From books to film, here's how the COVID-19 pandemic has (or hasn't) been represented in culture

You're unlikely to find a mention of the pandemic in a major Hollywood blockbuster. (ABC News: Emma Machan)

By Jessica Riga

It's been five years since COVID-19 started to sweep the globe, sparking lockdowns, infecting communities and claiming millions of lives.

But for an event of its scale, the way the pandemic has been represented in culture — if at all — has varied wildly.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hardly been mentioned in any major Hollywood blockbusters, with the industry sidestepping the very thing that brought several productions to a halt.

It is a different story when it comes to literature, with multiple novels interrogating the pandemic's lasting effects on our lives and relationships.

The pandemic chapter

Madeleine Gray is the author of Green Dot, which follows Hera, a 20-something who starts an affair with her older, married colleague.

In the middle of the novel, Hera attempts to flee the mess she's made in Sydney by moving to London — but strict COVID-19 lockdowns up-end her new life and force her back home.

Madeleine Gray wrote her debut novel Green Dot during Sydney's COVID-19 lockdown. 
(Supplied: Allen & Unwin/Zan Wimberley)

Gray wrote the novel when she was living alone during lockdown in Sydney, with her mental health "not exactly flourishing".

"I decided to include the pandemic section in the book because Green Dot is a contemporary novel, set before and during the pandemic time, and to me it would have felt strange to create a revisionist history of the present," Gray told ABC News.

"Green Dot is a story about yearning and love and not being able to connect with the person you love, so the pandemic was actually an amazing plot device for that.

Green Dot was published in 2023. (Supplied: Allen & Unwin)

"The isolation we all felt during the pandemic — that's a parallel to the kind of lovelorn desperation and pathos that my protagonist is experiencing."

Gray is far from the only author whose writing features the pandemic — see Dolly Alderton's Good Material, Curtis Sittenfeld's Romantic Comedy and Ann Patchett's Tom Lake.

But one of Gray's publishers suggested it "might be best" not to include the pandemic, the reason being that readers might not be ready to re-experience it.

"And while that is a perspective that I empathise with, at the same time, we did all go through it, and as a world we are still recovering from a deeply traumatic experience that connects all of us," Gray said.

"Fiction is a place in which we can see our world reflected back to us, enter the minds of others, understand that our experience of an event might be very different to someone else's, so I fought to keep the pandemic section.

"It felt right for the narrative arc and it was true to the world."

'Gob-smacking' impact

In the years since 2020, plenty of TV series have weaved the pandemic into their episodes, such as Morning Wars, Superstore and Grey's Anatomy.

The pandemic has also cropped up in international films, including the Oscar-nominated Norwegian film The Worst Person In the World.

But COVID-19 is yet to feature much in mainstream Hollywood films, if at all.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) was one of the first films to mention the pandemic. (Netflix)

Glass Onion, Rian Johnson's sequel to Knives Out, featured the pandemic but only through the lens of rich people ditching their face masks in turn for a getaway on a tech billionaire's private Greek island.

Because the film was bought by Netflix, it went straight to streaming after a limited one-week run in theatres.

"It is estimated that over 1 million people in the United States died from COVID-19," said Lauren Rosewarne, an expert in politics and pop culture at the University of Melbourne.

"That piece of data has been quickly glossed over as people rush to move on with life, but that is a gob-smacking number of people who are simply gone."

Dr Rosewarne added there were "very little positives to draw from this period".

"All the incalculable loss and grief aside, the pandemic also destroyed businesses, significantly impacted livelihoods and further amplified sharp and ugly political divisions.

"Experiencing the whole thing again right now is probably something nobody wants. At least not now, at least not in our entertainment media."

Hollywood's history of reluctance

This isn't the first time Hollywood has been reluctant to represent an unfolding crisis.

"The two classic examples of this are the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic," Dr Rosewarne said.

"Both topics took several years to make it to the big screen in a significant way."

After the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers were also digitally removed from the New York City skyline in several yet-to-be-released films to avoid re-traumatising audiences.

But there are other factors at play that may have contributed to a lack of COVID-19 content across film.

"Lockdowns, compounded with the Hollywood writers' strike, mean that the film and TV industries are still playing catch-up in a way that literature hasn't had to," Dr Rosewarne said.

For authors such as Madeleine Gray, representing the pandemic in novels is less of a risk because "to be honest, novels cost less money to make".

"That is why literature can be the wackiest, most exciting, most bizarre art form," Gray said.

"It just takes one person's wild brain to make a novel."

Representing the Zeitgeist

The COVID-19 pandemic hit at the start of a new decade. Now at the halfway mark, what can we expect from film, television and literature in the next five years?

"Creators have tried — and will continue to try — to capture aspects of the Zeitgeist in their work," Dr Rosewarne said.

"Some of this will be about the pandemic and understanding its impact on us, even if not necessarily being about the pandemic itself."

Dr Rosewarne said it was likely the pandemic would be represented through metaphors, rather than direct presentations.

"During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, for instance, there were several horror films about viruses and bodily invasion — albeit without any direct mention of AIDS," she said.

"Films and TV shows can reference the legacy of the pandemic without needing to be about the pandemic itself.

"Sometimes it will take a few years for us to see these patterns."

First published at ABC News, February 6, 2025