I’ve been thinking about scenes from a couple of wildly different Charlton Heston movies. The second I’ll get to later, but the first is a bit from Ben-Hur. No, it isn’t the chariot race, but instead, the scene where Heston goes looking for his mother and sister in the valley of the lepers. There’s a man on the edge of the gorge lowering a basket with bread for the sufferers below. He, I now realize, was the Door Dash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub guy of antiquity.
Here in the early stages of the coronavirus panic, when restaurants and bars have just been closed around the country, restaurants and bars are still airing ads they’d paid for before the panic began. I find it jarring to go from grim news on the TV to a TGI Fridays commercial showing crowds grabbing at platters of bar food. I’m going to assume they all washed their hands between every bite.
For some companies, the national seclusion strategy presents tremendous opportunities, and they have been marketing like mad to seize the moment. “Make the most of your time at home,” was the message I received in an email from Michaels, the arts and crafts chain. It savvied that many of those sheltering in their houses are doing so with children — cooped-up, bored children. So, they are promising “a fun family activity!” for those who “tune in to Michaels’ Facebook LIVE every Wednesday at noon.” It’s a brilliant response, so much so that I bet the company will ramp it up to a daily craft project for the tykes.
Another industry poised to benefit from the Great Hunkering Down is streaming television. It’s a measure of just how many people must be signing up right now that hackers, spoofers, and phishers are sending out phony emails targeting the newbies. “Hey there,” read an email that somehow made it through my spam filter. “We’re the customer service team reaching out to help our newest members get started with Netflix.” I was invited to click on any one of several highly dubious links.
Other than Netflix, the video businesses that can expect to do boffo box office with those at home are Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube, and relative newcomer Tik Tok. Teenage girls in particular are obsessed with the short, homemade videos served up by that platform. Nothing could be better for TikTok’s enterprise than a national lockdown of American high school and college students. Let’s all put on our tinfoil hats for a second and note that TikTok is a Chinese company. All right, now that we’ve got that out of our system, we may now all remove our tin hats.
Which brings me to the other Heston flick I’ve been thinking about, one I last saw on late-night TV some 30 years ago: The Omega Man. Chuck plays one of the last humans not to have been infected by a virus that turns people into murderous mutants. By night, he holes up in his fortress, not because he doesn’t want to get infected — he is immune to the disease — but because the zombies come out after dark hoping to kill him. The scene that has stuck with me doesn’t depict any of the nocturnal mutant-slaying, but what Heston gets up to during the daylight hours. He goes to a movie theater, turns on the projector, and settles in to watch the documentary film of Woodstock. He revels in the crowd. It’s his respite from the loneliness he suffers.
Like Heston, film offers us a juxtaposition of the old world, in which we took throngs for granted, with the new world of vacant public spaces. As we all settle in to watch streaming images of the world that until recently was, we can at least take the opportunity to appreciate the role our friends and neighbors — but no zombies, please — play in the simple but essential role of populating our lives.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
