This Isn’t A Movie

You know that part in the movies where no matter how much they scream or shout nobody believes the lead character? There’s a ghost, a virus and everyone will be dead by next week but to the infuriatingly oblivious in-the-film people, the heroes’ ramblings are certified crazy.

That is what this feels like.

Stealing out of my house to grab some groceries after a week of self-isolation, life is just like those disaster films.

The potentially deadly coronavirus has recently taken hold in a small country of 2,5 million people. Thousands dead around the world and many more fighting for their lives on too few ventilators is pretty much every inch of the thumping international news and yet many people I see lingering, chatting, standing far too close must think that they’re invincible.

The Invincibles, as you may have guessed, are the characters you would be yelling at from the couch.

They’re the folks doing idiotic things like ignoring calls to stay home, keep social distance, wash their hands with soap and stay the hell out of nightclubs, bars and restaurants in the face of looming disease, disaster and worse.

Movie convention dictates that they’ll die in cruel and unusual ways, some wishing they had listened as they or a loved one succumbs to an unspoken ‘I told you so’ with a dramatic intake of breath.

It’s all so predictable yet here we go, hurtling through the cringeworthy plot points of a B-grade pandemic movie like we haven’t seen it all before.

Cut back to the mall and the lead characters are the ones preaching doom and gloom to people getting too close to them in the check-out queue. They get in, they get out and only when they absolutely have to leave their house.

The Leads are easily identifiable because they’re the ones The Invincibles look at as if they’re insane.

They cower below coughs. They walk briskly away from someone trying to suppress a sneeze and their hands are starting to turn a shade lighter than the rest of their body for all the washing.

In the movies, they’d be the ones most likely to survive.

Their diligence, adherence to life-saving global health directives and commitment to being entirely absent from everything non-essential, would earn them enough cinematic brownie points to reach the final scene but this isn’t a movie.

And the coronavirus doesn’t work like that.

It’s transfered through the drops of a cough or a sneeze or on an unwashed hand and the Heroes, Invincibles and Leads are each susceptible to infection. We can all be infected and not know it. We all can spread the disease without symptoms. We can all be the ones who die.

In the movies, there’s always somewhere you can go.

There’s a place people have escaped to where they’ve found some life-giving water source, an immune peak or a verdant hidden valley, but this…

This is everywhere and we’re all ripe and ready hosts. Our elders, they say, even more so – which is why it is foolish to race towards the village or to the north where there are even fewer of our scant hospitals and purported 18 ICU beds.

The novel coronavirus science is green and the disease affects people differently so the best we can do is what we are told.

Stay home, wash our hands, remain calm, stop spreading fake panic-inducing news and slow the spread of infection.

Even in the movies, the hospital beds run out.

The medication dwindles, brave nurses are overwhelmed and, at worst, valiant doctors must choose who lives and who dies. The difference between film and real life is that the actors follow their grim death rattles with a grin. The director calls “cut!”, they all break for lunch and the cast lives to see another day.

Not so in the real world where dead is dead.

Where dead means gone but, with a little effort, it’s also preventable.

This isn’t a movie, but perhaps the cinema has prepared us to evaluate our character in times of crisis. And the one-question quiz is simply this: Who will we be when public health and lives dependent on it…

The Hero everyone thinks is overreacting but keeps speaking truth to power?

Or the unforgivable Invincible choosing fatal business as usual because they refust to hear the screams from the couch…

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