Rolling Covid in Pop Culture Thread

Reading the surprise fifth book in Dave Hutchison's Fractured Europe Sequence, one of the near-future events of the earlier books was a global flu pandemic. It's back in flashbacks and there is so much mask and lockdown talk, many asides about stupid Americans refusing to social distance and dying by the bushel.

(also would recommend the series if you're into Gibson and Le Carre)

I only learned this existed a week ago, ordered it immediately.

Died Suddenly is the newest antivax crap trending right now

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/11/22/new-died-suddenly-film-pushes-unfounded-depopulation-claims-about-covid-19-vaccine

"Glass Onion" !

Must be close to two years since I've posted in a Covid-related thread...The third season of The Morning Show is the most pointed attempt I've seen to document the first few months of the pandemic. It's a flashback episode meant to fill in the gap between the end of S2--where Jennifer Aniston's character comes down with the virus and does her show remotely--and S3, which takes place present day.

It's not great, but it did more or less capture the strangeness of that time.

I'm trying to think if I've seen any other recreation of those early days in pop culture.

I see a lot of books--non-fiction, not popular culture--but it'll be a while before I'm ready to read a book on that year, if ever.

From upthread:

Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn is set in the present day, and it’s a MASSIVE RELIEF to finally see a film or TV thing in which mask-wearing is completely normal, right down to a non-masker losing their rag at a supermarket checkout person, and people at a parent-teacher conference fiddling with their masks while speaking, or getting tsked for dicknosing.

― dark end of the st. maud (sic), Friday, January 21, 2022 4:07 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Really catches the awkwardness of social distancing too.

^^"Present Day": Spring/Summer 2020

Drive My Car and Worst Person In The World both end with scenes set in the mask-wearing present without the scripts needing to comment on it.
― symsymsym, Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Saw both of those, and the not-commenting was interesting; COVID was just a part of life. in The Morning Show, it's an unfolding story (interrupted by other stories: Jan. 6, Roe, etc.).

https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/stress-positions-no-movie-has-better-understood-how-mean-we-were-during-covid

Ooh, I'm interested. I do wish there were more pop culture depictions of how the pandemic fucked everyone up for a while, especially since its effects are still reverberating.