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Wednesday, January 11, 2006
HAM-demic!
Hey, it's that guy! The global influenza pandemic will be marked by outbreaks of severe over-acting, stilted dialogue and hackneyed, horror-movie cliches.
CBC's Fifth Estate aired a docu-drama called Black Dawn: The Next Pandemic tonight (Patrick Swayze not included). You know you're in trouble when a show is given an ominous-sounding but meaningless title like 'Black Dawn'. Black Dawn? But it's not a movie about an invasion of blow-up sex dolls (I WISH!), it's a show about the flu.
The program is a mix of DOGME 95-style dramatizations and Errol Morris-inspired interview segments (except there's no person behind the camera yelling questions like "Why are your ears so BIG?" at the experts) and the result is a show that is slightly less believable than the Dawn of the Dead remake and not as funny as Shaun of the Dead.
 "Don't sell the gawddamn Oseltamivir Phosphate, punk!"
The main character in the dramatizations is Jane (read her 'pandemic blog'), candidate for the 'Worst Nurse in a Pandemic Dramatization' Oscar. Jane is a downer who's secretly happy that there's a pandemic because it finally gives her a chance to indulge in some drama and she indulges ... constantly. You know the size of the Grinch's heart? That's the size of Jane's sense of humour.
The subtext hints that she has issues with her teenage son because he reminds her of the ex who has left her to fend for herself with two kids during a global flu pandemic ... but she never confronts those feelings because civilization is collapsing and people at the hospital where she works are bleeding from their eyes and ears. It should be noted that in War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise's character not only survives an alien genocide, he also reconciles with his family unit. Oh, those Americans are so superior!
Worse than the nurse are the constant mock media reports spread through the program. They're annoying because the Fifth Estate accepts them at face value as a serious cultural expression and offers no critique of that aspect of a global disaster. Most irritating is the voice-over at the end of the show when a fake anchor talks about the world being 'one world' or some crap like that not ten minutes after an expert told us that the poor will die in much greater numbers than the rich.
This program is a victim of a general trend of overselling the drama on CBC news programs with scary music and over-editing. In the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, every other episode featured music that expressed the 'awe and wonder' of space exploration but because there was awe and wonder around every corner, the music became a joke because it was out-of-scale with the experience of the crew. The same thing is happening on CBC news: nothing is dramatic if everything is dramatic.
Finally, the show did not entertain the scariest thought of all: can you imagine Prime Minister Stephen Harper dealing with a global flu pandemic? OH MY GOD, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11:45 PM
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