Here’s a strange and weird one when it comes to studying the long term psychological and sociological effects of the COVID lock down. It’s become clear to me that a lot of the pop culture that I consumed during the lockdown, movies, TV, books I seem to have completely forgotten. Like a face blindness toward media.
It’s so strange for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I have a weird photographic memory most of the time when it comes to movies and books. I can’t remember peoples’ names, birthdays, or what I had for dinner three nights ago, but I can remember tiny details in films that I’ve only seen once. Secondly, during COVID it seemed like the only momentous occasions and things that we had to look forward to during the lockdown were TV shows and movie releases on streaming. It’s the whole reason that streaming services like Disney+ and others were such saviors, because they were putting first run things we hadn’t seen onto the service so we could watch from home.
Keeping both of those in mind then, it’s completely bizarre to me that I’ve discovered that anything I watched and consumed during the COVID lockdown has been forgotten in a fog. Resident Alien was one of the series that we binge-watched during the later stages of the pandemic, and upon rewatching leading up to the new season, it became clear to me that I didn’t remember a damn thing about any of the episodes. I had bits and pieces, but the details and the throughlines are completely lost in this fog. I was watching episode that I know for sure I had watched, but it was if I were watching them for the first time.
The same thing has happened with The Matrix Resurrections. I know for a fact that I had the date it was released on Max highlighted on the calendar and that we made a “date night” out of it, as if going to the movies. The kids had gone to sleep, we opened a bottle of wine, made some popcorn and sat down to watch it. But I have since added it back to my watch queue on Max, or HBO Max, or whatever it’s called when you read this, because I honestly don’t remember anything about it. Bits and pieces but a whole lot of nothing else. And yes, I know the cynic voice of the internet has a retort already lined up to say, “Well, it’s because the movie wasn’t that memorable.” Or something to that effect. But that’s beside the point. The quality of the material shouldn’t matter, I should be able to remember at least a few key details.
So the question then is, why is this? If I ordinarily have a good retention, why didn’t my brain retain anything that I had watched during COVID? Was it because of the heightened reality that we were living in doing some air traffic in my brain to make sure that the fight or flight responses were ready to go and the unnecessary bullshit (like tiny movie details) were firing off into the brain abyss? Does this support the conspiracy theory that we all died at some point after 2016 and we’re living in a nightmarish purgatory… a Matrix if you will ever since then? Wait, was that the plot of the movie? Maybe I just remembered something?
Anyway… Anyone else experience this?