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.

I Knew There Was A Reason Children Frightened Me

Eva, a dear friend of mine, leant me a few books awhile back, one of them being “Little Children” by Tom Perrotta. I recalled there had been a film adaptation of the book sometime in the last five years starring Kate Winslet. It was a “sad modern drama,” the sort of movie I rarely go to see unless it’s nominated for a million awards, and often not even then. The book sat on my shelf, staring at me, reminding me that if not for my friend, never in a million years would I have picked it up or even considered reading it. But I trusted Eva, and Kate Winslet, not to steer me wrong.

“Little Children,” is a simple story in plot, but a complex story in terms of the human’s ability to mess up their own life. The novel focuses on three characters: Sarah, a disheveled and unhappy young mother; Todd, a gorgeous stay at home dad; and Ronald, a pedophile recently released from prison. Rest assured, this is not one of those depressing stories like Sapphire’s “Push” where children are abused and raped and then overcome obstacles. I don’t want to trivialize such things when they happen in real life, but too frequently do screenwriters and novelists, who know nothing of such dark experiences, try to capitalize on human tragedy and end up turning it into wretched melodrama. “Little Children” is free of that kind of exaggerated horror. Sarah and Todd meet on a playground, and feel an instant connection, each offering the other something missing in their, if not miserable, then at least mediocre lives. An affair proceeds and falls apart over the course of a summer. Again, so simple, and yet so loaded with emotion and experience.

As I began the novel, all I could think about was how much it made me NOT want to have children. When Sarah forgets her three-year-old daughter’s snack at the playground, she can only sit, hopeless and numb, as the little girl screams her head off. Todd finds himself getting jealous of his own son when his wife refuses to move the boy out of their bed so they might have an intimate night together. What affected me the most on a personal level was when Perrotta discussed Sarah’s decline into failure. As a young, feminist college student, Sarah dreamed of teaching young women, changing their lives. But time passes, she drops out of grad school, and is still working at Starbucks into her late twenties. Maybe it’s a post traumatic stress flashback to my retail days. All I kept thinking was how such a life could have happened to me. I have creative dreams, and I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given. Watching someone who had such spirit as a youth crumble into such a generic suburban drone made me want to cry. I have nothing against people having children, if they want kids. Some people should have them and some people shouldn’t. For those that do, I would love to hear their perspective on such a book as this. I have to wonder, how much of my horror at Sarah’s plight came from my own fears projected onto the text. Or was that the author’s intent? All I know is that the further I read, the more anxious I became.

The power of excellent writing, and this is excellent writing, dear little blogflowers, is to convince readers to feel a certain way, when it goes against every natural instinct. For example, even though Sarah is the other woman, the one ruining lives and wrecking homes, I was still on her side. Perrotta makes Sarah so vulnerable and sad, and Todd’s wife confident and beautiful in contrast, that it made me happy when he cheated on her. Now in real life, my feelings on cheating are very clear. It’s basically a zero tolerance policy. Yet, I hated Todd’s wife. I hated her for her model good looks, and how she was constantly nagging Todd to take the bar exam so she could be a stay at home mom. I wanted Todd to leave her. I felt like she deserved it. Isn’t that odd, the emotional connections we often have to art.

Then there’s that whole little bit about the pedophile. Every time another character belittled or abused Ronald, my gut instinct was to feel bad for him. Then almost in the same breath, Perrotta would make Ronald say or do something so despicable, you’d almost feel disgusted with yourself for feeling that moment of sympathy.

I should have hated this book. It was depressing and offered no happy ending, no silver lining, just pure unadulterated life. You may be as resistant to read this book as I was, but trust me, the writing is two hundred dollar wine. For a few days of reading, it will make you feel more thoughtful and in turn, smarter than everyone else you know.