Multimedia Institute presents Unfiltered Cinematic Thoughts The Quarantine Film Diaries from the Age of the Pandemic Pavle Levi This text was first published inASAP/J (the open-access platform of ASAP/Journal) DESIGN: Andrej Dolinka Three classic dystopian science fiction films This text will itself not abide by the rules of proper from the 1970s — Soylent Green (1973), distancing. Rather than respect common distinctions and The Omega Man (1971), and Logan’s Run clear-cut lines of separation, it will freely, in an unfiltered (1976) — provide useful metaphors for some manner, intertwine cinematic fiction and today’s reality. The aspects of the present moment. Made at coronavirus has temporarily brought the world to a halt. In the time when the post-apocalyptic genre this interregnum, to appropriate Antonio Gramsci’s well- was in full swing, and world capitalism known formulation, a great variety of strange, impure (at was beginning a sustained transformation into its now- times contradictory), and morbid symptoms appear…01 widespread neoliberal (post-industrial, speculative, and viciously anti-welfare) phase, these films — these “cinematic models” (as one may wish to call them by analogy with the currently oft-evoked scientific “prediction models”) — incite thinking about 01 Gramsci’s exact words are: “In this the socio-economic, ideological, and political interregnum a great variety of morbid underpinnings of the COVID-19 pandemic culture of symptoms appear.” See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks distancing and isolation. (London: The Electric Book Company, 1999), 556. [1] Soylent Green Or, People on the Stairs ichard Fleischer’s Soylent Green, set To be sure, in Soylent Green’s dystopia, no one has 02 So polluted is this world that beautiful and healthy in a New York City of economic and it easy.02 But the socio-ecological cataclysm, much Nature (oceans, animals, fields) exists in it only as an archive of spectacular moving images, which one gets to ecological catastrophe in the year 2022, like the coronavirus, is no “great equalizer” either.03 see — if one is lucky (privileged) — projected onto gigantic may have been a case of futuristic Patriarchal white masculinity is still hegemonic. Sexism screens as one lays dying in a hospital for assisted Rscience-fiction five decades ago when it was made. is unbridled.04 Small groups of wealthy corporate types suicide. Today, less than two years before it is supposed to take (let us not forget the celebrities), who inhabit the high- 03 Charles Trepany, “Madonna calls coronavirus ‘the great place, it seems more like an educational film done in the rises and keep away from the filthy and dangerous equalizer’ in controversial message from her bathtub,” style of hyperbolic realism. streets, are clearly suffering the least. They rely on USA Today (March 23, 2020). the services provided by the combined apparatuses 04 “The shadow pandemic: Violence against women and Soylent Green depicts an overpopulated society of private support, leisure, and population control: girls and COVID-19,” report, UN Women (April, 2020). suffering the consequences of uncontrolled greed and personal assistants, concierge doctors and firefighters, protracted disregard for the environment. The opening concubines (referred to as “furniture”), and the police.05 05 Alex Williams and Jonah Engel Bromwich, “The Rich Are Preparing for Coronavirus Differently,”The New York credits sequence, a synoptic montage of documentary- Those who are employed by the wealthy and by the Times (March 5, 2020). like photographs (both in color and black and white), system (whatever is left of it) struggle significantly more, effectively establishes the theme of rampant twentieth but above all they still feel fortunate to be able to get 06 Consider in this light the dramatic disproportion century industrialization leading to drastic depletion of by. Finally, there is the mostly undifferentiated mass of between the number of COVID-19 cases in different borrows of New York, the U.S. city most affected by the resources, severe food and water shortages, extreme disenfranchised people, by far the largest segment of illness: the fewest number of cases is to be found among poverty, and irreparable pollution (the glass-house the population, who simply seem to be written off, left the residents of Manhattan; the highest number of cases effect). The film particularly emphasizes unchecked to die in the overcrowded streets.06 is to be found in the working class neighborhoods of corporate domination and an unbridgeable class divide Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. that separates the extremely rich 1% from the poverty- stricken rest, the 99% of the population. This situation is given powerful visual expression in of interest in prioritizing, and ensuring, a safe place the film’s bizarre mise-en-scene. As police detective of residence for all people, must be recognized as an Frank Thorn (Charlton Heston) enters the building elementary, structural failure of capitalist democracy: where he lives, he literally has to walk over heaps of a failure that is, furthermore, directly, causally related lethargic, semi-dead people — piles of bodies stretching to a larger network of interconnected problems that across hallways and stairs, all the way to the door of define today’s malfunctioning (in some places, as this his apartment! A heavily armed guard sits there and pandemic has made blatantly clear, practically non- protects the sanctity of Thorn’s abode. existent) neoliberal institutions of public health.08 The privacy of one’s home (even a home as modest as Thorn’s happens to be) — the ability to effectively seclude one’s self from the rest of the world, to shelter- in-place or self-isolate, if need be — is here clearly cast as a tremendous class and racial privilege. Even 07 Va Lecia Adams Kellum, “The Intersection of when it is necessary, for reasons like the current Homelessness, Race, and the COVID-19 Crisis,” National Alliance to End Homelessness (April 7, 2020). need to safeguard one’s health amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the quarantine is a luxury that is not readily Roberta K. Timothy, “Coronavirus is not the great equalizer — race matters,” The Conversation 07 available to everyone. In a world that does not wish (April 6, 2020). to recognize any alternatives to the logic of private property, many — way too many — are deprived of the 08 Katy O’Donnell, “Trump’s libertarian housing regulator refuses to bail out mortgage firms with public money,” basic human right to have a home. This shameful lack Politico (April 16, 2020). 09 Danielle Zoellner, “Coronavirus: Jeff Bezos, world’s While the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants in the Speculating about the prehistoric past, Friedrich Engels richest man, asks public to donate to Amazon relief second decade of the twenty-first century experience wrote: “At this time, owing to the continual uncertainty fund,” Independent (March 24, 2020). tremendous suffering, the biggest corporations, such of food supplies, cannibalism seems to have arisen, 10 Abdi Latif Dahir, “‘Instead of coronavirus, the hunger as Soylent Industries and Amazon, keep growing their and was practiced from now onwards for a long time.”11 will kill us.’ A global food crisis looms,” The New York wealth despite the pandemics, the ecological cataclysms, Extending Engels’s line of reasoning, Soylent Green’s Times (April 22, 2020). and the collapse of all but the most oppressive social “cinematic model” projects that the twenty-first century 11 Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, institutions. For instance, Amazon is maximizing its will literally be the age of commodified cannibalism. and the State, online edition, Marx/Engels Internet profits from shipping and delivering goods to clients who Archive (2000), 13. have temporarily been immobilized in unprecedented “Life under capitalism,” Mark Steven recently wrote, “is 12 Mark Stevens, “Reading Marx on Halloween,” Jacobin numbers (due to various quarantine and curfew orders). the experience of horror, the irreversible liquefying of (October 31, 2018). At the same time, the richest corporation in the world human substance and its necrophagic consumption.”12 is hypocritically demonstrating its “humane” character Or, as Frank Thorn realized when, following Soylent’s by asking its clients to also contribute to a relief fund production process, he came face to face with the it started on behalf of its contract employees who fundamental truth of capitalist democracy: are working during the pandemic.09 Similarly, Soylent “Soylent Green is people!” Industries are entrepreneurially turning widespread hunger into a source of wealth by processing dead people into a novel, branded article of food called “Soylent Green.”10 isolation... [2] The Omega Man “They sure don’t make pictures like that anymore!” os Angeles, 1977. It is two years after a plague pandemic triggered by biological warfare. The U.S. President’s strategy of Colonel Robert Neville (once again played by “economy first, lives second” (protect Charlton Heston) is a military scientist and the Lthe elite’s wealth, then worry about ordinary people’s ultimate beneficiary of centuries of racial and gender 13 David Smith, “Trump says keeping US Covid-19 deaths health) has tragically backfired. Instead of the “very discrimination: a white man, he is the sole survivor to 100,000 would be a ’very good job,’” The Guardian good job of only 100,000 dead,” almost the entire immune to the plague because he has had timely access (March 29, 2020). world’s human population has been wiped out.13 In to a preventive treatment.15 He injected himself with 14 “Trump Cuts Funds for World Health Organization as developing his cinematic “disease model,” director Boris an experimental vaccine he was developing when the Oxfam Warns Pandemic Could Push Half a Billion into Poverty,” Democracy Now! (April 15, 2020). Sagal does not go as far as accusing the World Health pandemic broke out.