The doors of the carriage slide open. And there she is.
Rosamund Pike in Marie Curie drag holding a glowing vile of radium. It’s the poster for a formulaic-looking biopic, Radioactive, opening 20 March 2020. A movie neither I nor anyone I know will ever see.
Except now it’s July and it’s still there. Like those bowls of soup or whatever frozen by volcanic ash on ancient breakfast tables at the ruins of Pompeii.
I’m back on the tube again and Ros has been holding that test tube for months, staring straight ahead and asking herself, ‘When will this be over? When can we forget I ever did this film? Wouldn’t you rather go see James Bond?’
I don’t know if societies still do time capsules, those locked boxes of selected items intended to tell future people, ‘This is how we lived.’ When the Victorians laid the cornerstone of a new building they might place things inside like coins, photos, newspapers, religious texts.
No one would’ve chosen this film poster.
Or any of the other ones that stayed on the sides of buses and phone boxes around London all during the lockdown. Public advertising space isn’t worth much during a pandemic so the same adverts squatted there for months, trumpeting films like Mulan (eventually gone to streaming), A Quiet Place Part 2 (delayed til next year) or that British one about the beauty pageant with Lesley Manville and Gugu Mbatha-Raw -- which technically did open, I think, before it went to early to VOD.
These were the visual white noise of normal life, back when we all jostled into crowded carriages, social calendars full, stuffing every minute with any old bit of culture or social engagement. Unremarkable and unremarked upon, we rushed past them expecting that eventually they’d be replaced by the Next Thing and the Next after that. But these overstayed their welcome.
After premiering at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival and causing no stir, Rosamund Pike’s star turn as the pioneering scientist must have been deemed ‘radioactive’ itself since it was relegated to the late winter dumping ground where misbegotten, disappointing films go to wither. Savvy filmgoers know to avoid films that come out in that late February to March slot: they sit decaying through a one to two-week theatrical release in under-populated cinemas, depleting themselves of potential Oscar nominations, critical acclaim and the likelihood of recouping their budgets.
We wait through those fallow months, hung over from awards season and longing for green shoots to pop up at Cannes and raise our hopes again. Such are the normal cycles of growth and renewal in the cultural calendar, which have been warped this year like everything else.
Staring now at this poster that should have long since disappeared, it’s as if the mint green radiation from that glowing tube has caused a kind of mutation, turning the film (or the idea of the film) into a curious and persistent memento mori.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes called a photograph “the living image of a dead thing.” Some of the dead things signified by Rosamund’s weary expression (at least for me) include:
her hopes of a Best Actress nomination
the cultural currency of the prestige biopic
the viability of traditional cinematic release strategies
normal cosmopolitan commuter life
my own relationship with an equally actress-obsessed film fan, which didn’t so much decay as explode under the pressure of lockdown
Certain photos, Barthes says, acquire a sensory effect that cannot be explained by the actual image itself. They possess a particular subjective element that he called a punctum: ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’
We’re all a bit bruised now.
Though we didn’t know it, that week in late March was a global Sliding Doors moment. What is the alternative plotline where we miss this particular pandemic train and end up taking a different track and emerging as the blonde version of Gwyenth? I wouldn’t be thinking about this poster.
**
‘Half-life’ is the time it takes for a radioactive element to reduce to half of its original quantity. The half-life of radium, one of two elements that Marie Curie discovered, is a whopping 1600 years (basically the amount of time from Christ to Shakespeare). Compared to that, the half-life of most films is infinitesimal: huge quantities of initial buzz and hopes that exponentially deplete once they’ve actually been seen.
Sliding Doors is the exception: a moderately successful 90s rom-com that has lived on for more than thirty years. Along with its philosophically speculative cousin Groundhog Day, it’s survived in general consciousness as a kind of existential shorthand understood by people who haven’t even seen the films.
Find me someone, though, who remembers that before Renee Zellweger successfully impersonated Judy Garland she flopped in a 2006 biopic as Beatrix Potter. Or that Hillary Swank crashed and burned as Amelia Earhart.
Well, actually, I already know one. He’s just disappeared from my life.
The success or failure of human relationships isn’t measured by Box Office Mojo or Rotten Tomatoes. Even the ones that decay (or explode) can offer growth that lasts.
What’s the half-life of a feeling? How long until the intensity of a radioactive love or antagonism reduces to nothing but a tincture?
The huge majority of all films released will eventually sink down in the quicksand of Netflix or the bowels of IMDB. After so much time, creativity and energy have been poured into them, they settle into their final resting place as little more than trivia fodder to be dredged up by obsessives like me and my ex.
He and I even hosted a Zoom quiz back in April. Remember those?
The temporal experience of this pandemic has been surprisingly hard to describe. Rather than the tedium of a Beckett play, it’s had the double timescale of a Christopher Nolan movie. Looping, layering, somehow moving both slowly and quickly at the same time. Something you can only figure out in retrospect when you sit with your friends to unwind the threads: ‘What the hell was that about?’
As the groundhog days of lockdown cycled by in their endless loops of repetition, most people felt an even greater hunger for variety and a ravenous cultural consumption. Not enough content to fill our hungry holes.
In self-isolating homes around the world we consumed media like it was rapidly approaching its sell-by date. Remember the week everyone watched Tiger King? Good People? Hollywood?
I didn’t watch any of those. I was wrapped up in a real-life serialised drama and I haven’t haven’t had much appetite for a new movie or episode of TV in… what’s the date again?
Six whole months of this. Half a year.
That sounds like a significant benchmark, but we can’t see it proportionally if the end point is invisible. Speaking in the Commons yesterday, Boris said we should expect his new restrictions to last six months. I’m sure they chose that because there’s a nice symmetry to it: March to March.
He also added the word ‘perhaps…’
**
Cinemas have reopened and in some kind of cosmic coincidence we’ve been offered Tenet, a palindromic Nolan joint where time can go backward, allowing us to redo mistakes. We wait to see if Kenneth Branagh (somehow playing both Putin AND Trump) will be allowed to destroy everything – our past, our future, and our present.
In ‘normal’ circumstances, this is one I would’ve skipped, and yet there I was the other week in a cavernous cinema at the Vue Leicester Square, doing my part to Move On from everything that’s happened.
The experience was fun, in part, but also a little funereal. Before the film began, the audience of about eight people was subjected to not one but two promos convincing us of the unique power of in-person movie going. “This is not a Cinema,” I was told by Ridley Scott and John Boyega. Apparently, it’s some kind of communal, religious experience, someplace we can all be with one another again.
But we were already there. It seemed more like a message intended for everyone who should’ve been in those empty seats: absent companions, departed partners, nervous neighbours who decided to Netlfix and chill.
John David Washington in a sharp suit can go back in time to retrieve and rebury that nuclear material (or whatever the hell it was) but everything off-screen won’t be so easily reset.
Cinema-going was dying before this lockdown.
Maybe my relationship was, as well. I’m still talking that one through.
There will someday come a point from which all of us can look back and survey the wreckage.
Jobs lost.
Businesses gone.
Lives changed.
On the tube home, the posters for Radioactive were gone. I wanted to take a picture to accompany this essay but most of the advertising space has now been papered over with generic TfL images.
“Mind the Gap.” Literal placeholders until such time as the half-life of pandemic paranoia has passed and we allow ourselves some raised hopes that new stories, experienced together, might just be worth the risk.
Until then, we wait on the platform. “Next train approaching.”
Give us more content, more distraction
Give us more time.