Quarantainment

After a fairly rough week at work, I was feeling pretty low when I returned home Friday night. Thankfully both girls were free that evening while Audrey was at work, and they both thought my suggestion of watching a movie together while we ate supper made sense.

So, why did I pick Contagion?

Well, not because I thought Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film was funny, although I fully appreciated the irony of watching a movie depicting a deadly viral outbreak while more and more local action is taken against a global COVID-19 pandemic.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. It is a tightly wound thriller showing the impacts of an unknown virus among people from all walks of life, the herculean efforts to determine what it is and how to stop it, and just how easy it is for panic and misinformation to take hold and erode our social structures. An ensemble cast includes Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marino Cotillard, and Jude Law, among others, and the electronic score by Cliff Martinez is gripping and evocative. I'm not sure why it only rates a 6.7 on IMDb.

I picked it largely out of curiosity - I remember thinking it was a well-done film when I first saw it years ago but couldn't remember too much else about it. Both girls are cinema-savvy and science-conscious individuals so watching good movies with them inevitably provokes conversations and follow-up discussions, which feels wholly appropriate.

I also picked it because of my tendency to run worst-case scenarios in my imagination. As more and more disruption in our lives is felt through things like the suspension of sporting leagues, postponement of major cinematic releases and the closures of things like recreation centres, it is easy to become disheartened.

Watching dramatized unrest in the form of store lootings, house robberies, home invasions and armed forces enforcing quarantine measures, is strangely encouraging in a way. The manner in which most people have adopted reduced interaction and social distancing, and the efforts made to protect the elderly and those with compromised immune systems is quite heartening.

Having said that though, I did hear someone in the grocery store yesterday finish up a diatribe against toilet paper hoarders with, "well, I have plenty of ammunition - worst-case scenario, I'll just take what I need."

Besides a chance to recognize how much worse we could have it, Contagion has a couple of other factors in its favour for topical viewing. First, the science is pretty well done, with due care taken to make sure the procedures, equipment and language used reflect reality, even if some corners are cut in order to preserve the narrative. They re-shot a scene after science consultants identified that a medical professional would never inject themselves through their clothing.

In fact, when Fishburne's CDC official Ellis Cheever is asked about how long before a vaccine is found and distributed, he pivots right away to saying that strategies like social distancing and hand-washing are far more critical at the early stages. Sound familiar?

Secondly, it makes a point of addressing how the danger of the fictional MEV-1 virus is compounded by willful misinformation, disseminated by unscrupulous individuals for their own gain.

Dr. Ellis Cheever: We're working very hard to find out where this virus came from. To treat it and to vaccinate against it if we can. We don't know all of that yet, we just don't know. What we do know, is that in order to become sick you have to first come in contact with a sick person or something that they touched. In order to get scared, all you have to do is to come in contact with a rumor, or the television or the internet. I think what Mr. Krumwiede is uh... is spreading, is far more dangerous than the disease.

Hearing far-right talk-radio cranks try to dismiss COVID-19 as "the common cold" or "the sniffles" was bad enough, but when elected officials refer to it as "the Wuhan flu" or a "foreign virus," it's absolutely galling. Visibly Asian people in my own city are reporting facing racism and persecution on the streets and in schools due to some presumed connection to this virus; fear and paranoia don't need amplification from people who are supposed to know better.

But like the poster says, "nothing spreads like fear."

Contagion is currently streaming on Netflix (third or fourth most popular show!)  and Crave if you want to check it out. In the meantime, I am hoping to get a game of Pandemic in this afternoon...