Saturday, April 18, 2020

I Am Legend

I am being haunted by vague memories of this scary movie in which a global pandemic leaves this man living alone in his house with his dog, surviving the best he can while looking for a cure and for other survivors.

I've been thinking of it so much, I figured I needed to just watch it to get it out of my head, like exposure therapy.

I got to the first really scary scene where the dog enters a dark building where you know the infected people must be. The thought of losing his one live contact in the world sent me reeling, and I fled to my balm of choice - Fixer Upper, where the most drama is just how annoyed Joanna will get with Chip's antics, and the most danger is whether they will find mold or pests in an old, old house.

I've heard people have been rewatching Contagion and Outbreak and other pandemic movies, but I hadn't heard I Am Legend mentioned. (One of the Late Night hosts I watch repeatedly used a clip from the end of The Hot Zone where the Julia Margulies character is infected with Ebola through a gap in her containment suit.)

It's unusual that I've seen I Am Legend. I haven't watched the other pandemic films. I avoid them. I Am Legend came out in December 2007. I can't remember whether I saw it in the theater, but that's hard for me to believe. I would have been just recently married, and this isn't the type of movie we would have picked together. Doesn't really matter. I've seen it, and now I can't get it out of my head, but I can't watch it, either.

It's brought a feeling of panic into my daily life that wasn't as on-the-surface before. It's compounding my reaction to Trump wanting the economy to open May 1 and to the conservative tea party extremists rallying to end stay-at-home orders and to the thoughtless hedonists in Florida flocking to the first open beach. Why are these people not scared into hunkering down? Are they really okay with the idea of tens of thousands of deaths? Survival of the fittest? Essential workers as replaceable?

I don't get it. And they scare me more than the virus. I'm scared for my family and my community and tribal communities and communities of color and my country and my world.

One of the scenes in I Am Legend is the Will Smith character hunting deer who have taken to flocking downtown Manhattan. I remember feeling incredulous that deer would pick this of all the other places on earth they could go. But I've been strangely tickled at the stories of wildlife taking back cities around the globe.
It's like watching the forest come back around Chernobyl. A reminder that the earth really doesn't need us and doesn't care much whether we live or die. In fact, maybe has a slight preference to life's variety if we all perish, or at least, lose our place on top of the food and resource pyramids. (I've also been hearing the Hugo Weaving character - Agent Smith - ranting to the Laurence Fishbourne character about how humans are a virus, a plague that's taken over the earth.)

  • "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."
And what is the countermeasure? 
May all things be well. May all measure of things be well. Namaste. Breathe. Be grateful. Don't yell at the children when they're only having fun. Go for a run outside (try not to hyperventilate while wearing the mask). Try not to think that this may not be temporary. Try not to miss hugs quite so much.

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