San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Summer Guide: A return to live entertainment
Box office bump offers clues about where arts are headed after COVID
The summer of 2021 should bring us closer to answering the key cultural question of this moment: Did the pandemic interrupt and divert the direction we were heading, toward increased isolation and virtual living? Or did it accelerate it?
That’s the question at the heart of all other questions, such as whether people will go back to the movies, theater, rock concerts, book signings, etc. At issue here is how people, in a postpandemic world, will want to live. We remember the old normal. We know the new normal. But what about the next normal?
One good indication that the next normal might resemble the old was the movie box office for Memorial Day weekend, the traditional beginning to the summer movie season. I’d never thought I’d ever find hope for humanity in a box office chart, but life is full of surprises. “A Quiet Place Part II” grossed $58 million in four days, which is on a par with what the first installment did three years ago.
All told, the Memorial Day box office haul was about $100 million, which is a little less than half of what it was in 2019. But at a time when many theaters still hadn’t reopened, that’s a healthy indication that people want a return, not just to movies, but to normal life.
From this, we might be able to extrapolate good news for the other arts, as well. Moviegoers tend to skew young, and young people are more risk tolerant. When the pandemic
finally ends, as every pandemic does, middleaged and older people, presumably more wedded to the old normal, will return to the theater, the opera and the symphony.
A hundred years ago, the Spanish flu killed mostly young folks. Go to any old cemetery and it’s devastating the number of individuals in their 20s and 30s who died in 1919. Likewise, World War I killed a lot of young people, too. When both calamities ended, the survivors of that young generation gave us the Roaring ’20s, and the rest of the culture followed their lead.
Movies, literature, art, theater and music, as well as sports and technology, found new levels of quality and innovation. Disaster led to an explosion, not only of brilliance, but of conviviality. As much as I hope and partly expect the same to happen this time, I do have some doubts. The pandemic has shown us how much we need other people, but it’s also taught us that we can survive without them. It was always easier to stay home, but now you can, while getting by on a counterfeit of personal contact through your phone or computer.
Shy young people, cruelly robbed of more than a year of social life and development, could decide that sheltering inside the technological womb of social media might be an easier and more manageable way to go through life. I’m reminded of the movie “Her” (2013), in which everyone was socially weird, because no one had any experience with actual human interaction.
Still, there’s only so much that an app can do for a person. Here’s hoping that the mating call — essentially, the call to life — pries the reluctant from their media cloisters.
In the meantime, summer beckons. Barbecues. The baseball game. A swell of laughter coming from a few yards away, and from another yard. Kids squealing in a swimming pool. Lawn chairs. A cold bottle of beer. Imagine: someone hands one to you, and you don’t even have to wipe it with alcohol! No, you just drink it, like it’s 2019. Like it’s other year, besides that awful one.
Yes, it looks like it’s happening. This is the summer it all comes back. Including us.