Pandemic Multiplex

The most nerve-touching moment of Ari Aster’s new movie, Eddington, isn’t its unflinchingly violent finale or brutal sendup of teens worshipping at the altar of Floyd. It’s the director of cerebral A24 hits like Hereditary and Midsommar’s intimate knowledge of what a smalltown grocery store actually looks like. 

Amid the shelves stocked with Food Club private-label brands and an anemic produce section, Joaquin Phoenix’s put-upon, asthmatic Sheriff Joe Cross has his political awakening. Already bristling at mask mandates that don’t account for his own respiratory condition, he intervenes with the full force of the law when employees boot a naked-faced senior citizen. 

It’s the catalyst for his seemingly quixotic mayoral bid against hicklib Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal riffing–whether intentionally or not–on his own SJW online persona). It’s also a scene that proves Aster is searching, far more preoccupied with sussing out some semblance of truth than enjoying the spoils of his status as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after artists.

With its polarizing critical notices and audience reception, Eddington has cemented its status as the best release of the year thus far, a film that has dominated the online world in ways movies rarely do anymore. Regardless of what one believes about COVID, the George Floyd riots, or Big Tech’s domination of our diminished West, it broaches topics that have long been the sole territory of the minds behind South Park. 

However, I’m not that interested in writing another Eddington dissection, both because it's the subject of every other thinkpiece this week and because it’s best experienced blind on a weekend multiplex pilgrimage. I’m interested in why Aster’s COVID interrogation is the first to elicit a deluge of commentary when Hollywood has remained positively obsessed with the pandemic’s ramifications since it began its modest return to form after the lockdowns in our biggest cities finally abated. 

My own COVID awakening began in early June of 2020. Like Joaquin’s Sheriff Joe, I pushed back against early mask adopters like The Fresh Market and Costco that catered to the UMC white bougie liberalism of their core demo. But then, Hallmark announced the enhanced safety protocols that would resurrect its pipeline of Christmas movies just in time for the 2020 holiday season. By the time the next Jurassic World sequel resumed production in the early summer and pioneered how Hollywood would press on in the face of this viral existential threat, I began to fully see through the bullshit.

If we were in this together–if the virus were so dangerous that we couldn’t eat indoors or shop in 150,000 square foot stores unmasked, then surely we could get by with drive-in movies and streaming the thousands of films already in existence for an extra year or so.

A film shoot is the most sweaty, nasty, and intimate working environment this side of a submarine. As much as I love the movies, they should have paused production in the wake of an event that merited such utter destruction of our daily lives—if things were actually as bad as we were told. 

From the first films of its post-COVID slate, Hollywood admitted it knew this too. Summer 2021’s two horror hits, M. Night Shaymalan’s Old and James Wan’s Malignant, set up Big Pharma as their central villains who wrought havoc on the everyman. Not to be outdone, COVID-protocol MVP Jurassic World: Dominion followed in 2022 by diving headfirst into biological warfare and slick corporate scientists using the world as their lab space with a clear stand-in for Anthony Fauci as the ringmaster. 

For Hollywood, such palpable ambivalence makes perfect sense. As the passport to social capital, masking and vaxxing became the ultimate status symbol during the period. However, too much adherence to the party line could decimate the film industry because it lacked the insulation of other media forms. Americans would always stream TV and listen to music at home. Print underwent a pandemic resurgence thanks to BookTok. Concerts were destined from Day 1 to be the central post-pandemic outlet. 

However, COVID proved that actual moviegoing wasn’t really necessary for most. Studios that had longed for decades to bypass theaters made their streaming play with simultaneous theatrical and VOD releases and shortened exclusive windows at multiplexes. Sure, the execs realized soon after that the old system was preferable with many finding themselves out of a job for their privileging of streaming, but the damage was done.

COVID protocols blew up budgets to such extents that the last two Mission: Impossibles can never really reach the black while unions salivated at the chance to welcome utterly useless new crew members into the fold.

Theoretically, moviegoing is a preferable experience, but theaters’ lack of attention to upkeep and blind eyes to bad behavior have made the inflated $17 matinee ticket a gamble in an era when lockdowns have distorted our already tenuous social mores.

In The Coronation: Essays from the Covid Moment, philosopher Charles Eisenstein writes about pandemic resistance, “The argument comes down to whether our systems of knowledge production (science and journalism) are sound, whether our medical and political authorities are trustworthy. To doubt public health orthodoxy is to answer, no, they are not sound, they are not trustworthy.” Though he doesn’t explicitly address culturemaking, Eisenstein’s conclusions have proven endlessly applicable and especially relevant to America’s movie industry. 

Such explains why the COVID-coded film has become 2025's most popular genre. Universal opted for a full-throttle reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise that made Scarlett Johansson the new face of the brand with this summer’s aptly titled Jurassic World: Rebirth. The only holdover from the previous installment (besides dinosaurs) is a Big Pharma antagonist in the form of Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a CEO who hires Johansson and her mercenaries on a video game-like quest to extract cancer-killing dino DNA from the latest breeds of land, sea, and air prehistoric creatures so he can make billions off an experimental treatment.

Its admirable effects and wonderfully crafted action sequences aside, the film is unable to reconcile this clear political subtext and its need to provide a kid-appealing B narrative thanks to the inorganic insertion of a stranded family into the proceedings. Nevertheless, Rebirth persists with its less-than-tacit pandemic gestures. For most of its life, Jurassic Park was a critique of bending science to the whims of spectacle. But in the last half decade, it's become our most sustained allegory of COVID overreach. 

Though raking in the equivalent of the new Jurassic Park’s opening hour during its entire theatrical run, A24’s late-spring underperformer Death of a Unicorn serves as a much more potent critique of COVID tyranny and Big Pharma’s all-out assault on the American family. Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play a father-daughter duo working through the messy death of the family matriarch. A preening midlevel lawyer, Rudd’s Elliot hopes to worm his way into a higher echelon via a weekend retreat to the home of his dying pharmaceutical-titan boss (Richard E. Grant). But when they discover the unicorn that Elliot hit on the ride up has the power to obliterate illness, the narrative turns into a Chaucerian morality tale with iterations of the mythical creatures that resemble one of JP’s velociraptors more than the entities in so many fairy tales. 

As the company behind both Unicorn and Eddington, A24 has exhibited a recent preoccupation with deflating liberalism’s excesses. A decade ago, Grant’s evil CEO would have been a Cheney-like neocon. But, on death’s doorstep, his top priority is reserving the dwindling supply of unicorn blood for his “friends at Davos,” in between the phone calls he and his wife (Téa Leone) make to a vague Third World-centric NGO. Never before have those wanting to eat the rich been offered such a diverse buffet.

In those early Bush years, no movie franchise took the mantle of 70s right-coded flicks like Dirty Harry and Death Wish as energetically as 28 Days Later. With its rage virus lab leaked by ne’er-do-well PETA activists and treatment of 2A as the bedrock of dystopian success, it served as a much more direct prophetic assessment of the COVID age than Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. While its long-in-development sequel, 28 Years Later, avoids the particulars of virology, it remains enthralled by the aftermath of creating societies built on a quasi-religious relationship to disease. With original writer-director team Alex Garland and Danny Boyle at the helm, the Scottish village that has turned zombies into totems and tribalism into the status quo serves a reminder of COVID’s havoc and a dissection of what got us here in the first place. 

In a post-pandemic America that made the voting majority into a band of Joe Crosses, the movies continue to remain our front line for exposing uncomfortable truths. From zombies, unicorns, and dinosaurs to the indie dramas finally shaking off the shackles of their own superiority, the dream factory has fully assumed the role that was once the bedrock of our infallible legacy media outlets. Fiction becomes fact and fantasy our reality. But what else can we ask for amid the cultural rubble of the post-COVID world?

Eddington, Jurassic World: Rebirth, and 28 Years Later are now playing in theaters. Death of a Unicorn is streaming on HBO Max.