I was very fortunate in my experience of the pandemic. I didn’t lose anyone, and while I did eventually get sick, it wasn’t too severe a case. It’s possible for me to look back on my personal version of those years through a kind of nostalgic and even intermittently rosy filter, as if the years were just made up of more time with my wife and oddities like sanitizing grocery deliveries.
That last item comes up a lot in pandemic reminiscing in media. Remember when we Lysol-wiped cereal boxes? Remember the toilet paper shortages? How droll! What a weird time!
It’s the kind of thing you smile about when you dodged all the worst bullets. (And never even ran out of toilet paper.)
Remember when everyone started making bread?
“Pandemic Bread,” the short film by Zeinabu Davis, remembers that—and everything else. This 2023 piece is wrapped in warm sunlight, a filter that burnishes even as it records. The worst this family is experiencing, it seems, is the anti-espresso-drip boredom of a glazed-eyed kid coasting through Zoom classes; this could have long-term ramifications, but we haven’t gotten to them yet. In the meantime, Princess Punzalan’s Luz acts as a remote Filipino-English hospital interpreter, taking calls while she—of course—sets about making her pandemic bread. Punzalan nails an instantly endearing combination of expressiveness and professional reserve, taking Luz through her first-person descriptions of one man’s priapism so that I laugh at her face but admire how her voice keeps the patient’s dignity intact.
Then she handles a call where an older woman, Becca Godinez’s Remedios, is dying of COVID pneumonia and, despite her doctor’s (Claire Simba) best and most earnest efforts, refusing intubation, and the golden aura of Luz’s kitchen is now interspersed with the clinical blue sheen of a hospital room, where the light winks off the doctor’s face shield. We’ve gone from the sensory pleasure of hands knuckling into dough to a touch-free blight. Remedios will die, and she won’t even die on what would be her own terms, sent home to be with her loved ones; the best the doctor can do, and the best Luz can pass on, is the offer to set up a FaceTime call. She’ll die alone, and the only person who can touch her can’t afford to do it without gloves on, because there are always more patients.
It’s a brutal turn, and Davis maximizes its effectiveness, at least for English-only viewers, through the simple choice of not translating Luz as she translates. We hear what the doctor says, and we take in the meaning, and then we’re left with Luz and Luz alone as she passes on the words, with no subtitles as visual clutter to distract from her face as she tries to keep herself from breaking down. As she bears witness.
She can go back to her bread and her family—what else is there to do?—but there’s no sense she can really shake the knowledge of what’s going on outside her orbit, where isolation is lonely, terrifying, and final, not an excuse for cozy, quirky domesticity. Even watching this makes that hard. You can’t turn it off and say, “Remember Tiger King?”
“Pandemic Bread” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Year of the Month
Winning the numbers game.
Anthologized
From one war story about an impossibly granted choice, we get a war story with no choices at all.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Serial Experiments Lain, Episode Two, “Girls”
This seems to drop the original plot conceit of the series – the girl who took her own life – for another one. Lain gets her new computer installed, but this time she discovers there’s a girl who looks like her going out to clubs, and she goes out partly to try and find her and partly to try and fit in. There’s room for an interpretation that she sees this mysterious girl as a more interesting, more extroverted version of herself. There’s also an interesting pattern of a surreal cold open that turns out to be foreshadowing plot; it turns out the guy we saw in the cold open is a shooter at the club, and Lain confronts him (suicidally) and intimidates him with the sentence “Wherever you go, we are always connected.”
There’s a lot to unpack here; Lain has a surreal vision of a horrifying girl who moves through her like a ghost. I get the sense Lain (like her near-contemporary Shinji Ikari) is afraid of connection to other people, and this shows her disconnection from the people around her – who are distant, weird, and abrasive even when they’re sympathetic to her – and, perhaps, why she dives into the internet (nothing to relate to there). Her bold declaration to the shooter seems as much her trying to will her sentence into existence as it is threatening that guy.
Nobody 2
Still a stupid action film, but at least a more fun one. The emotions here are genuinely of a father as opposed to an aggrieved teenager, and there’s much more of a sense of humour over the whole thing. I enjoyed Colin Hanks as a guy who’s not just a heavy, but an unpleasant dickhead as well – channelling his father in Catch Me If You Can a bit in terms of tamping down his natural likeability.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Season Eighteen, Episode Seven, “Gilligan’s Island: A Conspiracy Theorist’s Paradise”
All-timer of an opener – a great example of the Gang’s limited (but still present) self-awareness and the show’s intense self-awareness. Like, we know the title of the episode, we know where Mac is going with this. The episode is messy, but that’s what it’s going for, and it’s all funny and works out amusingly in the end.
You’re not there yet but Hanks has fun on Happy Endings too as a less likable version of himself.
Gothika – I was hoping this would be the fun kind of stupid thriller but it’s not, it’s the stupid kind of stupid thriller. You can tell because it ends with a Limp Bizkit song. Why is it called Gothika? Nobody knows. Good cast though.
Ludwig, S2E3 – more puzzly murdery fun. Hopefully the developments in this one get our hero and his police partner back on the same page because the sulky tension hasn’t been as much fun.
Twilight Zone, “Mirror Image” – one of my favourites so far! I wonder if David Lynch saw this one at a formative age, it would explain a LOT.
Apparently RDJ met his wife on the Gothika set, and she was shocked he’d work on something so crummy.
I guess his career was in a bit of a weird place at that point so it’s not TOTALLY surprising, but he could probably still have done better. I was really surprised that Penelope Cruz was in there!
Watching some fifties stuff is fun because you go “Oh, David Lynch saw this.”
“SAY, MA! WHAT’S A DOPPELGANGER?”
I got a new TV secondhand so I was just setting up the thing! It’s a Google TV which I kind of hate but I was able to opt out of any data sharing, etc…hopefully. Now to make sure there’s no AI on this fucker. My cat also watched, fascinated.
This really speaks to a part of my pandemic experience, one my friend put very well: when younger people ask what I was doing during the worldwide pandemic where people were dying and protesting, I’ll tell them “It was actually pretty much the same as before.”
I’m sure my ex could relate given her own sourdough experiments at the time.
Year of the Month updates:
Here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this October!
Oct. 3rd: Gillian Nelson: Movie Surfers
Oct. 4th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Pi
Oct. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Mighty Joe Young
Oct. 13th: John Bruni: High Art
Oct. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Who Moved My Cheese?
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown
And there’s still time to write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich