Life imitating art
We’re living in a Braindead world
Admit it, you downloaded Contagion this week, didn’t you? I know I did. In fact, it popped up a few weeks ago on Sky and I watched it then first, then I read the article by Soumya Karlamangla, who watched it four times to assess how similar circumstances in the movie are to our current predicament, and I watched it again.
After that I was on a roll. I downloaded Children of Men, The Andromeda Strain, Carriers, Cabin Fever and 28 Days Later .I skipped Outbreak because I remember it being baloney, but first-person shocker Pandemic and The Crazies (2010) are ready to go.
If you did succumb to Contagion, the decade-old film that The New York Times delighted in reminding folks ‘‘kills off Gwyneth Paltrow in its first 15 minutes’’, you’re not alone.
Rewatches of the film in the wake of the Covid19 pandemic have spawned a thousand thinkpieces and pushed the film to the top of the download and streaming charts all over the world.
I reckon it’s partly because people are always looking for patterns or ways they could have predicted what was coming to make sense of where we’re at – the same reason the tenuous echoes in Dean Koontz’s 1981 horror novel The Eyes of Darkness caused such a kerfuffle a few weeks back.
It’s normal to look to our pop-culture artefacts for solace and insight at a time like this. That’s kind of what they’re for.
I think we’re also looking for happy endings and, say what you like about Contagion, it does deliver that.
Despite the initial grossness (and anyone not wanting to know what Oscar-winning actress Paltrow’s cranial autopsy would look like may want to skip this film), there is something incredibly comforting about it.
It’s full of competent scientists bucking authority and putting their lives on the line for the good of all humanity. It also ends on a high note, with folks who take the danger seriously surviving long enough for the well-oiled military pharmaceutical-industrial complex to do its thing and roll out free vaccines.
You will still have to wade through director Steven Soderbergh’s thinly disguised moralising: Paltrow, a high-powered business woman, stops to meet an old flame on the way home from Hong Kong, where she unknowingly contracted the killer disease, spreading it to the whole of the United States.
In other words, one woman’s infidelity destroys the world. (Deep, deep eye roll.)
Later, Paltrow’s suburban Dudley Do-Right husband Matt Damon saves his daughter’s life by stopping her from snogging, or even seeing, her handsy boyfriend.
Sans unfaithful wife, and with his daughter’s chastity on state-mandated lockdown, he not only survives, but thrives in the pandemic environment, going from downtrodden cuckold to heroic champion of health and wholesomeness by the end of the film.
I may never stop rolling my eyes. Actually, there’s often a moral at the heart of epidemic and pandemic films.
Usually, the disease is a tacit punishment for human transgressions. In Outbreak, the schlocky, 1990s precursor to Contagion, it’s our treatment of animals; in quasi-zombie films 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later, it’s (ironically) social isolation, personal and systemic.
Sometimes, the subtext is less sub and more text, as with Alfonso Cuaron’s beautiful, elegiac, 2006 movie Children of Men, an uncomfortably prescient movie that’s set after the disease has already done its dirty work.
An unnamed pandemic has rendered humanity sterile and society an absolute shambles. Terrorism, extremism and fascism are on the rise, ‘‘refugees’’ and ‘‘outsiders’’ are being loaded into cages and shunted into violent, filthy ghettos, and while the government panders to popularism, the media trumpets panic and all hope seems lost.
Now where have I heard that story before . . . oh, that’s right, the 6pm news.
Bleak as hell and often quite harrowing, Children of Men has, nonetheless, an almost beatific ending, loaded with quasi-religious imagery that’s just subtle enough not to be cloying.
If you’re looking for a . . . well, not exactly happy, but at least hopeful ending, that’s the film for you.
If, on the other hand, you want an epidemic film that’s not going to ask to much from you, other than how hard can you laugh at stuff, and deliver a happy ending to boot, I recommend our very own Braindead, Peter Jackson’s 1992 splatter gore horror-comedy. And no, that’s not just because I’m in it.
There are definitely parallels between the film and our current situation.
It’s about a zoonotic disease (one that jumps from animals to humans, just like Covid-19), although the disease in Braindead comes from the bite of a rather gnarly (and fictional) animal called the Sumatran Rat Monkey.
And, as the film progresses, it showcases the importance of social distancing in beating the disease, mostly because anyone infected is likely to eat your face off, but you get the point.
It’s also honest about the ways in which disease is a great leveller, attacking the young, the old, a nurse, a baby, and a priest, equally.
Braindead is about standing up for yourself and doing what needs to be done, even if it’s hard, or scary, or involves taking a lawnmower to your friends and neighbours. But, more than that, it’s about having a bloody good laugh in the face of fear.
As far as pop-culture choices go, we might need that right now.