COVID-19 is a prequel episode to a dystopian blockbuster

Cinematic and real dystopias

Here we are, a few months after the first coronavirus (COVID-19) incident was traced in Hubei, China, the world is in panic mode. It doesn’t feel real, but, as French president Macron declared, “we are at war” and this time the enemy is not observable with the naked eye.

As we are told, the coronavirus has marched from a market in Wuhan all the way to Iran, Italy, the US and almost every major city on the globe. Despite early warnings that the virus was incredibly infectious, most countries stood rather uncomfortably in view of post-apocalyptic images from China.We underestimated COVID-19 and Italy, Spain and now the US proved this was a mistake. Even the UK has reconsidered its initial strategy of the dangerous ‘herd immunity’.

At this point I should note that the issue with the virus is not its lethality, which is quite low, but its infectiousness. The virus can infect thousands within days. A fraction of those infected will need to be hospitalised, and a fraction of those will need to be treated in an intensive health unit. This can cause hospitals to overflow with patients (and remember hospitals treat other cases as well) and eventually, if no precautions are taken, they lose their ability to treat all incidents leading to the situation we are now observing in Italy.

Who could have imagined?

Who could have imagined that half of the planet would be in quarantine because of a virus from Wuhan?

Well, according to twitter, Dean Koontz did in his 1989 edition of “the Eyes of Darkness”. The viral passage from the book follows:

“To understand that,” Dombey said, “you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center.”

Do I believe this is proof of a conspiracy theory of some sort? No, but I do believe it’s an amazing coincidence. Contrary to what the majority on twitter may think, Koontz was not the only one to foretell the current infectious outbreak.

Scientists, activists and political theorists have been pointing out the possibility for quite some time. It is not a secret that the current mode of agricultural production is flawed. In fact, it is a tragedy waiting to happen, or rather slowly happening. Let’s remember HIV, the mad cow disease, SARS, avian flu, swine flu , Ebola, Zika virus, MERS, and this is not an exhaustive list. We have been constantly facing newly emergent diseases coming from different sources. The fact that we had to wait until 2020 for a disease that spreads as easily as COVID-19 is no surprise at all. The surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner.

I am not saying that diseases are not naturally occurring, that would be wrong. What I am saying is that our agricultural industry is speeding up this natural process through harmful pests, extensive antibiotic and hormone use, overcrowding and a series of practices that I am not the one to number here. The issue is that we are harming the animals, we are harming the environment and finally we are harming ourselves. Even if the virus escaped from a lab as many claim, that doesn’t make the above less true.

We tend to describe the future with positivism, as if things will magically improve. We confuse technological improvements with the general amelioration of life and these two, don’t necessarily go together.

Cinematic dystopias

Our visions of the future tend to be either good or bad and the further ahead in time we are talking, the more extremely good (utopian) or bad (dystopian) our visions become. Cinema has been fantastic at illustrating the latter (dystopias are more interesting let’s face it).

Nevertheless it is important to make a distinction between dystopian films, exploring life in a dystopian future, and those exploring a major catastrophe/apocalypse leading to the creation of a dystopian future.

For example, Bird Box (2018) is a film about supernatural entities attacking humans. The entities can drive mad anyone who looks at them. Bird box explores a catastrophe in its making, not life after it.

Brazil (1986) on the other hand is a pure dystopia. Trapped in a highly bureaucratic Orwellian world, humanity lives a life of repetition stripped from every sense of creativity, self worth and ultimately humanity. In Brazil the message is a mixed one. The hero fights the system, but in the end the system captures him. At that point, the protagonist finds refuge in the fantasies of his own mind and in that way escapes. In social terms the film is pessimistic: “not much can be done about the problems of society by one man”. In general terms however, the message is deeply optimistic: “no matter what happens, no one can imprison your imagination!”

Now let’s talk about dystopian films that deal with viruses. A good example is Twelve Monkeys (1995). Humanity has lost the battle with a man-made virus that killed most of the human population. The remaining humans, live under the earth and attempt to change the course of history by sending someone in the past with a time machine.

Children of Men (2006) is more realistic. Having lost its ability to reproduce under mysterious circumstance, an ageing humanity is drifting towards chaos. Hope in this hopeless world appears in the form of a pregnant woman, the first in many years.

The last film I am going to discuss is Blindness (2008). In this film a mysterious illness of “white blindness” spreads. Despite the efforts of the authorities, the illness is not contained and soon the whole city is blind. In the end (spoilers), the illness disappears the same way it arrived, mysteriously and with no explanation. Humanity now has to face the monstrous things it did during the chaos.

A cinematic dystopia comes to life

A few weeks before COVID-19 reached Europe, we all saw photos from empty cities in China. Many rushed to proclaim that these were dystopian or post-apocalyptic images that look like they came out of a Hollywood film. When the rest of the world looked at them, there was a mixed sentiment of compassion and indifference, as if this really was something belonging in a distant future or a blockbuster movie.

Soon enough the virus spread in Europe. Within a month Italy was in a crisis and Spain and France quickly joined in, while the UK’s and the US’s mismanagement of the situation is not going to make things better. Within this month the markets appear to be collapsing and the prospects for the world economy appear grim and grimmer.

The coronavirus is not the entities from Birdbox, it cannot drive us mad but it can cause panic. As in the Twelve Monkeys we have, or will soon have an idea of how the virus works and how it was created. Like Blindness we have attempted to contain the virus in Hubei, but we failed and now we are all facing the consequences.

So far for similarities. We cannot go back in time to stop the virus from spreading like Bruce Willis does in Twelve Monkeys, but we can prevent it from further spreading in the future. No miracles will happen like in Blindness or Children of Men. The solution to this man-made problem will be man-made too.

What happens after the crisis?

What we are experiencing, is a prequel episode of the spin-off series to a major dystopian blockbuster. Humanity is the director and in this week’s episode, the coronavirus is the evil villain that threatens to destroy civilisation. When the episode will be over, humanity will prevail and next week a new episode, featuring a new villain will appear. What will we do then? We can keep watching the series but it is a given that the more we watch, the closer we will get to meeting the final villain that might be more than what we bargained for. Or we can change course, finish the coronavirus episode and watch something else.

The dystopia is far from happening. This is not a zombie apocalypse like Walking Dead where humanity has given up on hope and all that is left is to look for a safe refuge. A cure will be found soon enough, it is a matter of time. However, we are facing a real danger. This is getting used to the photos we are watching or the images we watch in the streets daily. We are facing the danger of becoming used to the idea of a dystopian world, where governments are free to show their worst authoritarian self with the excuse of leading us out of a crisis. Just like the film Brazil, we risk ending up with states addicted to the new level of authority given to them in good will during this period.

This is a difficult situation but more than everything, it is a warning that we are doing something wrong. This is not only about the way we treat animals and cultivate our land. It is not only about how our current economy produces diseases that are bound, at some point, to become dangerous and infectious.

This is about everything at once, the decline of ecosystems around the world because of human activity, the melting of the arctic ice, deforestation, atmospheric pollution, mass migrations of humans fleeing famine and war, social injustices and inequality. The 21st century so far has been a century where we are experiencing the symptoms of a planet and a society that are sick. The issue is that we are treating each symptom separately and fail to diagnose the sickness.

Make no mistake about it, the next day after the coronavirus saga finishes (the sooner the better), things will not return to normal, even if they feel like it at first. We have been receiving warnings that things are going wrong for quite some time. With Fukushima the planet showed us that our nuclear facilities are not prepared to face everything, the fires in Siberia, Australia and the Amazon last year demonstrated that the climate is reaching a critical point. This year the coronavirus demonstrated that the blind optimism of the current socioeconomic system, that things will always work out on their own, is not viable.

When the coronavirus story reaches its end, we will have to face the consequences of a damaged global economy, which has not recovered from the 2008 crisis. This is the time where we need to look at what happened and what is happening and ask: could things go differently? Or what could we do to avoid something similar in the future?

My answer to these questions is global solidarity. This solidarity is not limited to cooperation between humans and states but also extends to empathy towards life on earth. Corporate thinking is not working, and neoliberalism is inadequate to face the challenges ahead of us.

Unlike Brazil, the ending cannot be one where we retreat to ourselves. The solution needs to be social and common. This time of need should also be an opportunity for us to practice our moral humanism and demand that the aftermath of this crisis does not end with a new financial dystopia but with a regenerated vision for a utopian society.