The problems with Contagion in a Covid-19 world
The COVID-19 pandemic has hugely renewed interest in Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 thriller Contagion.
According to Warner Bros, at the end of December last year the film was listed at 270th position among its titles. Since the beginning of 2020, the film has jumped to second place, bested only by the Harry Potter movies.
The plot sees the rapid spread of a highly-infectious respiratory virus (which originates in Asia) with an ensemble cast all trying, in their own way, to cope with the outbreak. Sound familiar?
Marion Cotillard is an epidemiologist with the World Health Organisation, Kate Winslet is an epidemic intelligence service officer, Jennifer Ehle works at the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Matt Damon is the ‘everyman’ stand-in for the American dad…
The film, written by Scott Z Burns, doesn’t skimp on the science of a deadly outbreak.
A piece in the New Scientist in 2011 said:
It’s hard to name many Hollywood blockbusters that are as invested in the realities of science as Contagion … Although it is by no means flawlessly accurate — it’s not a NOVA documentary — Contagion has been well fact-checked compared to most science/y blockbusters…very few Hollywood productions realistically portray the process of science, both its successes and frustrations. That’s what makes Contagion unique.”
But we’re now living in the Contagion timeline — the scenes of empty supermarket shelves, the desperate struggle for a vaccine, the feverish hand-washing and wariness of coughing — they’ve all become our grim reality.
As Variety notes:
In one scene, Dr Sanjay Gupta, playing himself, is featured on a TV news program discussing preventive measures. Now, nine years later, he’s doing it for real on CNN.
Parts of the film produce a wry smile: Laurence Fishburne’s character explains on TV the importance of ‘social distancing’ — a phrase which is now almost ubiquitous, Kate Winslet tells off her colleague for touching his face too much.
In the film it’s conspiracy theorist Jude Law peddling the unproven ‘forsythia’ as a cure to ‘MEV-1’, in our crazier world it is instead President Donald Trump repeatedly vouching for hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 (against the advice of medical professionals).
(Who could have imagined writing that sentence in 2011?)
But perhaps because it’s now been six months since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that some of the (at times startlingly) accurate film fall thuddeningly flat or parts of a pandemic feel brushed over.
Fishburne’s character is told about plans to lockdown certain cities and breaks protocol to warn his wife to travel that evening.
But less than five minutes later it appears martial law has set in across America with shops being raided for supplies and mass graves being dug — in reality the ‘lockdown’ came far sooner and we are still in it with little prospects of a vaccine in the coming months.
There is no ‘flattening the curve’, no remote working, no discussion of ‘herd immunity’ — although Jude Law’s Alan Krumwiede does help the film portray the dangers of misinformation.
Soderbergh and Burns made a 105-minute film and tried to tell the full story of a pandemic which kills 26 million people worldwide, from patient zero (Gwyneth Paltrow) to the lottery-system used to roll out a vaccine.
It’s an ambitious effort and the film is by no means ‘bad’. Watching it now is a reminder that the scientists (largely) knew what to expect.
“There were two things that were unsettling,” Soderbergh said at the time about his Contagion research. “One is that everyone you spoke to said, ‘We’re due for a big one.’”
We are now in the middle of a ‘big one’ that has touched every element of our society.
Particular scenes are striking for their raw emotion or accuracy: Matt Damon unable to even comprehend the sudden death of his wife and then cannot hug his daughter, separated by a sheet of glass.
We have lived with COVID-19 since it first emerged from Wuhan in December last year.
Much of the world has spent weeks if not months in lockdown, unable to go outside or socialise properly with friends or family. Some unable even to go to the shops or for a walk in the sunshine.
Because Contagion whizzes by so briskly we almost feel cheated, the deaths are in the film sure, the one-off moments of grief or reflection.
But there is no sense of the crippling loneliness the virus has wrought on the world.
The closest the film comes is when Kate Winslet’s Dr Erin Mears falls sick and is in her hotel room checking who has serviced the room and delivered her food on the phone. She is trapped by the virus, just as we all are, whether we have it or not.
In April, Soderbergh was announced as head of a committee assembled by the Directors Guild of America to look into how Hollywood can eventually get back to work.
He said: “The good news is there’s absolutely going to be a way to go back to work and to keep people safe.”
He was asked by the LA Times about Contagion’s prescience.
He said:
“It’s been fascinating to see the aspects of this narrative play out that we didn’t think about.
“The sociological behavior, how people have behaved as individuals, as states, as countries — that’s been really fascinating. And something that very purposely, Scott and I were trying to keep the narrative very focused and we had rules about points of view and what we can see and what we couldn’t see.
“But wow, there’s a lot of really fascinating human behavior that we didn’t even think about when we were doing this. It’s just a reminder of how deeply irrational we are. When we’re put into some sort of fear-threat space, we become deeply illogical. It’s crazy to witness.”
We are all witnesses to it.
Contagion is currently streaming on Netflix in the UK.
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