ST. LOUIS — The streets of St. Louis are quiet these days.
Inside homes, televisions are singing a different tune. Streaming networks like Amazon Prime and Netflix are booming right now. The latter debuted its third season of "Ozark," the Lake of the Ozarks-located (but not really) drama series on Friday to great reviews and a flurry of social media chatter.
Amazon is stuffed with recently theatrical releases such as "The Way Back," "The Invisible Man," and "The Hunt." Hulu launched a Reese Witherspoon-Kerry Washington starring series earlier this month. Stay-at-home, ordered or not, has only opened the wormhole for advanced distractions. Netflix doesn't even bother to ask "are you still watching" anymore after a few hours of binging. They get it. We're home for a while.
Movie theaters are ghost towns, abandoned sets for the territory otherwise known as the stomping grounds for film addicts. You drive by Marcus Wehrenberg's Ronnies cinema in South County or AMC's Esquire parking lot in the heart of midtown, and you could squint and nearly see Will Smith walking around with his German Shepherd.
Times have changed, even if the look was settling in long before COVID-19 came to town. Streaming was already starting to win the battle, taking out most of the competition outside of the random blockbuster. Those new films I named earlier that are available for $20 weren't all smash hits. Ben Affleck's basketball drama was critically-acclaimed yet also criminally forgotten when it was in theaters. Leigh Whannell's revenge drama with Elizabeth Moss made a killing, turning a $7 million budget into $124 million worldwide, but when see outside of the budget/box office take restriction, that total isn't overwhelming.
It doesn't help that the movies and shows being released echo the current issue at hand. A Jesse Eisenberg World War II drama, "Resistance," could draw a comparison in name alone, but the overall tones of isolation and death tolls don't heighten the tension. The volume of past mistakes ringing across the room like an unstable mantra. Look at "Tiger King," a wildly unhinged series that documents the rise and fall of an endangered animal park owner named Joe Exotic.
Now, that doesn't create a direct link right away, but it should when you realize everything in that docu-series is 100% true. In that series is a heavy portion of this country's personality: speak loud, act a little, and think later. It's that philosophy that may or may not have let this virus take a deadly turn. Stubborn, divided, and cynical: That's us. When Joe Exotic is teaching us things, it's OK to worry.
Even in the Jason Bateman-Laura Linney starring Netflix hit, you can see the perimeters of human frailty painting a large picture of despair. The way that Bateman's Marty messed up so badly early on, laundering money for a drug cartel that he's constantly trying to find a way out — only to be hindered by someone close to him.
At their best, and even moderately talented peak, works of fiction teach us about our past and where we are going. They also raise questions, often leading to lingering dismay and people pushing each other into a corner. I'll be honest and admit most of the movies on these days have a hint of foreshadowing. Anytime there's a group of people bunkering down and trying to survive against the odds in the story I'm watching, that is certainly more of a shade of our current gray.
Maybe I simply miss the movies and their impact on my life. I noted this disconnect in my last article about the requirement for movie theaters, but I'll say it again for firm landing. Movies are important and play a vital role in our everyday society. Just ask anyone right now without the usual exit routes to distraction and fun. They are getting lost in television shows, both new and classically overlooked. They work in their pajamas and keep a semi-friendly relationship with deodorant and shampoo. Movies and the land of creative, music and any form of art, serve as a faithful escape. Something not letting you down right now.
I don't miss the real world connection movies can have on us. That's not a fun realization. I don't want to see the on-screen happenings leap onto the streets, where gas masks are experiencing a shortage and hospitals can't contain the sick. Throw a dart at your DVD collection and something will attach itself to the current pandemic.
It's all too real right now. I can spend 2-3 hours with otherworldly creations or spitting image types in a box, but the creeping realization that next week could look totally different never gets too far away. I wanted this to sound optimistic, but I think that plan failed.
Everything in the movies is playing out on the big stage right now, and it's quite scary.
Remember Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight"? Of course you do, but pay attention. During that film, Heath Ledger's Joker wanted to create chaos by unveiling crusaders from different mothers, Batman and Harvey Dent, to be more vigilante than hero. He just wanted to "watch the world burn." You can reference either one of Ledger's monologues for the current state of the world.
The one where he tells Batman that he's only as good as the world wants him to be, or the one where he convinces Dent that the world worries about the wrong things and that they are infected. "When the chips are down, these civilized people, they'll eat each other." Was he really just ahead of the curve? I sure hope not.
That was the genius of Nolan's film. Twelve years later, it's teaching us things about ourselves that have been there for centuries, but couldn't be detected. It's my biggest fear that this virus doesn't turn out to be the deadliest combatant in this pandemic. My biggest fear is us being the deadliest. Our own ignorance.
The streets of St. Louis are awfully quiet these days. I used to long for the crime-ridden neighborhoods of my youth to calm down, but not in this way.
Now, it's all one big movie out there. A scary movie.
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