When I first saw Contagion, sitting on my couch after my school had declared a lengthened spring break, my primary response was fear. It read like a horror movie, the haunting accumulation of bodies, the sense that something bad was always just around the corner. Rewatching it now, four years after the initial lockdown, that horror feels more distant. It’s still a harrowing movie, very effective in depicting the world’s unpreparedness for a pandemic, and it’s an entertaining ensemble story. Four years since that initial shutdown, though, I feel a lot more conflicted about the applicability of this movie to real life.
Dystopian fiction, in spite of its presumed mission of criticizing societal ills, often fails to incorporate race and class in its setting. From giants of pop culture like The Hunger Games to modern classics like The Handmaid’s Tale, race in particular goes unremarked on, obscuring many of the forms of oppression in our reality that these texts aim to dissect. Contagion is no different. It claims to be a “cautionary tale,” according to a Buzzfeed interview with producer Michael Shamberg, a tale that is “meant to scare the infrastructure into doing the right thing.” It’s a movie that tries to criticize society and spark change through that, yet where it falls flat is in what appears to be a dedication to a tidy ending rather than a truly thoughtful critique of who is at most risk in a pandemic.
Where it does succeed is in its visual horror. Contagion develops a visual language around fomites, which the film describes as “transmission from surfaces,” through subtle focuses on each surface a character touches. This emphasizes glaring issues in behavior around hygiene (coughing into hands, a chef not cleaning his hands after dealing with raw meat), and tells the story of why the virus is able to spread so quickly and, relatedly, why our world is unprepared for fighting that spread. These images are the norm. The world since the birth of COVID-19 is different––we are hopefully more cautious––but these images still ring true. This is where the dystopia of Contagion touches our present society. After setting up this characteristic of its setting, Contagion also quite effectively establishes its stakes when Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), the film’s original focus, dies very suddenly after contracting the virus. This disruption of the expectation set by the beginning of the film serves to tell the audience that no one is safe. It’s not just this initial death where these stakes are set up, though; Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet), who is set up as the hero of the story, suffers a similar fate farther into the movie, ensuring these stakes are maintained throughout.
The film begins to stumble when depicting the dystopia of the world’s response to the pandemic. In particular, its weak point is when it looks at how those with less access to the vaccine are dealing with their situation. These plotlines are tangential to the stories of the other, more significant protagonists to the point that one such plotline––a small Chinese village that facilitates a hostage negotiation in exchange for vaccines––completely escaped my memory between my initial watch and now. This singular look outside of the U.S. and the perspective being that of WHO epidemiologist Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) rather than anyone in the village weakens the audience’s connection to those outside of the largely white and American protagonists. The other such storyline––a janitor at the CDC who wants to get the vaccine for his son and must do so illegally––falls into the same pitfalls. These plotlines are framed as moments in the development of more significant, higher in authority characters. They are not presented as a reality many of us could potentially face but instead as outliers that compound the issues of others.
The neatness of the vaccine as a cure also feels too simple for reality. COVID-19 remains an issue, one which requires a change in behavior beyond a singular shot. I don’t claim to be an epidemiologist, so I have little to say in regards to the scientific accuracy of the film. That said, the chaos that the film presents feels undermined by the tidiness of its ending––how would we truly move on from death on that massive a scale? Certainly not by returning to normal, as Matt Damon’s Mitch Emhoff assures his daughter will happen once people get the vaccine. Contagion does not suggest we would end up back where we started, but it does present a simpler future than the one we experience.
Contagion is an enjoyable film. It makes great use of visual framing devices and has something meaningful to say about our almost hubristic lack of preparation for a pandemic. But it is not a film interested in how the marginalized would experience such a circumstance. It recognizes that something about our world should change, but that “something” starts and stops at washing our hands. That, to me, shows that the dystopia that Contagion depicts isn’t fully addressed even in the film itself.
Evan Debusk is a first-year Theater Production Design major who has seen all of Gwenyth Paltrow’s movies, they can be reached at [email protected].