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Unexpected challenges of Coronavirus pandemic:

How to take a decision?

The pandemic outbreak of the novel Corona- virus in the winter of 2019/20 has impressively and momentously demonstrated how demanding it can be for politics, the economy and civil society to make sufficiently reliable predictions of disruptive future events: the rapid spread of Covid-19, the severity of the disease and the rapid rise in the number of sick people and deaths, the resulting supply gaps and the rampant speculation, the very sudden cuts in fundamental rights, border closures and the resulting reservations among the popu-lation, the spread of false information, social iso-lation and domestic violence in quarantine – all these and many other problems have created consi-derable difficulties for societal decision-makers, who have been ‘surprised’ by those challenges and did not know ad hoc how to deal with them in a meaningful and responsible manner. This uncer-tainty has resulted in far-reaching consequences, for example, because important protective equipment for medical personnel has been missing and profiteers have wanted to benefit from the emer-gency. Coercive measures and uncertainties asso-ciated with the situation lead to financial and psychological burdens for the population – and thus to social tensions, like extremist populism and conspiracy theories.

Pandemic warnings in film and tele-vision are more vivid than through experts and authorities

For a long time, the spread of dangerous infectious diseases has not only formed the basis for an unmanageable number of entertainment films, not least in zombie and alien cinema, but also (with a notable increase in the past decade) in more serious dramas that deal with the social conse-quences of such a plague. In these fictional worlds, the virus pandemic becomes both an allegory that represents other undesirable social developments and an expression of a real danger, which virolo-gists, epidemiologists, and civil protectionists have always warned against. However, the appeals by experts for better pandemic preparation and aftercare to politicians have largely gone unheard: the dangers of an outbreak seemed unlikely, theoretical, and controllable – with the visible consequences. At the same time, the vivid pandemic fictions in film and television have created a considerable potential for conveying future and behavioral knowledge that may now prove useful: the astonishingly concrete popular images for their narratives, for example of sports halls converted into emergency hospitals (cf. fig. 1), appear, from the present perspective, almost as prophetic warn-ings of the real dangers of a pandemic, which have already materialized in film and television long before that. Interestingly, film and TV develop their own ideas within the fictional narrative world as to which behavioral options are useful in such a crisis.

Transfer of knowledge and meaning through film and television allows communication and organization of a society

Films and television series impressively de-monstrate that – despite and precisely because of their speculative character, the artistic freedoms they are granted and their tendency to deal with unlikely scenarios – they also serve, beyond their entertaining and commercial potential, as a system of dynamic social discourse and knowledge transfer, “as a central place of social self-understanding” (HICKETHIER 2008, 47). Through the macrosocial communicative mediation processes set in motion by film and television, meaning is produced, dis-courses of what is real and unreal circulate through society, and truth is stabilized as a common sense. Thereby, together with the other modern mass media, visual media gain enormously in community-building power: mass media serve the “conducting of self-observation of the social system” (LUHMANN 1996, 173) and the “constant production and pro-cessing of irritation” (LUHMANN 1996, 174), i.e. an uninterrupted rearrangement, selection and norma-lization of social realities through communication. Even if this dominance of the media in the social production of meaning is sometimes disturbing, only this constant dynamic updating of the social consensus makes it possible – especially under the rapidly changing living conditions of a highly com-plex late modernity – to always find an intersub-jective basis on which as many members of society as possible can agree. Only on this basis of a shared reality, we can interact and communicate with each other meaningfully and thus organize and shape our living together as a society.

Film and television convey suggestions for appropriate behavior and allow social modern-ization

Film and television provide their viewers with orientation in modern times of constantly changing certainties and dwindling securities: They convey to the recipients “a knowledge of it and at the same time a feeling for what is historical, social and cultural present beyond their own living environ-ment [...], what is possible and impossible here and now, tempting and repulsive, urgent or indifferent” (KEPPLER 2006, 316-317). In this context, cine-matic art also conveys an understanding of what appears right and wrong under the respective given conditions, what is to be evaluated as appropriate and inappropriate: “The ensemble of characters plays through behaviors and opinions of different kinds, which are juxtaposed and presented to the audience on individual themes, and which have to prove their suitability”, i.e. they have to prove them-selves in dealing with the respective social challenges the fictional characters are confronted with (HICKETHIER 1994, 67). The fictional cha-racters also indirectly make concrete behavioral suggestions as to how one could act as a television viewer within the framework of one’s own real-world lifestyle: with the help of the fictional be-havioral fragments, individual and social problems can be individually solved. Film and television thus participate in conveying meaning and modelling action for the increasingly complex living con-ditions of late modernity. They become the most important subsystem of “social modernization pro-cesses”, a “place where the behavioral models neces-sary for modernization are offered and dissemi-nated” (HICKETHIER 1994, 70): the cinematic arts make it possible to adapt to new and thus unknown modern situations of interaction, to emerge from them as successfully as possible and to circulate this knowledge in modern society. This important so-cietal function of TV and cinema can be under-stood best if you compare it to so-called “social media”: “social network” platforms on the Internet primarily tend to reproduce highly stylized illusory realities in an individualized bubble, to give pre-ference to extremely emotionalized, advertising-ef-fective content and polarizing, hardly controllable disinformation. Motion pictures and television series, on the contrary, effectively help to correct outdated moral concepts, clichés, and prejudices, to present options for action for demanding contem-porary life situations that the recipients can accept or reject. In doing so, they point out otherwise in-visible and underrepresented lines of social conflict. Cinematic art forms thus hold together an otherwise atomizing, constantly isolating, individualizing and accelerating modernity by maintaining the subjects’ feeling that life in community can still be influenced and desirable changes can be realized.

Figure 1: In Contagion (53), a supposedly unthinkable future already appeared almost 10 years ago, anticipating the horrors of the present with its emergency hospitals, mass graves, and criminal profiteers of crisis.

Films as an early warning system for crises and intuitive orientation aid for disaster situations

Against this background, pandemic films and series can also potentially offer orientation in dealing with the real-world challenges that are fictionally played out in them. Cinema films and television series – as phenomena of popular culture with a particularly broad impact – thus not only act as an ‘early warning system’ for possible social ills (for example, fundamentally inadequate prepara-tion for pandemics) and future challenges (for ex-ample, coping with a pandemic under these de-ficient conditions). They also contain (aesthetically implicitly as well as narratively explicitly formula-ted) suggestions for coping with present and future questions (such as the appropriate social and indi-vidual behavior in the case of a pandemic), which the recipients have always used intuitively and often unconsciously to adjust to possible life situations. It is precisely the aesthetic game that, due to cinema’s stylistic differentiation, allows us to distinguish between developments that tend to be more desir-able and undesirable: while film and television take a stand with their artistic means, they allow a discourse on whether certain developments are also desirable in social reality or should be avoided.