In the new normal, no one can hear you scream
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When Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Alien was released in 1979, the poster featured an alien egg cracking open, with an eerie light and mist. It was a great poster image, but even better was the small tag line below: “In space no one can hear you scream.” With extraordinary brevity, Scott exploded the vogue for science fiction movies as heroic, thought-provoking and pretentious (Star Wars, Close Encounters, 2001) and suddenly made the genre stark, claustrophobic and terrifying. In Scott’s universe there are vast worlds to mine and new life-forms to be discovered at the very fringes of humanity’s reach. But when those life-forms inevitably decide to kill you; in a vacuum, no one will hear your shouts for help, or your cries for mercy. And it was with that same sense of desperate isolation that I screamed unherd, while watching The Bundesliga on TV this week.
Behind closed doors is apparently par for the course in the “new normal”. Inspired by the German trailblazers, sportsmen and women around the world are now psyching themselves up, dropping and giving twenty, in determined preparation for competing behind closed doors. They’ve done the Corona tests, been cleared, or have cheered as the antibodies are confirmed, and they are headed alone to some anonymous outpost at the far end of the known universe [some ‘neutral’ disinfected venue], to play for us in splendid isolation. Watching the Bundesliga players, celebratory high-fives and kisses were replaced with elbow bumps which could actually be heard, while the great unwashed crowds were locked out. The players looked bored and forlorn, while their uptight support staff stood stoically in designer snoods and $100 face-masks.
There is talk of the theatre, of live music, of even opera going the same way. Artists will be able to come out of the shadows, to co-locate nervously and perform, as if released like creative phoenixes, to grace the stage again, while sealed behind doors. If policy makers insist (and all opinion polls seems to suggest we want to be guided by their insistence) then the architects of the new normal will do all they can to replicate the great gatherings of the past (remember full stadiums yelling, Glastonbury flags obscuring and theatre stalls laughing?) but with audiences cocooned away from the alien virus. The Masters golf is to be re-scheduled in a manicured Hunger Games style quarantined course. Royal Ascot will go ahead, but without Royals, or lascivious wassails swaying, unstable in high heels. Formula One racing will still be noisy, but as in Ridley Scott’s horror, there will be no one to hear the engines scream.
Which brings me to another great form of gathering - higher education, and its more grown-up cousins, business or executive education. The profession has none of the glamour of the movies, or the pulse raising thrills of sport. We occasionally use music, but more to make a point, or signal a change of mood, than to truly lift the soul in the way a great gig or concert can do. But my fear is that higher and business education may head the same way as the Bundesliga. Policy makers’ timidity will mean School estates staff are compelled to erect plexiglass screens to divide mask-muffled lecturers from sparsely allocated students, as the only way of making classes “safe.” The more cautious still will default wholly to virtual broadcast lectures and Zoom seminar groups and no collective breathe will be risked in the transmission of valuable thoughts and ideas.
It has already begun in the primary and secondary sectors. We have had two decades of parents’ perennial fight to wrestle their children’s gaze away from the screen of the Xbox, the Playstation or their iPhone. Now the new normal for the best provided for kids, is to sit for hours with an iPad, or laptop connected to some disembodied remote teacher. And the outcome sought by this endeavour? Yes, you might win a place, paying over £9,000 a year, to experience the same online with Cambridge University or Manchester. It seems the zenith of educational experience will be to provide something that is “not too bad”. So, not a life-enhancing experience that challenges the way you think, or the chance to meet your life-partner, or even, the possibility of discovering yourself. No, the ambition of the new normal seems to be, like football behind closed doors, to make it “not too bad”.
Unless the policy makers change their guidance, then the safety first approach of large cohort education will end up having all the thrills of Bill Clinton’s famous marijuana defence: yes, we say we smoked some at university, but we certainly did not inhale. The purified air we breathe will be all ours and the familiar walls will remain unchanged as we supposedly learn and grow. Students in the near future will watch great Campus films like Everybody Wants Some, or Animal House, or Goodwill Hunting and simply not believe it was like that.
And if you dare tap them on the shoulder while they are watching, they will instinctively flinch and scream.
