Dozens of horror movies come out every year. There are whole film festivals dedicated to indie horror. It is one of my favorite genres. And yet… for the most part, I rarely find these films scary for more than a moment. There’s enough distance from the conceit to reality in most of them that they just don’t really stick. The best horror movies, to me, get at a deeper underlying truth. Halloween has things to say about suburban life. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre understands the omnipresence of death in the desert. But it doesn’t have to be a horror movie to land like that. Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 procedural thriller, is neither shot nor written like a horror movie. And yet, even in the best of times, you won’t see a scarier movie. And facing down the coronavirus in 2020 is not the best of times. In other words: It’s the perfect time to revisit Contagion.
Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) stops in Chicago for an affair on her way home from China. Just a couple days later, she’s dead, as is her son, leaving her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) confused and frightened. A man in China dies on a bus, and conspiracy blogger Alan Krumweide (Jude Law) thinks this might be something big. Then Beth’s lover gets sick. Then more people. Dr. Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) at the CDC realizes it might be a new virus; two top scientists at a secure lab (Jennifer Ehle and Dimitri Martin) investigate. Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet) flies to Minnesota to interview Mitch and brief the city on how to handle the crisis. But things get rapidly out of control as cities are placed on quarantine. Looting begins, and services collapse. Dr. Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is sent to China to find the origins of the virus, but she is kidnapped by a village hoping to ransom her for early access to vaccines.
All these threads meet up, but each is interesting in their own right. Let’s take a look.
Alan Krumweide
One of my favorite podcasts right now is called Knowledge Fight. In it, Dan and Jordan obsessively watch Alex Jones’ InfoWars and talk about the way he spreads misinformation, the truth behind his claims, and the narratives that he builds. And let me tell you, Alex Jones has spent a lot of time talking about the coronavirus. But Jones doesn’t just report on the news. He invents it. Whether by making up an origin for it whole cloth or by inventing a fake cure-all to sell to his listeners, Jones talks about the coronavirus obsessively — and he makes a lot of money selling food and fake medicine off it.
Alan Krumweide isn’t based on Alex Jones, and yet Contagion nails the kind of toxic, attention-seeking, profit-driven madness that something like a pandemic can inspire in the wrong kind of person. Krumweide initially thinks the virus may be his ticket into mainstream respectability. He quickly realizes it’s his ticket to a lot more than that. Krumweide claims that ‘forsythia’, a supplement that he sells, is a cure for the virus. He fakes being infected on his own show and takes forsythia and suddenly, he’s fine. If you think that level of scam is a step too far, how about this: A frequent InfoWars guest has already said that he had coronavirus and cured himself using supplements. On air. And Jones offered no pushback whatsoever. He just sold his own supplements later in the show.
I’ve seen dozens of posts featuring misleading information about the coronavirus. Contagion is very good at priming you to ask an essential question whenever information about it comes out: Who is posting this, and what do they get out of it?
It’s also very good at showing the damage done by people who don’t ask those questions.
Dr. Cheever
Even an idealized government response – and Contagion‘s is very idealized – is not without flaws. Dr. Cheever is a warm, empathetic man, and that means that there are times when his emotions get the better of him. For much of the film, Dr. Cheever is a level-headed and rational leader in the response to this virus. But when he learns that several major American cities are going to be put on quarantine, he does something totally understandable: He tells his wife (Sanaa Lathan) to get out of the city before the order comes down. It’s something sweet and simple, something I think most of us would do for our loved ones. But there are repercussions.
The most notable of which is, his wife tells her closest friend, and her friend tells some of her friends on Facebook. Soon, it looks like Cheever helped his circle of friends escape the quarantine he condemned the rest of the city to. And that’s all the opening Alan Krumweide needs. Alan and Cheever face off on a cable news show. Alan continues to push his forsythia narrative, but he knows the science isn’t on his side. When Dr. Cheever pushes back and says the CDC is looking into it but that there’s no evidence that forsythia works, Krumweide drops the bomb about Cheever’s friends escaping quarantine.
Conspiracies thrive in black box environments, and government bureaucracy is basically a black box machine. Bad actors can twist even well-meaning government response, because at the end of the day, the government makes mistakes. Don’t let people trying to sell you something slip in by preying on the uncertainty and chaos of the moment.
Dr. Mears and Dr. Orantes
Every pandemic has men and women on the ground, nurses, doctors, and other healthcare professionals risking infection to save lives. In Contagion, these are represented by Dr. Mears (Winslet) and Dr. Orantes (Cotillard). Dr. Mears flies to the first hotspot of the contagion in the US, where she meets with local government intransigence before contracting the virus herself. In a quarantined area that doesn’t have enough beds, medicine, even blankets to help, impossible doctors must make impossible decisions about who to save. Meanwhile, Dr. Orantes investigates its origins in China before she gets kidnapped and held to ransom to guarantee early access to any developed vaccine. While she’s there, however, she realizes the danger the people in the village are in, and ends up working with them to keep them healthy.
Folks who have to work, either in healthcare or just with the general public, there’s a lot of danger right now. The danger of infection is obvious. The danger of shortages is something we’re only beginning to understand. in Italy, doctors have to operate on war-time triage rules, giving limited resources and attention to patients with the best odds of survival and letting others die. Mears ends up buried in a mass grave, which is an all-too-frightening reality in some places. The more we force folks to go to work, the more we put them and everyone they know at risk.
Orantes, on the other hand, ends up getting at one of the most pleasant surprises about human beings. Movies are quick to show humans at their worst during chaotic moments, but law and order have not broken down, even in pretty extreme cases. Instead, people have come together. Mutual Aid organizations are popping up all over the country to offer supplies, transportation, and more to those in need. People from all over the world are offering advice, telling folks how to stay safe, creating quarantine-friendly activities. People come together.
Mitch Emhoff
Mitch and his daughter Jory are the stand-ins for the common people in Contagion. Neither of them has the virus, but both have lost loved ones too it. If Alan doesn’t take the virus seriously enough, Mitch might take it too seriously — and so do a lot of others. What we see from Mitch’s point of view is a man slowly becoming more authoritarian as he witnesses a police state unfold around him. The movie doesn’t particularly challenge this view, either. In the end, both Mitch and the government were ultimately right to create a brutal and oppressive regime. You have to do, the movie suggests, whatever it takes to stay safe. Even if what it takes is pretty cruel.
In the real world, we’ve seen almost the opposite is the case. I mentioned Mutual Aid above, and that’s something the movie misses completely. There haven’t been any riots. Indeed, in many places, the pandemic is having the opposite outcome: Health experts are recommending that we empty the prisons and the courts as much as possible, since those are places that tend to pack a lot of people in tightly with substandard food and healthcare. Contagion paints a picture of an effective authoritarian response to pandemic; reality, thus far, suggests that the authoritarianism of ICE and the carceral state make things worse. Instead, it is our communities that are coming together.
COVID-19
Where does that leave us?
Perhaps the most hopeful moment of the film comes from Dr. Ally Hextall (Ehle), a CDC doctor working on the virus. Ally helps develop a vaccine by taking an enormous personal risk — and, from there, she never tries to profit off it. She takes a risk, it pays off, and the vaccine is distributed for free worldwide. The process isn’t flawless. The wait is unbelievable for some, there are fake vaccines, and some folks – like the poor Chinese village – show no sign of having access to it at all. The rich and politically connected get it first. But it’s free. Baby steps.
In reality, while people are on the whole better than the movie makes them out to be, corporations are on the whole worse. Republicans shot down emergency efforts that would have saved lives and livelihoods, while corporations are trying to get exclusive rights to potential treatments so they can charge exorbitant rates. But you should never have been trusting politicians or CEOs to save us anyway.
The message of Contagion fits in well in the Obama era: The elites will take care of it. They’ll rise above the panicked rabble. They’ll hold it together.
But this is not the Obama era anymore, and the lies of meritocracy are easier to see. Look to your neighbors. Look for the helpers. And then go become one.
Contagion is a great movie – one of the best thrillers ever made, I think – but even today, it’s not real life. It’s a worst case scenario, and often a cynical one at that. Some people have suggested that Contagion is hard to watch right now, but I don’t feel that way. Having just revisited the movie, while it paints a vivid picture of pandemic collapse, I can look out my window and see that it’s not true. It paints a picture of a government having to hold its people in check. For the most part, thus far, I’ve seen the opposite: People supporting communities.
Stay strong and stay healthy, friends. And take care of one another.
