O is for "Oh......"
on the Omicron Variant, Ugo Gregoretti's ๐๐ฎ๐ช๐ค๐ณ๐ฐ๐ฏ (1963), and Becky Cheatle's ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ฎ๐ช๐ค๐ณ๐ฐ๐ฏ ๐๐ข๐ณ๐ช๐ข๐ฏ๐ต...
WHAT have I done?
Thatโs what I thought after my wife tested positive for COVID. It was December 13th; we had been at a book launch party a few days prior which was, as it turned out, a super-spreader event1. Our friends and neighbors were dropping like flies - in fact as of this writing, the Omicron variant is ripping through New York City. Hospitalization rates are at their highest since spring 2020, and the city has hit an insane (recorded) positivity rate of 33%. The science is not at all clear if a recent Omicron infection actually heightens immunity. Even if the infections are more mild after three vaccines, Omicron is no joke. Weeks earlier I had read about its โunprecedentedโ surge in South Africa, afflicting children - the age group whose immunity to Regular Coronavirus was the closest thing to a silver lining anybody could eke out of the first wave of the global pandemic.
Omicron. It means โsmall Oโ in the Greek alphabet. What does any of this have to do with movies? Well, in late November, when the variant of concern first began to rear its head, multiple friends sent me the same news story:
Then,
I thought this was a clever pastiche, but more than that, the resultant controversy (โscandalโ? โconfusionโ?) was proof at least of a couple things: historical illiteracy en masse, widespread readiness to share dubious information on social media, the Power of Graphic Design. The replies fascinated me as well: people scolding the designer, Irish writer and filmmaker Becky Cheatle, for spreading misinformation, bemoaning the way the rumor metastasized in Brazil, congratulating her for โtrolling the world.โ (I encountered a term for COVID skeptics in these replies which I had not heard before: negationist.) It was hard to piece the story together via comments and retweets, because these big social media companies are making vague efforts to restrict hate speech and misinformation, an ongoing experiment.
There exists a very real movie called Omicron2 โ an Italian sci-fi satire written and directed by Ugo Gregoretti in 1963, just a decade before the fake-vintage Omicron Variant depicted by the poster by Becky Cheatle. The movie follows a space alien, never seen in his nascent form, named Omicron, sent to Earth from his home planet - called Ultra - on a reconnaissance mission. He hijacks the body of a laborer named Trabucco (Renato Salvatori), killed in an accident at his workplace, a metal foundry in Turin. As piloted by Omicron (in constant contact with his home authorities via voice-over), the reanimated โTrabuccoโ becomes a medical miracle, to the delight and terror of the cityโs residents. The storyline anticipates Mike Nicholsโ unfortunate What Planet Are You From? starring Garry Shandling as a humanoid alien sent to impregnate a human woman. Omicron is (mostly) a spoof of the eraโs political science fiction, whether the anti-Blacklist Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or the canโt-we-all-just-get-along atomic age parable The Day The Earth Stood Still. Neither I nor any of my mouthbreathing cinephile colleagues had seen or heard of Omicron, so I had to learn more, ordering a used Italian DVD online.
For a while, Salvatoriโs full-body, maniacally mugging performance is the main sell of Gregorettiโs film, producing farcical (and periodically disgusting) gags. The reanimated corpseโs leg gets stuck ramrod-straight like an erection; pored over by egghead scientists and cigar-puffing executives, Trabucco-Omicron becomes a metaphor for the bourgeois fetishization of blue-collar laborers and other undesirables. Things get murkier after he returns to work, achieving a higher measure of productivity than any of his (still-human) colleagues; footage of him assembling sixty gyroscopes in under a minute leads the bosses to accuse the rest of his team of laziness, further poisoning the well between management and labor, already on the brink of a massive strike. (Maybe this is an explicit callback to the dialectical conclusion of Metropolis: โBetween the head and the hands there must be the heart!โ) This device allows Omicron to satirize labor struggles common to industrialized cities in postwar Europe, a common theme of 1960s Italian cinema - wherein rural villagers moved to cities in search of a more profitable life, rebuilding bombed-out metropolises to suit export needs and feed Europeโs postwar โeconomic miracleโ, haunted by American-style standards of productivity.