I can't in good faith tell you there was ever a right time to watch Tom Hooper's Cats. But during a pandemic, it seems to be generally agreed, is as good a time as any. "Cats hits different when you've been quarantined for a week," wrote Vulture last month, "In isolation, you'll catch more than a few disturbing moments that went unnoticed before." Vanity Fair concurred: "[N]ow is the perfect time to indulge in one of the most bizarre movies of 2019. Were we ever so young?"
Cats, of course, is no different a movie now than when it came out four months ago. The actors still look like characters from an Animorphs cover devised in hell. The titular cats remain of indeterminate size. We still have no more insight into why Judi Dench, who has fur, is also wearing a fur coat. What has changed, though, is us. Because, for better or worse, we now can't help but view all the culture we consume through the lens of the pandemic.
Coronavirus has tainted the way we perceive everything, whether that means drawing out previously unnoticed moments in Cats or making something like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which likewise predated the outbreak, feel "like a particularly poignant, if heartbreaking, takeaway for our current moment, when any future at all seems terribly uncertain." And would anyone have thought of digital trading cards as being something that could help us feel a "little more connected to everyone" prior to the outbreak? Possibly, but we certainly do now. Even Tiger King can be watched as a coronavirus-specific binge: "[I]t has given many a collective sense of community during a time when they are in self-isolation and experiencing the impact of a public health emergency," writes USA Today, though the show superficially has nothing to do with quarantine.
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This "pandemic brain" effect comes from the fact that we are looking to find our current experience reflected in some way around us. Living in quarantine is a wholly new experience for the vast majority of Americans, and there is nothing we can read, watch, or bake that will help us understand what to expect in the uncertain days ahead. Naturally, then — since it is still too early for there to be movies, TV shows, or books that grapple with COVID-19 specifically — we turn instead to preexisting art. Forbes, for example, writes that Netflix's movie The Platform is a "perfect parable for a pandemic" because it "mirrors the evils of wealth inequality, [with] the protagonist trapped inside a hellish prison, forced to share his cramped room with a repugnant roommate," even though it was written and shot months before the outbreak. Even Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat, "the 1957 classic about two siblings stuck at home and the shenanigans that they get up to," can now be read as "the perfect quarantine book for children," in the words of The New Yorker, although its author never would have imagined it that way.
Nothing illustrates the tendency to project coronavirus onto the world around us better than Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In part because it is new, and in part because of its unhurried playing style, multiple publications have seized on how the game seems — however anachronistically — to have been made for this pandemic. "Animal Crossing Is the Perfect Way to Spend Quarantine," claimed The New York Times, calling it a "candy-colored substitute for real life," although it had of course been in development for years before its fortuitously-timed release. In a different article on the same topic, the Times also wrote that "for adults, especially millennials who have lived through the Great Recession and current coronavirus-induced economic stress, [Animal Crossing] offers the white picket fence often associated with the American dream that's increasingly elusive." Sure? But there's more: Animal Crossing "can remind us of the value of connection — and retreat — in the midst of a pandemic," The New Yorker wrote. For Todd Martens of The Los Angeles Times, playing the game in self-isolation has taught him lessons about himself.
Animal Crossing, however, is not the only video game to elicit such an emotional response due specifically to the circumstances of the outbreak. Bloodborne, a 2015 Gothic role-playing game, is "a dark reflection of life in 2020," writes NPR, although it is of course an unintentional one. Even The Sims franchise is being lauded as an encapsulation of the way we live now. "On days when I can't see my friends, or days when I just don't want to, I can play along in some simulacrum of life," Teen Vogue writes, although comfort during a global health catastrophe had never been the intended purpose of the game.
The truth is almost anything can be reshaped by the perspective of coronavirus. Amazon Prime's Making the Cut, a Project Runway knockoff which debuted while much of the world was in quarantine, offers a disorienting reminder of what life used to be like as the fashion designers travel to cities now under lockdown. I've found myself similarly distracted when watching any random movie in which characters casually hug friends, touch their faces, or hold a subway pole bare-handed. No wonder, then, that The Invisible Man is now somehow a quarantine parable. So is Sea Fever. Even movies that have nothing recognizably in common with the current moment are repurposed: Emma, in this way, is an unintentional quarantine comfort movie. Taskmaster, meanwhile, is "a celebration of what the human brain can do when placed under suitable pressure." How timely! Only, of course, it's not.
This is about more than just coincidences. Rather, the coronavirus outbreak has dramatically changed the way we interact with the world. We find the pandemic reflected in everything, even the entertainment we turn to in order to "escape," because the outbreak is what we're thinking about all the time. From behind these COVID-19-tinted glasses, then, is it any wonder that something as irrelevant as Cats can feel like it was made, impossibly, for this exact moment?
"Pandemic brain" isn't going to go away anytime soon, either. We're making these associations now only because we don't have an alternative — yet. It will only be a matter of time before our entertainment, too, is inspired by the outbreak in numerous ways. Already television writers have mused how they might have tackled COVID-19 on their shows. Somewhere out there, Tom Hooper might even be at work on a new script.
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