Work for this site, and the eventual book, began to be serialized in Telegram starting in 2022. The first interest involved exploring the degree to which the extraordinary measures imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic (what I call 3/11, since March 11, 2020, was when the WHO declared a “public health emergency of international concern”), often resembled responses scripted long before in Hollywood movies. This was certainly true of China’s initial response, and then Italy’s, followed by many others after. The impacts of 3/11 were nothing short of the impacts of the crises brought on by 9/11, and by the 2008 financial crisis, with many areas of overlap. Many critical observers made the point that never before had they seen such harsh measures for a pandemic as during 3/11, with everything ranging from military control over vaccine procurement and distribution, to states of emergency, curfews, fines, vaccine passports, punitive taxation, violent crackdowns on protests, censorship, and mass quarantines in the form of lockdowns—among other policies.
The second interest developed from the realization that even key elements of the criticism and opposition to the 3/11 measures, had already been scripted and articulated in Hollywood movies.
Thirdly, it soon became clear that, rather than “mass formation” or “mass psychosis,” what we were dealing with was something that was far more long-term, and more profoundly cultural. Viral contagions have been one of the key sources of fear, globally, for centuries now. In Europe and North America, memories of plagues haunt both official discourse and popular culture—and Hollywood comes in at that point. “Hollywood” (which I use as an abbreviation for the US-dominated commercial film industry) thus had ample material to feed into its filmmaking, but then something else happened as a result: Hollywood began to reshape and reformulate what it had taken in from history and from public fears, and perhaps had its own agendas as well to imprint on how pandemics would be imagined.
For a more comprehensive overview of this project, see the Introduction:
