If this life we are living now were a novel, it would be called “Drop the Body” or “Land of Ham”; if a memoir, “Bunker Time: The Year of Motley Heavings.” If it were a sandwich, the filling would be moths, jam and beef powder, and its leathery bread would be buttered on the outside.

I have been thinking of this since the great Sarah Polley pointed out on Twitter that if this were a movie, what a ham-fisted, overstuffed, simple-minded mess of a movie it would be.

“So much heavy-handed foreshadowing,” she wrote. “The apocalyptic footage from Wuhan, the supervillain American president, the whistleblower dying, the Russia/China border closed while people still claimed it was just a flu, the warnings unheeded. Insulting to the audience’s intelligence. And then — that most annoying of horror/disaster movie tropes — the hapless idiots walking into disaster after disaster, all of which the audience can see coming from a mile away.”

It would be uncertain of its genre, she wrote — “Horror movie? Political? Disaster? Screwball comedy?”—and it would have far too many protagonists while forgetting the most interesting one, “that bat in China.”

Polley is right. The movie would be the “based on” kind but who could believe the base?

We have never experienced such a non-stop blast of incoming bad news from such an array of implausible sources: Trump threatening Iran over gunboats in the Persian Gulf, oil so cheap that we siphon it into the car, a Nova Scotia denturist with a kill list, every surface shooting poison darts, death by ventilator, the American Deep South staying true to moronic form, plucky little Britain not waving but drowning, Italy the Sick Man of Europe, Hungary as Bloodlands Revisited, face masks being batted around the globe like badminton shuttlecocks, a clamour for flour, a climate Sturm und Drang summer approaching, elderly sex monsters hunted on their private islands, Amazon warehouse ant farms, the drawbacks of medical gear for men only, the death of privacy, Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” nailing down the coffin lid, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a daily brunch-time reason-over-passion relaxation app.

In what container does this fit? Certainly not a work of art, although Hieronymus Bosch had a go, but his horror is more or less flat-planed. Francis Bacon’s screaming popes are helpful, but their pain is internal.

In modern warfare, humans can count on the greatest danger coming from above, from drones and fighters sending missiles and dropping bombs. But this danger surrounds us. The threat comes from beneath, above, in the air, on every bit of matter from leaves to muslin to metal to hair, from inside the lung and up through the throat.

Ever since man first painted an antlered beast on the wall of a cave, he has tried to render the world around him. I don’t know what form the portrait of 2020 could take. Maybe Polley is right and only very bad movies can even try to approach this immensity.

Humans like stories. Generally speaking, novels should tell a story and stories should have a point, but there is no point to what we’re living through, no angle. Stuff happened. More stuff happened.

The key is that it won’t end. Again, I say Donald Trump is a test just as COVID-19 is a test. Mere rehearsals. The answer is to change the political and economic system in time for the genuine exam, which is climate change.

Just stay home is not the answer to global heating. It will be solved outside.

The American artist Gregory Crewdson has always created and photographed eerie stage sets of people alone in silent landscapes, standing outside houses, underwater, alone on dimly lit streets in small towns.

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In the evenings, I am outside, walking distantly, with police cars slowly driving past, looking at Toronto mises en scène in the front windows of people’s houses. At those times, country music seems the most appropriate art, the best way to convey that feeling of lonesome hearts and lost souls.

What is happening, you may ask yourself. Artists answer, but who knows which one rings most true in this glass balloon time, so fragile, so frightening?

All I can say is that art might help you personally, so alone right now. Will Ferrell movies about child-men, Leni Reifenstahl’s horror films, audiobooks, caricatures, Louise Bourgeois’s stick-like anxiety figures, collage, found art to be lugged home and glued, twangy rockabilly, folk art, Easter Island monoliths, hyperrealistic Mary Pratt paintings of eggs in the carton lit up like bulbs and Newfoundland moose carcasses bled and hung.

The art of 2020 might well be marvellous or ugly, or tasteless, artless, a comic mess, a disaster, a waste of time, or nothing more than very bad art for very bad times.