COVID-19 is Badly-Written Horror
So there’s this horror movie cliche. You’ve got some character who is super over-confident, usually tries to play the role of leader, usually has some element of machismo mixed in, and likes to tell other people what to do. And the point of this character is to get to one specific scene. You know the scene.
“Look, the ax murderer’s probably already gone off to some other house. All we have to do is unlock the front door and get to the car, and we are home free.”
Everyone else hates the idea. Someone says they’ve just found some semblance of refuge, they shouldn’t unlock the door and throw that away. Someone asks why the ax murderer would leave when he knows they’re inside. Someone points out that even if they get to the car, they don’t really have anywhere to go. Someone mentions that they definitely just saw the ax murderer out the window. But this character knows better. And besides, they have to do something, right? All this doing nothing is driving him crazy! It’s inhuman, and he’s not going to stand for it. How dare you make my decision for me.
So, against everyone else’s protest, Mr. Dude says “Look, if you don’t want to come, you don’t have to come, but I’m leaving.” And he unlocks the door, and he takes three steps outside, and he says “see? Nothing to wor-”
But he doesn’t finish saying the word “worry” because he’s suddenly dead and now everyone else is less safe because the ax murderer is closer to the unlocked and wide-open door than they are.
And, like I said, this is a cliche, so there’s literally dozens of different iterations of this character and this scene out there, so fill in the plot elements as you wish. But we all know this scene.
And I used to moan about scenes like this. Cliches. Unoriginal writing. There are versions of it that are done better or worse, attempts at subversion, but at the end of the day, I’ve seen it before, I know what’s happening, and honestly I’d usually have rather just not had that character in the cast to begin with.
But I can’t complain anymore. It makes me so mad that I can’t complain about that cliche anymore. Because those writers, those unoriginal, copy-cat writers, those writers working off of a formula, eschewing creativity for repetition, were all right and I was wrong.
We’re living in a horror movie right now. The ax murderer is definitely outside. And we have our sanctuary, tenuous as it may be, in the form of hunker-down orders and quarantines. And we have our group of machismo-infused, over-confident, pseudo-leaders who are saying “look, if you don’t want to come, you don’t have to come, but I’m leaving.” And a lot of them are going to die. And they’re going to make the rest of us a lot less safe.
It’s not cliche anymore. It’s not formulaic. It’s not repetitive. It’s just… reality. It’s our reality.
Stay inside. Save yourself. Save your neighbors. Save the world. Don’t be a victim of bad writing.