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O is for "Oh......"

O is for "Oh......"

on the Omicron Variant, Ugo Gregoretti's ๐˜–๐˜ฎ๐˜ช๐˜ค๐˜ณ๐˜ฐ๐˜ฏ (1963), and Becky Cheatle's ๐˜›๐˜ฉ๐˜ฆ ๐˜–๐˜ฎ๐˜ช๐˜ค๐˜ณ๐˜ฐ๐˜ฏ ๐˜๐˜ข๐˜ณ๐˜ช๐˜ข๐˜ฏ๐˜ต...

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Steve Macfarlane (โ„ )
Jan 10, 2022
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from Omicron (1963)

WHAT have I done?

Thatโ€™s 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 โ€œunprecedentedโ€ 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 โ€œsmall 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:

Twitter avatar for @ReutersFacts
Reuters Fact Check @ReutersFacts
A digitally altered poster about a non-existent film called โ€˜The Omicron Variantโ€™ has tricked some users into thinking the coronavirus variant was planned
reut.rsFact Check-Vintage movie poster for โ€˜The Omicron Variantโ€™ is fakeA photoshopped poster advertising a non-existent film called โ€˜The Omicron Variantโ€™ has duped some social media users into thinking the namesake coronavirus variant was planned.
5:17 PM โˆ™ Dec 2, 2021
283Likes92Retweets

Then,

Twitter avatar for @BeckyCheatle
Becky Cheatle @BeckyCheatle
I Photoshopped the phrase "The Omicron Variant" into a bunch of 70s sci-fi movie posters #Omicron
Image
Image
Image
8:00 AM โˆ™ Nov 28, 2021
1,145Likes404Retweets

I thought this was a clever pastiche, but more than that, the resultant controversy (โ€œscandalโ€? โ€œconfusionโ€?) 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 โ€œtrolling 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 โ€œTrabuccoโ€ becomes a medical miracle, to the delight and terror of the cityโ€™s 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 eraโ€™s political science fiction, whether the anti-Blacklist Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or the canโ€™t-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, Salvatoriโ€™s full-body, maniacally mugging performance is the main sell of Gregorettiโ€™s film, producing farcical (and periodically disgusting) gags. The reanimated corpseโ€™s 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: โ€œBetween 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 Europeโ€™s postwar โ€œeconomic miracleโ€, haunted by American-style standards of productivity.

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