At the beginning of Glass Onion, Rian Johnson’s murder-mystery sequel to Knives Out, our motley gang of potential suspects are invited to a private island by the enigmatic and obscenely wealthy Miles Bron. The movie is set during May of 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, and, as a result, all the invitees jump at the chance to break free of their isolation. As they wait at the dock, en route to Bron’s island, they’re given a mysterious throat spray and told to forget about COVID. To a one, they do – including the scientist and the eminently reasonable detective, Benoit Blanc. Outside of a few masks shown in flashbacks, the pandemic is no longer a concern.
Now, for the purposes of the movie, this was most likely a device to allow the plot to continue unabated by constant risk assessment and hospital visits. Others have posited that Bron was simply hoarding a miracle cure, one more of the many criticisms of the ultra-rich stuffed into Glass Onion. Much more likely, though – especially given the film’s ultimate trajectory – the throat spray was nothing but bullshit, a performative placebo at best and a fake cure at worst. A shout-out to the far-right’s onetime edicts to drink bleach and horse dewormer to “protect” yourself.
Of course, as even the smartest and most sensible of the guests board the boat with masks stuffed into their pockets, with nary a second thought for the unstoppable virus ravaging the world, the spray is also a unfortunately apt metaphor for how quickly people are willing to accept a lie for the sake of their own convenience.
I don’t know what Johnson’s purpose was for setting Glass Onion at the beginning of the pandemic. But, watching all the Zoom calls and package wipe-downs, the frantic baking and barely controlled cabin fever, I found myself getting nostalgic. Nostalgic, for a fucking pandemic. For a time when it seemed like people actually gave a shit about COVID.
Look, I didn’t want to write this. I wasn’t planning on it – really, I wasn’t. When I sat down to write a wrap-up of the year, it was solely with the intention of listing some articles I wrote and maybe selling some books. (And I will probably still do that tomorrow.) But it’s difficult, maybe even impossible, for me to look back on 2022 without acknowledging it as the year the world finally gave up on the pandemic. The year the world gave up on me, and my wife, and countless others in our position.
I don’t think I need to prove that statement to anyone; President Biden quite literally said as much. Love the man or hate him, once he declared the pandemic over in September, everyone was willing to jump onboard. Many didn’t even need the push.
2022 was the year we all finally moved on, into our post-pandemic lives. Travel resumed, authors went on book tours, countless venues stopped even the pretense of checking for vaccinations or enforcing masks. Work-from-home policies went from being seen as corporate salvation to anti-capitalist propaganda, something to be stopped at any cost. Hell, even authoritarian China loosened its draconian pandemic prevention rules. The country is, of course, paying the price for that now – as are offices and authors and everyone else – but that’s kind of my point here, the heart of the matter I’ve (admittedly slowly) been getting to.
The COVID-19 pandemic is far, far from over,
and pretending it is only makes things much, much worse.
There were a lot of jokes in the nascent days of 2020 about how “running from it like the plague” didn’t work as a metaphor anymore. It was, at the time, an insult aimed specifically at antivaxxers and the far-right – but, right now, we, as an entire damn society, as a global civilization, are currently running headlong into a plague. COVID cases are rising again, everywhere – and will only get worse in the coming weeks. And that’s just the scantily reported cases we actually know about.
And yet, despite all evidence otherwise, the virus is being relegated to “just another flu.” Shrugged off and ignored as we all have better things to do. Which, (a) why would we want another flu? Why is another omnipresent virus considered a win? And, (b) even if COVID is only as equally deadly – which it’s not, it’s worse – it’s still vastly more prevalent. Up to ten times as dominant. Nevermind that the flu doesn’t give you permanent lung damage or ruin your cognitive function forever.
And all of the above is just why it’s bad for healthies, for those with functioning immune systems and halfway decent medical insurance. For vast swaths of us – the disabled and the chronically ill and the poor and the marginalized – COVID-19 remains something closer to a death sentence. I obviously can’t speak to all situations, but as an immunocompromised person with several underlying health conditions, if I get COVID I am fucked. And this is despite, like, six vaccinations and a pair of antibody treatments that are, thanks to constant COVID mutations, no longer viable. A lengthy hospital stay and months of recuperation is the best-case scenario.
This isn’t new, of course. I and others have been saying this from the start, begging people to pay attention to everyone on the edges and the front lines. I’d even go so far as to say I’m beating a dead horse here, but I’m pretty sure someone might actually care if I did that. PETA or the ASPCA at bare minimum.
Once upon a time, I dared to think that maybe, just maybe, we, as a people, would learn something from COVID. That once we saw that wearing masks also meant no one got the cold or the flu, maybe we’d finally eradicate those viruses, too, or at least stop having an annual season celebrating them. But we didn’t. We didn’t learn fuck-all anything. And now we’re in the midst of a tripledemic, acting like the last three years never fucking happened. Like rampant death and disability and an outsized risk to the most vulnerable aren’t a thing anymore. Like if we just close our eyes we can wish all of that away.
Look, I’m not going to convince anyone of anything this far in, I know that. I don’t like it, I don’t fully understand it, but I know it. Still being concerned about not getting COVID has made me an outlier, a germophobic weirdo. I’ve been here before. The months after my transplant basically left me allergic to the world. I’m used to having to look out for my own health. I’m used to the stares and the unasked-for opinions and the not being able to go anywhere. And I’m used to to feeling shitty about imposing my vulnerabilities on my wife and friends and family, feeling like the fragile freak bringing the party down.
But the level to which the world has regressed – it’s hard not to feel like I’m losing my mind a little. People who actively and openly have COVID are going into offices or holding holiday get-togethers. Stores and festivals and even the handful of Hollywood productions I’ve seen calls for are proudly advertising that they don’t require masks or vaccinations anymore. And both my CF clinic and transplant clinic have instituted mandatory in-person visits. During my last one, I was told to call from the parking lot so I could be checked in without having to sit in the waiting room. The hospital, after all, was rife with horrible respiratory viruses and my team wanted to mitigate my exposure as much as possible. But, still, despite being able to check my vitals and lung function at home, despite having done virtual visits before, I had to go in. I had to risk my health for a routine check-up.
The New York Times has christened those of us who, for some strange reason, don’t want to get COVID as “the last holdouts.” Framing us as some fringe group for not wanting to get violently ill. Now, to be fair, Amy Harmon’s article is mostly sympathetic to the immunocompromised and others who are still masking, and the headline is inflammatory clickbait. (I know from personal experience that the writer doesn’t pick their own headline for The New York Times.) But she nonetheless devotes time, space, and several quotes to both-sides-ism and people who think we’re overreacting. A choice that is a both a bummer and entirely telling – because even people on our side don’t want to be entirely on our side.
Again, this isn’t new. I’ve been screaming myself raw at The Atlantic and countless other outlets who’ve been doing this shit since pretty much the start of the pandemic. Ignoring the immunocompromised, the disabled, anyone who isn’t white and middle-class and disguising their unsavory conservatism under the veil of being a “moderate.” Calling for just this situation, for everyone to ignore a global fucking pandemic, so the healthies, the lucky ones who can actually survive COVID, can get back to their lives, the rest of us be damned.
I’m just so fucking tired of it. So fucking angry. COVID didn’t go away, didn’t stop tearing across the globe. The virus got marginally less fatal and we all decided that was good enough. I’m going to have to live in this pandemic for ten more fucking years because everyone else got bored of it. Because my life, because thousands of other lives, because our well-being was a reasonable enough price to pay for everyone else’s chance at normalcy.
I’m tired and I’m angry and I’ve got nowhere to put any of it, no chance to rest and no one to blame. No one, and everyone. But how do you live like that? How do you keep that loneliness from overtaking you? How do you let that aspect of otherness from becoming your whole identity? How do you keep all that rage contained without burning away some vital part of yourself?
At the end of Glass Onion, with the murder solved and a flotilla of cops on the way, with the illusion of privilege and exception burning away behind them, our former suspects sit, broken, on the steps of Miles Bron’s villa. There’s no mention of COVID, no epilogue that sees them returning to their pandemic lives. Instead, the credits roll. The movie ends.
But life – this one, the real one we’re all living – isn’t a movie. We can’t simply cut to black. Sooner or later everyone is going to have to reckon with the lies they told themselves. We’re going to have to leave that fantasy island and go home. I only hope it doesn’t take a murder to get us there.