contains spoilers for the 2011 film, Contagion
I think it should be fairly obvious why I've decided to write about this film at this time. Films can often be a great source of escapism from the real world at times like this, or you can go in the complete opposite direction and watch films which were seemingly written with a crystal ball at hand.
When Contagion was first released, director Steven Soderbergh spoke about his desire to create an "ultra-realistic film" about the outbreak of a disease. In his research, screenwriter Scott Burns spoke of his fascination that the prevalent attitude amongst epidemiologists wasn't "If this is going to happen', it's 'When is this going to happen?'" And looking at it now, Contagion is a pretty unnervingly accurate predictor of what was to come.
I'm not going to outline all the ways that events in Contagion reflect real life, but rather the more interesting things that the film reveals about the human responses to such disasters. The film follows several separate story-lines and characters, meaning we get to see how the pandemic affects people from different wakes of life, and their response: from doctors selflessly working on the front-line to online bloggers exploiting the crisis for their own gain.
The closest thing the film has to an emotional core is Matt Damon's character Mitch, an ordinary every-man who loses his wife and step-son to the virus early on. Left alone to protect himself and his daughter he attempts to stay safe as mass hysteria grows through the population. The two attempt to go shopping, and then later pick up their government-issued food rations, and are faced both times by riots and looting as ordinary people grow desperate and hungry, and we see the worst of humanity brought out by the pandemic, and the disintegration of societal norms and order. We also see the impacts of fear on a population- Mitch is unwilling to allow his daughter to meet up with her boyfriend amid fears of infection and on one occasion forcefully drags the two apart, only allowing them to re-unite once they have both been vaccinated. The young couple dance together in a living room decorated to resemble a prom hall, a symbol of the chunk of their lives that has been lost to them thanks to the virus.
Fear is also seen in another subplot when Marion Cotillard's epidemiologist, Dr Orantes, is kidnapped by a badly-affected Chinese village and held as ransom for a place at the front of the queue vaccines. Their actions, while morally wrong, are driven by a sense of fear at further deaths and demonstrate the often helplessness of more disadvantaged groups and the way they are often abandoned by their governments. The village is eventually given placebo vaccines by the Chinese government and Dr Orantes, having been freed, runs back to warn them.
The majority of the film follows the medical response to the outbreak, and the different researchers attempting to trace the virus' origin and find a vaccine. They are led by Dr Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) who epitomises the cautious, rational medical approach, calmly debating characters such as Bryan Cranston's general and Jude Law's devious conspiracy theorist with scientific facts. However he falls short when he leaks news of a quarantine to his fiancée, warning her to get out of the city hours before the official announcement of a lock-down, putting his personal motives before professional in an arguably selfish way.
The utter selflessness of doctors is also shown, most significantly in Jennifer Ehle's Dr Hextall who tests the vaccine on herself and visits her sick father, another doctor felled in the line of duty. It's also clear in Kate Winslet's character, Dr Erin Mears, who travels around the country attempting to trace the path of the virus as it infects people at an exponential rate. She contracts the virus and lies in a warehouse that has been converted into a hospital while a plane to retrieve her is diverted
to pick up an infected politician instead, before a shocking jump-cut reveals her death. In her story we also see the frustrations of political bureaucracy as officials struggle to comprehend the scale of the virus, asking whether the closing of shopping malls can be delayed until after the Thanksgiving shopping period.
The battle between the need for transparency from the government and the desire to not incite mass panic is one that is debated in the news today and also runs through Contagion. The uncertainty created in the vacuum of information allows for opportunists such as Jude Law's blogger Alan Krumwiede who fakes his own sickness to promote fake herbal cures, which he sells on his website to millions of followers. Unproven chemicals have been promoted as miracle cures by certain world leaders in this pandemic too, and the dishonesty and almost sociopathic disregard displayed by such individuals is epitomised by Krumwiede who is willing to attack the actual vaccine as harmful, when it arrives, in order to boost his own products.
Contagion is the movie for our times and manages to be sharply prescient and accurate as well as being a thrilling, if sometimes uncomfortable, watch. It holds very pressing truths about our response as a species to global events such as the one we are facing right now and the impact of fear upon a population. It also delivers a timely warning about the dangers of internet misinformation, with one character remarking "Blogging isn't writing. It's just graffiti with punctuation." How true.
Contagion is currently on Netflix