Gabriel Nussbaum
Watching television in the quiet of the night, it struck me that fiction and reality have recently inverted. In the program I watched, youngish people in Brooklyn talk about music and failed romances. They attend bars and restaurants, hop in and out of cabs, hug each other. The show is supposed to take place “today,” and we would be forgiven for describing what we see as the present, but of course it is not the present; our actual present (here in New York) is in pandemic lockdown, a condition I don’t need to explain. But consider which setting (ours or the show’s) feels more like fiction and which like normal life. Last night, watching TV, I had the sense of being on the wrong side of the glass.
If a season two of this New York-based show were to be ordered – and I suspect it might – when will season two be scripted to take place? Will it take place in our real world (in which a pandemic crashed on New York, killing thousands, shuttering the record shops and everything else) or will it take place in an extension of the show’s originally-conceived “present” – which now would be a parallel universe, gently mocking us with its normalcy? Since a half-hour romantic comedy (based on an English Gen-X novel) isn’t the optimal vehicle for a steely look at life in post-pandemic Brooklyn, it is fair to assume that the writers’ best option is to ignore Brooklyn’s new real reality and continue on the narrative track they were on already, that is, an innocent and false reality. Unfortunately, that false reality will still be tainted by the shadow of the pandemic, because I the viewer am tainted by the pandemic. Since I cannot shift my viewer-perspective back in time, I will be stuck watching the show through the lens of now, with my pang of grim nostalgia for the New York of before. I can imagine this show drifting, season by season, farther and farther away from our actual city’s actual reality, until the show has become, unintentionally, a utopian science-fiction.
The broader topic here is how an abrupt and massive crisis is able to limit creative freedom. I’m not talking about freedom to make art; we can still make art. I’m talking about the freedom to tell the story you want to tell, without social or creative impediment. After a crisis, narrative artists – novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters – face a forced choice: either their new ‘set-in-the-present’ fiction will somehow literally incorporate the pandemic (or whatever the crisis in question,) or their stories will take place in some alternate crisis-free reality, recognizably not our own. The limitless creative freedom enjoyed by fiction writers is itself fiction; our creative work cannot escape the impact of a sudden world-altering event. Long after Hurricane Katrina, I can’t write a New Orleans story that doesn’t involve Katrina, even if I never mention it; the viewer provides that component within their own mind. After Kennedy’s assasination, a writer could no longer write about a public figure without the reader worrying about hidden dangers. More to the point, a writer could no longer write anything at all without Kennedy’s assassination coloring a reader’s experiece. A large enough crisis becomes an unremovable factor in our interpretation of art, even when the crisis plays no visible role in the art itself. The writer has no say in the matter; Kennedy’s death changed the consciousness. It’s interesting to think that the assasination colored all creative work that came after and before. Because we only exist in the post-assasination world, it doesn’t matter whether a work was written before the crisis; it can now only be seen through the filter of our post-crisis mind. We can’t watch that Brooklyn TV comedy through any eyes but our own, right now. Obviously, living through a crisis affects our take on everything that follows; experience colors reality. But it is interesting that fictional work is as susceptible to crisis as real life. While we might seek out late-night comfort viewing or a lightweight novel with the hope of being transported, we simply can't watch or read with our old eyes, only our current eyes. So the pandemic will be there in our romantic comedies and our Agatha Christie paperbacks; the virus has infected our fiction.
Postscript: I asked one of the TV show’s writers about the plans for season two. He reported that the last time he saw the creative team, it was at the show’s premiere a couple of weeks before the shut down, and there is no clarity on when or if another season might be filmed, nor has there been a discussion about whether the pandemic changes the narrative. I suspect when that discussion happens, they’ll discover that it’s not their decision to make.