Since the release of his debut feature and sleeper hit of 1989, SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE, Soderbergh has consistently tread a fine line between mainstream commercial filmmaking and low-to-no budget cinema. In so doing, he has strategically managed to satisfy both studio heads at multi-million dollar entertainment conglomerates and audiences with a voracious appetite for art house cuisine while multi-tasking behind (and often in front of) the camera and shuttling between the roles of writer, producer, editor, cinematographer and director. Soderbergh’s TRAFFIC, an instant classic about the global war on drugs replete with an inventive, color-coded composition and a tension-inducing, handheld, guerrilla filmmaking approach (yet distributed by a major studio) balanced by a truly effective ensemble cast, exhilarated critics and cinephiles alike and may, quite simply, be the filmmaker’s masterpiece as rumors begin to swirl of his imminent retirement from the craft.
CONTAGION, on the other hand, sneakily introduces a war on communication, most particularly, the social network, in which we are currently engaged in both our waking moments and sleeping hours. And just as an exchange of information, if it is potent enough, may be transmitted from one source to another in the social network at an accelerated rate where it succeeds in becoming viral and trends to the point of becoming extensively popular, Soderbergh hypothesizes that a hybridized infection, likewise, can either spread directly or indirectly at an alarming capacity until it absorbs our lives and the fabric of our global society. It’s an ambitious concept and bloggers, tweeters and the mainstream media are caught in the crosshairs. Contagion, the term itself, originates from various meanings and translations for “a touching, contact”, “communication of disease” and “the transmission of disease from one person to another”. With the breakdown of communication comes the collapse of social mores and customs such as talking to and touching others and as the film’s taglines insist, “Don’t talk to anyone” and “Don’t touch anyone”.
The film’s production company, Participant Media, endeavored to create a social action element to engage its audience ‘participants’ in viral preparedness, but I think that Soderbergh’s motives are more elusive and that his attempts are to denigrate the ever-moving procession of social media in all its guises, be they Twitter, Facebook or Google+. So where there’s the strain of mutated animal DNA compounding the disease in Soderbergh’s film, there exists the strain of being contaminated by relentlessly invasive social media portals. In an interesting twist, Soderbergh affiliates the menace of the airborne pathogen with potentially injurious pharmaceutical corporations and the investment community whose ulterior rationale may not be to immunize but to weaponize and whereas an antidote to the virus is concerned, to monetize. The cold gaze of these bureaucrats at the subsequent media being relayed to them via television of the momentous discovery, likely in advance of a vaccine, coupled with the apathetic configuration of their placement around the model boardroom table, speaks ominous notes. Meanwhile, as residents of the world engage in quarantine and disengage from contact with one another, others desperate enough in seeking fast-tracked recovery, sacrifice common human decency by raiding pharmacies around the globe for a homeopathic remedy called Forsythia rumored to be successful in warding off the contagion. This alternative cure is eventually exposed as a placebo peddled by a false prophet, Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), who delicately juggles social relationships with crooked investors in the pharm industry along with his followers on Twitter and online readers in the blogosphere.
One character who ignores the online chatter is Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) who might be likened to Robert Neville, author Richard Matheson’s lone survivor of a vampiric pandemic in his classic horror novel, “I Am Legend” which (at the time of this review) has not only been adapted to film on four separate occasions, but was the inspiration for George Romero’s 1968 seminal zombie film, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.
The Legend of the Last Omega Man on Earth
Although not necessarily an ‘Omega Man’ warding off vampiric infestations, Emhoff is surrounded with societal unrest and disorder and in a way, is pardoned from the plague because he doesn’t want to socialize and would much rather stay behind closed doors and keep to himself. As he strives for privacy, notice how his daughter, Jory (Anna Jacoby-Heron), continues to use her cell phone to text SMS messages with her boyfriend, Andrew (Brian J. O’Donnell) and in one instance, tempts fate and risks sharing the plague by kissing after making dual snow angels in the single-digit cold Minnesota weather. On multiple occasions, Mitch tries to annul the kids’ relationship, once going so far as to fix Andrew in the sights of the double-barrel of a shotgun. Even more significant is how the patriarchal Emhoff is seemingly immune to the virus which gripped his wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), supposedly, the second carrier of the virus and their young son, Clark (Griffin Kane). For inexplicable reasons, Mitch has built an immunity to the virus just as Matheson’s hero, Robert Neville, convinces himself of his insusceptibility to the global plague because he was bitten by an infected bat (bearing a thematic similarity with the climax of CONTAGION) as opposed to another diseased human being and survives his daily life by locking himself in and riding out the storm of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles in the prison of his own home.
Soderbergh may be urging us all to embrace privacy. As demonstrated in his 2002 re-boot of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi epic, SOLARIS, at its core, is about one man alone on an island of his own thoughts. Scientists aboard the space station hovering over the oceanic planet of Solaris would much rather mingle with their respective ‘guests’ (loved ones who they each left behind in their past on planet Earth who are reproduced by the sentient powers of Solaris’ waves) than each other. As Mitch fondly looks at pictures taken on his dead wife’s digital camera, he whimpers with remorse for her and, just as the suicidal/dead wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), had been resurrected by the power of her living husband (Donatas Banionis) Kris’ thoughts being beamed to Solaris creating a reproduction of her presence on the space station, Mrs. Emhoff is ‘resurrected’ in non-linear fashion on Day One in Macau just long enough for us to see how Soderbergh’s virus was initiated. Arriving at the film’s climax, the reveal of the virus’ origin is exposed as likely a propagandist element warning corporations of their invasion of the natural world and the consequences that follow - - for it is Emhoff’s mining company responsible for disturbing a jungle, which unsettles a banana tree safe housing a nest of bats, one of which is a carrier of the disease who jettisons its half-chewed morsel of banana into a horde of hogs awaiting slaughter - - a cinematic domino effect that leaves a disrupted global discourse in its wake amidst a Solarian-like sea of Purell hand sanitizing lotion.
