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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky.

Back in March, when New Yorkers learned the city was about to head into lockdown, Alex Shepard was out buying essentials.

ALEX: And I was walking back, I did my last supply run, which of course was to Astor Wine and Spirits. And I was sort of walking back burdened with all this wine. And there were just hundreds of people out in, uh, Washington Square Park. That was when it sort of hit me that this is going to be really, really, really bad here really, really quickly.

This was at a time when a lot of people were watching movies like Outbreak or Contagion to prepare them for what was to come. But those films didn’t feel right to Alex. But then when he saw those people in the park, he thought about another movie: .

CLIP: BEACHGOERS

ALEX: That combination of, uh, people, uh, sort of frolicking about as if nothing is wrong and this killer sort of lurking just beneath the surface is, is something that's hit me again and again. This is a situation in which one, the experts are being ignored, but when conflicting pieces of information, people tend to end up doing what they want to do. Right. And in that case, you go to the beach on a holiday weekend, you know, you go in the water.

CLIP: JAWS MUSIC

This music has become a very familiar trope over the years, but Alex could suddenly imagine what it must have been like to hear it for the first time, and how must have hit moviegoers at a gut level.

ALEX: What we’ve been looking for this entire year or just ways to express this, this general sense of, of dread it's word. I keep coming back to trying to find slow. Moving dread in, in art is not necessarily easy. I think Jaws captures it. It really, really well.

Although that feeling of slow-moving dread wasn’t the original plan for the movie. had commissioned these mechanical sharks, but they didn’t work. So, for most of the film, the camera acts as the shark’s point of view.

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ALEX: The way that the camera moves as the shark, there's a certain intelligent, you know, almost raw intelligence about, uh, about the way it moves, but also this, this determination to, to kill. I mean, one of the other things going back particularly to the earlier part of this year was the dominant sense that whatever you're out in the world there is this lingering possibility that, that something terrible is, is about to happen.

Alex wrote an article for the New Republic about how Jaws felt like the movie of 2020, with the shark as a metaphor for COVID. But he wasn’t the only journalist to make that connection. And a lot of these articles ended up being about the character of Larry Vaughn, The Mayor of Amity Island, played by Murray Hamilton.

CLIP: It’s all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, "Huh? What?" You yell shark, we've got a panic on our hands, on the Fourth of July.

In 2020, Mayor Vaughn suddenly felt like the embodiment of every leader who initially dismissed the seriousness of COVID. Boris Johnson actually said in an interview, years ago, that he thought The Mayor was the real hero of the movie because he kept the beaches open – although those words came back to haunt him this year. But Alex still sees Mayor Vaughan as a quintessentially American type of character.

ALEX: My favorite line in the movie is when he's talking to a reporter on the beach and he says:

CLIP: As you can see, it's a beautiful day,” he tells the media at one point. “The beaches are opened, and people are having a wonderful time

ALEX: There's a, I think a particular brand of optimism of foolish optimism that I think is uniquely American. It's the kind of thing that, you know, the Tocqueville writes about, you know, that it's the huckster character as well, you know going back to PT Barnum but, you know, the Music Man, uh, there all these great, great in quotation marks, but these great American figures who are once kind of, I, you know, either they're naive and they're cynical at the same time, they're innocent and they're conniving, they're both optimistic, but they're also always running a con on somebody They're charming and repellent at the same time. ALEX: Yes, That's exactly right. There's a populist energy, but, but beneath that, not far beneath it, is this obsessed, absolute obsession with the economic bottom line. 3

Yeah. One of my favorite lines is when, um, you know, Richard Dreyfuss who in this case seems like standing in for all scientists in 2020 is explaining all this stuff to him.

HOOPER: Those proportions are correct. MAYOR: Love to prove that, wouldn't you? Get your name into the National Geographic. (Laughs)

And, and like that moment of like Dreyfuss is so incredulous, he burst out laughing. I kept thinking of that scene, you know, when all these scientists were suddenly being discounted. ALEX: Yeah. And I think Mayor Vaughn is so intent on the fact that this can't possibly be happening so determined to ignore anyone who is putting what's obviously going on in front of him, that, that he just, you know, starts saying anything that you can possibly think of to discount these people. Uh, one of the, the scenes for me that, that sticks out for thinking about my 2020 at least is when, uh, sheriff Brody, you know, he sort of finally gloms onto what's happening. And he goes home and just starts reading books about sharks, you know, this guy from New York. Uh, and I was like, Oh, this is the, the 1970s version of doom scrolling. Oh, that's so true. It is like all those horrific pictures of shark bites and stuff like that. ALEX: Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, what we, what we've all been doing.

As I mentioned, there were many articles about Jaws being the movie of the year – but Jaws had seriously competition from another Spielberg movie: . And it wasn’t just journalists making that connection. Jaws and Jurassic Park were actually competing for the top spot at the drive-in box office – because that was the best way to watch movies in public this year.

And a group of comedians set up a Jurassic Park parody account on called JurassicPark2go, which has over 320 thousand followers. They tweet things like, “we are hard at work trying to create a vaccine for being eaten by a ,” or “just found half a guest. hope he got his ticket half price ha ha,” or “Do you guys think god is pissed at us?”

Sean T. Collins writes for the site Polygon. His editor assigned him a story about why so many people were saying Jurassic Park felt like the movie of the year. When he re-watched the film, he was surprised to see that every major decision in the plot was driven by money. And he began to wonder, is the real monster in this movie capitalism? 4

SEAN: The whole reason that the characters played by and and arrive on the Island in the first place is because of the accident, the accident, quote, unquote, that takes place at the very beginning of the film, when a worker is killed by the . At that point, the insurance company starts balking and there's a lawsuit filed by the family of the worker. They need to bring in these outside experts to calm the insurance company down and calm the investors down.

HAMMOND: I mean, let’s face it in your particular field, you’re the top minds and if I could just persuade you to sign off on the par, to get your endorsement, maybe to pen a wee testimonial, I could get back on schedule.

SEAN: And I don't think I remembered that at all. I think I just figured like, oh, he's bringing them in to show it off because they're famous. And the whole idea that they were stress testing it, to make sure that the cashflow would still, uh, continue to kind of sailed by me.

Another thing that surprised him was that he had a newfound appreciation for one of the villains, Dennis Nedry, played by Wayne Knight – who is of course, even more famous for playing Newman on .

SEAN: He's the one who sabotages the Park. So you can try and sneak off a collection of dinosaur embryos to sell to a rival company. The whole reason he's doing that is because he's not, he feels he isn't being paid, what he's worth. And the, he actually has like a little tiff on screen with John Hammond. The character played by who owns the Park. Like he doesn't want to give an more money because we teach to read the wrong lesson.

NEDRY: You know anybody who can network eight Connection Machines and debug two million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if he can, I'd like to see him try. HAMMOND: I’m sorry about your financial problems, Dennis, I really am but they’re your problems.

SEAN: In fact, the whole film basically proves his point because they can't do anything without him. It's like the one guy who was holding the Park together and Samuel L. Jackson says, without an engineer, I can't get your asset. Park back online. And it's like, well, they probably should have been paying him more then.

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The character of John Hammond, who runs the park, is definitely more sympathetic than the Mayor in Jaws. But Sean says, that doesn’t make Hammond any less of a villain.

SEAN: Hammond is like Santa Claus. Right. You know, he's got, he's like a jolly figure. He's got that British accent and he's got his white beard and he's bringing the children to the park at the same time. He's stress testing the Park with these experts, which is maybe not what I would've done, but the reason he's bringing them there is because their parents are getting a divorce and this is supposed to be like, it's supposed to take their mind off it. I think that that humanizes them in a real way. And I think also he has this sort of childlike enthusiasm about the Park. Like, he's just, you know, we have a T- Rex he says to them when they're like, you have a T-Rex

ELLIE: You’ve said you’ve got a T-Rex? HAMMOND: Uh huh. GRANT: Say that again? HAMMOND: We have a T-Rex. Welcome to Jurassic Park!

What do you think is his fatal flaw exactly? SEAN: I think his belief in money, but I think it's really as simple as that, like how could everything go wrong? They spared no expense. So when things do go wrong, he's almost completely unprepared. So it's not just, it's not like the greed of wanting to make money, but the magical power of money. SEAN: Right, right. It does have a transformative effect on people throughout the film, like Genaro who's the sleazy lawyer. He is at first like a real skeptic about the project. You know, he's the one kind of complaining about, we have to please the investors, we have to please the insurance company. But then once he sees the , he's like, we're going to make a fortunate this place. And his, his mindset completely shifts where he is now, like the biggest booster of the Park and the biggest he's the biggest skeptic towards the skeptics. Money has this sort of talismanic power that transforms how people look at what the park is and what the Park does.

A slow-moving deadly shark may feel more like a more accurate metaphor for COVID than speedy carnivorous dinosaurs, but the way the park itself is managed has 2020 written all over it. Like when Sean first saw Jurassic Park in the ‘90s, he didn’t see the employees of the park as anything more than dinosaur food. But now, he started thinking of them as essential workers.

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SEAN: Essential workers are the people who are basically have to go out there and wave the flares around so that the T-Rex doesn't attack the children and the T-Rex attacks them instead. What about also the reopening of Disney world? SEAN: (Laughs) That was, I remember when they first came out with those videos and it was so dystopian, like we're open for business and it was like, okay, there's just, something seemed really creepy about like having like the happiest place on earth, reopened with everyone wearing masks. And it just seemed like this insistence on like, no, we're going to have a good time. Dammit.

Or to go completely meta, : Dominion – the 6th Jurassic Park movie -- went back into production this summer, and the cast and crew went through 40,000 COVID tests. People could have literally died so the franchise could keep making. I thought Sean would agree how absurd this is, but he was more sympathetic.

SEAN: It’s hard because you know, you know, if movies aren't getting shot, all the people who work on films, you know, not actors who are going to do fine, the least the kind of actors who star in these movies, but you know, working actors and the crew theater employees who sell popcorn ticket takers and all that kind of stuff, there's a whole ecosystem in danger of collapse. And so on the one hand, it's obviously like, you know, there's no pressing need to make Jurassic World Dominion. That's worth people dying. But at the same time, the so many people are in a position where they have no choice but to work. And, but to hope that their employers continue to push forward as dangerous as that is.

Spielberg’s blockbusters were often dismissed as pure escapist entertainment, the movie equivalent to a theme park ride. And over the years, he’s tried to prove he is a “serious filmmaker,” not just the guy who makes blockbusters. But if these movies are resonating with people decades later, in the worst of times, maybe they’re more artful than critics realized when they came out.

Again, here’s Alex Shepard:

ALEX: He's been very, very good at, at positioning blockbuster movies and mass entertainment, as ways of thinking through the kind of larger political environment. I think Jurassic Park is very much a movie that's expressing ambivalence about, uh, you know, a post-Cold War a world in which, you know, untrammeled capitalism has one, right? It's not only one, but it's, you know, running amuck across the globe and, and Jaws, I think is a smaller movie to some extent, but you know, it was also filmed while 7 the Watergate hearings were happening. When you read accounts of it being made, it's, you know, they're having parties at night based on, and what's happening in Congress, but it's a view of America and politics itself, I think is jaundiced by the Nixon administration.

Of course, if you asked people who saw Jaws or Jurassic Park at the drive-in this summer whether they came away discussing politics or late-stage capitalism, the answer would probably be no. But Sean says, that’s the magic of a Spielberg blockbuster. It can work on totally different levels.

SEAN: Fantasy , horror, you know, what they do is they provide us with imagery and ideas that are big enough and spectacular enough or horrifying enough to give voice to everyday emotions and feelings for which everyday vocabulary is. It's not up to the task of conveying the severity of how we feel. So, we turn to genre work because it feels like we feel, even if it's not realistic, this obviously not dinosaurs running around eating anybody right now, but you need to, but reaching that far and giving us something that big is something about it feels right. And I think that's the, that in large part is the value of genre work. It has a vocabulary of imagery and a vocabulary of ideas that suit the way we feel.

This year, some people wanted to escape reality entirely, and go to a virtual world where they can build a paradise on an island full of cute little animals. But the most insidious monster of 2020 was lurking in that tiny world. We’ll take a trip to Animal Crossing after the break.

BREAK

One of the biggest video games of the year was Animal Crossing. The game itself is almost 20 years old, but a new version called Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out in March on Nintendo Switch and so far, it’s sold 26 million copies. I saw firsthand how my assistant producer, Stephanie Billman was practically living a second life in the game.

STEPHANIE: As you see all of this craziness going on around you, you don't really have a lot of control what's going to, and we don't have any control over COVID. We don't have any control over, you know, with whatever the heck's going on, you know, politically, but here's this, this game where you can create your own Island and you can fashion it however you want anything that you want to do or anything that you love you can do with this Island. There's no right way or wrong way to do it. And that's nice. You know, it gives you a sense of control when there's this chaos around you. 8

When the game starts, you get a little avatar that you can customize to look like yourself, if that’s what you want. And your avatar lands on this beautiful island.

The game is all about world building. Your goal is to keep improving your island and turn it into a five-star resort. To buy anything, you use a currency called Bells, which doesn’t cost real money. You work in game to earn Bells, like you can go fishing, insect hunting or grow fruit trees. Then you sell your bounty to these animal characters who live on your island.

You can also trade with other players – who you don’t typically see in the game -- but there are ways to get in contact them. In fact, there’s an Amazon-type website within Animal Crossing, so the players can barter with each other.

And you don’t need to spend Bells on improving your island resort. You can also buy little outfits for your avatar.

STEPHANIE: And like I've spent way more money on way more Bells on outfits than anybody should. Like, I have like a mariachi outfit. What am I going to do with that? But I bought it because it was on sale.

Rae Paoletta is a journalist who wrote about Animal Crossing for the site Inverse, and other media outlets. She also got addicted to Animal Crossing because she was dealing with a personal disappointment.

RAE: For context. I was supposed to have my wedding in March and of course, because of the pandemic, I didn't get to have that! (Laughs.) So basically, my daily life and my Animal Crossing like fake life were becoming blended and the lines between them were just not so clear anymore.

The animal characters on your island speak gibberish, and their translations appear like subtitles.

CLIP: ANIMAL GIBBERISH

The character you interact with the most is called Tom Nook. I thought Tom Nook was a raccoon, wearing a green sweater and a tie. But Rae says, he’s actually a Tanuki.

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RAE: Which is a real animal, like a tanuki is actually a Japanese raccoon dog. And they have a long history in, um, Japanese culture of kind of like similar to how we in the States maybe would say that the Fox is like a trickster or sly. That's kind of how the, tanuki is portrayed.

When Stephanie started playing the game, she had no clue how tricky Tom Nook would turn out to be.

STEPHANIE: When you start, you know, you start with a tent. And I like, I came from this, not knowing anything. So I had no idea what was going on. So I just thought, okay, so I'm supposed to live in a tent for those whole time. Like, this doesn't seem like any fun. And then he like comes and he's like, Oh, if you want a house, you know, I can loan you some money. And Tom himself, you know, he's just, he just comes off as like this really happy-go-lucky, you know, he wants to make sure that everyone's having fun at the Island, but you know, at the end of the day, he's the mayor. So he makes the rules, his nephews own the only dry goods store. There's no kind of like villager vote where you can come together and decide on the policies on the Island. He makes everything like, he makes the laws, but here he's also your landlord. And he's also the, the, the building contractor. Did your feelings about him change over time? Like, it sounds like at first you liked him and then you're like, this is weird and then it just kept playing the game. Did you just sort of get used to them or did you get more annoyed by it? STEPHANIE: Oh, I got more annoyed. If you want to move a building, you have to go pay him 50,000 bells and he gives you this moving kit and he gives it to you. And he kind of has this look on his face, like, ha ha, I got you suckered because when you go do the moving kid, you put it, you place it where you want it to be. And the way that the placement works, it's easy for you to, to miss a line. You could be off just by an inch from what you wanted, and guess what you just, because you're off that one inch, once you, once it's built. And once you give them that 50,000 bells, you have to pay another 50,000 bells to move that same damn building. And I ended up spending like a million bells on that crap. And it really pissed me off because it was like a million bells is a lot of cash, you know, I'm fishing for days to get a million bells.

I asked Rae whether Tom’s conflicts of interest as your landlord, building contractor, and loan officer would be illegal in the real world.

RAE: That’s a great question. Um, I think he definitely should be tried like perhaps at the Hague. This game I assume, is not supposed to be a critique of capitalism, but if it is saying anything about capitalism, what do you think it’s saying? 10

RAE: I think one of the interesting things about Animal Crossing and how capitalist it is, is that you really don't have a choice. If you want to build anything on your Island, if you want to get your Island to the five-star rating, which like unlocks certain other things in the game, you have to be able to buy and build certain things. And so you have to work like it's literally labor. The entire game is built around laboring so that you can buy the things you need to feel good about yourself. And like, if that's not the best description of capitalism, I don't know what it is.

Stephanie agrees.

STEPHANIE: The capitalism gives you these goals that I think a socialist version of it wouldn't be like, what are you going to do? Like collectively like grow potatoes. Like that's not fun. So, it sounds like in a weird way, the game has made you slightly more sympathetic to capitalism. STEPHANIE: Yeah. But at the same time, the minute I get off, I get off Nintendo Switch I'm like universal health care for all, you know? So, it's clearly for me, it's not, you know, translating well, I mean it, at the same time, I'm this like the biggest capitalist that you ever want to see when I'm on my Island.

The funny thing is, when Animal Crossing first came out in 2001, it was a harsher game. Tom Nook was outright angry and condescending. And there were other animal characters trying to shake you down for money. With each new version of the game, Tom Nook was given a makeover until he became a happy-go-lucky booster. And a lot of players like Tom Nook. They think he helps them out. He gives them a loan without interest and teaches them how to be an entrepreneur.

But the whole thing is still pretty weird. Think about Minecraft. It’s a similar game where you build a little world for yourself. But all these kids who get sucked in Minecraft don’t find themselves in debt to a shady real estate developer. Although Stephanie says, if Tom Nook were totally obnoxious, she wouldn’t put up with him.

STEPHANIE: Tom works hard. And he really does seem to care about making the Island a beautiful place for, and he gives you advice on how to make it prettier, like he tries to do things that he thinks will get attract more people. Like he always tries to get this particular singer called KK Slider, who sucks by the way, to come to the Island because he's such an international pop star that if he comes to the Island and does concerts, then that'll make more people want to come visit. It's a dog playing a guitar and not very well. 11

CLIP: KK SLIDER

He does suck, but he’s a very cute dog.

I asked Rae if they were to do an update of Animal Crossing where they got rid of Tom Nook completely, would the game be better? She says no way.

RAE: There's just something that draws me back to this robber baron that is Tom Nook, where I feel like he's become such a central part of the game. There is something about him that makes me feel like, yeah, this is, this is what Animal Crossing is all about. I do think that, you know, he should be tried for his crimes, but I think that the game is not the same without him.

And as they say, the real treasure, were the friends she made along the way.

RAE: I joined a bunch of groups that I actually made a lot of friends from on Twitter, where we would have this Sunday thing called the stalk market. Because in Animal Crossing, if you don't know, you could buy turnips on Sundays. You have to tell your friends like, okay, like my prices are good today. You can come to my island; you could buy the turnoffs they're cheap. And then later in the week you can sell them. So, you flip a profit. So it's funny though, cause you're still, you're also gaming the system. I mean, there's a little Tom Nook in you. RAE: Yeah, it absolutely was, you know, but again, much like capitalism, we're all forced to, uh, become the very thing we hate to a certain degree to survive.

2020 was not about creating perfect worlds. It was about survival, picking your battles, looking for monsters you can slay and deciding you can live with the rest for now.

And in a way, what Tom Nook is teaching you is what the protagonists of many horror movies have learned -- how to survive by channeling the monster inside of you.

CLIP: TOM NOOK RAP

That’s it for this week, thank you for listening. Special thanks to Alex Shepard, Sean T. Collins, Rae Paoletta and my assistant producer Stephanie Billman.

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