Spoilers below.
Norman: Contagion, 2011, Dir. Steven Soderbergh. I caught this one during its theatrical run, but didn’t remember it much. Then in March of 2020, I started to remember it a bit. I wanted to return to it now to see how well it would match up with the lived experience of a real pandemic.
It felt like watching a dream I once had. How about you.
Tyler: Well, I first saw it many years ago, perhaps a library DVD, and thought it effective. I didn’t return to it over the years, though, perhaps because it was such a harrowing going-on-dystopian vision.
Then, as you note, March of 2020. That harrowing vision made real. Yeah.
Those memories are a dream. My recollections of those early days have a gauzy quality, all the traumatic moments and revelations mashed together. Perhaps that’s how our minds allow us to function in the wake of such a global disruption. The darkest edges got obscured, the most vivid shocks dulled, reshaped into a general haze.
Watching Contagion took that haze away, and took me right back.
Norman: When I first saw Contagion, it struck me as minor Soderbergh. He’s always been a director willing to experiment and play. Here he wanted to do Robert Altman’s Pandemic. It felt clinical. Characters weren’t people so much as props for working out a scenario.
A lot of that still applies, but the reality of the actual pandemic makes Contagion more prescient. These people are real. People died when we didn’t know what we were dealing with. High school students missed their proms. The movie is lived-in now.
Tyler: So much of what it depicts, Contagion, came true in at least partial fashion. They really, really thought this project through.
Norman: Whoever they hired for consultants were amazing!
That’s why I likened it to a dream. It had all the contours of reality, but it was slightly off. Things were right in essence if not in specifics.
Tyler: I’m reminded of films like JFK or United 93, depictions of history that, despite fabrications or guesses, capture the visceral experience of earth-shaking events. But those movies, of course, were created after the eras they recreate. Contagion isn’t dead-on, like you say, but it is startling how its small and grander moments evoke what we all experienced. Empty airport terminals. Social distancing. Doubt in science. The least of humanity and the best of it. The virus in Contagion isn’t Covid, and Gwyneth Paltrow wasn’t patient zero. But, like you say, man, the essence is uncanny.
Norman: In 2020 a lot of us were thinking about contact tracing and the R (rate of infection number) for the first time. So many significant concepts are illustrated with dramatic simplicity that is so effective that it’s a little unnerving now.
My favorite is how it depicted teenage love in the middle of a pandemic. This was something that I was close to as a youth worker. Kids trying to figure out their social lives, how to navigate the loss of significant milestones such as high school graduation! I was actually scheduled to see two high school plays the weekend that quarantines started. I got to see one of them on a Saturday night, but my other ticket was for a Sunday afternoon and it was cancelled. Students were devastated that they couldn’t do all the performances they had worked so hard on. Contagion captured those losses with great economy and precision.
Tyler: Soderbergh the craftsman is in fine form here. Doesn’t overplay any hands.
Norman: What rang a bell for you? Which moment felt closest to reality?
Tyler: To a certain extent, my emotions reared up the most when confronted with Jude Law’s loathsome sociopathic online opportunist. The character spreads misinformation about a false cure like a blog-era Dr. Oz, and eventually plants the venomous seeds of doubt about vaccines. I hated the movie every time Law was onscreen, but that’s not due to any lack of quality in the filmmaking. Rather, it’s quite the opposite—Contagion is dead-on in predicting how a pandemic could be, and would be, politicized.
Norman: I thought a lot of Ivermectin during those scenes. The real pandemic didn’t have one central blogger like Law’s character, but it did have its share of medical quackery. I was often surprised in 2020 how quickly people latched on to anything that WASN’T vetted by real medicine, and they embraced it BECAUSE the medical establishment had expressed doubts.
Contagion could only hint at how much the internet would impact our experience. Twitter and Facebook weren’t featured, but in reality they were crucial in ways both good and bad.
Tyler: There are mentions of Twitter early by Law, and Facebook later when exposing Laurence Fishburne’s unethical moment of weakness. These are passing notes, though. By 2020, social media dominated our consumption and interpretation of events.
Norman: And it dominated the experience of quarantine. That and Animal Crossing!
Tyler: Tom Nook the hustler. Legendary.
I do wanna say, the performances here are pristine across the board, but Matt Damon especially sticks the landing.
Norman: It’s an ensemble of people who can really act. And that makes a difference in helping the audience to believe.
What struck you as completely different from the real pandemic? I thought they got it mostly right, but what did they get wrong?
Tyler: The run on groceries at first is a holy-shit-I-remember-that moment. It progresses into unrest and riots, however, which we didn’t quite get to in reality. Entire communities weren’t lining up for MREs by early 2021.
I think, though, we have to make clear that the virus depicted in this movie kills at far quicker and greater a rate than Covid. Some of the more outrageous quasi-predictions may well have come to pass, had Covid been even deadlier.
Norman: One of the things that made Covid so difficult to deal with was that it had a long incubation period and symptoms ranged from nothing to death. Contagion depicts something more predictable and something that would cause a lot more panic. In our real world a lot of people balked at masks and vaccines in part because Covid didn’t always cause a lot of harm. I’ve had it twice and in both cases it’s been nothing more than a 24 hour bug. But I know folks with long Covid and it’s a beast.
Tyler: Yeah, I too have had it twice—that I know of—and both times had virtually no symptoms. It’s a bizarre thing, Covid.
Norman: The riots made sense in the world of the movie, but didn’t match up with our experience.
Tyler: Did it stick with you this time around, the movie? I’ve been thinking about it pretty frequently since I rewatched.
Norman: For me the pandemic was marked by a sense of not knowing. Contagion, more than anything else, seems to get that.
What are we dealing with? Is it on surfaces? Is it in the air? How long does it incubate? Can we predict its symptoms? Can you get reinfected? How can we cure it? How can we prevent it? How can we get society on the same page?
A movie like Contagion should make us humble. It’s not a movie I’ll ever return to for entertainment, but seeing it again has definitely made me reassess it’s place in Soderbergh’s work. I’ll probably show it to my kids and grandkids. In a creaky voice, I’ll say, “Kids. This is what it was like to live through a pandemic!”
Tyler: You may have nailed it right at the start. There’s Altman-esque expertise in the filmmaking.
And, hey, maybe your kids and grandkids will have pandemics of their own to remember. Can’t wait for Trump to suck all the money out of prevention programs again!
Norman: This one falls into a weird category of films I love and respect, but maybe never want to see again.
Jeanne Dielmann
Requiem for a Dream
Compliance
Irreversible
Tyler: 12 Years A Slave would be on my list.
Norman: Oh yeah. That a “show my kids one day” movie.
Have you seen Heaven Knows What?
Tyler: I have not. Pray tell?
Norman: The guys who did Uncut Gems.
Similar filmmaking vibes but about homeless heroin addicts. It was brutal beyond belief. Watched it last night. Never want to see it again. Almost pitch-perfect filmmaking.
How do you think you’ll approach Contagion in the future? Did it shoot up in your Soderbergh rankings?
Tyler: Well, I have a twisted curiosity about what it’s like to experience cataclysmic moments in history. I was born twenty years after JFK’s assassination, so over the years I’ve explored media that get at the emotions of that tragedy. Just the same, I slept late on September 11th, missing all the moments that so many saw live on television. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by news footage from that day. I can watch United 93 and get something out of it, however morbidly. I’ll absolutely indulge a History Channel documentary called JFK: 3 Shots That Changed America, as the entire film is archival footage in chronological order, no narrator or talking heads. I’ve got this Civil-War-reenactor’s strange desire to be there as history unfolds. As I noted earlier, Contagion is so on-point about the experience of a pandemic that I could see myself coming back to it.
That said, I also could see myself staying away forever. Unlike November 22nd or 9/11, I lived through the Covid pandemic. I know what it was like to experience it, unfiltered, through and through. Do I want to relive something like that, given my very potent, very real memories? I’m not so sure.
Soderbergh-wise, I think it’s certainly one of his worthier ventures. I’m not gonna love on it like I do Out Of Sight or even the very dark The Knick, but the filmmaker’s terrific economy and human sensibility are on full display. It looks great, too, thanks to, as ever, Soderbergh behind the camera, credited as “Peter Andrews.” The dude is a filmmaking natural, something approaching a savant, obsessive about creating. Contagion is, in the very least, an example of that talent in action.
Norman: One major difference between 9/11 and the pandemic is that living through the pandemic was a prolonged experience. It was dramatic at points (ship coming into NYC, Trump almost dying), but mostly it was agonizing and it was in the middle of an election year, which made it doubly so.
But I think you’ve hit on something. Contagion, for all the acting and craft, feels like an educational film when seen in 2024.
Tyler: You’d be very hard pressed to make a film about Covid that gets the job done the way Contagion does.
Writers' Loom 