Everyone seems closer now, even as they’ve become more untouchable than ever. A group of women use the Zoom video conferencing application to have a group chat from their separate homes during the UK coronavirus lockdown.
Three weeks into isolation, it suddenly felt urgent to watch Tiger King. The Netflix documentary fits a familiar mold: odd true-crime story (private zoo owner hires assassin to kill an animal rights activist), colorful characters (a man who runs a tiger-based sex cult; a zoo worker who is mauled by a tiger and opts to amputate his hand rather than cause any more bad PR for his boss; an animal rights activist who may or may not have killed her own philandering husband and fed him to tigers), and a tone that wavers between mockery and empathy.
It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and under normal circumstances, it’s probably not something I would watch. Yet a few weeks into lockdown, when going to Wegmans felt decadent and luxurious, I wanted to watch Tiger King more than anything — not because it was good, but because I knew other people were watching it, and because I could talk to them about it once I was done.
Life in a pandemic is stripped down to bare survival. For a while, all my non-work-related conversations were about food: which stores had enough of it, and what items had the longest shelf life. I found myself rationing things for no reason, bulk-buying tampons, reusing paper towels. I should be baking bread, I thought during those first weeks, only to watch the shelves empty of flour as everyone else started thinking the exact same thing.
Those shared artifacts give us something to bond over between our nightly panic attacks and hours of impotent doom-scrolling.
Pop culture feels deeply frivolous in this context, yet it was also deeply necessary. I needed something to talk to people about that wasn’t food or our impending doom. Culture is a social glue. It doesn’t just provide us with an escape from our lives (though we could all probably use one), it establishes a sense that we are operating within a community, that we all know and care about at least some of the same things. That sense of belonging is more important than ever, as we deal with a disaster that has divided us up into separate homes. Isolation worsens our distress, making it easy to spiral and panic and burn out. We have to find some communal touchstone: the TV show we’re all watching, the baked goods we’re all making, the song the whole neighborhood sings. Those shared artifacts give us something to bond over between our nightly panic attacks and hours of impotent doom-scrolling. They connect us when nothing else does.
The culture that’s emerged during this pandemic is one defined by our shared loneliness: Everyone, from our co-workers to our parents to our talk show hosts, has become a head in a box, a glitchy image beamed to us through Zoom or FaceTime. Our online friendships are now just as “real” as our off-line ones — in fact, they may be the only friendships some of us have left — and the time we used to spend at restaurants and parties, we now spend in computer-simulated gathering places, whether that’s the paradisiacal island of Animal Crossing or the 24-hour-a-day bar brawl that is Twitter. For those of us who grew up parsing the distinction between online personas and “real” people, it’s alarming to find that the distinction has evaporated: My two-year-old has playdates by hopping onto video conference calls and waving toys at a laptop monitor, and may grow up feeling there is no difference between interacting with an image of someone and socializing with that person in the flesh.
There’s a weird intimacy to this new state of play. A “concert” has become your favorite musician, looking washed-out and tired, strumming a guitar in front of a webcam. A “reading” or a “book discussion” is now two authors speaking into different laptops from different living rooms. Everyone seems closer now — we know what the insides of their houses look like, how they dress at home, how they look under bad lighting or without makeup — even as they’ve become more untouchable than ever. It is just as impossible for me to visit my best friend in Manhattan as it is for me to visit Idris Elba, which, in an odd way, makes Elba feel like just another guy I happen to know.
That leveling effect does not always play to the advantage of the entertainers: If celebrities and presidential candidates use the same technology as 16-year-old YouTubers, it’s easier to notice when the 16-year-olds are more interesting. Stephen Colbert can tell jokes from his bathtub and the Backstreet Boys can reenact “I Want It That Way” from their separate mansions, but those clips still are no more impressive than the family of nerds staging “One Day More” in their living room or the guy delivering a full late-night monologue while riding his bike through Manhattan. New movies like Emma are skipping their theatrical runs to stream on Amazon, but women’s magazines are recommending TikTok compilations of teens kissing their crushes instead.
It makes sense that we would tilt toward the lo-fi and amateur right now — family singalongs, teen diaries, documentaries about small-town weirdos with bad hair. What we most want to see right now is each other: unknown and unrehearsed, pale and frazzled, coming apart at the seams. We are heads in boxes, checking in on other heads in boxes, trying to find some commonality, no matter how far apart we are — a way to be apart without being alone.