Covid on tv/in movies

[Rev. Rye]

One of the things I try to avoid as a writer is accidentally pigeonholing when a story takes place. It’s the reason I try to avoid putting computers and phones doing things other than taking or receiving calls in my stories unless absolutely necessary. One particularly notable case study in why I try to avoid it is The Decalogue. It’s a set of 10 short films based around the Ten Commandments. Don’t worry, it’s a masterpiece, and despite the premise, religion tends to play a shockingly small role in the films (even the ones based on explicitly religious rules are given secular proxies). One thing that really struck me: despite being set in Warsaw just before the fall of communism, most of the films could probably be remade and set in modern-day Chicago with minimal changes.

The only exceptions I can think of are 8 ("Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”)which could probably have changed the Holocaust survivor to an immigrant whose parents were deported and killed by a cartel; 5 (“thou shalt not murder”) which, frankly, couldn’t have possibly been done that way since we abandoned hanging as capital punishment in 1928; and 1 (“thou shalt have no other gods before me”), where the God in question is a Soviet Bloc computer whose Godlike functions are limited to turning on the lights in one scene and a bunch of mathematical equations I could probably program into the FunctionCalc app on my iPhone. Or even my TI-83 if the memory on that was less wonky (I gave up on that part of the TI-83 when I tried to program something into it and it wound up deleting it spontaneously.)