Disaster films prepared us for a crisis—but not for the unrelenting boredom

Nobody said it would be boring. We were expecting fire and brimstone, the breakdown of civilisation, food wars, and wild-eyed neighbours foaming at the gills. What we got instead was rolling news, lesson plans, celebrity content, cookery tutorials and a Sunday Skype with nan. Looking back now it seems obvious: of course the scything illness, when it came, would take over gradually, becoming a disease of our collective consciousness more than a ravaging plague.

This isn’t to minimise the horrors of the pandemic for those who have experienced it first-hand—but it seems striking that even as the situation develops, so many are still attempting to live normal lives. The very abnormal thing in our midst feels like a collective disease, a needling worry; lightly infecting our actions, rather than shutting us down entirely.

The question of why movies never show people going to the bathroom is a seesawing one throughout one’s life: when I was a teenager I thought it so spicy and far-out—“wait, whoa whoa whoa, guys, it’s true, why does Indiana Jones never go to the loo?” Later on, of course, the more sensible adult kicked in. The question was absurd, the deranged ravings of a puerile mind. Of course movies never show toilets. They’re here to show a synthesised version of real life, and must cut to the chase, give us the good stuff—they aren’t a compendium of facts and drudgery.

Nowadays, as a critic, I have started to swing back around on the toilet question. I want to see one movie—just one—in which characters need to be excused at a restaurant before pudding; a movie where someone’s bowel complications make them cantankerous; a man under-washing his hands. I would love all this, and other everyday things besides: I would kill for just one scene, in any film, depicting somebody checking their phone casually rather than for receiving plot information, and laughing at what they see onscreen.

But the movies are afraid of banality: more so than novels, which have generally proven more adept at incorporating the humdrum. The film world has tended to focus on pure action, and on heightened scenarios that favour drama over realism. For this reason, it may be that many people have a visual lexicon for illness and worldwide disaster that grossly amplifies the sort of situation we now find ourselves in.

A case in point is the 1995 disaster movie Outbreak by Wolfgang Peterson, starring Dustin Hoffman and Marcel from Friends. The film uses the idea of a worldwide disease in order to heighten suspense, culminating in a tense helicopter chase to “beat this thing.” Another 90s outbreak movie, 12 Monkeys, imagines a world devastated by a virus that has been released by a maniac in various cities across the world; Bruce Willis, a boy when disaster struck, is sent back in time from his Dantesque post-apocalyptic existence to try to avert the attack.

In these as in so many disaster films, the most magnetic idea of all is the concept of societal breakdown. Other disasters are highly likely to bring this about—the worst effects of climate change are already affecting society, hitting the worst off most calamitously—but an interesting facet of our current disaster is that civilisation is roughly staying put, while the parameters of our civilisation (work, money, families, access to the internet, generalised healthcare) are being sorely tested. In the United Kingdom at least, the concept of work has predominated: nothing must be allowed to prevent people from continuing to work. So the lie that we are all “working from home” has persisted, and our Prime Minister has led by example by working from hospital. Meanwhile, many with flexible enough jobs to work remotely online pretend—they must be pretending—that they are putting in a full 9 to 5, in spite of childcare, anxiety and the fact it actually rarely matters what time you get your work done. This is patently bananas and unsustainable, but for everybody who has recently seen the light and realised ‘work’ and ‘money’ are made up, there are as many people at least who need the routine, and the stability.

In Empire of the Sun, a World War II coming of age story based on the JG Ballard novel, a poignant moment comes late when the protagonist, Jim, forgetting his former life as a rich kid, decides that the happiest year of his life was in a prison camp. We understand that he has come to enjoy his routine there, which is preferable at least to the horrors of life on the streets. People need routine to get by: so here we find ourselves, starved of actual company, replicating our social experiences, replacing hugs with phonecalls, sexual intercourse with “cam stuff,” and evenings at the pub with… getting pissed with the camera set to “on.”

Amidst all of this, for many people the pandemic has become truly monotonous and dreary—the gnawing fear for one’s relatives commingled with another serious bout of seemingly endless washing-up; our regulation one hour of exercise seized between half-hearted stabs at the cryptic crossword and another late night trip down a YouTube wormhole. So we are unprepared for all this tedium. Worse, it has to battle with our better instincts to keep calm, stay sane and active: of course it’s wrong to complain of boredom at a time such as this, when tragedy is striking—and yet it can drive you mad, and is surely affecting us all.

Surely this monotony stems from the breaking down of these frameworks that guide our lives: we now see the hours in the day differently; our leisure has been chipped away by the work we now bash out when we see fit. Beforehand the two alternated more harmoniously, giving us a sense of equilibrium. The ability to work, which brings the chance to create a balanced life filled with leisure hours and visits from loved ones, has been shown to be a privilege. It seems likely to me that those of us who tasted these privileges will seek to recreate them after fact.

In a recent article for the Financial Times Arundhati Roy dared to imagine another world emerging from this calamity, one not beset by such heinous inequities. And yet, forces are still hard at work in maintaining the status quo—the work hours, the holidays, the wage gaps, the disparities in education—so that we can return to it after this has all passed. Could we bear the excitement?