Lockdowns in cities, shortages in supermarkets, the struggle between countries to achieve a vaccine, confusion in the official numbers of deaths and infections, social distancing, miracle cures, the absence of sanitary material… Does that ring a bell? Years before the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic, two films, Contagion and Outbreak, already drew in fiction this scenario that seemed pure entertainment to us. His successes have caused thousands of people to resort to revisiting these stories in search of answers or relief to face the reality that we never imagined. But there are still forecasts on the horizon whose verification is pending for the coming months. Will they hit the target again?
The 90s were prolific in the genre that is popularly called ‘disaster cinema’. Against a backdrop of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and dangerous wildlife, Hollywood’s first major production about a global viral pandemic emerged, Outbreak, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Dustin Hoffman and René Russo. Its premiere in March 1995 in the US placed it as number 1 at the box office, and the success would later spread in Europe. In 2011, two years after the H1N1 flu epidemic, which produced the first global panic outbreak due to a novel virus of animal origin -mass storage of vaccines included-, it was released in theaters, in a more discreet way despite its stellar cast and direction, Contagion.
Steven Soderbergh pulled the thread of the scenario drawn by the H1N1 pathogen and the first SARS, which originated in 2003 and which, despite its resemblance to our sadly famous coronavirus, was confined to space in a few months, without leading to massive international spread. Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lawrence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet and Jude Law put a face to the polyhedron that makes up a pandemic: the doctor, the manager, the journalist, the citizen and even the WHO.
, in addition to everything we already know, has caused both films to skyrocket on the lists of the most sought after and most viewed titles for months. Burst returns 240,000 entries in Google searches; Contagion, 730,000. These figures increase by 20% if we write their original titles in English. HBO is the platform that has taken the cat to water, the first to put both films in our country in its catalog, and place them among the most viewed titles. Do we like to wallow in our misfortune? Does the human being harbor a masochistic essence?
“Cinema has the advantage of helping us experience the pandemic indirectly, from other perspectives, from other behaviors and reactions. In this way, it helps us mentally think about other possible courses of action, since they are presenting us with different scenarios, that is, they help us to analyze the different decisions that can be made in each situation”, explains Tomás Domingo Moratalla, professor of Moral Philosophy at UNED, in an article that will be published this month in the magazine Bioética Complutense and that he advances exclusively for the Economist.
When we are forced to experience extraordinary situations, it is often difficult for us to accept that they are real, that they are really happening. Resorting to reviewing movies that stage these same situations helps us to assimilate and accept that they are happening
The professor, who has analyzed in previous articles the contributions of films on viruses and their real impact on social and ethical issues, defends that the cinema works as a laboratory to test these types of extraordinary situations: “Perhaps we have never been in critical situations, of catastrophes, but putting ourselves in that situation can be a good learning experience and lead us to think: what would happen if, what would I do in that situation, what should be done in that case…”
In short, there is hope for those who, like the person signing these lines, have rushed in recent months to revisit Contagion and Outbreak. This is not an exercise in psychological self-harm. On the contrary, resorting to these stories works as a tool to search for answers in an uncertain and completely unknown context. “When we are forced to experience extraordinary situations, it is often difficult for us to accept that they are real, that they are really happening. Resorting to watching movies that stage these same situations helps us to assimilate and accept that they are happening”, illustrates the health psychologist Cristina Prieto , co-director of the Psicax psychology center.
Kate Winslet, epidemiologist on ‘Contagion’.
Facing the anguish that these fictional scenes already generate in the viewer can be, paradoxically, therapeutic. Prieto emphasizes its usefulness to “elaborate the lived situation”, in the same way that experiential techniques are used to overcome traumas such as accidents. “It serves as a model for us to adopt the appropriate behaviors and thus release anxiety,” he concludes.
This instrumental character as a test scenario, the “laboratory” of reality to which Professor Domingo Moratalla refers, is reinforced by verifying the forceful successes and similarities in the scenarios imagined by the scriptwriters of Contagion and Outbreak with respect to the covid pandemic. -19, the disease that causes the current coronavirus. Next, we review a list with the forecasts fulfilled since 1995 and 2011, and those that are yet to be seen…
1. Animal origin…with human cause
Both Petersen’s and Soderbergh’s films take unknown zoonotic viruses as their starting point. That is, of animal origin. In the case of Outburst, the host of the virus was a small monkey of African origin, which carried the motaba virus, similar to Ebola but with a 100% lethality. In Contagion, the virus comes from a bat that ends up mating with a pig. From there, it jumps to humans in the process of cooking the animal at a restaurant in Hong Kong. It will be named MEV-1.
In both films, however, people are directly targeted as the cause of this situation, with obvious environmental criticism. In Outbreak, the monkey from the African jungle is captured and transferred to the black market for wild animals in the US, where the chain of infections begins. In Contagion, the bat carrying the pathogen moves to communities inhabited by people in search of survival resources because multinational companies destroy their natural habitat to take advantage of natural resources for their benefit. In this approach, the jump to the farm pig for human consumption occurs.
Pangolin, one of the animals suspected of carrying the coronavirus. Image: Getty.
The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is related to the cross between a bat and another wild animal, such as , which is sold for consumption in an unregulated market for wild animals in the Chinese province of Wuhan, population 11 million. .
2. Lockdown to slow the spread
Both our coronavirus and those devised in these fictional films are respiratory transmission. The measures that are taken to stop its expansion are identical to those that we have known in all the countries of the world in recent weeks: confinement, closure with physical barriers in cities and isolation of the sick. , focus of the epidemic. , which will not end until June 21.
3. Contagion of toilets due to failures in prevention
Spain leads the numbers of health personnel affected by covid-19 in the world. In Outbreak, an error in the use of PPE (personal protective equipment) ends with Kevin Spacey’s character infected by the virus, in the same way that happened to .
Cuba Gooding Jr., Dustin Hoffman and Kevin Spacey, in ‘Outbreak’.
It was the first Spanish Ebola infection outside of Africa in 2014, after having cared for two sick and repatriated religious from this continent.
4. Shortages and panic in the population
In Spain, as in other countries around the world, citizens had to face the harrowing episode of those who advanced the films. The outstanding one as the most demanded product in the shops was the main cause of panic in our country. Contagion was wrong, however, in imagining a complete shortage, which would give rise to basic rationing carried out from the military. Thanks to the work of carriers and food producers, this situation has not been transferred to the real pandemic.
5. Nationalist struggle for resources
Contagion hits the target again with another of the great issues of the covid-19 health emergency: to manage the disease. With a virus skipping between continents, countries with the least have been hit the hardest. Spain blamed a , protective equipment for staff and to deal with the coronavirus. The lack of resources is behind one of the highest rates of infections and deaths in the world. The film starring Matt Damon points in that direction with the lack of body bags that are piling up in graves, and that Canada is reluctant to sell to the US given a forecast for its own population.
6. Doctor Cheever, ‘afro’ version of Fernando Simón
In an African-American version, it is easy to glimpse characteristics displayed by , in Dr. Cheever played by Lawrence Fishburne in Contagion, as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both with a medical profile, they are calm and cautious in their appearances, always relying on scientific evidence.
In the center, Lawrence Fishburne, who plays Dr. Cheever in ‘Contagion’.
His recommendations to avoid contagion are traced: social distancing, and attention not to touch your face. The double facet of Dr. Cheever, health and politics, forced by the management position he holds and the contradictions that this entails, projects that he manages the pandemic in Spain.
7. Economic and social impact of confinement
Soderbergh’s film walks through meetings in which the health profiles and managers collide. , the withdrawal of cash in banks, and others at a social level such as the problem of child care due to the closure of schools are raised in the face of decisions that only respond to health criteria.
caused by the coronavirus, which has consisted of four stages in the case…
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