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Having maxed out my fawning over Amazon Prime, at least for the moment, I’m electing to head back now to Netflix to catch a flick or two before they leave streaming. First in line in this endeavor was the 2011 film Contagion. For what it is worth, it wasn’t one of the featured selections included in my warning email.

Contagion is another one of those films with seemingly everybody in it. That right there was a bit of a red flag when it first came out. I’ve also never been drawn to these disease/fear films all that much. The combination means that, for me, the movie came and went with little notice.

Then sometime about a year ago, a video showed up on YouTube with some selective snippets from the movie that seemed to predict what happened through 2020. That was enough for me to add it to my “to watch” queue, but not enough for me to actually watch it. For the latter, Netflix had to set a date for its removal (September 30th, if you’re playing along at home).

Particularly when framed the right way, the predictions within this movie can seem pretty scary. How could they have known what was coming? The subject matter (of course) caused a huge surge in interest during 2020 and most of Contagion‘s user reviews that I’ve read are from that context, not the original run. The more common reaction is how IMPORTANT the movie is in the context of what was “going on.”

I’m going to have to argue that is is neither prescient nor particularly important.

The reason is the same in both cases. What the film depicts is taken from the playbooks of the public health establishment; both predicting what is possible in terms of a modern pandemic and the plans in place (or, in some cases, merely advocated for) to deal with it. It caught many of us by surprise, because the actual performance of governments in 2020 seemed haphazard and reactionary. In fact, the playbooks were all written in 2011 and even well before and national and international health organizations did their best to do what they knew they should be doing.

Thus 2020 might be better seen as life imitating art, especially if “art” can include the technical papers and simulation war games used to anticipate what might happen when a dangerous virus spreads worldwide. I assert that, without a doubt, our lives these past few years have imitated that prior art.

How often did it happen, when reality deviated from anticipation and planning, that reality got bent to match the expectation? Mapping events in the film to the reality shows us some potential culprits. For example, Jude Law advocates for a natural remedy “forsythia,” blaming “big pharma” for suppressing cheap and readily-available cures in favor of solutions that will make them rich off of their intellectual property rights. Why does this align so perfectly with the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin advocacy that actually played out in 2020? Are the planners at WHO so attuned to human nature? Or was the case that they were standing watch for “forsythia” and had their playbook ready to deal with it when it showed its conspiracy-minded head?

In 2020, screenwriter Scott Burns said in an interview that he blamed “people*” who failed to fund “the science” in the decade preceding a pandemic outbreak. This is the message from the scientific community (they are always and everywhere underfunded) and was surely something they filmmakers heard during Contagion‘s creation. I also find it interesting that the film touches on the idea that the release of the virus might have been politically motivated but then, in the end, demonstrates that it arose naturally**. Once again, I get some insight into the content of the playbook. A virus with “novel” characteristics might, at first glance, appear to be genetically engineered but sober study will reveal a natural mechanism. While that may be true more often than not, might the assumption also lead to an intense refusal to accept evidence of illicit genetic experimentation even as such evidence piles up? For myself, I am pretty confident in the “lab origin” theory of the corona virus. I remain concerned, as well, that there are several clear political motivations for releasing corona right when and where it was. Much evidence does point to accidental release but that isn’t the only possible explanation, now is it?

I struggled when thinking about how I would “rate” this film in the traditional 1-to-5 stars format. Without the appearance of the ‘rona, it might have well been a two. It’s a little disjoint, a lot preachy, and probably intended to be a “message” as much as it is “entertainment.” Post-COVID, one can’t help but view it very differently.

*The interview didn’t go into details but I take “people” clearly to mean “all those ignorant and short-sighted rubes who lack the enlightened understanding of our society and its needs, as I do.” He means the politicians who voted to not raise taxes and not increase funding and the “deplorables” who elected such mean-spirited politicians in the first place. It’s a nasty thing to say about your own customers, but I think the mindset that would so accuse also assumes that they don’t need these “others” – as customers, as neighbors, and fellow citizens. That’s also a lot of reading between the lines for one word, so maybe he meant nothing like this.

**Spoiler Alert: I was a little amused by the ending, which I’ll reveal right here. Patient Zero is revealed to be the slutty Beth Emhoff (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), who wantonly spread the disease through partying and sexual congress, killing tens of millions. It is also revealed that the company for whom she works is destroying precious habitat, leading to the cross infection of a bat virus to pigs and then to people. Does somebody really hate women in corporate positions? Or are we suggesting that it is capitalism that is the root of Beth’s infidelity?