This video is not an essay, it is a raw nerve.
Contagion is a 2011 film directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring an ensemble cast including
Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Winslet.
The film revolves around the origin, contraction, spread, and cure of the fictional MEV-1 virus,
a highly contagious, aggressive, and fatal strain of hybrid bat and pig flu.
The initial patient, Beth Emhoff, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, contracts the virus in Macau
after shaking hands with a casino chef who has recently handled an infected pig.
She spreads the virus to several other people in the casino after they handle objects that
she’s touched, such as gambling chips, a martini glass, and her cell phone.
An important aspect of the film is that the fictional virus is highly transmissible via
fomites, which are objects that an infected person has touched after touching their mouth
or nose, coughing or sneezing on the object, or otherwise leaving infectious residue on
an otherwise inert, non-biological object.
A local waiter who handled her glass returns home, infecting members of his family before
wandering into traffic in a fever-induced delirium where he is struck by a vehicle and
killed.
A Japanese businessman who shared chips with her returns to Tokyo where he falls ill rapidly,
dying suddenly of a seizure on a crowded bus, infecting several bystanders who touch him
or handrails that he touched.
A Ukranian model who handled Beth’s phone flies to London where her symptoms also escalate
rapidly while she transmits the disease to others via handling portfolios and riding
in a cab.
Beth returns to America where she infects several people in Chicago, first her ex lover
Jon who contracts it when they have sex while she is on layover, and a bartender at the
airport who handles her credit card, before flying to Minneapolis where she infects the
coworker who drives her home from the airport and her son Clark.
A day or two later Beth’s husband, Mitch, played by Matt Damon, picks up Clark from
school after Clark begins to exhibit a fever.
While Beth and Mitch are talking in the kitchen Beth suddenly has a seizure.
Mitch rushes her to the hospital, leaving Clark with a babysitter, but Beth’s condition
continues to worsen, she fails to respond to treatment, and she dies.
As a stunned Mitch is driving home he gets a call from the babysitter that Clark has
possibly had a seizure and might not be breathing.
Mitch tells her to call 911 immediately, but before anyone can get there Clark is already
dead.
From there the story expands to encompass the doctors, politicians, reporters, hucksters,
and ordinary people who are swept up in an all-encompassing pandemic that threatens to
kill a quarter of the global population.
The movie is an incredibly tense hundred minutes of society pushed to its breaking points,
not as a fantastical disintegration into wastelands of leather-clad murder gangs or a zombie apocalypse,
but one rooted in the historical reality of epidemics.
And I can’t stop watching it.
I have watched Contagion over fifteen times in the last two weeks.
Several days I’ve just watched it on repeat two or three times.
And I'm not alone.
According to Netflix it is, at the time of writing, the second most watched thing in
Canada.
For weeks it has sat in the top ten.
Unlike many similar films, such as the 1995 film Outbreak starring Dustin Hoffman, the
film is not about any one person, and there is no singular twist of victory.
Rather it is an example of sociological storytelling.
It’s about the systems and networks that these characters exist within, and how they
both influence and are influenced by those systems, and what happens when those systems
are placed under tremendous strain.
Kate Winslet plays Dr. Erin Mears, a front line worker for the CDC who is sent to Wisconsin
to track the transmission of the virus and contain its spread.
Half way through the film she catches the virus herself, and then her condition worsens,
and then she dies.
It is unceremonious.
It is not foreshadowed or paid off because it is not poetic, because pandemics are not
poetic and don’t have a tight arc or an eye for narrative fulfillment.
It doesn’t have meaning, the only meaning is in how we choose to respond.
Because this is sociological the movie doesn’t end when doctor Ally Hextall develops a vaccine.
What would be the singular victory moment in most films is instead the beginning of
a slow, painful march back to stability as first the vaccine needs to be mass produced,
and then distributed to billions of people worldwide.
It is a dangerous task that needs to be tightly controlled as it requires access to the isolated
virus and thus is very slow to ramp up.
The film trudges through the immense societal tension that is created when there is a cure,
but it will take over a year to make and distribute enough for everyone, a situation that lays
bare every societal privilege.
Dr. Orantes, played by Marion Cotillard, is kidnapped and held ransom for the vaccine
by Chinese villagers who are keenly aware that in the priority of global politics the
poor, the rural, and the non-white are at the very back of the line.
They are terrorists, but they’re not wrong, just desperate.
They are at the back of the line, and the government throws them under the bus anyway.
Despite the existence of a vaccine Mitch continues to keep his teenage daughter, Jory, under
aggressive quarantine out of legitimate fear of the disease that has been amplified to
paranoia by the trauma of losing Beth and Clark, the survivor’s guilt of being naturally
immune, and the uncertainty of whether his daughter would share that immunity or not.
In December 2019 the coronavirus COVID-19 was identified by doctors in the city of Wuhan.
Over the course of January and February the spread of the virus began to be identified
in South Korea, Japan, and Italy and, gradually, most of the rest of the world.
The disease itself is not exceptionally lethal when compared to epidemics such as the Black
Death in the mid 14th century or the spread of Smallpox through indiginous populations
following contact with Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, but, first of all, “better
than the black death” is a pretty bad standard, and second on a global scale a mortality rate
of 1-2 percent in an unchecked pandemic still means, in absolute terms, millions and millions
of preventable deaths.
This is compounded by the strain that mass illness, even one that is not terribly lethal,
inherently places on an already strained society: crowding healthcare systems, disrupting infrastructure,
and forcing people to choose between working while ill, and thus infecting others, or losing
their jobs.
A low mortality rate is often the result of adequate care, but the quality of care goes
down as the number of severely ill goes up, as the number of infected healthcare workers
reduces the number of people qualified and capable of administering that care.
This, in turn, has a knock on effect where unrelated illnesses and injuries become more
dangerous.
A heart attack or broken leg that would be easily managed under normal circumstances
becomes that much worse when there aren’t enough people to help, aren’t enough beds
to go around.
The more people who are exposed, the more need to roll the dice against that one to
two percent, and the more are going to lose.
As of March 2020 most of the United States and Canada have entered a period of uncertain
quarantining.
Non-essential businesses are closed, events are canceled, workers are being sent home
or laid off, borders are being shut down, and the economy is in freefall.
Every existing societal problem, from income inequality to housing inequality to healthcare,
is being stressed and amplified by not only the virus but the complicity of our governments.
News comes out hourly about warnings the people in charge received months ago, and the ways
in which they were either ignored or exploited for personal gain.
Several American politicians were briefed on the security risks of COVID 19 in late
January, and then took to Twitter to decry public fear as a partisan hoax while they
dumped their stocks in preparation for a crash that they knew was coming.
People in government, their corporate donors, and their pundit allies are getting anxious,
debating breaking quarantine and telling everyone to go back to work and roll the dice on whether
or not they’re going to die for the economy.
We are standing on the precipice of a very uncertain future, and we don’t know if that
future is days, weeks, months, or years away.
This could be the new normal for a very long time.
So why do I keep watching Contagion?
A dimension of narrative that I like to bring up pretty regularly is the idea that one purpose
of fiction is that it allows us a space to practice intense emotions and states without
exposing us to the complexities or harms of those states in reality.
This is typically in the context of the fanciful: reckless stunts, wild sex, gun fights, or
general risky behaviour.
We talked about this with Fifty Shades and the idea of non-consent as a fantasy subject.
Watching a disaster film in a disaster, particularly one as sociologically driven as Contagion,
is an extension of this.
Rather than practicing intense emotional states before they happen, this instinct of exposing
ourselves to what we’re already experiencing, amplifying existing emotional states, it works
as a form of emotional inoculation.
I am scared and anxious and uncertain, and so I will make myself more scared and more
anxious and more uncertain, because it’s still fiction, it’s still safe, it still
has an end.
It is bounded.
Things will get bad, things will then get worse, people will die.
The world is unfair, it is unbalanced, it is unjust, and catastrophe will bring out
both the best and worst of all of us.
And then it will end.
Is there looting, and arson, and murder?
Yeah.
But it is, ultimately, out of the ordinary.
People get paranoid, people get desperate, they riot under stress, but even when food
supply lines break down, the world isn’t summarily turned over to those with the bullets
and the willingness to use them.
There is no Mad Max dystopia, no Fallout post-apocalypse, because at the end of the day humans are pro-social.
The cooperative survive.
In 1349, in the midst of the black death, it must have looked like the end of the world.
Entire households, entire villages, dying a gross, horrifying, painful death, month
after month after month.
Then for generations, every year wondering if this was the year the plague returned.
Was this the year there would be no one left to bury the dead.
But people survived.
The working class, who bore the brunt of the disease and saw the bodies of their families,
clans, and communities piled like cordwood, fought back against the aristocrats who isolated
themselves in their towers and remote estates.
It was messy, and bloody, and it took decades, but in the end serfdom was abolished.
Europe lost upwards of sixty percent of its population over the course of five years,
but it wasn’t armageddon.
Things kept going, people kept going, and Europe would go on to be absolute bastards
to the rest of the world.
The disease in Contagion is not unrealistic, real diseases have been as deadly, or worse,
but it is dramatic.
It moves very, very quickly, is highly contagious, and kills a huge number of those who are infected.
In reality this aggressiveness would kinda work against the disease, and, morbidly, would
help responders limit the spread.
It moves so fast and kills so quickly that there’s little question of who has it, and
within a couple days everyone who has it is either recovered or dead.
This was the aspect of the SARS epidemic that allowed response teams to effectively quarantine
the virus where it burnt itself out.
That said it’s not impossible that something could spread so aggressively, be so incredibly
contagious, that it could spread like wildfire and become almost impossible to contain before
anyone even knows what’s going on.
But it’s undeniably dramatic and emotionally effective.
48 hours.
We can contain two days in our head.
A situation where things will get materially worse literally tomorrow or the day after
if nothing is done right this second, that’s a comprehensible timeline.
Forty eight hours is short enough that in a catastrophe, driven by adrenaline and stress
and necessity, you can stay awake that long without even realizing it.
COVID’s life cycle is closer to a month.
By the time you get sick you’ve already been sick for two weeks, and now you’re
in for hell for another two to four weeks.
It’s just past the range where it really feels real.
Two weeks isn’t long, but it’s still over the line into the indeterminate “future”.
This problem extends in both directions.
There’s only so much space in the mind for time.
As the news ramps up, as things get worse, the present crowds out history.
The distance between the irrelevant past and the now contracts.
’Days ago’ becomes distant.
‘Months ago’ is irrelevant.
Years ago is ancient.
By evening even earlier the same day is suspect in its relevance to the Now.
We remember January but it has as much presence in the mind as childhood.
Our lives become super liminal, displaced from time, as we wrestle with our own minds
and how they try to process the chronology of our own existence.
By Sunday, Friday no longer feels real, and yet every day’s news is the consequence
of decisions made fourteen, twenty one, twenty eight days ago.
Today’s responses won’t yield results until well into next month.
This flaw in our meat is a gap into which charlatans, hucksters, and conmen can drive
a wedge and pry us open, and pry they will try.
When I first saw Contagion in 2012 I thought the weakest element was what I considered
at the time to be the demonization of online media.
Jude Law’s character plays an online pundit and conspiracy theorist who preaches to an
audience of millions about an herbal tincture of forsythia that he claims is the cure, a
cure he just-so-happens to be selling.
It is, in 2020, the realest element of the film.
Herbal cures, hydrogen water, steam treatment, teas, magnets, suspensions of silver, tinctures,
and tonics.
We’ve got pastors standing at the pulpit telling their congregation it's all a hoax,
that there’s no reason to suspend services, that their nebulous enemies are just trying
to shut them down.
We now live in a world where the US president told people based on a rumour that chloroquine,
a drug used for treating malaria and lupus, was the cure, so a man in Arizona ate a packet
of fish tank cleaner containing the chemical.
He’s dead now.
And that is, again, all part of it.
There is an escapism to a story about horrible things, because that story is complete.
It is bounded.
It provides a framework to horror that doesn’t exist in the real present.
Our future is uncertain, beset on all sides by devils, and we can come out better or we
can come out worse or we can die and none of us knows which it will be and we’re all
screaming at those in power to make the moral choice, to choose better.
And I am in an absolute haze.
My daily life has not much been impacted, overtly.
I’m already an agoraphobic shut-in who works online and has a bad sleep schedule.
But it’s too much.
I’m tired all the time.
I can’t pay attention to the news and I can’t not pay attention to the news.
Working is difficult.
I have a long history of respiratory illness.
I am at risk.
On one hand I am deeply privileged to be in a position where I am and can remain isolated.
On the other hand I can’t even think about the other hand.
Disease does not have a narrative meaning, it does not have an eye for poetry or twists
or closure.
The only meaning is in how we respond.
So I watch Contagion over and over and over again.
Because I need to practice emotions, and I need to live in a bounded world, and I need
to believe we can choose better.