Contagion (2011), or: How to Get Cheated out of Your Disaster Experience
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Lina Zhou
Freiburg University Germany
linazh1996@gmail.com
Author(s):
Coline Lapointe1
1Freiburg University, Coline.Lapointe@Orange.Fr, DEU
Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) has experienced a massive increase in streaming views ever since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. On major platforms such as Amazon Prime it climbed to the top of the charts. The renewed appeal of the film has been attributed to the film’s “uncanny” accuracy (Adams), while others have argued that Contagion regained this degree of popularity because of its educational impetus regarding the course of action during a pandemic. However, it needs to be noted that while the medical aspects of the movie were indeed largely based on the factually feasible – also because Soderbergh specifically consulted scientists and infectious disease experts – other parts of Contagion differ considerably from what took place during the coronavirus pandemic. There were no declarations of martial law, there were no large-scale panics, and the closest we got to civil unrest and looting and rioting in the streets was the occasional fight over rolls of toilet paper in a supermarket parking lot.
Contagion, we will argue, was constructed as an “ultra-realistic” (Smith) disaster movie only with respect to its medical and the pharmaceutical research parts, while it adhered to most of the other conventionally engaging and entertaining disaster movie elements. The fact that these disaster movie tropes are wildly exaggerated has been known for decades. Worse, there are indications that they are even counterproductive in terms of their effect on disaster response, corrupting societal resilience. Indeed, examining the popular culture of disaster, Gary R. Webb has shown that disaster movies portray the myth of “social breakdown, while research consistently points to the resilience of human societies” (437). So far, Contagion has not been studied from such a perspective. This paper will examine Contagion within the framework of the disaster genre as a whole rather than just to see how aspects of medical accuracy coincided with the 2020/2021 pandemic experience of the movie’s audience. Given the lack of disaster images coming out of the pandemic, we are wondering whether Covid-19 sceptics and deniers actually feel cheated out of a ‘real’ – that is: filmic – disaster.
References
Adams, Sam. “Watching Contagion in the Age of Coronavirus”. Slate, 19 Mar. 2020, https://slate.com/culture/2020/03/contagion-coronavirus-soderbergh.html.
Smith, Jeremy. “Steven Soderbergh Talks Contagion”. Cool News, 8 September 2011, http://www.aintitcool.com/node/51119.
Webb, Gary R. “The Popular Culture of Disaster”. Handbook of Disaster Research, Ed. Havidán Rodríguez et al, Springer, 2007, 430-441.
Storytelling, Gamification & Co: Using Creative Tools to Design Disaster Cultures in the Anthropocene