Okay, so here we all are, sitting in and isolating and being responsible. Well, most of us are. Our options to pass the time are go for a walk or jog, so long as we stay socially distanced, or run through an aerobics program at home, curl up with a good book, listen to some good music or watch the telly.
I opted to put the book aside and watch the telly last night, which meant a perusal of the program guide and Hello! One of the movies on offer was Contagion; all about a deadly virus slowly spreading throughout the world and the various Centres for Disease Control frantically on the hop to develop a vaccine to counter it and save the world’s inhabitants.
Right. Either one of the program managers has a sense of humour (a really black one) or they are genuinely weird enough to think we might want to watch a a film about a deadly disease decimating the global population, while staying inside and sitting out an actual deadly disease that is decimating the global population. Like, what made them think we might want to watch a movie that we are kind of living right now?
On the other hand, perhaps they thought it was eerily relevant to the world’s current situation and so would be a really good choice for weeknight viewing…? Of course, I may be completely off the mark and if I was to see the ratings for last night’s television tune-ins, I might see that a huge number of viewers had tuned in because there’s nothing like watching a fictional fear-raiser while living with a factual one going on right outside our doors, right?
To be honest, I actually did consider (albeit briefly) watching it myself but opted for one of the Alien movies on another channel instead. It was one I hadn’t seen and while I knew there was bound to be some blood and guts, I figured it might be a better option as it was one of the Alien films I hadn’t seen and on the whole, it wasn’t bad. Except for the part where some of the crew were accidentally infected because they unknowingly squished some little round egg type thingies and a fine mist of minute particles became airborne (uh oh) and found their way, disease/virus-like, into the crew members via their skin, their mouths, ears and noses (without them realising) and then developed at warp speed into baby aliens which…well, we all know what happened then so I won’t go into the gory details of them emerging from their human hosts.
And I started wondering if I would have been better off just watching the global disease movie after all. Or better still, watching neither of them and just getting back into my book instead.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it. We all love a scary movie, especially when we know it’s just fiction and once the credits start rolling we can get up and move on with our normal routines. Except we are kind of living in a scary movie in reality right now and have no idea what the running time is, which means there’s no normal at present. We can’t change the channel or just switch it off either. So not good.
On the plus side though, at least the disease we are dealing with right now does not hatch out (really messily!) into baby aliens that want to hunt us down and rip us to shreds! At least that’s something, and eventually what we are dealing with will hopefully run its course and we will be able to venture out again and begin to pick up our lives. Eventually…
I think I should have just stuck with my book.