“The Time That Is Left Us”: Imagining a (Post)Pandemic Future and Plagued Temporalities in Michael Bay and Adam Mason’s Songbird

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Released during the height of the pandemic, Songbird (2020) received negative criticism from film critics for opportunistically capitalizing on the latent anxieties borne from those uncertain times. Critics have suggested that it sent an irresponsible message by emphasizing the capacity of public health institutions to enable authoritarian regimes. There is, however, critical and cultural value in confronting this problematic cinematic text during the (post)pandemic present as it can potentially allow a rethinking of how we conceptualize temporalities vis-à-vis film aesthetics and narrative. Songbird articulates a dystopian future where COVID-23 has ravaged the world and operates on two temporalities that are emblematic of the tension between the homogenous time of the authoritarian state and the ephemeral time of the people. By positioning the film as an example of what Giorgio Agamben calls “gestural cinema,” I examine how the film seeks to capture the irreconcilability of irrecoverable temporalities and the nostalgic future. The film dramatizes these temporalities in the context of a dystopian world where those infected with the virus are excluded in quarantine facilities while the remaining uninfected populace is forced to stay at home at all times with only a few exceptions. This article theorizes “plagued temporalities” as a new viral modernity that elicits a fresh, altered perception of chance and contingency. In Songbird, these plagued temporalities are experienced by the COVID-23 immune protagonist who can roam freely through urban spaces in solitude while simultaneously encountering figures who have different experiences of lived time.