Commentary: 'This ain't no zombie novel, but the zombie novels can teach us a thing or two. In the zombie stories, the humans nearly always end up fighting. That's the trap — and we know better.'
that garnered a bit of notoriety. It featured zombies and viral pandemics, and so the story was riddled with empty and ravaged cities. Zombies were particularly fashionable back then.
In our current pandemic, these signifiers are rearing their eerie heads. Of course most are absent. We certainly aren't and will not be anywhere near burning cars. There are no gangs of bandits on motorcycles. There are no broken windows. But there are uncollected newspapers, piling up at the entrance to the office building where I've been virtually meeting with patients through the wonders of sterile technology.
My second angle is that we are not in a disaster movie. What we see in the movies is a lot worse, a whole lot worse, than the unsettling emptiness on the street where I work. That's important to remember. Film scholars have noted that we tend to over-interpret familiar cinematic images when we encounter these images outside of the movies.
My book featured characters who grew bored and frustrated with one another. Ennui was at least as dangerous as the pandemic itself. This very ennui, the lonely, one-note chords that empty streets and closed shops play in our pattern-prone brains, is the sentiment we have to guard most stringently against.
Now, I must apologize. As a psychiatrist, I am going to offer clichés. Clichés are clichés, after all, because they are true. Oddly enough, we tend to ignore clichés when things get weird. I am arguing, therefore, that these clichés are currently especially important.
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