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Contagion (2011; Directed by Steven Soderbergh)

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic currently paralyzing much of the world and altering any social, economic, and political norms that we might collectively have taken for granted, millions of people have dealt with the anxiety and uncertainty of this transformative mass health emergency in the best way they’ve learned how: they have stayed in their homes and watched lots of stuff on Netflix. One of the pieces od media that quarantined viewers have understandably gravitated toward is Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 viral outbreak thriller Contagion, and honestly, they could do far worse.

Contagion is in many ways a highly representative Soderbergh work, a filmic story told through multiple disconnected but broadly related narrative threads and peppered with multimedia expository methods. The camera work is immediate and the cinematography unadorned, the acting naturalistic and marked by overlapping dialogue, the editing sharp, nimble, and vital. Alissa Quart coined the term “hyperlink cinema” to describe this style, and several Soderbergh movies (most notably Traffic, which won him his Best Director Academy Award) fit the guidelines. Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (a frequent collaborator and director of last year’s excellently sober The Report) are also fond of using the hyperlink cinema approach to explore various facets of a complex social or political issue that the traditional protagonist-biography format of Hollywood message movies has proven too rigid and direct to handle effectively.

Contagion proves that a viral pandemic of global proportions (an imagined and far deadlier one than we currently face, if that’s any sort of balm for the sting of current circumstances) is precisely the kind of event that hyperlink cinema was developed in order to depict onscreen. A message movie with a singularly focused narrative strand would necessarily proscribe and thus misrepresent the rhizomatic enormity of a worldwide plague in a way that a multipronged hyperlinker like Contagion is not likewise constrained to do. A lesser single-narrative-thread film would probably would have focused on the experiences of Midwestern everyman Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon), whose world-travelling (and unfaithful) wife Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from a business trip to Hong Kong and quickly falls dangerously ill. It may have alternately focused on the journey through the pandemic of a quartet of prominent health professionals: CDC chief Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), one of his top on-the-ground Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), CDC research scientist and eventual vaccine developer Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle), or WHO epidemiologist Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard), who investigates the virus’ origins in mainland China.

Contagion intercuts all of their perspectives on the pandemic together to craft a greater multivalent whole, and even finds time to include the subplot of conspiracy-minded blogger (How quaintly 2011! Who the hell blogs anymore?) Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), who gains millions of devoted (and a litte desperate) followers flogging a homeopathic cure employing an existing pharmaceutical product and thus contributes to a dangerous contagion of panic and distrust that escalates into order-collapsing self-interested lawlessness. Krumwiede’s plot might seem like the least accurate and most paranoidly apocalyptic portion of Contagion‘s multifaceted portrait of a fictional model pandemic (his self-fashioned protective bubble-head suit has something of 12 Monkeys to its design), and it’s fair to say that the contemporary coronavirus situation proves this out. There’s no need for obscure anti-government bloggers to sow fear and discord with dangerous, unfounded promises of dubious miracle cures when you’ve got the President of the United States doing that on national television, after all.

Given the film’s fairly solid basis in disease response strategies and scientific knowledge, many details of Contagion will be alarmingly familiar to anyone living through the current pandemic. Ideas now common in the collective discourse like social distancing come up in dialogue, and Winslet’s Dr. Mears admonishes a colleague not to touch his face to prevent contracting the virus, as we have all been admonished many times by public health figures. The virus’ Chinese origins and its spread through the haphazard incautious contact of a globally-travelling, socially networked society that cannot easily or painlessly be limited, let alone locked down entirely, is likewise all too real today, although the film is not as good on the economic consequences as one might like. Probably the most unrealistic thing in the film, to be honest, is that two teenagers choose a U2 song for a proxy post-pandemic prom dance in Mitch’s living room (a wild flight of Gen-X fancy, if there ever was one).

Grounded as Contagion is in disease control modelling and rigorously studied scientific hypotheses and predictions, it should be so familiar. In so many ways, the coronavirus pandemic currently seizing up the world is seeing the global population react in all the ways that this film depicted, although thus far both the death toll and the complete breakdown of law and order shown in the film are not quite yet our reality (a line late in the film, as the world recovers, notes that the virus killed 26 million people; if COVID-19 claims that many victims, one doubts our social order would be able to endure it either). Is it comforting to have your contemporary reality largely mapped out in a fictional movie based on scientific modelling that is far more dire than an actual global pandemic? It’s hard to say, but Contagion‘s intention is like that of all of Soderbergh’s hyperlinked cinema verité socio-political message movies: not to comfort viewers but to shake them out of well-learned complacency concerning a problem by confronting them with fictional but documentary-immediate dramatic plottings of real issues and accurate information. Contagion is just a movie, but it has a well-researched and well-founded point and makes it skillfully, forcefully, and persuasively. It’s perhaps not entirely too late for this film to be of some benefit to our shared predicament of the moment, for whatever that benefit may be worth.