‘Truth is stranger than fiction’, Mark Twain had quoted famously many years ago. Imagine how real, palpable his widely used quote seems today in the throes of a developing global pandemic, the novel Corona virus which the 2011 Hollywood thriller ‘Contagion’ had unwittingly portrayed as the fictional virus ‘MEV-1’.

The Popularity of the film

Written by American screenwriter, producer and director Scott Z. Burns and directed by the acclaimed, prolific filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, the movie ‘Contagion’, with a huge star-cast including Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Matt Damon and Marion Cotillard, which premiered at the 68^th Venice International Film Festival, had been a box-office hit that year and eventually garnered the highest debut gross of a Soderbergh film, totalling $60.8 internationally.

Fast forward 2020, in the wake of the pandemic, as Netflix and Amazon have usurped our home quarantined days, ‘Contagion’ is again back with a bang in online streaming, finding a place in the iTunes top rental charts, as the buzzword (read ‘dialogue’) “Don’t touch anyone, stay away from other people” reflects weirdly in our daily lives! 

The Deadly Virus

Many of us who have seen the film earlier in theatres or recently in Amazon Prime has instantly related the central theme of the film, the rapid spread of the deadly virus in human species as the premonition of a horrid reality we are living today. 

The question is: as we continue living this script of dystopian horror, losing endless lives globally since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, can we think of this connection as purely coincidental?  

A close look at the film’s pre-release poster (September 2011) reveals the punchline: “Nothing Spreads Like Fear.” And yes, fear it is, the devilish nightmare of getting infected at the slightest hint of human contact outside our home, the sickening anxiety of dying a lonely, excruciating death in the hospital, severed from our family, our loved ones, which the film exploited through its storyline. Not to forget the controversy of a biological warfare conspiracy, the chaos ensued by the crowd psychology and the disruption of social order, all of which comes to haunt us now, as we live reels of the film in our everyday lives. 

What the writer says

But what is the scriptwriter, the fertile brain behind the movie ‘Contagion’ thinking now about its weird resemblance to the reality of COVID-19? Very recently, the writer of the film Scott Z. Burns stated in CNN news that he could have never anticipated the government’s response to this very real pandemic and calls it a ‘Federal blunder’. 

Apparently shocked by the grim reality of the whole scenario, he opens up about his interaction with the CDC years ago, while doing the research of the film, in an interview with Anderson Cooper: “The richest country in the world would have a three-months headstart to this, but now finds itself as the sickest country in the world.” 

In another interview with Vulture, Burns stated his shock more profoundly regarding the unpreparedness of the United States when the pandemic hit. “I would have never thought in writing the screenplay for Contagion that one of the variables would be a government that doesn’t believe in science and then misinforms the population.” He expressed. 

All said and done, the human penchant for panic in the face of the unknown is essentially true, which the film emphasized on, and which our real-life drama is reminding us strongly, every day. 

All said and done, the human penchant for panic in the face of the unknown is essentially true, which the film emphasized on, and which our real-life drama is reminding us strongly, every day. 

References:

Wikipedia

CNN Entertainment 

Vulture.com

JustWatch.com