Throughout history, movies have been used to process trauma or allow audiences to work through their reactions to potential futures. Collective trauma is often depicted in historical fiction, where recurring themes are shown in a historical context to cope with lingering negative feelings that continue to haunt a culture of people until the modern day. In the film world, war, racism, homophobia, environmental destruction, sexism, and other forms of hate are quite commonly brought up in storyline production to process how the world used to operate and often how it continues to affect us. Living in a post-COVID world, we are beginning to see the trauma of the past three years seep into our entertainment. Even before the pandemic, there have been an incredible amount of films that focus on the idea of a plague of some kind; with COVID being so fresh, the number of films produced thus far is relatively limited but growing. In this article, we’re going to take a look at some of these recent films, particularly the 2021 film The Falls and the 2020 film Songbird, and assess how they go about telling a COVID story and how the virus is used as a plot device.
How do you make a story about COVID? Many times with the historical fiction genre, the creation team has a bit of freedom because the past they are addressing is so far behind us that many either don’t remember every detail or are willing to allow some looseness in the plot. However, COVID is a majorly fresh scar. Seeing those chirpy messages about wearing masks and sticking together to support each other in these tough times is enough for anyone to break out in hives. Because of this, making a story about the period has to include all the elements that led up to one of the most traumatic times in recent memory.
Keeping this in mind, The Falls and Songbird address the pandemic in very different ways. The Falls is a Taiwanese film that features a mother, Pin Wen, and daughter, Xiao Jing, in the early days of COVID-19. When a student in Xiao Jing’s class tests positive, she is forced to quarantine at home. Living together, Pin Wen now can’t work and has to quarantine with her daughter. Throughout their time, they are forced to think about their relationship and work through issues that have long lingered in their home. The Falls has done very well, receiving nominations and awards for its cast and crew, including Best Narrative Feature at the 58th Golden Horse Awards. On the other hand, Songbird terrifyingly takes place in 2024 and shows the United States dealing with year four of quarantine. In this world, the government has become a police state, locking infected individuals in Q-Zones or concentration camps. The story follows a motorbike courier with immunity, Nico Price, and his virtual relationship with Sara Garcia, who lives with her grandmother, Lita. When Lita tests positive, Nico promises to not let Sara be taken. Just as a disclaimer, while Songbird received terrible reviews, how they tell a COVID story is still interesting and worth discussing.
Even though COVID was such a specific time, and both of these films discuss its implications in different ways, the movies also use the pandemic as a plot device to tell age-old stories and make critiques on our society. As was mentioned earlier, most of us remember the worst days of COVID with disturbing clarity, so maintaining the accuracy of the period for the plot is important. However, that does not prevent production companies from dramatizing and romanticizing the time. Telling a love story separated by cruel quarantine measures or being forced to coexist amp up the drama of the quarantine era. Besides the setting, both the disaster romance trope and the rocky isolated familial relationship trope are not new in any sense, but by placing them with a backdrop of COVID, the stories became more relevant and relatable to the current situation.
Even with the established tropes, Songbird and The Falls talk about COVID in very different ways. The Falls shows a realistic portrayal of the pandemic and how it affected individual lives in the early days, including the anxiety of positive tests and dealing with the unknown. Songbird takes the trope of the pandemic and runs with it, showing a not-so-distant future and a frankly horrifying prediction of the state of the country in the next four years after the film was produced. In general, these seem like the main two ways that movies about COVID have been created: in a dystopian not-so-far-off future or a realistic depiction of the pandemic’s impact on individuals. The major difference between them, it seems, is who or what the antagonist is. Songbird quite obviously gives that role to the US government and the fascist police force that is leaving these people to die, whereas The Falls’ antagonist is the disease itself. In general, Taiwan was incredibly strict regarding its COVID-19 prevention measures. Requiring a lengthy quarantine upon entering the country until early 2023 and not lifting the mask mandate until the middle of that year, Taiwan did a great job of keeping the disease under control comparatively. Hence, when watching this movie, the fear and caution centered around this unseeable enemy are taken even more seriously in the cultural context. Rather than having a physical antagonist, The Falls created physical embodiments of the disease to put some of that fear onto. For instance, in one of the first scenes, Pin Wen goes to speak with her boss who is not wearing a mask. He is cold and disinterested, and by not wearing a mask, he is one of the physical embodiments of the COVID-19 antagonist of the film. While COVID is the driving force behind all the misery occurring in Songbird, the true antagonist is the human policies created to deal with it. Songbird puts more blame on humanity. Meanwhile, The Falls recognizes the force behind the negative situation. Even though it puts faces on those behind the catastrophe with all the ‘maskless’ evils, these people are never explicitly blamed for the world the characters are trying to exist.
With the trauma of the pandemic in the past few years, our entertainment is slowly beginning to reflect some of the fear and uncertainty that we all had to face. While on the surface, Songbird and The Falls are both COVID-based disaster films meant to take place in the four-ish year period when fear around the pandemic was at its peak, the way that COVID is used as a plot device sets them apart. It seems that the way to truly make a COVID film is to take well-established tropes but put the tension of the plot in separate entities. While Songbird blames humanity and critiques the American police force and militaristic society, The Falls backs up and uses physical embodiments of COVID-19 as an antagonist, placing the disease as the point of tension. Objects like masks and positive COVID tests were used to facilitate that fear and set apart the good and the bad in both these films, giving the audience an unfortunately relatable trauma to tap into. The film is a great way to process emotions and rehash traumatic history, particularly in the form of historical fiction, placing storylines in a period that the audience lived through. With such fresh trauma, it’s interesting to see the beginning of this shift of virus-disaster films from sci-fi to historical fiction, gaining traction as something that isn’t as unbelievable as it might have been even ten years ago.
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