I recently watched Contagion and I thought it was a great depiction of how diseases and misinformation can spread and cause a lot of problems in modern societies like ours.
Contagion’s story is very interesting to me because it’s very similar to what happened in 2020 with COVID 19 roughly 9 years after the movie came out. Both pandemics started in China as the result of unsanitary conditions in a market where raw meat was being sold, and both diseases were linked to bats. Some other aspects of the movie differ from what happened in our universe, but are still kind of similar. We didn’t have one guy with a computer pretending to be a journalist and claiming that he had a plant that could cure COVID.
We had multiple right wing influencers pretending to be journalists and claiming that several different chemicals and plants (including horse dewormer) could cure COVID. And US President Donald Trump was (Gods and Spirits help us all) one of them. We also had way too many idiots who completely forgot that masks, social distancing, and staying home while sick are just good ways to not get sick because of those charlatans who kept trying to sell their snake oil.
Some Conservative idiots in Canada straight up tried to invade Ottawa to bully our government into letting them refuse to get vaccinated because they were afraid of getting autism or something stupid like that. (Vaccines don’t cause autism! Autism causes vaccines!) Obviously it didn’t work, because they were too annoying for the people of Ottawa and got kicked out, but they did try to use the fact that they were kicked out as an opportunity to pretend to be a persecuted minority that was being bullied by the government (and they say WE’RE the overly sensitive ones!?) until Trump came back and reminded the rest of Canada of why we shouldn’t have those kinds of people leading the country.
We had stories of people panicking and buying toilet paper in bulk in our universe when the Pandemic started in 2020, and the Contagion universe had a lot of people panic buying the fake MEV cure plant that the conspiracy theorist that I briefly mentioned earlier was talking about.
Come to think of it, I don’t think any of the conspiracy theorists in our world ever faced consequences for their actions like the conspiracy theorist in that movie. I think the worst things that happened to some of them were bans from Twitter that got reverted when Elon Musk started his Cyberpunk Antagonist Arc and became the site’s boss. Basically, I wish we could punish people for lying about things that they don’t understand. Bigots who spread hateful rhetoric about non-white and LGBTQ+ people should be sent to mental institutions until they can learn to be functioning members of society. People who lie about the effects of vaccines (and their followers) should be vaccinated. Flat Earthers and climate change deniers should be sent to Mars. And people who use Generative AI to do everything for them until they devolve into Cyberpsychosis ridden slaves to their machine gods should be pulled away from their eldritch contraptions and forced to watch the Data Centres that power their mechanical overlords be picked apart for Graphics Cards that would be better suited for use in gaming PCs that can run video games with extremely advanced graphics settings, as opposed to facilitating the creation of man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.
Seriously though, that scene where the conspiracy theorist destroyed a scientist who was trying to call out his medical misinformation by throwing some unrelated accusations at him was probably the most painfully accurate depiction of how it feels to be dealing with fascists and conspiracy theorists. You can’t reason with them or pretend they’re operating by the same standards as you if they’re ignoring your well established reasons for wanting the world to be a better place and throwing away their standards (and humanity) to crush your soul with death threats, mockery of your fallen comrades, and outright celebration of genocidal purges and world destroying catastrophes.
I would comment on the arc that that one girl has where she misses her boyfriend and basically has to be in a long distance relationship with him because of pandemic induced social distancing rules, but I was single and happy to not be in school during that Pandemic (because I was a 15 year old trans girl who thought she was a boy at the time and hated homework), so any commentary that I could make about it would be pretty mediocre. (Ok, but seriously though, I do kinda understand that part about not wanting a long distance relationship. Having a (preferably trans) girlfriend near me would be awesome! Especially if she happens to be a nerd like me!)
In conclusion, I see Contagion as an incredibly accurate prediction of the chaos that happened in 2020 that grossly underestimated the number of conspiracy theorists who would be willing to lie about scientific consensus regarding a pandemic that was killing or hurting millions of people around the globe.
PS: Sorry if this wasn’t particularly well structured. I didn’t have a lot of time to polish things so I kinda just wrote down what came to my mind when thinking about Contagion’s similarities to the Pandemic of 2020.
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