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"Contagion" and Zombies

Quyen Le

Warning: spoilers below for the film Contagion


For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

Richard Dawkins

Halloween is around the corner and it’s appropriate that these days, zombies are on the rise given that vampires are now about sex or sparkles, rebooted 80s’ franchises are, well, franchises, and I can only assume that werewolves are passe given how The Wolfman bombed at the box office only a year and a half ago. How appropriate, too, that I recently watched Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, a film with a premise so similar to the core root of the zombie sub-horror genre that the degree of separation between one and the other is as thin as Heineken. 

For those unfamiliar with the September release, Contagion is about an pandemic of a new, deadly virus, a virus so deadly it ravages countries and blips the mortality statistics into the millions worldwide within a month of its premiere. As people drop dead and the virus mutates, societies breakdown into anarchy, barely contained by a veil (if not facade) of remaining authority still alive. Doctors and nurses walk out, refusing to treat patients since there is no cure and they don’t want to become infected themselves; researchers at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) rush to find a vaccine and cure, working tirelessly against a pathogen that has no precursor; rioters break into pharmacies, attempting to loot homeopathic treatments a conspiracy-driven blogger promotes; civilians are forced to protect their homes with arms, turning away friends for fear of transmission and living lives of relative isolation; survivors live in more dread than the dying, going about their daily routine with a mysophobic and self-preservation alertness; and and the bureaucracy of governments churns its wheels as it attempts to allocate resources and personnel to different scenes, each nation balancing the interest of its own people with that of the international community in the face of natural force capable of wiping out the human population. 

While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often.

Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad, and Robert J. Smith, "When Zombies Attack!“ (2009)

Pause for a second a consider how similar the events which unfold in Contagion correlate with events with which we’ve come to expect in zombie stories: if anything, zombies are a perfect model for the pandemic of an infectious disease, plus the bonus of bludgeoning practice if you’re into that sort of spectacle. The key difference between zombies and a deadly disease is a minute one: infectious diseases can be transmitted a variety of ways – such as vectors like mosquitoes and rats, fomites like a staircase railing or martini class, or even direct contact like handshaking and kissing – and unless the pathogen itself is particularly hardy and has a long incubation period, it will likely die off once its host (aka the unfortunate patient) dies; zombies, on the other have two modes of action: 1) eat the living, or 2) leave a infectious mark after their prey manages to get away – the agent which causes the disease, interestingly, requires both direct contact (aka chomp) and the host to die before it can be properly transmitted. Besides this medical difference, pandemics and zombies both share the same consequences: social breakdown into levels of anarchy and inhumanity, and both are spread by contact, direct or indirect. 

The film suggests that, at any moment, our advanced civilization could be close to a breakdown exacerbated by precisely what is most advanced in it.

David Denby, Contagion review via The New Yorker

Yet what’s really scary in “Contagion” is how fast once-humming airports and offices, homes and cities empty out when push comes to shove comes to panic in the streets.

Mahnola Dargis, Contagion review via The New York Times

What makes Contagion compelling is its particularly realistic grasp in depicting the events unfold when a new, deadly virus hits the globe. The film is an ensemble film with six intertwined stories with three distinct POVs: the first, involving Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) and his family, provides insight into the events unfolding amongst civilians; the second revolves around government authorities on the scene, and has three distinct plot lines – Dr. Ellis Cheever (Lawrence Fishburne) balancing his duties between the CDC and US homeland security, Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) who works tirelessly on a vaccine, and Dr. Leonara Orantes (Marion Cotillard), a WHO epidemiologist who visits Hong Kong and tries to determine the origin of the virus; and lastly the third, which revolves around Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) who blogs conspiracy theory-ridden polemics and vouches for alternative medicine. In total, there are six stories and three POVs which pervade Contagion. 

One aspect of the film is befuddling. Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) is a popular blogger with conspiracy theories about the government’s ties with drug companies. His concerns are ominous but unfocused. Does he think drug companies encourage viruses? The blogger subplot doesn’t interact clearly with the main story lines and functions mostly as an alarming but vague distraction.

Roger Ebert, Contagion review via the Chicago SunTimes

If there’s a serious misstep in Contagion, it’s that the subplot involving Alan is poorly focused. His motivation is murky. Initially, he appears to be a conspiracy theory nutcase. Then he’s a market manipulator being recruited by a hedge fund manager. Soderbergh wants him in the film to represent a slice of the population, but doesn’t seem to know how to manage him. There’s a sense that Alan should have been given either more or less screen time. The amount he’s actually accorded doesn’t seem just right.

James Berardinelli, Contagion review

Listen, I don’t object to the depiction of an Internet journalist as a scumbag; I object to reducing the entire discussion of the current dreadful state of media in this country to a lame joke, and one that suggests we’re better off not challenging authority. 

Andrew O'Hehir, Contagion review via Salon.com

Contagion could have been a much more haunting (and hence stronger) film had Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns placed a bigger emphasis on the decay of social order that results when the disease becomes pandemic – the same emphasis that makes certain zombie dramas like The Walking Dead so much more compelling than the average zombie flesh fest. Unfortunately, the Krumwiede story becomes an unnecessary crux in the film’s progression: while it’s likely that a good portion of the population would turn to unfounded internet declarations in times of desperation, I don’t think an entire story line needed to be dedicated to this aspect of a pandemic causing social deterioration. In fact, the Krumwiede story could have easily been incorporated into Cheever’s troubles in dealing with government bureaucracy and reaching out to the American population. I suspect, however, that Krumwiede’s story was included to give Contagion narrative momentum, and unfortunately I wholeheartedly believe this was the wrong choice. A wiser decision would have been to linger more on the deterioration of the dying, and to give more screen time to Emhoff and Hextall, whose respective story lines encompass the core components of Contagion’s horror: a man who is trying to keep his remaining family alive, and a women who is pressed by the constraints of time and technology to find a cure. 

"Contagion’s” implacable tone has its drawbacks. The movie is almost pathological in its avoidance of messy emotion.

Michael Phillips, Contagion review via the Chicago Tribune

If anything, the primary momentum of Contagion could have easily been Mitch Emhoff’s perspective: true terror lies not with the dying, but with the remaining who have yet to know of their own fates. The moments in Contagion where we see people looting, robbing, and clawing over one another for limited supplies are as poignant as they are when we see similar moments in zombie narratives: they encompass the deterioration of social order, when anarchy becomes as pandemic as the disease itself. Sure, you have those who retain their own sense of decency and humanity, but realistically (and unfortunately) such individuals tend to be far and few between in the wake of a potential human apocalypse. Mitch Emhoff is one of those few dignified people amidst the chaos, a character whose sense of common decency is undeterred in the wake of disaster; his story line is what really keeps the viewers on edge, for we can only imagine what would happen to him and his daughter if they were forced to fend for themselves against violence or worse yet, opportunists. 

Had Soderbergh and Burns considered the possibility that being scientifically accurate and narratively compelling were not mutually exclusive, I suspect Contagion would have been one of the few films to achieve the feat of depicting a researcher more nuanced than Hollywood cliches – I’m speaking, of course, of Dr. Hextall’s story. 

The pressure cooker plot calls for intense performances all around but first among equals are Winslet and Ehle. The former’s abilities are amply known but, whenever Ehle appears in films or onstage, she makes it clear she entirely belongs in the company of Streep (whom she resembles), Winslet, Blanchett, Kidman, Linney, et al. 

Todd McCarthy, Contagion review via The Hollywood Reporter

While Contagion has more (currently) sound science than the average science fiction thriller, Soderbergh still makes the mistake of assuming the research process is too boring for the big screen. It’s not an unfounded assumption, but it’s an assumption based off the idea that the technology and technicalities themselves must be the focus in depicting the research process in a narrative. The technicalities themselves might be boring to the average non-researcher (even for researchers in some cases) but the human drive behind such research is a rather compelling one.

Imagine: Dr. Hextall gets a sample of the pathogen, and begins the arduous process of identifying its microscopic components – is it a bacteria, a virus, a prion?; imagine too that once she identifies its molecular make up and its origins (courtesy of Professor Ian Sussman, played by Elliott Gould), Hextall must now go through the various trial and errors in creating a viable vaccine. Sure, the process itself might be boring to watch, but imagine the emotions attached to each step: the grueling thought process that tests the extent of current knowledge and its application to a unforeseen force; the ensuing lack of sleep that results because each minute she sleeps means another hundred (if not thousand) victims to succumb; the hope and disappointment when a vaccine is tried and fails; the moment of despair when nothing seems to work; the burst of hope when an epiphany results in a successful vaccine – the end result is still the development of a vaccine, but the emphasis on Hextall’s humanity as opposed to her knowledge of microbiology could have been a particularly moving and incredibly novel aspect of Contagion’s momentum. 

Don’t get me wrong, Contagion is not a bad movie; in fact, it’s a very good thriller that, save Krumwiede’s story, is tightly paced and bound to create mysophobes in its wake. It’s quite possible to make a dramatically moving zombie story (The Walking Dead is doing a superb job at the moment), and likewise it’s very possible to make a dramatically moving pandemic thriller that builds on Contagion’s strengths and shortcomings. The focus, unfortunately, lies a bit too much on the overarching realities of the situation – bureaucracy, technicalities, research – that, in a documentary, would have been more than appropriate; however, since Contagion is fictional, a tighter grasp on the aspects that make a compelling narrative (such as the human condition and confluence of emotions) would have made for a stronger overall film. I’m not sure if Soderbergh made the connection between pandemics and zombies, but if he didn’t I think he would have made wiser choices in the film’s narrative momentum – minus the bludgeoning. 

SIde note: when Hextall tests the vaccine on herself, she references Dr. Barry Marshall when her diseased and distressed father protests her actions. Marshall, an Australian, along with his colleague Robin Warren, is responsible for identifying the bacteria, Helicobacter pylori, as the agent responsible for gastric (stomach) ulcers in 1982. Up until this discovery, it was largely believed that gastric ulcers were associated (or caused) by excessive stress. At the time of Marshall’s discovery, however, the medical community did not accept his findings as sound, so in 1984 he drank a petri dish of H. pylori and subsequently took antibiotics to prove his point. The experiment was cited in 1985 in the Medical Journal of Australia. In 1994, the National Institutes of Health of America acknowledged Marshall’s findings as sound. 

Small quibble: I don’t know if the production of Hextall’s vaccine would have been as speedy as depicted in Contagion given how long it took for the medical community to accept Marshall’s findings, notwithstanding the issues of human trials needed to prove the vaccine’s effectiveness. But really, who wants to sit through that process? 


Recommended Reading

Contagion trailer, which is where I got the above images from.

Happy (early) Halloween, everyone