning of our pandemic, it became clear that because it had been decades since we had to be afraid that our family members might catch a pathogen that would put them in a lot of pain and then kill them, we didn’t have much generational memory of that experience. Unless you count QAnon, 2020 is really not there. A lot of Songbird is familiar Walking Dead territory: warlords fighting one another for scraps, impromptu cults emerging out of the wreckage.
Meanwhile, our legislatures and courts continue mostly as before, and if our leaders are unhelpful to those suffering in the pandemic, it’s not because they’re dead of COVID, but just because their hearts are frozen in their chests. (In my town, even our raked-leaf pickup days continued as normal this year.) The government has collapsed, and only a few people have anything recognizable as power-the enterprising head of a delivery service, a former sanitation worker turned quarantine enforcer.
#SONGBIRD ON NETFLIX FULL#
This world is a 28 Days Later–style mess-empty streets full of trash, where the only humans to be seen are wearing full biohazard suits. The things that happen in Songbird, this pumped-up world where COVID-19 “gets worse,” make it an object lesson in all the ways our own pandemic has been, among other things, catastrophically uncinematic. Send me updates about Slate special offers.
#SONGBIRD ON NETFLIX MOVIE#
How could you even make a movie about a pandemic like ours, caused by a virus nobody is immune to, that can be spread asymptomatically, and results in a disease that has a relatively low case-fatality rate? A disease that-rather than infecting you right when you leave your house, like the airborne COVID-23 of Songbird, and killing you in 48 hours’ time-can be easily survived by many, and can be effectively stemmed by small interventions like mask-wearing? One that, because you can survive it, some people, including many in the government, don’t take it seriously, and so its unchecked spread causes many deaths? A movie about this kind of stretched-out catastrophe would be almost impossible to make, which, I think, is part of why some Americans have a hard time believing our COVID is “that bad.” If 9/11 was “like a movie,” our pandemic is not. Songbird is supposed to be a thought experiment: “What if COVID-19, but worse?” But instead, this film just shows how pandemic movies failed to prepare us for the real experience of COVID-19. In my town, even our raked-leaf pickup days continued as normal this year. The’s movie’s world is a 28 Days Later-style mess.
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