Dan Slevin reflects on his changing viewing habits as the pandemic drags on.
Photo: Disney
The other day I was looking back through recent posts to this little corner of the RNZ website and, to my horror but not to my surprise, discovered that there have only been 12 pieces posted here since January 2021, compared with 35 in 2020.
Some might call that dereliction of duty. I’m calling it Covid fatigue.
As 2021 progressed I discovered three things about my pandemic self. Firstly, that it has been exhausting, especially if you have a demanding day job to maintain. Secondly, I had fallen out of the habit of going to the cinema – a behaviour that I had loved, advocated for and profited from in the past was now something of a chore. Indeed, during Covid outbreaks it even felt like a risk.
I chose to see nothing in person at the last New Zealand International Film Festival and I told people that I was less worried about picking up Covid in a well-ventilated auditorium than I was about gathering in crowded foyers, and that was true, but during the second half of last year I mainly just wanted to stay at home.
Thirdly, that my tastes had – I hope temporarily – changed. Even at home, I was avoiding challenging or possibly depressing material in favour of more easily consumed fare. Life outside was difficult enough for so many people near and far from me that when faced with an after-dinner choice of viewing, more often than not we chose comfort food.
This meant that we would choose new seasons of shows we liked (See, Apple TV+; For All Mankind, Apple TV+, The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel, Amazon Prime) or we could be confident would be entertaining (Loki and Hawkeye, Disney+). In one eye and out the other – none of those needed any boosting from me in these pages and I barely had the brainspace to write about them insightfully in any case.
Photo: Apple
Looking at the wasteland that is my Letterboxd diary for the last year or so is sobering: if I wasn’t reviewing something for At the Movies, I was re-watching old favourites, the comfort food of Japanese anime, superhero films that were landing on streaming services much faster than ever before. Not much protein.
As I just alluded to, every so often during the last couple of years, the call has come out from RNZ National to help fill a gap on At the Movies: either Simon is on leave or stuck at home for some reason. These opportunities were welcome but tiring – a fun challenge but draining. In times of restricted access to RNZ premises, I write, record, and edit those shows by myself – always worried about meeting the kind of audio standards set by the magicians who operate the boards at RNZ when I’m working in my own little home studio, let alone making actual sense in the reviews. Meeting those deadlines is always pretty stressful.
But at least, At the Movies got me back out to the cinema (highlights this summer were Spielberg’s West Side Story and Weerasethakul’s incredible Memoria) but I still found myself wondering whether this gig was a thing I could still do. Many of my contemporaries are doing some of their best work in this environment that I find so challenging. Maybe it’s quitting time.
TildaSwinton in Memoria Photo: Madman
But, for better or worse, those contemporaries are my community and I love being a part of it. Writing about Bill Gosden on the publication of The Gosden Years reminded me that I have some history and that perspective is worth something.
The other day I was tending my other little digital garden, Funerals & Snakes, a collection of all my film writing prior to RNZ, and was astonished to discover that it still gets over 3,000 hits a month. For a site that hasn’t had an update in nearly 30 months! Maybe, there’s some value in what I have been doing after all?
I’m extremely grateful that RNZ has left me to my own devices here at Widescreen. They don’t assign me topics nor – apart from some valuable sub-editing – do they curate the content. The only guidance at the beginning was try not to repeat anything that Simon is doing on At the Movies, but apart from that I get to follow my nose and it’s time that nose was a little closer to the grindstone.
Maybe this recent creative dip has been less about a lack of excitement for the product, maybe my lack of excitement for the product is a result of my creative dip? And I can attend to that myself – by paying closer attention again, challenging my own assumptions again, wrestling the right words out of my head again.
It’s time.
