The doors to Jurassic World burst open. The monorail brings the boys into the park. Crowds stuff the main straight of the park, a street similar to Main Street U.S.A. Travelers, tourists and tyrannosaurus junkies track their paths, holding large maps. Gaggles of dinosaur fans gather by statues and computer-generated displays of famous dinosaurs.
It’s hot. It’s sweaty. People are calling out, laughing, jiving together. It’s a good time. A great time, in fact. All of these people gathered together to celebrate their time at a theme park.
“Like all of a sudden, the most terrifying thing about ‘Jurassic Park’ is the social proximity of crowds, not the fact that dinosaurs are trying to take over the island,” said Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University and founding director for the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “And I suppose this is very natural and we’ve seen precedents for it relatively recently.”
He added, “With coronavirus, within a month and certainly by the time we get to now, we’ve become so conscious of what constitutes good, safe and ethical behavior. And we become very conscious of what constitutes flying in the face of that good, safe and ethical behavior. We read that new set of interpretations of reality into everything we see. Most of what we see on television, or in movies, is stuff that was made before that.”
Maybe it’s a ’90s basketball game on TV. Or possibly a new video of a pool party in the Ozarks. Uncomfortable video footage of crowds and fans unnerve us. Videos of friends touching each other’s faces, sharing food and breathing near each other rattles the nerves.
All movies are old now
Don Schechter, professor of the practice in film and media studies at Tufts University, didn’t realize that there would be such a change in how he consumed media until he was watching something on TV around late April during the coronavirus pandemic.
Characters weren’t social distancing. They weren’t wearing masks. They weren’t taking safety precautions to avoid a virus.
They were acting normal. The old way of normal. Not the old normal.
“I’m like ‘Oh, they’re touching. Oh, they’re like eating the same food.’ Those things that are natural in normal times felt so uncomfortable and weird to watch,” he said.
Discomfort settles in when watching shows and movies where people are touching their faces or gathering in large groups since public health experts have advised us to avoid participating in those situations, Schechter said.
But all television shows, movies and sports games recorded and filmed before the pandemic show us that alternate reality — the reality of a world we knew before we started working from home and quarantining ourselves.
Because of this, rewatching a movie made before the coronavirus pandemic could be seen as an old film. It may be odd to consider a 2019 movie as “old” or “outdated,” but those films and television shows don’t represent the the reality we’re experiencing right now. Movies filmed before the COVID-19 pandemic began don’t display the modern world, making them feel older and less relevant, according to Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University and founding director for the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.
The emotional response to old movies like that could be heartbreaking. Seeing crowds at “Jurassic Park” or at a throwback NBA playoff game may make us yearn for the past and may upset us for not having a chance to be apart of that old world.
But sometimes we yearn for the world we miss so dearly, Thompson said.
“The other response, though, could be one that’s actually a more cheerful idea,” he said. “We haven’t been able to be in a crowd. There’s this sense that everybody’s having to social distance. Isn’t it lovely to see, you know, a little slice of what things were like before that?”
It’s why the Michael Jordan documentary “The Last Dance” succeeded so well for ESPN. It represented a nostalgic view of the world, one we yearn to see again.
What will movies be like?
What will movies and TV look like after the pandemic is over? Or when the pandemic reaches a level where production can resume? It’s too early to speculate, Thompson said. But we can look back at history for a clue.
After 9/11, comedy shows largely ignored the terrorist attacks. “Friends” featured a brief cameo of the event when Joey wore a New York Fire Department shirt, for example. The New York-based “Sex in the City” mentioned how shopping was the “patriotic” thing to do, a passing reference to shops calling for people to shop to help the economy deal with the fallout of the attack.
Dramas, though, were quick to jump on the terrorist event. Films and shows centered around the FBI, terrorist plots and the military were released in bunches, Thompson said. This went against traditional thinking that people would resist disaster movies following 9/11.
No one knows what movies will be like when the pandemic ends. Productions filmed immediately after stay-at-home orders end will have to include masks and some cultural references to the disease’s spread, though, Thompson said.
“I don’t think we’re going to see, all of a sudden, no more superhero movies or, all of a sudden, more superhero movies,” he said. “We’re probably going to see more superhero movies, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the virus.”
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