Feedback Friday: Our First Pandemic Double Feature (Patreon)

In an effort to streamline the podcast and encourage a little more conversation around some of the feedback letters we receive, we're going to start putting some of them here and responding to them individually. This week, listener Patrick flashes back nearly two years ago to our pandemic-themed episode on Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. He writes:

I only just listened to your Panic in the Streets / Contagion pairing, partly because I didn’t have access until recently, and partly out of straight-up anxiety. I’m glad I finally got there because it was very good to hear your thoughtful commentary on the films and on the world, and I especially appreciate how open and vulnerable you were willing to be with the audience and each other about your hopes and fears.

Of course things have changed since that recording almost two years ago. While I would never ask you to rewatch these movies, I am very interested in your thoughts on them now that we are so deep into the covid pandemic. A discussion of characters fighting in the streets for access to a vaccine, for example, was particularly fascinating given all our real-world fighting in the streets not to have a vaccine. On the other hand, you may not want to revisit the topic, and I certainly wouldn’t blame you for that.

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Scott says:

Oh how naive we were! Like many others at the time, I think we shared the expectation that COVID-19 would pass over us like a wave and we’d be back to normal a few weeks later—which, actually, is not something Contagion would suggest at all. Contagion leads us to believe that a pandemic ends with the introduction of a vaccine, which hasn’t been the case with this real-life pandemic of ours, but it has returned us to a state of semi-normalcy. The difference between the virus in Soderbergh’s film and the coronavirus is that the virus’ effects in Contagion are much more immediate and deadly, which drastically alters society’s response to a vaccine. The conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was roundly mocked for his piece asking what would happen if Covid were 10 times deadlier, but he reasonably concluded that we would treat it differently, and Soderbergh’s film deals with just such a drastic scenario. As much as I’m aghast over people refusing a vaccine to protect themselves from a virus that’s killed over 800,000 Americans, we’d see far fewer “I did my own research” types if many times more faced a certain and violent death.

As Megan Amram wrote on Twitter last March, “Corona is a black light and America is a cum-stained hotel room.” Were Soderbergh to make another Contagion about this pandemic—and, now that I think of it, he definitely should—he’d be confronting an infectious disease that not only continues to take lives and threaten others indefinitely, but continues to expose weaknesses in our politics, our civic discourse, and our ability to act in our neighbor’s best interest, not just our own. When I think back about specific details in Contagion, two things stand out: One is that the virus in the film can be passed on surfaces like subway railings, which hasn’t been our experience with Covid, despite those early days of obsessive sanitizing. The other is that final scene where Matt Damon’s kid goes to “prom” at home with the boy that she likes. In order to enter, he needs to flash a wristband indicating that he’s been vaccinated. The world may have had a deadlier disease in Contagion than we did, but damn am I jealous of that vaccine passport.