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Its been hovering around the top ten of the iTunes rental chart for weeks (its currently at No.
13), and its shot up theVOD cable rankings.
BuzzFeedreportedthat in December, before the COVID-19 outbreak,Contagionwas the 270th most-watched Warner Bros film.
So far this year, its the second-most-watched.
What was I doing, watching this pandemic movie while coronavirus headlines streamed across my phone?
Millions and millions of people die inContagion.
Why on earth did I want to watch it?
Pandemic fiction is usually a story of helplessness.
The virus is spreading, its invisible, and all the usual safeguards have failed.
Even when a deadly virus isnt sweeping the globe, safeguards are never perfect.
But in pandemic stories the threat becomes more immediate, universal, and horrible.
Viruses are not supervillains with origin stories to explain their villainy, and theyre not serial killers with fetishes.
Theres no theory of mind to wrestle with.
So pandemic fiction is about how people behave in response to acute, sudden-onset helplessness.
Its a model for how we could respond.
Contagion, which divvies the story up among several main characters, has a handful of helplessness-management options.
Emhoff discovers hes immune, but locks his daughter in the house for months to protect her from infection.
There are lots of characters who die, including some of the most competent first responders.
Its a frightening movie!
But I also started clinging to all the things aboutContagionthat were counterintuitively soothing chiefly, noteveryonedies.
But then, after the horror kicks in, the mechanism for fixing it also swiftly clicks into action.
The fictional version lets us feel some small piece of what the real version could feel like.
Yes, characters inContagionfeel helpless, and yes, some of them get sick and die.
But the story doesnt end with death.
It ends with the discovery of a vaccine, and the world slowly putting itself back together.
Its gonna be okay.
But pandemic stories with more miserable, fully dystopian premises can also be soothing.
Comfort comes from the expectation that the fiction will have a shape, some kind of resolution.
The virus comes, society collapses, most of the human population dies.
But still,still, some people survive and life goes on.
Many zombie stories are also pandemic stories.
In the case of zombie stories, though, the sense of helplessness usually gets diverted into violence.
you’ve got the option to shoot a zombie in the head.
There are even more models of pandemic stories, too.
In many of them, the sickness becomes a metaphor for other things.
In CamussThe Plague,its the absurdity of all life; in Ling MasSeverance,its consumerism and capitalism.
Its the same terror, but its set inside an enclosed narrative frame.
Their stories are not about the plague, mostly.
Theyre love stories and tragedies and political commentaries and jokes.
This is why I watchedContagion, and I suspect why lots of other people did too.
Those are the things that make all stories even terrifying pandemic stories feel comforting.
