Chapter 1
Coronavirus capitalism
Coronavirus capitalism is a moment of rupture and convergence.1 Our lives have been ripped out of their ordinariness and placed in what before was largely the province of fiction and film. The rupture we have experienced raises questions about the social through its lack. That is, social distancing means we have not had much opportunity to engage in normal social interaction, sparking questions about society itself. As this rupture in the ordinary has caused people to reassess what is important in their own lives, it also triggered a crisis of capitalism that left an abyss, a question: how do we manage this crisis from an economic and political perspective?
The coronavirus crisis has been a shock to our collective social system but in March 2020, as COVID-19 was beginning to hit the United States hard, author and filmmaker Naomi Klein told us not to be shocked by how the system would respond. Drawing on her 2007 bestseller, The Shock Doctrine, Klein created a video essay entitled “Coronavirus Capitalism – And How to Beat It.”2 In it, Klein described how the powerful would use COVID-19 as an opportunity to handout billions to the financial sector and rollback welfare policies. Like wars, stock market crashes and natural disasters of the past, the capitalist class would not let this crisis go to waste. But Klein also argued that crises are not just tools for the 1% to amass more wealth and power, but also for the 99% to reorganize aspects of society to at least minimize the damage done, medically and financially but also socially and ecologically. We are faced with two possibilities: the potential for positive social change that serves the interests of the many or a further collective crushing under the jackboot of oppression worn by the few. Thus, the crisis produces a rupture in our possible post-COVID-19 future. As Christian Fuchs, Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster, parsimoniously proposes, “the coronavirus crisis is a rupture and existential crisis of society that poses both potentials for the development of socialism and solidarity on the one side and slavery and fascist dictatorship on the other side.”3
As our lives are ruptured by the silent transmission of a deadly disease many of us are experiencing an existence of a never-before-seen convergence. During the different stages of lockdowns and social distancing orders our lives and social roles have converged into what Fuchs calls the “supra-time-space of the home.”4 Everything we do and all the social roles we embody have been stuffed into our often meagre shelters. Whether you live in a large house or a small apartment, the space that used to be dedicated to a certain type of activity – sleeping, watching TV, cooking, etc. – has increasingly converged into the space that includes all other aspects of our lives. Normally we would have places of work, leisure and friendship, but during times of restricted assembly and closures of indoor spaces, our lives have moved to our homes. Before the pandemic, this compartmentalized division of our lives into different locations helped to divide up our social roles as workers, spouses, friends, parents and citizens not only across space, but also across time. Though the standard 9 to 5 job was already drifting into the rear-view mirror of time before the pandemic, COVID-19 has accelerated this process substantially, especially for non-essential workers. Moving many if not all our social roles into our homes means those roles are no longer constrained to particular times, those moments when we inhabit the set location of that role. As the workplace moves home for many of us, our role as worker extends all day, as it does for all the other social roles. Thus, we have convergence into the supra-time-space of our home. Every day, all the time, we are all things converged.
Coronavirus capitalism is a convergence and rupture of the everyday. Our “normal” lives have been ripped at the seams and spasmodically sown together through the location of the home. At the wider, institutional level, our social systems are rupturing in response to economic and political problems posed by the virus, and the disjuncture between the two polls of possible responses. At the same time, we also have a sense of convergence at the econo-political level in that the preferred path of the elite has been decided. Therefore, coronavirus capitalism is also a convergence and rupture of the social in its large and small forms.
The situation suggests, perhaps, that the only thing that matters now is how we ordinary people understand the situation around us, and how we respond to it. Here again rupture and convergence are central. As our ruptured lives have converged into our homes the windows to our outside world are further and further mediated. It is no surprise that a website like Window Swap was created as a “quarantine project” that allows one to peer through the windows of website users from around the world,5 reminding us that Microsoft's operating system was aptly named. Our mediated lives allow us to communicate and remake the social in ways otherwise hardly imaginable. Social distancing has only to be physical, while we can still engage in many aspects of social life. Yet, the neoliberal use of such technology is what initially triggered the convergence of the everyday as we know it. Neoliberalism, a doctrine that opposes state intervention into the economy while advocating for the rights of individuals, particularly concerning private property rights and entrepreneurial freedom,6 meant our advanced communication technology has expanded our working life and role through the omnipresence of emails and the interconnection between social media and professional networking and oversight. While the coronavirus sped up the process of convergence, profit-centered politics had already initiated the erosion of more distinct notions of place and time.
During the pandemic, the mediated world is not just the main window we use to understand society, but perhaps our only window. We understand the situation we are in largely if not entirely through the mediated content we consume. If our understanding of the world around us is mediated, knowing the content of the media is important. But we would be remiss to think we only perceive the social, political and economic world through factual content– or content presented as fact – about the social, political and economic. We do not understand our world just through the lens of the news media. Especially in our converged world of the home we may be more likely to converge our thoughts and begin to interpret the allegories presented to us in the realm of film and apply them to the real world around us– as is the case in this book.
Coronavirus Capitalism Goes to the Cinema sets out to read films as a way of understanding the world around us, but this understanding is not being read through the eyes of the directors, screenwriters and producers. These creators of films encode meaning in their story. They present us with a fictional world and wish to tell us something about it, and in turn about our world and ourselves. But we do not always have to take on and accept their messages and meanings. As the scholar Stuart Hall rightly pointed out we can decode these texts differently and read them in unexpected ways.7 We can, and often do, interpret these texts in ways not intended by these creators. In fact, moments of crises often result in these different forms of decoding, of understanding the world around us, not least of all during this pandemic. For example, I have heard many friends' stories of panic seeing people on their TV screens greet each other with a hug (shouldn't they be six feet apart?!) or wonder why people on screen are talking to each other without wearing masks. These are momentary thoughts in which our real-world experience shapes the way we view what we see onscreen.
To watch films through the lens of our lived experience, however divorced from the reality presented onscreen, is difficult to suppress. The media refracts to us not just the world that created it, but also the world that we understand when we consume it. That is why many old films do not stand the test of time; many of their representations, messages and jokes have become so off-putting as to barely be watchable because our sensibilities have changed over time. Since crises speed up time through the process of both rapid rupture and rapid convergence, we interpret even recently made films in a completely different light. This book (re)interprets recent films as they are refracted through the lens of the coronavirus pandemic, presenting not only an alternative perspective on the films themselves but also tells us about politics in a time of COVID. This short book takes us on a journey through the tales only film can tell in order to explore something deeper about our society in a time of crisis. Through these moving images we find our blind spots, our non-COVID contagions, our voluntary collective self-isolation and our ideological vaccines.
We begin our exploration of the outcomes of our neoliberal approach to the pandemic in Chapter 2 by analyzing the films Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame which deal with a pandemic of sorts. The films' villain, Thanos, has amassed all the magical Infinity Stones which grant him the power to kill half of life on earth with the snap of his fingers. Our world, even with COVID-19, is not nearly as bleak, but the ideologies of such superhero movies filter into our world and shape the way we view moments of crisis, and who we label villains and heroes. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared himself to a superhero when praising his ambitious economic plan for furthering neoliberalism, but he and Donald Trump only imitated the Malthusian villain that is Thanos. The chapter explores the similarities while also suggesting that these Marvel films themselves represent their heroes as a moderate neoliberal solution to their more right-wing evil-doer enemies.
In Chapter 3, we discuss how the handling of the coronavirus pandemic is often presented to us through the metaphor of war, with World War I standing out as a point of comparison for two particular reasons. First, the “Spanish flu” pandemic broke out during the war. Second, the First Great War was fought in the trenches, a warfare style that corresponds metaphorically to our hunkered down home living during lockdowns. The film 1917 does an excellent job of depicting the war, and we use it to explore its underlying theme in relation to the COVID context. The film follows two young soldiers on their dangerous journey to deliver a message to a friendly battalion to prevent certain doom. This chapter asks and answers the questions, what messages has our neoliberal system received and which messages arrived too late?
In Chapter 4, we stick with the war metaphor by looking through the eyes of a ten-year old boy in Hitler's Germany to see the parallels between the mobilization of World War II and the war against COVID-19. The boy in question is the titular character from Taika Waititi's 2019 war comedy Jojo Rabbit, which explores the role and power of ideology, namely fascism. We compare that with our own ideological struggle with neoliberalism and, looking at the psycho-social thought of Rollo May, we explore the notion of psyche-self versus ego-self in relation to this film and our own positionality. The analysis presented in this chapter reexamines these ideas in light of the pandemic, asking if the lessons learned by the characters can be applied to our situation and its neoliberal context.
Jojo Rabbit – spoiler alert – ends in liberation with the fascists defeated. Through the character of Elsa, a Jewish girl who has been hiding in Jojo's house, the film explores the notions of confinement and freedom which is applied to our own setting of confinement to our homes during the pandemic. This begs the question, what does freedom look like once the pandemic subsides? In Chapter 5 we answer this question by looking at the famous American anarchist Emma Goldman, a woman who personally struggled with confinement and spent her life working for a radical kind of freedom. The chapter goes on to compare the representation of freedom and the struggle for it in Jojo Rabbit with another surreal take on World War II, Quintin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Both films feature a female character that manages to escape confinement by the Nazis, but their personal liberation stories are very different and provide us with distinct lessons to apply to our COVID-19 context.
Anti-lockdown demonstrations provide a further look at freedom and the neoliberal ideology. Chapter 6 makes the link between protesters in such demonstrations and characters in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood. Returning to Rollo May, the chapter interrogates his understanding of freedom as compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and that of the characters of the film. The chapter looks at freedom and destiny and brings in the idea of the social contract, which in its present form is the real villain of our own story. Collectively we have accepted the promise of neoliberalism despite its problems and have signed up to its social contract as demonstrated repeatedly in elections despite the available alternatives in the voting booth.
Chapter 7 examines the clever detective drama Knives Out and compares the protagonist Marta, a nurse who is covering up her accidental lethal poisoning of a patient, to health care workers during the pandemic. Marta is nursing an old murder mystery novel writer who financially supports his family. Informed by George Lakoff's Moral Politics, we explore the family dynamic in the film as an allegory for capitalism and the role of non-white immigrant health care workers whose lives are on the line during a pandemic because of the failures of neoliberalism. The interpretation of the film presented in this chapter suggests a revolu...
