I’m imagining the year 2060, when I’ll be 80 years old. In my mind’s eye, I see someone who’s my age now. Like me, this fictional person is a history buff – and a cinephile, too, of course – and she watches old movies and reads books about (mostly pop-culture) history. (What will this time period’s version of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls be called, anyway? Stan’s World: When Marvel Ate the Entertainment Industry?)
This person, who was born in 2020, reads part of the Wikipedia entry for “COVID-19 pandemic in the United States” and becomes fascinated. After watching a few YouTube videos of archival news footage about the pandemic, she stumbles across the trailer for Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger’s documentary Totally Under Control. She watches the whole movie with an unbelieving half-grin on her face.
It’s a disturbing watch, but for her it’s a little like when I watched Triumph of the Will. It all happened so long ago, it’s hard to imagine actually living through it. This invented person – like the actual people who might one day watch Totally Under Control four decades from now – will never know the rage, frustration, and sense of hopelessness that watching Gibney, et al.’s film engenders in someone living through this moment.