“The urban environment is essentially a built environment, a built environment that not only expresses human behaviour and experiences but also shapes and influences this behaviour and experience.” (Proshansky, 1978, p. 156).
Everything is connected, even if we don’t always catch it at first glance. People, places, power, and the way we all interact within it. The urban center is a phenomenon of connectivity and interlinked experiences, of split-second passing by and the single sliver of collision between yourself and another.
There are two ways to approach this idealism of connectivity, either the more lighthearted and optimistic way of the human condition, of the universal experience you share with a stranger you may never see again, the infinite happenstance of brushing in memory–“all goes onward and outward” (Whitman, 2018, p.36)–or within the social disorder and pathogenic transmission seen in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion.
Let us take the same conditions that make everyday social life possible: mobility, proximity, interconnection and interdependence. In the film, the very thing that binds people together in urban contexts is what eventually becomes the vector of exposure. Such casual gestures of urban life, like touching a railing, exchanging money at the grocery store, and sitting beside someone on the bus, all now become potential points of transmission.
This hyperlink narrative reflects the very sinister side of this double-edged blade. Characters who will never meet are nevertheless bound by the same pathogen, doomed to the same fate as a parallel fraying thread. A chef in Hong Kong, a woman on a bus in Guandong, a fashion designer in London, a man on a flight to Tokyo. These characters are not linked directly via human connectivity, but rather the inanimate as a character in itself.
Soderbergh uses the hyperlink narrative to follow threads of contact through high-traffic touch points, camera movement following hands and fingers and items as they are interacted with. A gambling chip, a credit card–a more explicit nod towards the permeating nature of capitalism and global economics leeching into every system (Baker, 2013).
This narrative approach visually and structurally unfurls the information, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that recontextualize themselves to the viewer as it develops. The bat is displaced by a mining company that Beth worked for, the diseased pigs are sold to a chef in Macau, who then passes that contamination and virus back to Beth. The displacement of the bat is not an incidental cause but a symptom of a larger pattern in which urban and industrial development reshape ecological boundaries to serve human agendas.
In a final thought inspired by the analysis of Proshansky: the places we construct in pursuit of economic gain transform not only landscapes, but the identities and vulnerabilities of the people who inhabit them.
Baker, A. (2013). Global Cinema and Contagion. Films Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Spring 2013). pp. 5-14. University of California Press.
Proshansky, H. M. (1978). The City and Self-Identity. Environment and Behaviour, 10(2), 147-169. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916578102002
Whitman, W. (1855) Leaves of Grass [2018]. Song of Myself. pp. 30-93. Canterbury Press.
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