Lee Mordechai is senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the coauthor of Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics, and Zombies in American Movies.
It’s become a cliché to observe that news coverage of disasters like the LA wildfires resembles a Hollywood movie. Yet the movies themselves are now shying away from depicting our disastrous reality by peddling easy myths of technological quick fixes.
For six months, Israel has been deliberately killing civilians in Gaza and destroying infrastructure to make the area uninhabitable. Israeli academic Lee Mordechai summarizes the horrific results of an operation that is wholly immoral and criminal.
Movies depicting the spread of disease have become a well-established genre and helped frame our understanding of the real-life COVID-19 pandemic. The spirit of these films increasingly reflects the despair and atomization of neoliberal capitalism.