LIFE AS A MOVIE

We get flattened!

BY Angelo Fernando

Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time compresses several billion years of the universe’s existence into about 200 pages. What we are collectively experiencing around the world has the opposite effect. Time is being stretched into a slow-motion movie, starting with the big bang of an inscrutable virus colliding with our everyday lives.

Sometimes, what feels like a zombie apocalypse movie is being produced, watched and critiqued by us in what we once called ‘real time.’ Let’s just call it ‘surreal time.’

We want to put it behind us and move on; but we keep adding to the soundtrack with our comments and conspiracy theories, silly memes that help depressurise our angst and  anguished voices when someone we know falls victim to coronavirus – the villain in the movie.

Perhaps that’s what makes this movie with so many bad reviews go viral (sigh… pun intended!).


Indeed, you too want to flatten the curve and pulverise it into the x-axis. Those of us who barely paid attention to peaks and troughs in graphs realise now that we are the vectors. We’re both the data points in that mathematical snapshot and transmitters of the pathogen. And we have the leverage to flatten it by basically doing nothing other than staying at home.

If only all this collective action didn’t have to flatten our paycheques and retirement funds, and turn our birthday parties into one-dimensional video events!

I once attended an awkward Zoom party where the celebrant was on display like a trophy on a stage. It was so inadequate that after the livestream ended, I piled my family into the minivan and drove to their house where we chatted on the street for about an hour. It felt so much more satisfying.

And I also attended a livestreamed funeral out of Melbourne. It felt voyeuristic because no one should have to grieve on camera. After practising physical distancing and socialising online for a few months, don’t you feel that many virtual reality experiences are one-dimensional and overhyped?

Though it might seem like the easiest fit for a computer teacher like me to port a batch of lessons online, in reality it isn’t. We lose more than the whiteboards and overhead projectors. We lose eye contact and all of those minute exchanges that you can never have on a 15 inch screen.

After three months of this, my students unanimously claimed they preferred being in class to going online. Imagine that!

Coronavirus also pulverised the ‘I hate school’ response, which was once a hallmark of teenagers. Despite the benefits of online platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet, we lose a lot when we don’t occupy a collective space. We flatten humanity when we ‘meet’ each other on a panel of liquid crystals made up of a matrix of pixels.

For a brief moment in time, the classroom becomes an instant community where knowledge is enlarged upon and put together like a messy jigsaw puzzle. We also put up with each other’s idiosyncrasies, expectations, missed assignments and cold viruses.

I’m writing this in a country that has begun to ease back on compulsory ‘stay homes’ with COVID-19 cases still appearing in many places. Unemployment is at 15 percent and the business community is still in triage.

With luck, this bad movie will end in a few months. But over in Sri Lanka, the movie script looks very different. Despite the long curfew, some are even seeing this as an opportunity.

“Never waste a good crisis,” one business leader told me recently. If only America would take note.