Reality TV
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On a rainy Thursday afternoon a couple of weeks ago I went to a 4pm session of The Call of the Wild at a cinema in downtown Brooklyn. The movie, based on Jack London’s 1903 novel, follows the life of Buck, a dog that is born into privilege, then sold into slavery, only to break free of domesticity altogether and lead a pack of wolves in the wild. In previous cinematic remakes of The Call of the Wild, Buck has been played by dog actors. This time, though, the director opted to use CGI. My editor wanted to know what might be lost when real animals no longer appear in movies, when movies themselves become technologically domesticated, which is why I was at the 4pm session on a Thursday afternoon.
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I was joined by five other people in the 200 seat cinema: a young boy and his mother, who got bored 20 minutes in and left. And three middle aged men, one of whom put on 3D glasses to watch the film, which had no 3D option. During the previews, I scanned Twitter to see what people thought about the movie. Someone posted a GIF of Harrison Ford interacting with a man in a mo-cap suit as if he were a dog. Turns out that on set, the dog’s movements were performed by a man named Terry who was then edited out and replaced with the computer-generated dog. Terry, who used to be a in Cirque de Soleil, is a pre-eminent ‘creature actor’ and has played other animal CGI roles, including a murderous ape. Something about Terry pretending to be another creature while being rendered invisible by technology reminded me once again of the tale of the Mechanical Turk.
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Like others, I’ve been reading the literature of plague. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, seven young women and three young men flee a “death-dealing pestilence” (the Black Death) in Florence to quarantine in an idyllic country villa nearby. To pass the time in the evenings, they tell stories. On the fourth evening, Emilia tells a story about Simona and Pasquino, who love each other. One day in a garden, Pasquino rubs a sage leaf against his teeth and dies. Simona is accused of murder. To prove her innocence, she rubs sage leaf against her teeth, and promptly dies.
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Meanwhile, in Germany, 14 contestants on Big Brother who chose to participate in their own televised quarantine were told about the present day pandemic on a live show last Tuesday night.
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To pass some time during my own quarantine, I watched the first episode of Love is Blind, a reality TV show marketed as a “social experiment” where 30 men and women date each other in “pods”—little social isolation rooms where you can hear your date but not see them—the idea being that physical appearance is somehow what’s holding people back from finding their true soul mate. On the fourth day, Cameron, an AI scientist, tells Lauren, a content creator, that he loves her through the glass wall in his “pod”. “I feel like I’m in a dream right now,” Lauren responds, adding that despite never having seen Cameron, she too, is in love. “It’s like a roller coast of emotion,” the AI scientist says.
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At 3pm on Friday afternoon, I left my apartment to walk to my shift at the Park Slope food co-operative, a worker owned and run supermarket. It was the first warm spring afternoon and after being inside all day the white and pink blossoms were blinding. The supermarket was only letting a select number of people in at a time to make sure there was no overcrowding. A line of people standing a few feet apart curled around the block. Some crouched. One bought a deck chair. A father was blowing up a latex glove with air and putting it to his head, pretending to be a chicken for his son.
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I worked downstairs in the basement putting nuts into small bags and then restocking the nut aisle upstairs, which was almost entirely depleted. There were six other people working the shift, mostly doing their tasks quietly, sometimes talking about experiences of “social distancing”. One man’s wine importing business had been shuttered. He was working extra shifts at the co-op “for a sense of purpose.” One woman said she had come to her shift an hour early to escape her two children, aged three and six, who were using the precious toilet paper to play hospital and wrap each other in bandages. “Well you can leave an hour early,” a bearded man who was cutting cheese and wrapping it in glad warp said. “No, I think I’ll stay to the end,” she said. “And then when I get home I think I’ll just sit in my car for a while.”
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Around half way through the shift, a permanent staff member at the co-op told us that they had to stop letting people into the supermarket, that all those people waiting to buy food had to go home, but assured us we’d be able to shop for ourselves after the shift was over. Then she mumbled something about food shortages in the coming weeks. When I was bagging the Marcona almonds—blanched, roasted in olive oil, sprinkled with sea salt, known in Spain as the Queen of Almonds—the man whose job it was to bag mixed olives leaned over and asked if I could put aside a bag for him. “Thank you so, so much,” he said, when I handed him a bag at the end of the shift.
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The virus can be stopped. But who will lead the effort? I’ve been obsessed with Dr Fauci, whose unflinching, undramatic honesty feels like the only antidote to Trump’s narcissism. But for how long? When snail fever, a parasitic disease related to the use of human excrement as fertilizer, killed untold thousands along the Yangtze River in the 1970s, Mao, entirely insulated from the human suffering, responded with a poem:
We ask the God of Plague: “Where are you bound?”
Paper barges aflame and candle light illuminate the sky.