"There will come a day when all humanity will be buried
All that gave birth to long beautiful patience
Everything is so amazing
All that is famous
And what is beautiful
Great thrones and beautiful nations
All that will plunge into one gendarme
And be wiped out in one hour "
(Indian Mahabharta)
While the Corona pandemic sweeps the world and statistics of the injured and the dead surround us all the time, and we have been forced to sit at home for long periods, this has given many people the opportunity and time to read and watch movies, while comedy films and entertainment programs seem a suitable option to escape the frustration and depression caused by constant exposure The news of the epidemic, what happened was the opposite. Instead of people fleeing the epidemic it seemed as if they were fleeing to it, where the movie "Contagion" (which deals with the story of a virus that originated in China - topped) lists of views, topped the "plague company" (Plague Inc.) Top Lists Phones in the United States (and players spread a deadly virus). So why do people resort to entertainment linked to epidemics and diseases, while the epidemic surrounds us from all sides?
Art allows us to explore different ways of understanding a crisis. It is not based on science, logic and analytical thinking, but it is based on human emotions and their connections.
Escape from epidemic to epidemic
According to Julie Norm, associate professor of psychology at Wilsley College of Massachusetts, these games / movies / books give us a sense of control over a situation that today appears to be terrifyingly uncontrollable. In most of these actions, the virus / bacteria / alien invasion is much more dangerous than the "Covid-19" virus, and despite this, humanity - represented by the main character often - is able to win, which gives us some hope that we will be able to win against a virus. Covid-19 ". Another reason is what social psychologists call a downward social comparison. When we see in these works worse disasters than what we are going through, and higher mortality rates than those caused by the Corona virus, that comparison makes us comfortable.
Mikkel Fugl Eskjær, a professor of communication and psychology at Aalborg University in Denmark, adds that the fictional placement in films and literary works gives us a way to manipulate the complex information that is not covered in the media, which raises one aspect of the story related to facts and information. When people face crises or anxiety on a large societal scale, they seek to search for information on several levels, and while the media presents information based on facts, art allows us to review different ways of understanding the crisis, it is not based on science, logic and analytical thinking, but it is based on emotions Humanity and its connections. And emotions are the essence of human cognition. Through art and culture, we see, hear and feel how an epidemic is spreading, and we sympathize with the people who suffer and those who fight the virus. In addition, films that revolve in a disastrous context, despite their disastrous atmosphere, carry an optimistic view that triumphs for the human spirit, ethics and human conscience. (1)
The philosopher Slavoy Cicek has pointed out this point, as he raises the question about the role of the image of destruction in disaster films, and believes that in light of the difficulty of imagining a global utopia project based on work and cooperation, the only way we can welcome the idea is by paying the price at the level. Mental cross-scenes of extreme destruction. What is surprising in disaster films is how disaster and destruction unite people, racial tensions fade and cross-ethnic societal cooperation arises, as if the only way to imagine utopia is to evoke the state of utter disaster. (2)
Below is a collection of literary and cinematic works that deal with epidemic outbreaks, whether imagined or somehow realistic, that indulging in them may help us believe that all of this will pass.
"Blindness", by Jose Saramago
"What the world looks like now. The elderly with a blindfolded eye asked, and the doctor's wife said, there is no difference between inside and outside the quarry, between here and there, between the few and the many, between what we are going through now and what we will go through. And people, how people face this situation, the girl asked her With black glasses, they are walking like ghosts, this must be the case that I called a ghost, that one be confident that life exists, lives it with its four senses, as we call it, and yet you cannot see it. "
The novel revolves around the "blindness" epidemic, starting with a scene of a man who is suddenly blind while driving his car, and continues to spread the infection to the city's residents one by one. With the epidemic spreading, the authorities decide to isolate the injured in an old mental hospital. Under armed guard of the army, where the injured crowded in non-human conditions, the novel follows a group of characters who are the ophthalmologist and his wife (the only person who was not infected and still sighted, but she claimed blindness to accompany and care for her husband, but it hides this fact) In addition to several other characters.
With the increase in the number of casualties and the lack of food supplies, the fragility of human civilization, the values, morals and everything that a person grows for, appears, an armed group of the blind controls the scarce food supplies and begins distributing them at first against the valuables and then against the rape of women, until the wife of the doctor leads a small revolution that ends By burning the building and leaving it to discover that the place has become unguarded after the guards and all the residents of the city were blinded, and that the city has become a real mess, and society has completely collapsed, the novel follows the main characters as they try to survive amid all this chaos and destruction.
"The music has stopped. The world has never known such silence, and cinemas and theaters have become a haven for the homeless and have stopped searching for their shelter. As for the role of larger theaters, they have been used as quarantines by the government or the few visionaries because they believe that disease can be cured by means Certain strategies have not previously been effective in tackling cholera and other communicable epidemics. "
Blindness (2008)
Directed by Fernando Meirelles, starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffallo, based on the aforementioned novel "Blindness", in the film we see the events of the novel almost the same, with slight changes. But while Saramago deliberately depended on visual descriptions, and drowning more in descriptions based on other senses such as smells and sounds, here the director paints a picture of cruel blindness, we see human fragility and the world collapses in a fractured desiotic form.
"Sixth Day": André Shadid 1960
Andre Chedid, a French writer of Lebanese origin, was born in Cairo in 1920, although she moved to France since 1946, the Egyptian airspace and the Egyptian countryside appeared clearly in her work, especially in her novel "Sixth Day" in which she deals with the events of the cholera epidemic in Egypt During the forties. The novel begins with the visit of the heroine Seddik to her village that was devastated by the cholera epidemic, where her sister died. It deals with a wonderful description and a grim death in every corner of the village.
- You are very far away, and you know nothing about us.
- I do not know anything, "Saleh" ?!
Eleven people from our family have died, but from the village, I no longer know the number of their dead, but the worst thing is the hospital ... The ambulance was arriving, and the nurses entered the houses by force, taking out our belongings and burning them, carrying our patients and going.
- to where?
- They never tell us.
A friend returns to Medina, where her paralyzed husband, Saeed, and her grandson, the child, Hassan, are waiting for her, who dreams to grow up and become like his mentor, Selim, the educated teacher. And when Professor Salim is infected with cholera, he tells her that on the sixth day, we either die or we are resurrected. On the sixth day, Hassan and the old man were sitting next to each other on the stairs of the abandoned school, and they were waiting until midnight, and no one came.
The grandson of the child, Hassan, suffers from cholera. A friend decides to fight to the end, to take him away from the people and the bad air, clinging to the hope that he will be cured, and that it fights the disease until the sixth day. A friend with the child sets off on a boat carrying hope in her heart, where she meets the Tramp monkey (Ocazion) who informs the authorities about cholera patients in exchange for money, and when Okazion discovers the presence of the child with cholera on the boat, he screams to warn the ferryman (Abu Nawas) who says carelessly Death accompanies them everywhere. Their journey continues for the sake of hope, but the novel ends with the death of the child.
"And if with a smile that smiles on her mouth, she hears their voices. She torrents enormous rivers, and surrenders or good to the current carrying her in meekness. The boy is everywhere, he is near her, in front of her, and in the voice of these men and in their hearts. He is not dead."
The movie "Sixth Day" 1986
The film is directed by Youssef Chahine, starring Dalida, Mohsen Mohieldin, Abdel Aziz Makhyoun. The film is based on the novel, but Youssef Chahine added a distinctive depth to a number of characters, the most important of which is the character of the monkeys who played "Mohsen Mohy El-Din" in the movie, which falls in love with "Girlfriend". Youssef Chahine paints a wonderful cinematic picture that oscillates between scenes of death, And the bodies dumped, among the dances of Mohsen Mohieldin and his songs full of life, and the song "After the Flood" in which Muhammed Mounir offers hidden hope after the flood.
"The Plague": Albert Camus 1947
"People had first accepted being cut off from the outside as they accepted any temporary inconvenience that would only touch some of their habits. But they suddenly became aware of a form of confinement, under a sky in which summer began to shrink, and they felt a mysterious feeling that this retreat was threatening their entire lives." .
The novel takes place in the Algerian city of Oran during the French occupation, where the city is filled with the bodies of dead rats, and the plague epidemic is spreading in the city, at first the authorities seek to obscure the matter, and the media deny it. But the epidemic is spreading uncontrollably, which leads to the isolation of the city and is subject to a general quarantine that no one is allowed to enter or leave. The novel traces the attitudes and feelings of the city's residents in the shadow of public quarantine, a sense of isolation and exile, and the efforts of the two main characters, the doctor and narrator, "Jean-Rio" and "Jean-Taro" to resist the epidemic, by isolating the sick and disposing of bodies in order to protect the healthy, adhering to their moral responsibility towards the group.
The disease here is moral and political as much as it is physiological. In the novel there were many signs of the impending crisis, such as dead mice in factories, warehouses, and apartment buildings, yet these signs were ignored by the authorities until the plague spread and they had to close the city and isolate it from the world. (3)
"The newspapers stopped talking about something, which exaggerated talking about the rats' stories. Rats were dying in the streets and the people in their rooms, and the newspapers only cared about the street. But the governorate and the municipality started to wonder, and in fact no one thought about moving, as long as Every doctor only stood for two or three accidents, but according to one of them, he thought of adding the numbers until he panicked and alerted. It was not until a few days passed that the number of dead people doubled, so it became clear to those who care about this strange evil that the matter is a real epidemic.
"Death in Venice": Thomas Mann 1922
The protagonist Gustav Achenbach, a famous German writer, travels on a trip from Munich to Venice where the fiftieth writer meets a teenage boy named Tadzio, fascinated by his beauty, and seeks after him, secretly tracking him in the streets of Venice, which occurred in the clutches of cholera, where cholera is rampant in the city. But economic stakeholders are trying to suppress rumors and antibacterial odors and deny the epidemic. And while the epidemic is spreading, and the city's residents flee, its streets are empty. Ashnbach cannot leave her, ending up dying in Venice.
Here, Thomas Mann appears to be more acrimonious in his accusation of Western bourgeois society. The epidemic here is internal and external, it appears in the pent-up desires under the cover of respect and wealth in the personality of Ashenbach, as a result of his environment, the European bourgeois system based on the idea that everything else, women, the working class and the non-Western world, exists only to satisfy his desires and desires. (4)
Al-Harafish: Naguib Mahfouz 1977
“This sweeping death does not differentiate between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, a woman and a man, an old man and a child. He chases creation with the truncheon of annihilation ... It is the halfway, no one knows where it comes from.
The novel deals with ten stories for generations of a family inhabited by an Egyptian neighborhood that reflects the philosophy of government and the succession of rulers and the role of peoples, and the story we deal with here is the first story, the story of Ashour Al-Naji, the first fatwa that successively generations after him, the Ashour child of unknown lineage that Sheikh Afra Zaidan raised in his palm, and when He grew up and grew up strong in the flesh, but he refused to use his strength except to support the truth, and when he hits the hot epidemic, Ashour realizes despite his great physical strength that this is an enemy that is unacceptable to his relationship, fleeing away some of his family to the desert as he saw in his dreams, and when he returns he finds that all the people of the neighborhood They died after being hit by the "half", and only he was saved.
Contagion 2011
Directed by Stephen Sudberg, starring Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet.
Since the crisis of the Corona virus began, viewership of this film has risen in an unprecedented way, and communication sites have been filled with discussions about the similarity between the events of the film and the current crisis, despite its predecessor nine years.
In the movie, after returning from a business trip in China, Beth Imhoff develops symptoms of cough, fatigue, and rapidly deteriorates, after which she and her infected son die, which is rapidly spreading around the world. The film tracks attempts to control the epidemic from governments, global chaos, looting of stores and public panic, mass graves of victims of the epidemic, and attempts to find a vaccine. Many scenes remind us of what we see today in the news. More surprising is this scene that explains the origins of the virus and brings it back to a bat, which is another strange coincidence.
"Outbreak" 1995
Directed by Wolfgang Peterson, starring Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey.
Colonel Sam Daniels of the US Army's Institute for Medical Research of Infectious Diseases is sent to investigate a newly discovered virus in Africa, which confirms its seriousness and warns its chiefs in his reports, but they do not bother thinking that it is too far away and not likely to reach the United States of America. However, the virus is already transmitted to the United States of America through an infected ape smuggled from Zaire. The government is trying to conceal the matter, but the virus is spreading and turning into an epidemic, so the army will be forced to impose martial law and quarantine, while continuing efforts to search for a vaccine against the virus.