Coronavirus and the twelve monkeys
Desolate streets and wild animals walking on them, all because of a virus. This is what we read in the press and it is also what happens in a work of fiction that dates back a quarter of a century.
The pandemic that has caused the coronavirus COVID-19 sometimes seems like the plot of a movie. I have heard it several times from my father, as I have been keeping a preventive quarantine in his house for some days now. And, in fact, the mere fact of not being able to leave the house — for fear of suffering a potentially fatal contagion — is not essentially different from the plot of a “zombie apocalypse” sort of film.
But nothing convinced me more that I was living a movie script than the news today of a wild puma wandering the streets of Santiago de Chile. After the denunciation made by the neighbours, near six o’clock in the morning of today, the feline was intercepted in a square, from where it went to a school and finally it was captured in the backyard of a private house.
This is not an isolated case. There have been numerous sightings of wild animals circulating peacefully in several cities around the world, whose streets are deserted due to the forced or preventive quarantine of their human inhabitants.
I read in the press that elephants, peacocks, wild boars, deer, ducks, goats and even dolphins — yes, dolphins!-— have been reported by surprised neighbours who can’t believe their eyes when they see such unexpected visitants in the urban areas. It is known that the animated series The Simpsons usually get their “predictions” about the future right, and this is no exception, as we can see if we review the episode where the dolphins take over the world.
Also notable is the case of the elephants that broke into a liquor factory in China, drank all the alcohol inside, then stayed there to sleep it off, and finally woke up the next day with a hell of a hangover.
But what has surprised me most is the similarity between what is happening in relation to the script of the film “12 monkeys” (1995). In case you can’t place it, it’s a film by the talented and acclaimed director Terry Gilliam (also known for “Brazil”, and several other quite surrealistic films), starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, in one of his best performances to date.
According to the film’s plot, in a future world devastated by a deadly virus, a convict is sent back in time to gather information on the origin of the pandemic that wiped out most of the planet’s human population. Well, the scenes of wild animals walking the streets uninhabited by humans are some of the most characteristic of the film.
SPOILER WARNING. But that’s not all. It turns out in the film that the virus had been created intentionally by a mad scientist, very much like the real one denounced by the Italian TV channel RAI in 2015, when it reported that the Chinese were doing experiments to create a “supervirus”, combining human SARS with an animal coronavirus, to find out if the resulting virus could be transmitted to humans, and finally proving that it could! In parentheses, the coronavirus COVID-19 is also called SARS-CoV-2 because of its similarity to the original SARS.
It seems to me Oscar Wilde was right with his famous dictum: “Life imitates art much more than art imitates life”.
