The year we defiantly repudiated COVID-19

Twenty twenty-two was the year I got COVID. Three people in my family got it, actually. My younger son was first in early April, and I followed him in late April. My older son didn't get it, that we know of, until September. My wife has still never tested positive.

I say "that we know of" because I now think I may have gotten it twice. In September, I had some sort of COVID-y symptoms, but it was not the first time in the six months since my documented bout that I'd had some sort of light sniffles that proved to be nothing -- it was about the sixth time. So I never tested, but when my son had the same symptoms a few days later, we did ultimately test him and he returned a faint line indicating a positive result. I tested negative at that time but it stands to reason I might have been positive before that. (Bad Vance. Bad, bad Vance.) The point is, any of us might have had it another time and not tested, though my wife was vigilant about testing so it's pretty certain she's COVID immune.*

* - we understand that no one has a proven immunity to COVID-19, and would not intentionally contribute to any misinformation about the virus. 

I'm telling you all this to set up the context for how weird it was that we so definitively moved away from COVID in the second half of the year, both on a collective level as a society and a personal level in our minds.

And since this is a movie blog, my inclination is to determine how that change was reflected in the movies we watched.

The moment when I realized how much this cognitive transformation had occurred was when I watched Claire Denis' Stars at Noon about three weeks ago.

This movie was a pretty big whiff for me, which is funny because it took down one of the top prizes at Cannes -- though I'm finding that other critics and viewers were similarly put off by it. (Cannes results never promise to translate to general success with audiences.) 

There were plenty of things I didn't like about it -- the stars, the plot, the failure to make any of it interesting -- but one of the biggest things that took me out of it was the fact that the characters wore masks at various intervals throughout, not as some essential part of the story or themes, but to place the story within a specific historical context ... that historical context being within the last two years.

All I can tell you was that when I saw these masks, I said to myself: "We're still doing this?"

On the one hand, given the long gestation period for most movies, we should only just now be seeing movies where the telltale masks of COVID-19 could be incorporated into the story. Because that production schedule has been collapsed in recent years, and because some filmmakers worked hard to get out movies that directly dealt with the pandemic in order to engage with something that was consuming us both mentally and physically, we ended up seeing movies with masked characters nearly two years ago, around the start of 2021. One might have even snuck out in 2020, I don't really remember. (Actually yes, a small independent film I reviewed and enjoyed called Love in Dangerous Times was released in November of 2020, as just one example.)

On the other hand, though, my reaction to seeing the masks told me that COVID was a cultural and sociopolitical context that we wanted to stop grappling with the moment it was "over." I suspect any movies still coming out that are trying to deal so directly with the pandemic will seem like johnny come latelies as well.

What a weird realization. Clearly this is a world transformative event, and the sort of thing we should be collectively wrestling with for years, maybe even decades to come. But we, as moviegoers, are viewing it as some embarrassing mistake that we want to get past as soon as possible, never to discuss again.

I think this sort of gets at the intended timelessness of movies. You know how in movies, a character will say "My brother died 17 years ago" rather than "My brother died in 1983"? It's this sort of dialogue-writing trick that is designed to set the movie in an eternal sense of "now." Even if that person in real life would be more likely to list the year, the important thing for the viewer is to know how long ago it was, to get an idea of how fresh the wound still is. We do this so that a movie can always seems like it is taking place "now."

But movies made during COVID lose that, especially if they incorporate masks when it's not an essential component of the themes being considered. Rather than taking place in the eternal "now," that movie takes place in 2020 or 2021, and for the rest of its life as a work of art, it will remind us of this period we want to forget.

However, earlier in the year this was not yet a problem.

I really enjoyed Judd Apatow's The Bubble, even though it was the consummate COVID-19 movie, about characters trying to make a blockbuster effects film involving green screens and motion capture, while also social distancing. I watched that on the 1st of April -- happy April Fools Day -- before any of us had actually had COVID. That was a different time, but also, COVID-19 was central to the story, not just a design detail like it was in Stars at Noon.

Of course, no film symbolizes our societal departure from the pandemic times more than Top Gun: Maverick. That was released near the mid-point of the year on May 27th, and went on to shatter box office records, proving once and for all that you can't push movie audiences permanently to the small screen. This behemoth has grossed nearly 1.5 billion dollars worldwide, and has become Tom Cruise's biggest hit ever. Every calculation he did to delay the release as long as possible -- this was the last movie delayed by COVID to finally debut, almost to the point where it was becoming a punchline -- was validated and then some.

Top Gun has paved the way for other big theatrical moneymakers, most notably Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and now Avatar: The Way of Water. It's a chicken and the egg thing. Would audiences have remembered they craved a big-screen spectacle without it? We can't really say, but as ever, even at age 60, Cruise clearly has the entertainment industry on his shoulders ... and don't be surprised to see his next two Mission: Impossible movies racking up similar dough. (Before Avatar 2 I saw a little featurette on the making of the soon-to-be-famous motorcycle base jump stunt, and I have to say I am excited.)

I'd be lying, though, if I didn't say that part of the desire to return to theaters was the collective desire to give COVID the middle finger. We still don't want to play fast and loose with our health, but even the most progressive of us seem to trust in the efficacy of the vaccines ... while those who never believed in them never cared anyway. Together, it means that we trust the fellow members of our society, even the fringiest and least compliant, to not get us sick. Or if they do, we feel confident enough that we'll recover ... confident enough to embrace movies like we used to, embrace the social intimacy that is part and parcel to them. At least the biggest ones with the most star wattage.

But even the smaller movies have been coming to us in a torrent, even if we haven't needed to -- or been able to -- go to the movies to see them. A common theme in my writing over the past month has been how difficult it's been for me to stay on top of an ever-growing list of movies to check out on my Letterboxd watchlist. I think the biggest change is in the streamers. In past years, Netflix was the only one that put out a new movie each week -- sometimes multiple -- that felt like it was part of the larger cinematic conversation, not just some minor foreign film they acquired on the cheap. This year, Amazon upped its own frequency to about that level, and if others were behind, they weren't behind by much.

It's hard not to leave the year without a sense of optimism for where we're going, both in our physical health as a society and in the health of the film industry. Seeing the money to be had through a well-made theatrical release, studios will surely want to try to duplicate the success of Top Gun: Maverick, knowing that an appetite is there if only they can feed it. But the appetite for movies seems to be there generally, meaning streamers may continue to up their game, even if the most expensive ones that don't get the desired number of eyeballs (such as Netflix's The Gray Man) still prove the underlying flaws in the model. 

This may be a bubble -- no pun intended, Judd Apatow -- and it may be about to burst. 

But maybe if it only bursts by 25%, I'll actually be able to stay on top of my 2023 watchlist.

Note: After writing this but before posting it, I got COVID again. So did my wife, finally. I had my positive test on Tuesday, she got hers on Thursday. Oh well. I decided not to change anything I've written because the majority of what I said is still perfectly true ... only my personal experience of it has changed slightly.