'I'll Be Right Here'
One of the things you learn living through a (hopefully) once-in-a-generation global pandemic is that there is no real escape, save via herd immunity.
COVID-19 has been with us for more than a year now and it feels a part of quite literally everything. It has filled up our hospitals and dominated our news. It has kept us from friends and family members and interfered with our livelihoods. It is the primary organizing function in our lives. It dictates who we see, how and where we see them, and what we wear when we do. It even dictates how I buy my groceries. Last spring, when I worried about COVID-19 being everywhere, I mostly was concerned with what might be traveling in to the house on the shopping bags that held those groceries. Now, I know the pathogen itself is airborne. It’s everything else about it that makes it feel like it’s absolutely everywhere.
Obviously, this hits our health care and essential workers most tangibly and acutely. The fatigue they must feel at this point is incomprehensible to an insulated desk jockey like myself. But even for someone as fortunate as me - someone who has the means to keep his risk to a bare minimum - the wear and tear of this pandemic is unfathomable. And it may remain so for as long as I live.
As we announced on our podcast this week, Steve and I are taking a hiatus. It was Steve’s idea, but one I embraced almost immediately after he called me to discuss it - in a conversation that, quite humorously, had all the beats of an amicable breakup.
If it isn’t already obvious, we don’t make any money from this endeavor. We’ve been doing it together for seven-plus years. I’ve been writing about film in this space - not always under the banner of In Reel Deep - for almost a decade. We write and we talk about the movies here because we love to do it. The minute that isn’t the case - the moment it feels like more of an obligation or a chore - is the exact time for us to stop.
I can’t quite believe, now that I write this, that we’ve been doing it for this long without taking a real break. I can’t believe I had the incredible good fortune to sit a cubicle over from someone who cares as much about films and writing about them as I do, and who has good taste and real talent to go with it. It’s enough to make me pause and consider my position on fatalism.
The truth is, we don’t know if this is a hiatus or just … the end. We know it’s a stopping point, though it could wind up being the stopping point. We’re full-fledged adults now in ways we weren’t when we first met, with all the responsibilities and encumbrances that come with that fact. We might have come to this stopping point even without a global pandemic.
But it seems hard to argue with the notion that COVID-19 brought this specific hiatus about, even if it was an eventuality. COVID-19 has worked its way deep into every facet of film, just like everything else. I don’t need to catalogue the ways it has impacted the business, accelerating disruptive trends likely to alter the landscape of moviemaking forevermore.
But I do feel the need to talk about the more individual loss here. It is, of course, a trivial one in contrast to the mass death experienced every day in this country. I hope it goes without saying that I am not comparing what’s happening in our hospitals every day to what isn’t happening in our movie theaters. All I do hope to express is that something significant is being lost there too.
A year of a seemingly unending supply of streamable films at my fingertips has been more than enough to convince me that experiencing movies exclusively without the theaters they should be shown in is a dystopian future of which I want no part. The very environment of a movie theater is designed to offer you escape. You sit down next to strangers in the dark and you go somewhere else for a few hours. If you are a decent person, you don’t look at your phone. You certainly don’t pause the movie every 10 minutes to grab something from the fridge or respond to a text message or feed your cat.
There is just no escape right now. There are no movie theaters to safely attend. In the streaming-only world, there is no moviegoing experience. There is just content shoved down your throat at a mind-numbing pace. Consume it how you want. Spread it over three days. Brush your teeth while it plays. Don’t think too much about it when it’s over. Don’t even linger too long on how weird it is to see people in crowds without a mask on. Just move on to the next thing you’re watching while you do something else, while you’re biding your time for this all to be over.
Movies still do offer us some sort of respite. Our best of 2020 list is chock full of films you should make time to see. But writing and talking about them? Nope. Not right now. Not with the creeping, all-encompassing despair of COVID-19 spilling over on to celluloid, just like everywhere else. We have to dig too deep at this moment, and if we’re not going to be paid for our efforts, then it better feel like a labor of love.
My guess is we’ll be back in some fashion, sometime relatively soon. But one of this pandemic’s other lessons is that you aren’t as in control as you think - not even close. In the meantime, you can follow us on Letterboxd (ajohnsonterp and mino65434, respectively) or, for you imaginative types, try to conjure up what we’re texting each other about Nomadland or Dune or whatever else is coming soon to a reliable internet connection near you.
We’ll be right here.