Our Brains Want the Story of the Pandemic to Be Something It Isn’t

If the pandemic were a movie, it wouldn’t make any sense. Even putting aside the suffering and monotony that would make up the film’s “action,” the narrative structure of COVID—defined by its false endings, exhausting duration, and inscrutable villain, a virus—would be unwatchable. The most generous thing that Monisha Pasupathi, a psychology professor at the University of Utah who studies life narratives, said to me about the pandemic’s cinematic potential was that, well, “there’s always that contingent of film historians” who have a taste for the avant-garde.

Two years of living with the coronavirus has been spirit-depleting , but this weariness has been compounded by the fact that the pandemic has defied our attempts to snap it into a satisfying story