Predicting the pandemic
Rewatching Contagion was fun, until it wasn’t
Pixar’s Onward is the No.1 movie in America. But what if Contagion is the No.1 movie in our psyches? It’s currently way up there on the iTunes movie chart, which means we are paying for Steven Soderbergh’s nine-year-old sign of pandemic life. Covid-19 is upon us, infecting and killing people, compelling quarantine and “social distancing”. Planes are empty. Conferences and tennis tournaments are being scrapped. The new James Bond movie has been wishfully rescheduled for healthier climes.
In the best of times, we civilians are unlikely to have a clear sense of what to expect from our leaders and government agencies. So in addition to looking for clarity in these stressful times, lots of us have turned to Soderbergh. Contagion offers gymnastic catastrophe — it kicks, glides and throbs; it sticks the landing. In September of 2011, when it opened, studded with stars (Matt Damon, Sanaa Lathan, a snaggletoothed Jude Law), it was a decent hit.
The movie hit me squarely in my entertainment cortex, this funny, scary, stylish, soapy, plausible speculation of life during a global outbreak. The appeal now is how it’s proving to be an instructive worst-case scenario of our current freakout. We’ve turned to it, in part, to know how bad things could get.
The film’s virus seems a lot worse, for one thing. Six characters die in the first 12 or so minutes. One of them is Gwyneth Paltrow, our patient zero. When a pair of doctors cut her skull open, they peer inside with bewilderment that radiates through their layers of protective gear. One asks: “Should we tell somebody?” And the other replies: “Tell everybody.”
A scene like that is another reason we’ve turned to it. It’s not like, I don’t know, Bird Box, where you’re trapped along with a bunch of strangers in the middle of a mysterious suicidal outbreak; or like waiting with the folks in Night Of The Living Dead for the zombies to arrive. Nobody gets epidemiological information in that sort of movie; they just want to get tomorrow.
Contagion explains the terror; it’s an explanatory drama. Scott Z Burns wrote the script, and he embeds us with the crisis managers, scientists and bureaucrats who are looking, rationally, for answers, devising containment strategies, working toward a vaccine. Elected government is all but negligible. The most presidential character in the movie is Laurence Fishburne, and he runs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Bryan Cranston does gently flex military muscle as some kind of admiral. But he’s essentially part of a team. Most of the movie operates in staffs.
In Minnesota, the CDC inspection officer, played by Kate Winslet, keeps running afoul of the governor’s people. In Hong Kong, the World Health Organization, with Marion Cotillard as perhaps its chicest delegate, attempts to sleuth out the outbreak’s origin with a local group of male sceptics. Meanwhile, back at the CDC, Jennifer Ehle is trying to understand the virus at a cellular level, saying things like “It’s pleomorphic”.
One thrill of the movie is its belief in solution-driven competence. (Bonus points for having women embody that competence; they are almost saintly.) The only people who flip out are civilians: Law, as a Blogger Who Knows the Truth, and Damon, who loses half his family (Paltrow was his wife) but is biologically immune (classic Damon). Watching movie stars be world-savingly smart really does lower your blood pressure.
But, if we’re being honest, calm isn’t why anybody comes back around to Contagion. It’s having our pressure spiked. Panic is a draw. And Soderbergh is the right guy to goose the dismay. He’s always practised a filmmaking of neurotic compulsion: the doomsday obsessions of Andie MacDowell in Sex, Lies, and Videotape and James Spader’s complementary erotic fetish; the way Soderbergh essentially colour-codes his movies in blues, oranges and reds. I used to think the tinting was to help us follow all the storylines; now I think it’s to help him feel organised, that every element is in its place.
Soderbergh’s OCD flag really flies in Contagion. The introduction of every city receives a headcount: “Tokyo, population 36.6 million”, “Minneapolis, population 3 million”. Toward the end of the opening sequence, the camera peers down from Paltrow to the bowl of airport-bar peanuts at her elbows. It follows her credit card as it goes from her fingers to the attendant who swipes it. Anytime a hand touches a doorknob or a pole on a subway or a bus, the camera and editing basically go ewww. For the severely infected, the camera angles go sideways and the images warp and blur.
At some point, a scientist played by Elliott Gould sits in a restaurant after spending a lot of brain power thinking about a vaccine and watches a waiter yawn while drying glasses and a coughing woman take a swig of water. Gould’s reaction is a face he had to invent for the occasion. It’s worth noting that
Soderbergh does his own cinematography; those are basically his eyes boinging out of their sockets.
After 45 minutes, my delight subsided. I remembered why I was watching this again. And the gravity of it all set in — deeper than something terrifying like the 28 Days zombie movies, although not as movingly as a novel like Station Eleven or the archival footage Aids documentary How To Survive A Plague. The movie’s potential death toll — 70 million, somebody says — seems high compared to what officials are surmising about Covid-19. But people are dying. The striking nurses and empty gyms, malls and airports; the panic to
After 45 minutes, my delight subsided. I remembered why I was watching this again
flee: It all feels real. The movie doesn’t predict the racism and xenophobia that have broken out in the United States. (Maybe you saw the clip of a nincompoop newsperson asking whether we could get the virus from Chinese food.) Instead, it has desperate Hong Kong villagers kidnap an important white lady in order to get them to the front of the vaccine line.
Speaking for those who’ve rehelped ourselves, I’m glad I did. There have been moments in the last few weeks when I’ve felt we might be paranoid. Everything smells of hand sanitiser and people are testing their core strength to surf the subway-car turbulence lest they have to grip a subway pole. The other day, I watched a businessman wipe an entire train seat with disinfectant and then park himself in it before it dried. I thought we might all be Julianne Moore in Safe, suffering from a disease we might not actually have.
Then I got to the scene in Contagion in which Winslet’s helper takes a stab at commiseration. “My wife makes me take off my clothes in the garage,” he says, “and then she leaves out a bucket of warm water and soap. And then she douses everything in hand sanitiser after I leave. I mean, she’s overreacting, right?”
Her answer is what we’ve paid good money to hear: “Not really.”
She’s not done, either: “And stop touching your face.”