How the pandemic might change cinema — and why Soul was prescient
Warning: contains spoilers for Pixar’s Soul
The Covid-19 pandemic has temporarily changed how audiences consume films, how they’re distributed and how they’re shot.
But it also should change the output for the years to come as well.
Not in terms of budget — although studios will surely have less appetite for $200m blockbusters if there are no cinemas to screen them.
But rather in terms of themes and stories. And death is on the agenda.
It was on the world agenda before — back in the 1940s.
Films have always been a reflection of their time: the US output of paranoiac thrillers in the wake of JFK’s assassination/Watergate, the Showa-era Godzilla films in post-war Japan or the Cold War dystopia.
The last time there was a worldwide mass-casualty event akin to the devastation currently being wrought by the coronavirus was the Second World War.
And as the war continued to rage there were bold, inventive films not afraid of tackling life, death and the after-life.
Released in 1946 — although first mooted as the war was drawing to a close — A Matter of Life and Death (AMOLAD) tells the story of a bomber pilot arguing his right to live after a weather-related mix-up over the English Channel stops his going to heaven.
Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941) is a comedy about a boxer mistakenly taken to heaven before his time and in Heaven Can Wait (1943) a man has to prove he belongs in hell by telling his life story.
Angel on my Shoulder (1946) features a dead man doing a deal with the devil and Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) sees an angel visits businessman George Bailey to show him what life would be like if he had never lived.
There is even The Uninvited (1944). A supernatural film that is considered the first to to portray ghosts as legitimate entities rather than illusions: the after-life is real in Lewis Allen’s horror classic.
The Western world was grappling with death on an industrial scale for the first time since cinema going was popularised throughout the 1920s and 30s.
(Despite this willingness to tackle death head on, there was still a squeamishness about ‘death’ in a film title in the US: A Matter of Life and Death was rebranded ‘Stairway to Heaven’, a decision that irked co-director Michael Powell, and really Here Comes Mr Jordan should be titled Here Comes the Angel of Death).
In this sense Pixar’s excellent Soul could prove to be eerily prescient.
Released on Disney+ over the festive period, locked-down families afflicted themselves by grief and loss watched one of the world’s most popular production companies put out a children’s film about death and the after-life.
Joe, who has died prematurely, refuses to ascend to ‘The Great Beyond’ and instead tries to game the system to return to earth.
The creators of Soul toyed with giving the film a much bleaker ending, where Joe doesn’t get his second chance — but it was rejected.
Co-director Kemp Powers said:
“We have versions of the ending where Joe does not go back to his body, where he actually stays dead.
“We have versions of the ending where you see Joe on Earth a year later. Man, that ending sparked more debate than I think any other element of the film.”
While the pandemic will doubtless inspire direct film adaptations (one starring Kenneth Brannagh as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has already been green-lit), dig a little deeper and we should see a new wave of films, not about the pandemic but about the impact of the pandemic on the psyche of the world.
After all even AMOLAD is not just about death. As observed by Stephanie Zacharek writing for Criterion:
“What is it like to come back from war — to come back, literally, from death? No wonder nothing looks right to Peter. A Matter of Life and Death is, among other things, a mystical film about what we have come to know as PTSD.”
She goes on: “AMOLAD doesn’t sugarcoat the idea of death; it acknowledges that once we leave our earthly life, there’s no going back.”
Cinema in 2021 and onwards cannot afford to ignore how Covid has changed the world. There’s no going back.
Editor’s note: The author has not seen Jean Cocteau’s Orphee (1950) which also deals with the afterlife.
