Talynebear

Enlarge / Gwyneth Paltrow had a brief but highly significant appearance in the 2011 film Contagion, which has experienced a surge of popularity in the midst of the current coronavirus outbreak. (credit: Warner Bros.)

As the coronavirus spread rapidly around the world, and more people became aware of the serious threat it posed, the 2011 film Contagion experienced a sudden resurgence in popularity. The Steven Soderbergh-directed thriller moved from 270th place pre-pandemic on the most-watched list of Warner Bros. movies to second place in just a few months. The biggest spike in Google searches occurred on March 11, the same day President Trump announced a travel ban on Europe, peaking again three days later, when the ban was extended to the United Kingdom.

This struck Coltan Scrivner, a  graduate student at the University of Chicago specializing in the study of morbid curiosity, as remarkable, especially when he noted a similar spike in popularity for the 1995 film Outbreak. Why would people seek out the very kinds of films and TV shows that someone feeling threatened by a pandemic might be expected to avoid? He conducted an online survey to learn more. The result is a forthcoming article in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture.

Scrivner's hypothesis is that such "morbidly curious" behavior is an evolved response mechanism for dealing with threats by learning from imagined experiences. "We might reason that these search terms spiked in popularity because people were trying to learn more about the coronavirus outbreak in response to its recent impact on their daily life around that time," he wrote in his paper. "The shutting of international borders may have signaled to the American consciousness that the coronavirus was, in fact, a real threat." And part of the human impulse to prepare for said threat would be to learn more about it—including seeking out fictional representations of said threat.

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  Jesse (Dominic Cooper) and Tulip (Ruth Negga) have a plan to rescue Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) from the Grail. [credit: AMC ]

It's Team Jesse versus the Grail, as a vengeful God vows to bring on the apocalypse, in the fourth and final season of Preacher, AMC's adaption of the DC comic series created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. It pains me greatly to say this, since I love the show despite its flaws, but this final season is mostly an unfocused, rambling, incoherent mess. Fortunately, it's ultimately redeemed by a satisfying and surprisingly moving finale.

(Some spoilers below, especially for prior seasons.)

Preacher follows the madcap adventures of Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), the titular preacher (and former con artist) who inexplicably becomes the chosen host for Genesis, aka, the embodiment of the Word of God. This grants him the power to force people to do whatever he wants, including accidentally sending poor Eugene Root (Ian Colletti)—nicknamed "Arseface" because of a failed shotgun-suicide that left him with a badly puckered maw—to hell. Jesse is joined in his misadventures by his childhood sweetheart and partner in crime, Tulip (Ruth Negga), and a hard-partying, sweetly profane Irish vampire named Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun).