Have we forgotten about COVID-19? It’s been less than a year since the WHO declared the global emergency over, and yet COVID is weirdly absent from the culture. Take a quick survey of the cultural landscape—Beyoncé’s honky-tonk triumphalism, the moulded-plastic feminism of Barbie, the jet-fuelled machismo of Top Gun: Maverick—and you’ll glimpse a society seeking not to metabolize recent memories but rather to move past them. By my count, Taylor Swift has at least seven songs about her lightning-quick romance with Matty Healy and only one about the pandemic that upended her life and ours.
When COVID shows up in the culture at all, it’s often just a cameo appearance: a single line in Noah Kahan’s viral hit “Stick Season,” a brief sequence in Joachim Trier’s coming-of-age film The Worst Person in the World. Other times, the references are oblique. The indie horror film Host is about demonic evocation, not COVID, but it takes place entirely on Zoom, a hellscape every bit as terrifying to me as the torture chambers of the Saw franchise. John Mulaney’s Baby J is a stand-up special that doubles as an addiction memoir. But the story Mulaney tells, about a pandemic-era journey into paranoia, compulsivity, and nihilism, feels like an extreme version of an experience we all endured.
