“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” The words of the has-been Norma Desmond conclude “Sunset Boulevard.”
The next William Faulkner, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty or Richard Wright, the world awaits your magnum opus.
COVID-19 offers opportunity for outstanding literature, movies and theatre. One desiring a defining moment enjoys the catbird seat.
Reflecting upon World War II on the 75th anniversary of its conclusion: Although lots was lost, creativity followed.
The world would have been better absent the two World Wars. Yet out of their ashes emerged enduring oeuvre. We would not have “All Quiet on the Western Front” without World War I. We would not have “Cabaret” without the Weimar Republic between Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Third Reich.
“South Pacific” and “The Sound of Music” emerged from World War II, alongside “All My Sons,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Casablanca,” “Catch 22,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “Downfall,” “The English Patient,” “From Here to Eternity,” “The Great Escape,” “Inglorious Bastards,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Longest Day,” “Monuments Men,” “Notorious,” “On the Town,” “The Pianist,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Schindler’s List,” “Stalag 17,” Twelve O’Clock High,” “Valkyrie” and “White Christmas.”
Early television was influenced by World War II: “Hogan’s Heroes” and “McHale’s Navy” notably, but domestic sitcoms — such as “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” “Bewitched,” “The Burns and Allen Show,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Father Knows Best,” “I Love Lucy,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “Make Room for Daddy,” “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” “My Three Sons” and “The Patty Duke Show” — were inspired by veterans’ desire to forget wartime memories, in a cocoon of domesticity accompanying the economic imperative to entice women to marry and procreate, freeing jobs for returning GI’s. Complacency continued until Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” was published on February 19, 1963.
Great novels about the Vietnam War were written as well — among them “Going After Cacciato,” “Matterhorn” and “The Quiet American” — alongside innumerable films focused upon Vietnam.
The AIDS Crisis was examined in “Angels in America,” “Philadelphia” and “Rent.”
The unrestrained lust for lucre causing the 2008 Mortgage Meltdown is the subject of “American Psycho,” “The Big Short,” “The Lehman Trilogy,” “Margin Call” and “Wall Street.”
How can an aspiring filmmaker or novelist begin a heartbreaking work of staggering genius about COVID-19?
The first lines of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” suggest an opening quotation:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
I commend messages of hope and optimism over death and despair. Points of departure include the local variation on a theme of President Trump, Dr. Fauci, and Dr. Birx’s appearances, Gov. Reeves and Dr. Dobbs; self-proclaimed experts, practicing medicine without licenses, disrespecting scientific verities; and individuals prioritizing opinion over fact, gathering where superspreaders become the Typhoid Marys of the pandemic. I want opening paragraphs set in a grocery where people go masked, preparing a party akin to those past which I walk, with multiple cars parked outside, the antithesis of what is needed to defeat COVID-19.
Selfishness set the stage for pandemic disaster. The story’s leitmotif should be the cooperation and cohesion necessary for containment.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider.
