2020 might be over, but it’s not dead yet
Part of what made last year so surreal was that so much tragedy, obscurity, and profound isolation made the timeline blur together. Death to 2020 is an hour-long Netflix mockumentary that begins by taking you back 365 days, right before the pandemic reached the shores of the West, and how this time last year we were refreshing our Twitter feeds, wondering if the president of the United States was about to initiate World War III.Â
Death to 2020 is cute — a short, breezy watch at only an hour and 10 minutes — but unclever in its script and production and too focused on its poor attempt to have glib celebrities share in the suffering of the 99 per cent. At times, the script teetered on the edge of saying something profound, a meaningful comment on the tragedy of 2020, only to flatline with something so stupid, you can only roll your eyes and welcome the next scene to escape the witless humour. While the lines themselves were abysmal, the acting performances of Hugh Grant’s historian, Lisa Kudrow’s conversative spokeswoman, and Leslie Jones’s behavioural psychologist made the delivery at least bearable.Â
Navigating through the timeline of last year eventually brought us to the Black Lives Matter protests, where Jones and Samuel L. Jackson stole the show. When the subject of George Floyd surfaces, the sombre music feels more like a forewarning that a tasteless joke is on the horizon and less like an appropriate ambiance, but surprisingly, this proves to be one of the mockumentary’s sincere attempts at highlighting the unity of humanity during the year. While Jackson condemns the officials in power who did little to appease the protestors uniting against Black oppression, clips of violent cops firing tear gas and rubber bullets at protestors play in the background.Â
Returning to its sardonic roots, Stranger Things’s Joe Keery satirizes bare-minimum efforts to support the Black community in his role as a millennial influencer, including learning how to properly pronounce Black names, following more Black people on social media, and of course, posting the iconic racism-defeating black squares that painted Instagram on June 2.
The year 2020 is a challenging topic to mock when its damage hasn’t halted. Americans were mismanaged by a government that withheld leadership and condemned its own medical scientists. As Jackson’s character says, when the virus entered the USA, people “were out there comparing [COVID-19] to the flu, which is like comparing Uruguay to a banana. And one of those folks was the president.” A very vocal portion of Americans believe their election was a fraud and that Biden was illegally declared the winner, despite over 50 failed lawsuits saying otherwise.
We started the year with a country on fire, the threat of a World War, and a global call for Black resistance — we end this year with global warming still on the horizon, over 16,000 Canadian lives claimed by COVID-19, and only soft-spoken promises to deal with the white supremacy that pervades the West. While 2020 might be gone for good, we carry its wreckage into 2021, and the death count is still climbing.
