IF THE reality of Covid were not enough, the new blockbuster film Songbird depicts the world in 2024 trying to deal with the ravages of Covid-23, a new mutation of the coronavirus.

As one reviewer comments, the film combines “a Romeo and Juliet-lite love story with a sub-Contagion thriller.”

Touted as the first feature film about the pandemic, released during the pandemic, Songbird has not received the warm welcome its producers might have hoped for.

Reviews have ranged from the generous: “a fascinating historical document of how some creatives found their way around the rules during an impossible time for a struggling industry” (The Guardian), to the less so: “crass and gimmicky” (Globe and Mail, Canada), while others saw the film as a “schlocky and opportunistic” production.

Viewers have criticised it as being in bad taste for trying to bank on the current times and failing just about every step of the way.

Such responses tellingly reveal the complexity of the bigger questions behind the film, namely, what role does culture play when it comes to disasters?

This question is not new. Yet the seemingly never-ending current global health crisis gives it a sense of urgency.

Cultural representations of disasters can show ways to make sense of crises, whether it’s Joao Glama Stroberle's allegorical painting of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, HBO’s Chernobyl or the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, a magical-realist response to Hurricane Katrina.

These cultural representations act as social commentaries. They anticipate political action, shape and express environmental ethics and, most importantly, can help us to imagine what a possible future could look like.

Films, TV series and books about disasters show again and again that there is no one way of experiencing any disaster.

Zadie Smith’s recently published Intimations, an essay collection of pandemic reflections, describes this in clear terms: “The misery is very precisely designed and different for each person.”

As the disproportionate impact of Covid clearly demonstrates, we are all not in the same boat. This has been captured in poetry and confirmed by research.

The pandemic has not struck with the same force nor at the same time. What Covid has revealed is ever-starker socioeconomic divides. The pandemic is having a disproportionate impact on certain demographic and labour groups.

It has cut a swathe through the most vulnerable populations, the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions as well as the key workers who are keeping cities, hospitals and schools running.

In short, the impact of the pandemic — and we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg — is contingent on pre-existing vulnerability.

In response to the profound suffering and disruption to all aspects of our lives, many yearn for some, even small, return to “normal life.”

Yet it is precisely this “normal” — the reality of fatal inequalities, racial violence, injustice and disenfranchisement — that is the problem.

No return to the pre-pandemic conditions is possible, nor should it be wished for.

Rather, post-pandemic recovery has to work to address and repair these long-term structures of injustice, racism, and political, social and cultural marginalisation.

Good artistic works aim to recover these hidden narratives and voices, voices that need to be central to any long-term recovery processes.

The future starts slowly. How it will look depends on long-term community efforts and, even more so, on policy changes and political decisions.

Yet waiting for these might mean waiting too long. In the meantime, artists, neighbourhood groups, mutual aid and solidarity groups forge their way through the crisis, start this slow labour of recovery and point towards what alternative futures, in a small way, might look like.

The future starts with listening to the discordant experiences of those most affected by the impact of the pandemic.

For Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich, reflecting on writing in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, it soon became clear that “the book that I’m going to write will take years” and her novel Chernobyl Prayer 10 years to complete.

This “novel of voices,” as she calls it, captures precisely those discordant meanings and an ongoing sense of irreparable loss and confusion.

Understanding what the current pandemic means and what its real impact is will also take years. Undoing long-term vulnerabilities will take even longer.

Yet this work has to start now and continue day in, day out.

For British philosopher Nigel Warburton, Albert Camus’ The Plague, written in 1947, provides inspiration, with its depiction of “ordinary people rising to an occasion and doing extraordinary things.”

Whether an artistically uninspiring, ethically problematic contagion-themed love story where the pandemic is exploited as a jumping-off point can capture the many voices of the pandemic experience, sketch a horizon of post-Covid life, or provide an inspiration for such ordinary work of slow healing and recovery, is highly unlikely.

Tellingly, for one viewer of Songbird, in order to enjoy the film, one must “ignore what’s happening” in real life.

While seeking an escape might not in itself be bad, as film scholar Alfio Leotta reminds us: “The kind of escape we seek matters.”

It is thanks to the other worlds offered by books and films that we can gain a better, more critical — but also more courageous and imaginative — view of the present we are in and, not least, of what the future can hold.

Kasia Mika is lecturer in comparative literature, Queen Mary University of London. This article first appeared in The Conversation, theconversation.com. Songbird is available on Amazon Prime.