I posted not long ago a column about how Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” somehow called to mind the current Covid-19 pandemic.
After enduring seven months of this viral health crisis, I’m beginning to recall two excellent dramatic films that seem to describe some of the horrors we are facing as a society.
The two movies are “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” starring Kevin McCarthy, a science fiction yarn from 1956, and “Testament,” starring the great Jane Alexander, from 1983.
The Body Snatchers plot revolves around a sort of disease that spreads like a virus and turns its human hosts into zombie-like creatures.
The crucial way to contract the disease is to fall asleep, so McCarthy near the end of the story is frantically trying to leave an infected community with his girlfriend, who inadvertently takes a brief nap and awakens to tell him, “It’s not so bad.”
The final scene has McCarthy making it to another town, but everybody there believe he’s crazy and they haul him away to “the funny farm.”
“Testament” packs an even more emotional wallop. A suburban community in California has an ordinary afternoon interrupted by a TV blackout and sketchy reports of a nuclear blast occurring in the U.S.
Unlike companion “shock treatment” films with a nuclear holocaust theme of the era (“The Day After” and “Threads”), “Testament is low key, but desperate.
People in the town slowly, but surely die of radiation sickness that creeps in from other areas. Alexander deftly portrays a suburban housewife who somehow loses track of her husband who works miles away and watches her daughter and young son die in agony.
One of the most heartbreaking scenes ever filmed is when Alexander rocks her dying youngest son and sings a lullaby to him.
Her eldest son grows up fast emotionally and the two family members rescue a mentally-challenged Asian lad whose father, a gas station owner, died. She tries, but fails to commit suicide with both via carbon monoxide.
In the very last scene, the three are sitting at the kitchen table by candlelight because there is no electricity to celebrate a birthday. When she encourages the boys to make a wish, her son asks, “but what do we wish for, Mom?”
We now have learned of more than 235,000 Americans who have died of an invisible enemy, the Coronavirus, yet there still are people who willfully choose ignorance over science and have made the disastrous decision to make a health crisis into a political crisis.
It is possible that supposedly the most intelligent species ever to inhabit this planet could be wiped out by a microscopic enemy, and eventually leave no trace that we were here.
I want to wish President-Elect Joe Biden and his administration lotsa luck in meeting the challenges ahead. I don’t know how it can be done, but it must.
