Doomsday connected

It all started with our COVevening ritual. After the toddler was sound asleep, we’d open a bottle of red wine and watch the series du jour. Red wine was a must, since it had been proven to have many health benefits. I actually drank it as my nighttime medicine.

Then, comfy on the couch, medicinal drink in hand, we started watching Years and Years—a mini-series spanning approximately 12 years, starting in 2019. It portrays a Manchester family of four grown siblings and their respective families. While there are some futuristic elements (since it jumps into the future), it smartly avoids depicting huge, dramatic, and unbelievable tech changes. Instead, it shows subtle adjustments that only seem drastic in hindsight.

Emma Thompson as Vivienne Rook, a businesswoman-turned-politician and eventually the Prime Minister of Britain (like if Martha Stewart and Donald Trump had a fancy British baby), was amazing. She made me truly dislike her character and simultaneously agree with her—then feel a mix of joy and disgust about it.

At one point during our nightly binge, it felt too close to home. A scene showing the collapse of the banking system left people broke and furious (a more-mature-Vin-Diesel film, perhaps?).

Right then, it hit me—everything is so intertwined at this point in time that the smallest break in one part of our systems could cause the collapse of all of them. And when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING. My extra-dark, analytical mind, fueled by nighttime medicine and the doomsday-apocalypse feeling of the COVID-19 lockdown, led me to this prophecy:

The internet breaks due to an overload of users on multiple devices (in my house alone, we have five devices on Wi-Fi), leading to an overload of cell and phone services.

Since security systems rely on the internet, landlines, and cellular networks, they stop working or begin rebooting. Banks, institutions, and stores are left with minimal staff, while management frantically tries to fix the problems. Enter depression and a sense of defeat. Marginalized societies, already suffering financial repercussions from the pandemic, lose access to whatever money they had or could borrow.

In Western society, the men in power (yep, white, rich men) do everything to maintain the status quo: keeping the poor poor, the rich richer, and everyone else enslaved while conditioning us to be grateful for freedoms that should be basic. But I digress (loop the loop).

At this point, a furious public with poor health insurance, if any, poor health, and historic access to firearms—but not to education—erupts into riots and vandalism. When food is scarce, the invisible virus is no longer the biggest concern. Add in the tendency of poor populations to smoke and use drugs as coping mechanisms for stressful lives (designed by—you guessed it—white, rich men).

As riots are, by nature, huge social gatherings, and we’ve established that the first to riot will be uninsured, unhealthy smokers with little to lose, hospitals will overflow. Stores will be looted, people will be injured or killed, and others will be afraid, locked in their homes. And with no Netflix, Amazon Prime, or HBO on demand... Oh my!

By this point in my head, I started making my previously mentioned apocalypse order, inlaid with some hair accessories, because I am not facing the end of the world with messy hair (oh, how I wish I could think about anything other than my hair).

After that, I just had to watch some virus-outbreak movies to see if my predictions had ever been filmed. Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagion, which conveniently hit Netflix that week, was first on the list. The movie again struck that sweet spot of terror about the virus and self-soothing with online shopping (more hair stuff!!!).

As accurate a portrayal of a deadly virus as it was, the film also exploited a tired metaphor: a cheating woman brings the world to its end. Cheatxploitation? Cheatingwomenxploitation? Too long, but funny (not funny). Cheating men rarely lead to the end of the world.

Though my predictions, fortunately, haven’t come true, we are witnessing riots and resistance—long overdue. But why, oh why, do curses so often involve someone’s mom or sister, female genitalia, or a comparison to a little girl? It seems everything about women is considered an insult: our age, looks, bodies, and sexuality.

No wonder that even in the hierarchy of oppression and resistance, women are at the bottom. Now I’m just waiting for society to stop using women as insults and women’s sexuality as a reason for disasters.

Meanwhile, we decided to skip more disaster movies and moved on to lighter fare—Al Pacino as a Holocaust survivor turned Nazi hunter in Amazon’s Hunters.

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