The COVID Fog
When I get into a podcast I really get into a podcast. It’s not unusual for me to find a new podcast, fall instantly in love with it and then decide that I have to consume every last episode in a feverish rush.
For some podcasts that entails a lot of episodes going back a very long time. I recently really got into a really nifty British true crime podcast called Red Handed hosted by two very British women.
Podcasts double as sociological documents of what their hosts and guests lives looked like at various moments in their lives and their careers.
Listening to Red Handed from the first episode to the most recent one I’m able to track the podcast’s increasing popularity in the forms of sold out live international tours and book deals and the hosts making enough money to be able to support themselves exclusively through income from their podcasts.
Since the first episode was posted on July 9th, 2017 that of course means that the podcast was up and running and very successful when COVID 19 hit in 2020 and seemingly changed everything overnight.
When I go back and listen to the archives of podcasts that have been around for a while I always notice when the hosts reference anything having to do with COVID 19.
The great pandemic was so society and life-altering that it confusingly demanded to be addressed and discussed because it was and remains so important while also begging to be ignored.
On one level I found COVID 19 utterly fascinating. I’m forty-seven years old and I have never experienced anything like it. The closest I’ve come is probably 9/11 but when you look at the impact of COVID 19 it dwarfs the 9/11 attacks both in terms of casualties and societal impact.
For a year and a half we were all forced to live completely different lives than the one we had been leading. The country turned into a ghost town as people hid at home from a deadly pandemic.
It felt as if we couldn’t, as a society, not talk about COVID 19 but we were also extremely reluctant to talk about it for a very good, very legitimate reason: it was depressing. Oh sweet blessed Lord was it ever depressing. And sad! It was more than depressing and sad: it was fucking tragic.
It was tragic on so many different levels. It was tragic first and foremost because over a million Americans died from COVID-19. If one of my loved ones had been among the stricken the last thing that I would want to do is experience entertainment that reminded me of the devastation I had personally experienced.
That helps explain why podcasters tend to mention COVID 19 sparingly, if at all. They want to entertain and help people forget about their problems, not remind them of one of the worst things to happen to our country this side of making Donald Trump president.
Mentioning COVID 19 or discussing it also dates podcasts and other forms of entertainment. We want the pop culture we consume to be timeless, not tied hopelessly and permanently to a tragedy.
Judd Apatow’s The Bubble illustrates the dangers of COVID 19-based projects. The critically maligned flop tried to glean nervous laughter out of the pandemic but just reminded us all of what we’d spent years tying to forget.
COVID-19 united us in facing the same formidable foe and divided us by showing, yet again, how hopelessly fractured our country had become.
It feels like there was a culture-wide COVID 19 fog for at least a year and half that made it difficult to understand what COVID meant in the moment and exactly how profoundly it would change the way we live, work and communicate with one another.
There are great movies and books and albums to be made about COVID 19 but it will take some time to gain the necessary perspective.
As with 9/11, it’s also likely that the most powerful and true commentaries on COVID 19 will be metaphorical in nature. I would much rather watch The 25th Hour, which is haunted by the ghost of 9/11 but is not overtly about the attacks than something like Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close which is 9/11-centric in a way that was horrifying and tone-deaf at the time of its release and I’m guessing has aged terribly.
We haven’t come anywhere close to processing COVID 19 as a culture, let alone coming to peace with it. So I suppose it’s not surprising that art and entertainment would rather ignore it for any number of good reasons rather than forthrightly address something that understandably bummed us all the fuck out.
Several years on it’s still too soon to really delve into that trauma and I don’t know that we’ll ever be ready to transform pain into entertainment.
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