Wash Your Hands After Reading

A lot of people have been asking me about the movie “Contagion,” which came out in theatres a couple weeks ago and directed by Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies & Videotape, Traffic, Ocean‘s 11-13). It seems weird to say I enjoyed it, but I did, though it certainly lacked a strong story arch of typical Hollywood films. It’s more of a factual timeline: what procedure would we follow if this sort of global health crisis actually happened. Who are the important players. How bad could this situation actually get? The answer seems to be pretty damn bad. The good news, you get to see Gwenyth Paltrow cheat on Matt Damon and then die. The bad news is, after watching it you will probably think you are going to die. I know I did!

The movie starts with a woman (Paltrow) at the airport in Chicago, talking on the phone to the man she just cheated on her husband with. She looks tired. If you walked into the theater without reading the title or knowing anything about the film, you’d think this was some sort of relationship drama or thrilling crime movie where a husband goes insane and kills his cheating wife. This movie is not that exciting… in a typical sense. Again, you’re fascinated to see how bad things will get before they turn it around, and the answer again is quite bad. But the film has a very slow pace and focuses more on presenting a ton of factual evidence than titillating us with gruesome death scenes.

In fact, they kind of gloss over the five billion people dying part. We see mass graves, lines of carefully packaged bodies (they mention they’ve run out of body bags so have to make due with taped trash bags) and empty streets with garbage piled up. We see many people die, but only one main character. This is Kate Winslet, who plays a young CDC worker in charge of organizing disease control in one city. As she tries to make the local government officials see just how terrible the situation becomes, she eventually succumbs to the illness herself, dying in one of the very makeshift hospital facilities she helped to set up.

The mystery of how the disease started and spread definitely added to the “excitement,” almost like it was a CSI episode, showing close ups on different characters as they encountered Paltrow’s character and in turn were infected. The waiter who picked up her martini glass. The Japanese business man whose dice she blew on in a casino. The British model-type who picked up Paltrow’s phone when she forgot it on the bar counter. It both fascinated and terrified me, even if you ignore everyone around you, you can’t ignore the germs they’re shoving in your face.

I think that’s what is most compelling of all. Not the film itself but my reaction to it. It has in the time since made me so conscious of how often I touch my face. There’s actually a line in the movie, we touch our faces something like two thousand times a day. That seems insane. But then you add on to that number every time you hold your phone up to your face, after you set it down on a table, or in a pocket, or dropped it on the ground. Not to mention if you eat something and use silverware, which unless you just washed it before eating has either been sitting in a tray or worse for hours before you shoved it in your mouth. It all takes me back to my History of Sickness and Disease course back at U of M. Remember the days when we didn’t know about hand washing? No wonder we all died from the flu. And movies like Contagion seem to suggest that sure, our science and our knowledge of hygiene has improved, but as humans, we’re still disgustingly filthy creatures. How many times have you been in the bathroom at a public place and watched someone half ass wash their hands after using the facilities? Enough to make a movie like Contagion seem chillingly possible.