You know that moment, in slasher-horror movies, when the promiscuous teenagers who have been racing around the old barn, trying desperately to avoid the psycho killer, finally get him somehow?
Usually, it’s the girl in the third-tightest T-shirt (the girls in the first two have already been dispatched, in order of tightness) who hits him with a rock or a pole or stabs him with a pitchfork. It’s been a long time since I actually watched one of these.
The moment always comes near the natural end of the movie. The psycho slasher is down, pitchfork sticking out of his chest. In the foreground, the girl in the third-tightest T-shirt and her slightly vacant boyfriend embrace, relieved that it’s finally over. I should say her new boyfriend. Often, he began the movie as the boyfriend of the girl with the tightest T-shirt, but she was dispatched in the early shower scene, which technically made him single.
They hug each other tightly and rejoice that the ordeal is over. Whew, they say, or something equally vacant. (Nobody watches these pictures for the dialogue.)
We sure are glad that’s over, they say. We sure are relieved that the crazy psycho in the weird mask is lying dead behind us as we face, for some reason, in the opposite direction. Still, he’s gone, and we can be happy about that. One-hundred percent dead and gone. Why, there’s no way he couldn’t be dead, and we’re so sure of it we’re not even going to bother turning around to confirm that fact.
You’ve seen this scene a million times. In the background, of course, the psycho killer silently rises.
Insiders in the horror-slasher movie genre call it, I’m told, the Third Act Boo. It’s the moment when everything’s OK, everything’s OK, crisis over, back to normal, wait, what’s that noise? It’s a staple of the genre, and it serves two functions: One, it gives them a chance to kill the psycho again, and two, it sets up the sequel and the next 10 or 11 remakes. It’s such a tired old gimmick that no one is really surprised at all when it happens. Depending on which movie theater you’re in, sometimes the audience will even call out in glee, Hey! Turn around! TURN AROUND!
That seems to be where we are right now, as a country — or at least where some of us think we are.
Most of us are walking around without masks, happily shaking hands with each other, and pointing to our upper arms, just below the shoulder, and mouthing the words, “I got the shot!” as we enter shops or restaurants. We’re sidling up to the bar, elbow to elbow with strangers and their mists of saliva, and we’re feeling good about it. For us, this awful movie is over.
But despite the rapid and widespread deployment of three effective vaccines, plummeting rates of infection, and infection-related illness, there are a lot of people who are waiting for the Third Act Boo of the coronavirus pandemic. The governor of California, for instance, lifted some of the most draconian, and in many cases utterly ignored, rules he imposed during the crisis, but he reminded everyone that we’re all still in mortal danger. The psycho killer isn’t dead, he wants us to know. He’s just catching his breath.
It’s easy to understand why a progressive left-wing politician keeps warning about the Third Act Boo. For politicians and bureaucrats, this hasn’t been a slasher movie: It’s been a utopian fantasy flick, where the world is filled with obedient, isolated homebodies and they get to give daily crisis oratories covered by a lickspittle and compliant press.
But what about the young person at my local coffee shop who remains masked and gloved and encased in a thick plastic box? Her eyes are filled with terror as the next potential infectant enters the shop, which remains, as of this morning, festooned with alarming signs ordering customers not to sit, linger, stand too close, or attempt to use cash.
For her and, I suspect, her generation, the Third Act Boo is a permanent state of war footing. She’s about the right age to have spent her entire life being told that the oceans are going to rise and swallow us up, that we’re being poisoned by pesticides and right-wing news, that the world is getting hotter and meaner and more racist with every moment. The pandemic seemed to embody everything that her liberal education had predicted.
And now it’s supposed to be over? And worse, thanks to Big Pharma?
Talk about a Third Act Boo.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
