You may already know of or have heard this story many times and untiringly over the last few months. Maybe you even know it like the back of your hand. Anticipated apologies as I’m about to repeat it for the umpteenth time. However, I will take a different approach that you might never have considered.
Not long ago, to be more exact, 22 months ago in China the first known case of COVID-19 was discovered on December 31st, 2019. Quickly the disease has spread worldwide, leading to an ongoing pandemic and its endless waves of lockdown. It brought the most varied kinds of positive and negative consequences. Uncountable and irreparable losses, adaptation challenges, countless consequences, and changes in many areas of human life. However, you may not have noticed this story has a very familiar plot to other older pre-existing stories from 1963, 1954, and 375 BC.
1963 was the year of the release of the film The Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Tippi Hedren. In a nutshell, Melanie Daniels, who meets Mitch Brenner in San Francisco, decides to play a practical joke on him and follows Mitch to Bodega Bay. Simultaneously, a huge assault starts on the town by birds of varied kinds. The film is an adaptation of a 1952 short story with the same name by the British writer Daphne du Maurier. The birds’ peculiar behaviour could be attributed to plankton that had been poisoned and subsequently eaten by birds. The Birds share some resemblance -although not biologically- with the Coronavirus. The spectator can feel empathy with the characters by the parallel situations. Their relatable paranoia and overprotection protocols, the end of the world uncertainty and fear of the unknown and the increasing rate of disaster cases. Besides that, it might be shared in different media, compared to nowadays (internet), while the film (radio), but the news is not old:
“it appears that the bird attacks come in waves, with long intervals between. The reason for this does not seem clear as of yet”
Society changed in many ways during this near sixty-year gap, however, some of these similarities reflect the modern concepts of VUCA and BANI. Both are acronyms, VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, while BANI ‘brittle’, ‘anxious’, ‘nonlinear’ and ‘incomprehensible’. VUCA was coined by the American academics Burton Nanus and Warren Bennis in 1987, and BANI by the American anthropologist Jamais Cascio. They can be applied for general conditions and situations like the pandemic.
1954 was the year of the release of the film Rear Window, also directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart. In short, the film tells the story of Jeff, who is a professional photographer. He is recovering from an accident where he broke his leg in the comfort of his home. Out of boredom, he decides to spy on his neighbours and discovers a sequence of interesting and connected events. This voyeuristic theme could reflect some parts of the Cold War period. However, it still resonates with modern audiences, “life imitating art”, especially now in the cyberworld and pandemic context. The constant growth and popularity of the internet, a variety of social media and its many windows. Our less introspective society carries the world in its pocket, which needs constantly to scroll and observe others’ li(v)es.
375 BC was the approximate year Plato wrote the Socratic dialogue, concerning justice, the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. My focus will be on the Allegory of the Cave, which is a concept devised to ruminate on the nature of belief versus knowledge. There are three prisoners who have been chained together in a cave since birth, they have no concept of the world outside. Behind them is a fire and occasionally people carrying different objects walk past the fire, casting shadows onto the wall in front of the prisoners. The prisoners watch these shadows believing them to be real physical entities having not experienced the real world outdoors. Plato wrote that if one prisoner could be free, then he could see the fire and notice their sense of reality are the shadows of the objects carried by the other people that were free. Essentially he would learn that their understanding of reality was skewed. One prisoner escaped and discovered a whole new world outside, which he was unaware of. The prisoner believes the world outside the cave is much more real than life in the cavern. When he tries to go back there in order to free the others, he is blinded by the sunlight as he is not used to it. The chained prisoners noticed and believed they would be harmed if they tried to leave the cave. This philosophical concept can be applied to multiple areas. I believe it fits well with the post/present pandemic feeling of the ‘new normal.' Especially for the ones who are divided among countries in different stages of cases and vaccination or sadly the complete lack of access to the vaccination.
We may have noticed many similarities among the fictitious stories and the pandemic, or comparable to other previous real historic moments like the Spanish flu. However, we do not know how or when this real tragedy will completely end. Certainly, we can take care of those around us and ourselves, keep using masks and take all the jabs offered. We are not aware of what the future holds but who knows, maybe later, somebody can turn this tragedy into a new story for future audiences and awareness to avoid past mistakes and the mutation of the virus.
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