By Rob Long
Thursday, April 02, 2020
Pretty much every space-alien movie or television show —
from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Mork & Mindy — had
the same basic setup: There are aliens and spaceships and ray guns and flying
saucers — these things exist — but if people discover this, the country will
freak out.
Bill Bixby, the swinging bachelor in the old sitcom My
Favorite Martian, hides the identity of the Martian visitor, played by
veteran character actor Ray Walston, from everyone for the same reason that the
little boy in E.T. doesn’t tell anyone that he’s found a real live space
alien and is hiding him in the closet. Because he knows that grownups will hear
this and go insane and then the government will come in and take his E.T. away.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, like E.T.,
is a terrific and uplifting movie, but at least a third of it is
government-secrecy porn — 18-wheel trucks, disguised as just your average long
hauler, bringing equipment and support to Devils Tower. Barbed wire being
unspooled, black helicopters circling around, government agents tight-lipped
and no-smiles, and all because they know that if we learn aliens are coming to
visit, we’ll all have a conniption.
So it was weird, a few months ago, when some videos
surfaced showing active-duty Navy pilots, flying F-18s, encountering some crazy
nutty flying things they couldn’t identify. And what usually happens is that
these videos are dismissed by the government as drones or planes or something
perfectly reasonable. Nothing to see here, essentially.
But this time — and this happened a few months ago, do
you remember? — this time the Navy said, Yeah, we don’t know what those were.
And the audio on the tape from the pilots, where they express almost speechless
astonishment — how can that thing fly that way? — well, according to the Navy, Yeah,
we’re, like, freaking too.
So for the first time, video showing unidentified aerial
phenomena was confirmed as just that, weird objects flying around the sky at a
speed and in a trajectory that no known technology allows, and it was on
television and cable news for a day, and then everyone just went back to
talking about what Trump tweeted to the guy on CNN.
We didn’t freak or overreact. The country wasn’t plunged
into chaos and warlordism. A weird phenomenon occurred, it was duly noted, and
then we all went back to talking about celebrities.
That snapshot tells us a lot about the American
character. It also tells us something we probably already knew: Hollywood
movies and television shows have a dim view of the American people. In the face
of aliens — or, more relevantly, global contagion — they expect us to forget
everything we know about civility and community. They expect us, at the first
sniffle, to turn to black-market profiteering and to barricade the driveway, to
shut the door against our neighbors, to engage in pagan rituals, to wear
necklaces made of strung-together human skulls . . .
You get the picture. And while that’s overstating it,
this is undeniable: Hollywood fully expects that when the bad stuff comes, the
real danger will come not from killer viruses or alien warships but from the
gun nut next door and the weirdo down the street who keeps a copy of the Constitution
in his back pocket.
Today we find ourselves housebound, cut off from friends,
family, and colleagues, engaged in a collective action against a highly
contagious virus, and so far the only mass hysteria has been that some people
got nervous about their toilet-paper supply.
But who am I to call that “hysteria”? I’m fairly certain
that I have enough of those essential supplies to carry me through the crisis,
but I can’t speak for you or your needs. Don’t criticize people, goes the
saying, until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. How do I know how much
toilet paper you need until I’ve, you know, sat . . .
You get the picture. Hollywood was convinced that we
wouldn’t be able to handle this, whatever “this” is. And yes, a fuzzy and
impossible-to-identify image of a certified UFO isn’t exactly The Day the
Earth Stood Still. But the collective yawn from the general population
suggests that we’re well prepared for when (if) the real thing comes along.
Just as COVID-19 — as awful and deadly as it is — isn’t quite the killer grippe
of the movie Contagion, much less the explosively bloody Ebola of Outbreak,
the almost total lack of public freakouts suggests that we’re all going to be
fine. We may even be more stable and calm than the folks in Hollywood, many of
whom have chucked their belief in nontraditional shamanic medicine and magic
jade eggs and are now screaming at their internist for an antibody test — I
don’t care if there isn’t one yet! I want one! — and sending their
assistant out for hydroxychloroquine, vegan, if they have it.
The American people, whether they knew it or not, had
been preparing for a COVID-19-style event for a decade, at least. Americans in
general (and me in specific) may be terrible at math, but everyone is familiar
with the concept of a “viral video.” We’ve spent the better part of this
century sharing and retweeting and forwarding videos, passing funny memes and
GIFs along to our entire address book, sharing and posting “you won’t believe
what happened next” content to our Facebook wall. Our timelines and
social-media feeds are infested with viral content — we’re not even sure where
it all came from, who sent it first, why it’s in front of us — so the idea of
being touched by a virus that came from someone with whom we have the thinnest
connections? We’ve been living that way since aol.com.
And we know how to protect ourselves from it, too: log
off, run antivirus software, turn the computer off for a minute, and when it’s
cooled off, turn it back on. Sound familiar?
Working from home? Big deal. Our devices and software
have enabled many of us to take work everywhere. The American worker has long
since adjusted to late-evening emails and urgent texts from the boss over the
weekend. The COVID-19 edict to work from home is, for these Americans,
redundant — most of us carry our offices in our pockets, able to edit and
forward and collaborate on any document, on any task, anywhere. Connectivity
has already extended the working hours into the home hours — which is only fair
when you consider how much time employees spend mindlessly surfing the Web at
work.
The surge in videoconferencing comes just at the time
when ordinary Americans have mastered the tricks to looking good onscreen. All
over the country people are propping their laptops on a stack of books — when
you look slightly up, you appear thinner and more youthful — and blurring the
background of the home office that was, before COVID, a closet with a squeaky
door and a bunch of old Swiffers. Americans have been starring in their own
shows on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok for years — they are, I
assure you, ready for their close-up.
Americans are ready, in general. Maybe not cheerful about
it — the virus is serious business, and there are lots of tears left to be shed
— but to the average American, none of this seems like something to get
hysterical about. Some Navy pilots saw a UFO? Whatevs. We’ve all gotta stay in
because of a deadly virus? No prob. We’re Americans, we adapt. Even if we do,
somehow, run out of toilet paper, we’ll shrug and figure out a workaround.
You get the picture. Hollywood doesn’t.
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