Latest / The Kulturecast / Required Viewing 05: Contagion

Transcript

Required Viewing 05: Contagion · The Kulturecast

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: We're in way medium.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: It's quite possible you're highly contagious.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Don't talk to anyone.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Don't touch anyone.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: We're working very hard to find out where this virus
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: came from.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: It's in schools and it's in the mall. Have you
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: found any treatment at all? No.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: It's going to spread.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: It gets on airplanes. It travels at 500 miles an hour.
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: We're all guinea pigs.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: Contagion, rated PG-13, in theaters and IMAX September 9th.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Required Viewing, a sub-feed RSS
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: podcast on the CultureCast feed. I am your host, Chris
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Tashew of the CultureCast, and I am joined by my
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: good friend all the way from Texas Tech, where he
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: is the professor of media and communications. He wrote a
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: book in 2008, or is it six, about blogs that
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: just had Jon Stewart's mind spinning on The Daily Show
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: when he was on there. Your friend and mine, the professor, Dr.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: David Perlmutter.
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: Hello, Chris.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: You're not going to say what a great day to
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: be talking about the most upbeat film known to man.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: On this episode of Required Viewing, we are taking a
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: look at Steven Soderbergh's 2011.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: That's right. I said it.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: 2011 medical thriller called Contagion. So the film is directed
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: by Steven Soderbergh on a script.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: By Scott Z.
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: Burns.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: It stars a lot of well-known actors. Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon,
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lawrence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston, to name
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: a few. The film is about a fictional outbreak of
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: of a virus that in 2011 probably seemed far-fetched to
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: people to lay people that watched it though if you
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: read what the experts said about it at the time
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: and subsequently it is closer in reality than a lot
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: of films that had been done or have been done
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: since but the film is about a respiratory outbreak that
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: starts in china that spreads to the united states that
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: kills people does that sound like real life does that
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: sound familiar because it is unfortunately On this episode of
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Required Viewing, we are going to be talking about somewhat
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: sensitive subject material. So if you are triggered at all
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: by that, just a fair warning. We are not going
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: to belabor the point about COVID, however, because the comparisons
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: to COVID are obvious. It's not like we're having to
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: do the heavy lifting with that. Plenty of other people
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: on the Internet since 2020 have done that as well.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: But we will be talking about why this film is
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: required viewing from a 360 degree lens. So, Dr. Perlmutter,
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: I am so infinitely curious because you are you are
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: normally such an upbeat fella. And I can't imagine what
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: would have been going through your mind. I'm all I'm
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: just I'm obviously putting on an act here. I want
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: to know why. Oh, why did we spend an hour and,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: you know, 45 minutes watching Contagion?
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: This film, when it first came out, did not particularly
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: interest me. I mean, there's a million films to watch
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: and books to read, and I just have to make
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: some decisions. And part of the block was that, yeah,
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: I had read this book before. I had played this
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: game before. I'd watched this TV movie before. I'd watched
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: this cinema theater movie before. Like the plot of a
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: virus comes and kills a lot of people. And you
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: follow the medical authorities and the government, but you also
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: follow people, individuals who are caught up in it. It
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: is a very, very familiar folktale that's in our culture.
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: And I can go back to stories from the 1930s
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: that have this plot. There's a very famous novel, Earth Abides,
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: about a spread of a virus and there's only some
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: people left. So I thought like, yeah, you know, I
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: don't need to see another movie on this. Then about
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: a year passed and somebody I really respected, this is
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: before I knew you, I would always follow your advice,
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: but somebody I respected before you said, yeah, you really
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: should watch this.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: And I did.
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: And I came away with some impressions that I felt
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: really applied to what we're talking about when we say
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: 360 and required viewing. First is when you're dealing with
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: a topic that even before the events that later impacted
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: this film and made this film have a second life, literally,
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: on streaming because of what happened later years, almost within
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: a decade of this movie, you always have a question, right?
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: You're making a movie or you're appreciating a movie and
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: you have, and I was noticing when I was rewatching
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: this movie that it's under the category drama, medical thriller.
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: And I was thinking how unlike most dramas and medical
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: thrillers this is, because there's a certain distance here. This
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: is a very Coen Brothers adjacent type of movie where
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: you see things happen. People die. Children die. Disaster strikes
• 5:59
  Speaker 3: the human race. Terrible, terrible things are happening to characters
• 6:04
  Speaker 3: that you come to like and empathize with. But the
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: camera is not further away. It's not like this film
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: is shot with a 600 lens from wildlife or something
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: in a valley. But there is this distance scene. semi-documentary form.
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: And that's a really interesting choice by Steven Soderbergh. And
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: that's something to talk about. Like, I think it works
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: to have that, to not have melodrama, to not emphasize
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: the drama with like, Sundering music and like people bursting
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: into the tears. Because the other thing is his direction
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: of the acting is he's a lot of the actors.
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: They're not reacting in a normal drama or a medical thriller.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: They would.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: There's not a lot of like bursting into tears and
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: ranting and raving and like real emotions here. And those
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: are all fascinating as a choice. with this topic. And
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: then the second part is it's often been remarked that
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: if you knew nothing about the 1930s and didn't know
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: that there was a Great Depression going on, it would
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: be hard to tell that there was a Great Depression
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: going on in, say, American society just by American movies.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: That a lot of American movies from the 1930s were
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: super focused on entertainment. They might be gangster films, they
• 7:24
  Speaker 3: might be all dancing, all singing musicals and people jumping
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: in and out of water in synchronized swimming. I mean,
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: There was a lot of emphasis on entertainment because Hollywood felt,
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: and I think that was a very good, astute observation,
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: people didn't want to see their misery reflected on the screen.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: They already knew they were unhappy and miserable, and we're
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: going to pay a ticket to go see somebody else,
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: even a great actress, being unhappy and miserable because of
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: the Great Depression. So there was something to talk about
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: in this film Because we, to some extent, this has
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: been classified as a COVID movie, but it didn't happen
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: during COVID. But think about it. How many COVID movies
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: have we had? Like, almost none. And that was a
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: Hollywood decision. That was a creative decision of many people.
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: We've had documentaries. We've had a billion news reports. We've
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: had probably a trillion social media posts. But it is
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: interesting how often... people will just say without thinking about it, like, yeah,
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: movies reflect the society that makes them. Well, sometimes they do,
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: but it's in a mirror darkly, or it's like a
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: reverse image, or it's a mirror that a blanket has
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: been thrown over, or the mirror is redirected in another direction.
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: And I think that it's very interesting to see this
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: second life of this film as maybe the only representative
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: of this Big shock we had a few years ago
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: to our society, our economy, our life, many people's lives.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: And why is that the case in terms of how
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: cinema reflects society? So there's so much to talk about
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: here beyond the actual film of what is happening on
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: the screen. I, similarly to yourself, did not see it
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: when it came out.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: But I did, unlike yourself, not watch it until, like
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: most people clearly did... The early months of the pandemic.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: I remember watching this in, let's call it a window
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: of April to July of 2020, which at the time,
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, your mind is racing. I mean,
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: I can't put myself back in that position, but my
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: mind was racing as to... the possibilities of what we
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: could be experiencing in the real world based on what
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: we're seeing in this film. And in a lot of ways,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: and this is the thing that I think you've already
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: kind of alluded to it a little bit, cinema does
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: allow us to live out our fears, wants, desires, like
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: any good art, especially as the way we interact with cinema,
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: I think is so personal. And it's so kind of
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: sustained i mean you look at a piece of artwork
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: like a painting. And you just sit there and you
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: can spend as much or as little time with it
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: as you want. But cinema requires a layout of time
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: to be able to enjoy it completely. If you watch
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: five minutes of a movie and go, I didn't get it.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: It's like, well, you watched five minutes. If you watch
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: five minutes of Star Wars and you don't get it, yeah, well,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: it's because you watched five minutes of Star Wars. And
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: maybe there's five minutes in there that you can watch
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: to get the basic gist of it. But Cinema is
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: a art form similarly to, I would say, video games
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: and board games and anything more interactive that requires you
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: to interact with it direct and lay out an amount
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: of time to give it because it's expecting that of you.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: With a film, that's the runtime, obviously. And so cinema
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: allows us to explore things that we hope never happen
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: in real life or are exaggerated, embellished versions of things
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: that happen in real life. So, like I said, I
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: just wanted to get this out of the way here.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: The contagion in the film, as we see it, is
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: four times deadlier than COVID actually was. It kills one
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: in four people, which is insanity, because the world that
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: we see in Contagion, like you've already alluded to, is
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: not the world that we lived in.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: The world that we.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Lived in was a lot, not less exciting, but it's
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: a lot less cinematic than the way even this film
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: that's attempting to be pared down, to your point, is
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: in fact doing. I mean, we have in this film
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: people looting and rioting and all these things that never
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: really happen. And again, it's that... processing of what we
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: perceive our fears to be ahead of time versus should
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: these things ever happen what they actually could be i
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: mean you know to talk about another kind of touchstone
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: point for so many people especially my age 9-11 there
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: haven't really been great 9-11 films either because no film
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: about 9-11 is really going to reflect the actual genuine
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: insanity of what so many people saw and went through
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: and experienced on that day, either people who were seeing
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: it on TV or the first responders or people in
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: the buildings or or the people in charge, or any
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: of that. Nothing can actually speak to the genuine insanity
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: of that event, other than, like you've already talked about, documentaries,
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: or things where we're genuinely just talking to the people
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: that were involved and having them tell their stories. There
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: are shockingly few films about COVID. I don't suspect that
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: there will be any films about COVID for a while.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: We may get one kind of definitive thing, but I think, unfortunately...
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: For COVID, there's just too many extenuating circumstances that kind
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: of have become baked into it that have created a
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: longer tail for it in kind of an overwhelmingly negative
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: way than something like a 9-11 or other kind of
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: things that we as an American society or a global
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: society can use as a touchstone. I think it's interesting.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Contagion speaks to the globalness of a pandemic, which... a
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: film had not really done. You know, the other film
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: I really think of when I think of these kinds
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: of films is Outbreak, which was a much more like localized,
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: I would say fake proposition, but I believe, correct me
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: if I'm wrong, Dr. Perlmutter, because I think you probably
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: have seen it or at least know about it. It's
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: like air, it's like Ebola that's passed through the air,
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: which is, I mean, infinitely more horrifying than COVID, but
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: it's not real. I mean, what this film is attempting
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: to be, like you've already mentioned, is real. as real
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: as maybe a documentary or documentary adjacent, but it's not
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: trying to make this... It's not that it's not trying
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: to make it exciting, but it's not trying to turn
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: it into a full-fledged, the world is going to end
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: and we have to stop it. The stakes aren't to
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: that point. We see that society still exists in some
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: capacity and is not completely broken down, so this is
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: not an I Am Legend situation, but... Ultimately, the thing
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: that I find so interesting is kind of this opening
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: conversation to have about the movie is, for even the
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: things that we did see in real life, the film
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: is even more exaggerated. While it's not as exaggerated as
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: one would have thought in 20, you know, to look
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: back on it in 2011, that may have seemed like
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: a complete insane embellishment and exaggeration. Looking at it now,
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: it's like, The film, for me, ends up being somewhat sobering.
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, wow.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Some of the things that did happen happened worse than
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: in the movie. Some things that happened in real life
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: that happened in the film didn't happen at all. But
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: at the end of the day, what's so interesting about
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: a film like this one is I would say it's
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: intentionally prescient because I think Soderbergh.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: And Burns and everyone involved.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: Were trying to be cognizant of the way the CDC
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: and the WHO do things outwardly. But I also think
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: it's very interesting that they took to task the idea
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: of like, what is the back channel communication that we
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: as humans who are at a lower level don't see
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: from the people that are still humans at a higher level.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: And we get to see some of that in a
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: way that feels more honest and genuine than anything else
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: where it's like all these stalwart people with absolutely no
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: foibles making decisions. And maybe there's one person who wants
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: to blow up the city or turn the city to
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: glass to stop the spread of the virus. But that
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: person is often the one who's taken out of command
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: at the end of the film. In this, it's like, no, no, no.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: everyone here is trying to do their best within the
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: framework of things. And I like that there is that
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: honest conversation here about that, because again, like it's, it's
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: not every day you see a film like this. And
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: it's not every day you see a film like this,
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: that I think most people in a global kind of
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: community have had at least one shared experience, or there
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: are things in this film lines in this film that
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: are like a slight, like, Oh, wow. What a weird
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: thing to hear in 2011, keep 10 feet apart. Like,
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: Something that would have been a line in 2011 that
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: no one would have thought anything about that now has
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: kind of a cultural touchstone. It's weird because I haven't
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: seen him. I saw this film originally, like I said,
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: in 2020 and having watched it five years later. six
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: years later now, it's just, it feels different. It's not
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: as kind of scary and foreboding. It's more just like
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: I said, it's kind of sobering. And really, in a way,
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: I think it speaks to the kind of introspective nature
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: of cinema that they could have this conversation nine years
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: before it actually happened. And even they wanted to push
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: it further, probably because again, it's not that COVID wasn't
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: entertaining or exciting, but compared to this movie, it was not.
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And we often discuss here about filmmakers have this
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: infinite array of choices. Everything is a choice. The electricians
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: make choices. The carpenters make choices. The costumers make choices.
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: And you hope that those choices are aligned with a
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: vision of what you want the film to be. And obviously,
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: the default choice for the traditional Hollywood or Bollywood or
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: any film industry is that every style and scene and acting,
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: every element of the film contribute to the intended tone
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: and feel of the film. So yeah, we're watching, if
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: we ever watch Fast and Furious and the soundtrack is
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: Fast and Furious and the dialogue is Fast and Furious
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: and the lighting is Fast and Furious, irregardless of the cars.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: speeding along and crashing and blowing up. And that's the default, right?
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: So when a film decides, okay, we're going to have
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: a subject matter that is sensational, that is thrilling, that
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: is stressful on the edge of your seat, it's like, wow,
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: there is a global pandemic that has a Extremely high
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: death rate. People are dying everywhere. What's going to happen?
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: The decision to make an anti-tone of this, I won't
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: even say, maybe the medical word antiseptic is not the
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: right one, but this social distancing of the camera.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: I would say it's pretty apropos, though, in terms of
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: if you want to lean into it.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it is very.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: It's very, the film is clinical in a way that
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: a film like this needs to be. I mean, we
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: have multiple characters in this film played by well-known actors
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: and actresses just die, just die.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: They just die.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: It's not to say it's like real life, but sometimes
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: in real life, things do just happen. And a scene
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: with Matt Damon reacting to, and I don't think it's
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: a spoiler because I think it's the psycho or scream
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: moment of this movie. So they spoil it more or
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: less in the trailer. Having Gwyneth Paltrow die in the
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: first 15 minutes of this movie, and in a pretty graphic,
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: horrific way, and having Matt Damon essentially, oh, we were
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: just at home, and now we're at the hospital, now
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: she's dead. To have that just presented so matter-of-factly with no...
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: It's not with any pomp and circumstance, but it's just
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: kind of clinical in its presentation. Or when, again, when
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Kate Winslet dies in the film. I mean, it's a
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: smash cut to.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: She's sitting in this bed suffering and dying to then
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: a smash cut to her in a mass grave. Like
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: it is presented with so little. It's not even emotionality,
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: but it almost feels like I said, clinical. And I
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: would say antiseptic is a good way of presenting it
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: because a virus does not care. A virus doesn't care
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: about your feelings or anything like it operates on its
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: own time. I mean, Morgan, not Morgan Freeman, Morgan Freeman's
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: an outbreak. Larry F is my girlfriend and I have
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: been calling him because we've been watching Hannibal and he
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: plays Jack Crawford in that. He says, you know, the
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: virus has just been sitting around with nothing to do
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: other than to mutate. That is its singular purpose is
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: to infect, mutate and spread. And I like that again,
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: like all the characters in this film are just kind
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: of it's not matter of fact, it's just that is
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: it is what it is.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: And that's kind of.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Of as close. That's what makes this film feel kind
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: of so not icky in a way, but it's just
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: so matter of fact and clinical because that's kind of
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: the way life is for the most part.
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mentioned sort of the absolute classic science fiction
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: novel Earth Abides, which has been developed into a series.
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: I haven't seen it out yet because it's one of
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: my favorite science fiction post-apocalyptic novels. An alternate Earth, there's
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: a virus that spreads and a lot of people die.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: And the title and sort of the tone of the
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: book is that this is sort of a natural part
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: of life on Earth. I mean, we live in this very,
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: very specialized time in the first world, in the 20th
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: and 21st century, where the infant mortality rate, if you
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: live right now with medical health insurance in certain countries,
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: you probably don't have to worry too much about infant mortality,
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: which was the, or, or death and childbirth, which for 99.999%
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: of hominem, you know, human like creatures on this planet,
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: that was like the biggest worry you had. We don't
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: have to worry about starving to death, but it's all
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: based on this tiny little flick of, of time, right?
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: Because you just go back a hundred years and people
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: had to worry about those things. And then you go
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: back a hundred years and even today people are, I mean, again,
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: you restrict yourself to like Western Europe and North America
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: and But, you know, some other countries, too. But it's
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: just so interesting to me that that moment, let's just
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: let's go into the film for a second. There's that
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: moment there. And Matt Damon, I know he's there's some
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: controversy about Matt Damon. Like, is Matt Damon really a
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: good actor? I think he is often a good actor.
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: I think sometimes he's asked to do things which seem
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: a little bit over the top for me. But boy,
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: he was restrained in this film. And, you know, sometimes
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: you sort of visualize the moment where an agent calls
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: an actor. And I sent you a little text because
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: last time we talked, we did Jaws. And we mentioned
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: Michael Caine. And I had forgotten. I just saw on
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: the Internet recently after we recorded that a story about
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: Michael Caine did a lot of terrible movies in the
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: 80s and 90s after he'd become a star. And And
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: he told on a talk show about this conversation where
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: an agent called him and said, I have a role
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: for you in a new movie. And Michael Caine said,
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: what's it about? Obviously, meaning originally the movie. And the
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: agent said, about a million pounds. And Michael's saying, I'll
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: take it. Well, it was Jaws X, you know, what
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: he was in.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: Jaws 4, which was filmed in the Bahamas, which he
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: also mentions how he loved filming in the Bahamas, which
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: was the other positive.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: It was like, oh, at least it was in the Bahamas.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: It's like, okay, sure. Terrible movie, but at least you
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: get to go to the Bahamas on vacation.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: And I was imagining Matt Damon's agent calling him and saying, yeah,
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: there's a Steven Soderbergh film. It's about a virus, you know,
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: Probably you don't have to read, you know, but Steve
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: wants to talk to you about this. And I bet
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: that when Damon read the script, he said, you know,
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: I like this. And I'm going to talk about one
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: particular scene. And you've referred to it is that Matt
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: Damon's wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, is not quite patient zero, but
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: close to patient zero. Right. One of the first people
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: in the United States to to get this virus. And
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: she's there's a whole backstory, which we literally see because
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: the film starts on day two.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: Which I think was so smart, by the way.
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant choice. So he takes her to the
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: hospital and she dies. And there's this moment there where
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: he's being told by the medical people, like your wife
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: is dead. Your wife has passed away. And he, this
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: is good act. He, he, he says something to the
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: effect of like, I just brought her in here. She
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: just has a go, like he's not accepting like the brain.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: And I can imagine that must be true a lot.
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: You know, the, the, like there's, there's death where, you know,
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: grandpa has been sick for a long, long time and
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: he's in hospice. And I'm sure the conversation at that point,
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: but like, Grandpa has, you know, has finally passed away. OK,
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: thank you. We understand we've been preparing for this. But
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: like you're super young, healthy, vibrant wife of your young son.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: What?
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: And you see that shock. And I think that's that's
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: really so well done. Is that and it even it
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: is it isn't even like shock. It's like, what are
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: you saying, doctor? I'm so shocked. It's he's ready to
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: move on to the next item of business because his
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: brain can't register what he's just been told. And that
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: is throughout the film where people default to professionalism. They
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: default to what they know and what they're familiar with.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: And again, it's a brilliant way of doing a thriller
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: differently than having every single component of the film, including
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: the acting, be thriller parking adjacent.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: I guess I wonder if you were to just, you know,
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: to show this film to aliens from Galaxy Quest and say,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: is this, you know, is this the historical document?
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: Is this the historical documents?
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: I think that this film would convince a lot of people.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: You know, again, it doesn't play up the fact that
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: Gwyneth Paltrow is a well-known actress. We know that she's
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: a well-known actress because we exist in a framework and
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: society outside of the film. But the film doesn't care
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: that Gwyneth Paltrow is a well-known actress. She's the first
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: person to die. I mean, in terms of the big
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: name actors in the film. There are other people that die.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: Like you mentioned, there's other kind of patient zero adjacents
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: or patient 0.5s. But it's so pared down. I think
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: of other films that I really like. And I think
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, this reminds me of Zodiac.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Because it does have with the day two of it all,
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: it has that kind of not investigative journalist, but it
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: does have this kind of who done it? How did
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: it happen? And the film, I think, smartly punts on
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: it for the last two thirds of the movie or
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: last third, I guess, in terms of the Gwyneth Paltrow,
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: Matt Damon story. Because I think for me, and I
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: don't know how you feel about this in terms of
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: a film that is a ensemble film. with some of
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: the most well-known actors of the mid-2010s in it, including
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: Bryan Cranston. It was just like an everything for a while.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: I guess that's what happens when you're on the most
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: successful television show at the time. They're just like, hey,
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: you want to be in Contagion? Hey, you want to
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: be in Godzilla? Hey, you want to be in... I
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: was in Power Rangers at the time. He was in
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: like every... Matt Damon's character and his story in a
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: lot of ways is if you were to make that
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: film now, that's the character that you would make the
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: movie about. The entire film. Because it's kind of the
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: experience that we as human beings were getting in terms
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: of the closest experience most of us could have had
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: would have been what Matt Damon's story is. But what's
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: funny is Matt Damon's story is the one that ends
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: up being the most, in a film where there's very
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: little manufactured drama in terms of like, things that are
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: happening that seem kind of bombastic or unrealistic. Matt Damon's
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: story is the least realistic in the film, which is
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: kind of shocking to me because again, having lived through
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: the reality of it, what his story is, is so
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: not what really happened, but all the other things are
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: so much closer. And I kind of almost wish that
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: there had been no Gwyneth Paltrow story in the film.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: There had been no patient zero story because for me,
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: I really, really resonated with the parts of the film
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: that are the investigative parts because I think that's the
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: part that's kind of, like you said, it's not Coen Brothers,
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: but it is Coen Brothers. Soderbergh is such an interesting
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: director because it's not that he does or doesn't have
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: a specific style, but the way he makes films is
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: not workmanlike, but it seems like when you watch a
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: Soderbergh film, you're like, okay, that's a Soderbergh film. It
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: has a feel to it. It has an intentionality, the
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: way it's put together. I mean, my God, the scenes
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: in this film of showing the door handles and the
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: doorknobs and the screens are just, you could just see
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: Soderbergh sitting there going, we have to have these shots
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: in here. We have to make sure that the audience
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: is privy to kind of the dark black humor of
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: the film, which is like, you know, we as humans
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: are the ones who are creating the problem, solving the problem.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: making the problem worse. We as humans are trying to
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: do everything. We're doing everything. It's just weird. We as
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: human beings are part of this framework of what's going
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: on in the movie so much, but yet at the
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: same time, the film just feels a little bit emotionally restrained,
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: more so than another film would be. I like that
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: about Soderbergh. I haven't watched enough of his films. I
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: But the films that I've watched, they don't lean into
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: the bombastic emotion of things. The ones that I have
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: seen are kind of... They're restrained in a way that
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: it's aping real life as much as a film can
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: without belaboring the point of making it like, well, this is...
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: We're trying to make this a mockumentary. I don't think... Again,
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: if you showed an alien in this film, I think
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: they might think it's real life, but anyone... watching it
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: is going to be like, well, this is a movie, obviously.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: There's Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: I think that's kind of the smart thing that they
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: did do is cast all these big name actors because
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: if it had been just Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: and a bunch of second tier actors, that would have
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: been distracting. In a film like this where you have
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: Gwyneth Paltrow dying in the first 15 minutes, you have
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: to load your movie up with a bunch of other
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: well-known actors because otherwise you're just kind of distracted by
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow died at the beginning of
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: the movie.
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: So I remember a long time ago, and I cannot
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: credit who said this first. Sometimes you think something was
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: an insight that was just a collective. But I swear
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: this goes back to the 1970s about Academy Awards, that
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: they go to the people who act most, not necessarily
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: the people who act best. And that insight has had
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: a recrudescence on the internet. But it's been around a
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: long time. And it goes to another aspect of film
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: that we love to talk about, is that film, despite
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: its electronic medium and celluloid, still sometimes, and it's got
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: all these other technical elements, you are most of the
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: time watching humans played by humans on the screen. And yes,
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: you can have a film like... Hail Mary, where one
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: of the characters is a technical creation, but still does
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: a great job. I remember when I was watching The
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: Muppets long, long ago, I thought, why isn't there an
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: Oscar for Best Marionette or Puppet or something to give there?
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: But Rocky in Hail Mary....
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Andy circus would have gotten that Academy award for best
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: motion capture. That's the, that would have best puppetry would
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: have probably transitioned into mocap is what would have happened,
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: which would have been great. But you know, we don't
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: live in that forward thinking of a society, unfortunately.
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: Now in this movie, Lawrence Fishburne, of course is famously
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: known as a low key actor, like a slow burn actor. Like,
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: like he doesn't tend to play roles where someone's screaming
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: into a phone, you know, Missiles are incoming or something
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: like that. However, I would argue that Kate Winslet, Matt Damon,
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: and Gwyneth Paltrow, these are some of the best performances
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: of their career because they toned down some of the acting,
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: sort of what makes them better. themselves, right? Like, this
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: was not a Gwyneth Paltrow performance. This was not a
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: Matt Damon performance. This is not a Kate Winslet performance.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: This was acting, like in a role, which again, I'm
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: just assuming must have pleased them a lot to not
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: be told. Can you imagine being a famous actor and
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: you show up on the set and the director says, well, okay,
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: you don't really need to act here. We just want
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: you to be you, Cary Grant. Now, Cary Grant apparently
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: was very comfortable playing Cary Grant in movie after movie.
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: But I think somebody has to be right.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: Somebody has somebody has to be.
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: And he did a great job. Edward G. Robinson was
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: the best Edward G. Robinson. And he played along with that,
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: you know, in double indemnity as an insurance investigator. He
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: was Edward G. Robinson. You never forgot that. But like, wow,
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: what a performance as Edward G. Robinson as an insurance investigator.
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: This is also something when you're creating a movie, especially
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: if you have name actors that have a persona that
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: is well known to the public, the decision to tell
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: them You are going to be playing a role here.
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: I want you to bury yourself in the role and
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: not have us ever think that we are looking at you,
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: the actor, the name. And I thought that was just
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: so good a choice. And I would assume for the actors,
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: a very gratifying choice.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: I think that continues to speak to this kind of
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: Soderbergh clinical pared down nature of the film. Like you said,
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: you have some of the biggest actors at the time
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: in this movie being given what I would consider to
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: be relatively mundane roles. I mean, yes, you have Gwyneth
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: Paltrow kind of emoting and dying and Kate Winslet doing
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: the same thing and Marion Cotillard and all these other
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: really great actors. I mean, I want to say this
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: is around the time Marion Cotillard ends up winning the Oscar.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: It's either maybe a little bit before, a little bit
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: after she won the Oscar for La Vie en Rose.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: And yet they're asked, I think it's funny, you really
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: shine a light on this. It's not that they're not
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: asked to do anything, but they're really not being asked
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: to do a lot. They're being asked to kind of
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: inhabit a real person, an amalgamation of many real people.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: It's interesting. I would say that there's less roles in
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: this movie, but more jobs that these characters are.
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: Kind of exuding or inhabiting.
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: You mean you have John Hawks playing a janitor, so
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: kind of like the lowest rung person in the film,
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: all the way up to Bryan Cranston playing like the
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: rear admiral who's kind of in charge of everything. And
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: then Lawrence Fishburne, like you have all these levels of people.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: And yet, the characters are played convincingly by these great
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: actors because they're really inhabiting the job, less a character.
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: And what's interesting is it's kind of, the film is
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: more of a seeing what a stress test would look
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: like on a system that is set up in a
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: certain way, that's organized a certain way, and seeing where
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: those kind of weak points are within the system. I mean,
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: one of the, I forget exactly who it was, but
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: in the moments after the pandemic, the actual pandemic started,
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: But before the vaccines were made available to people, an
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: official was Matt Hancock in the UK revealed that watching
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: the scramble for vaccines in Contagion inspired him to order
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: a much larger quantity of vaccines for the UK than
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: his advisors had recommended. And it's things like that where
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: it's like the stress testing in the movie that is
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: done is so interesting because again, it's less about the
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: actors in the movie. Kate Winslet A third of her
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: scenes are in a hotel room. The other third of
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: her scenes are her lying in a bed dying. Like
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: she's not, it's not that she's not been given anything
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: to do, but it's more about seeing these things in a,
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: cinematic sense and less in a documentary sense, which I
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: think gives us maybe as the audience a little bit
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: more empathy and sympathy and understanding for these characters. Because
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: like you just said, we already have a connection to
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: Gwyneth Paltrow or to Matt Damon or to Lawrence Fishburne.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: These add these actors who, play normally play these kind
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: of acting roles and they're just being act asked to
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: play normal people and there aren't a lot of I
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: mean even in a film where it's you know to
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: just to speak to a random example where the crawdad
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: sing that's supposed to be a normal person like a
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: real everyday person or those Hallmark films. They're meant to
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: be real people, but yet the tone is so elevated
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: that it doesn't feel remotely like reality. This film, because
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: the tone is so muted, it does reflect reality in
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: a way that so many films I watch struggle with.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: They try to be reality or real or reality adjacent.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: And this film, I think it's what's so uncomfortable about
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: this movie is Soderbergh, I think, is uniquely qualified to
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: make a film with a tone like this one about
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: a subject material like this one, because, again, the clinical
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: nature of a virus is it doesn't care. whatever it
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: wants to do, it's going to do, it's going to spread,
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: it's going to promulgate, it's going to continue to infect
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: because that is its sole purpose. And Soderbergh understands that
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: with this kind of the forward momentum of the movie,
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: there is this kind of pressing nature of like, we
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: got to handle this because things aren't getting any better,
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: things aren't getting any better. And showing that, you know,
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: we don't already mentioned the day two of it all,
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: but showing that kind of day tracker at the bottom
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: of the screen, I think is that kind of just
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: ticking time bomb of like, we need to get this,
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: you know, we need to solve this problem because things
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: are getting worse and things are getting worse. And, and
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: I liked that Soderbergh once again, it's like, it's, you know,
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: it's not the world ending, uh, But for a lot
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: of these people, it's seeing their world around them kind
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: of crumbling. And how long can they kind of put
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: up with that and handle that until it breaks? And
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: I like that again, we don't see it. We see
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: the film, they find a vaccine and then things start
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: getting back to normal. And I did find it funny.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: It's like day 135 in the movie, less than a year. Jeez,
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: what an inconvenience. What an absolute inconvenience.
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: It's very funny.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: Like the movie can't bring itself to really go that far.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: And I think it's funny. Soderbergh, Soderbergh and Burns are
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: holding themselves back as filmmaker and screenwriter to kind of say, well,
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: what would be as far as we think it could
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: go realistically without gilding the lily and having it kind
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: of seem out of touch and completely over the top?
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: And even here, they seem kind of over the top
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: and their best interest to try and not be, it
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: still is not reality. It's more reality adjacent, but it's
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: fairly far adjacent over, which again, I think in the
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: best intention of a screen reader, writer and filmmaker trying
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: to make something real, I do think it's smart to
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: kind of still take some artistic license with it and
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: not say, well, we want it to be as real
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: as possible and as baseline reality as possible. That doesn't
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: serve an audience well if you're trying to at least
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: still somewhat be entertaining, because this movie is still trying
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: to entertain or shock and thrill.
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and on the word entertainment, There are different kinds
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: of entertainment. So you can watch a very serious, dark
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: documentary about some terrible episode in the human condition, and
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: you can be entertained in the sense that you're riveted
• 38:50
  Speaker 3: to the screen, and who knows, you might be in
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: tears at the end or just depressed afterwards.
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: Or in awe of the human spirit.
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: Or the opposite, yeah. So entertainment is a very broad tent,
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: and there's a lot of films that can be, or
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: any other kind of creations that can fall under that.
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: And I do think that This movie will go down
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: in history because it I think there's probably more quotes
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: than the one very apt one that you brought up.
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: I think a lot of people immediately, of course, we
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: haven't talked about the actual phenomenon because it's so self-evident.
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: but yeah, this, this movie had this amazing second life
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: of suddenly, and I, I've, looked up some of the numbers,
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: but it was, for a while, it was among the
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: most rented, among the most downloaded, watched movies of COVID.
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: And it's interesting that it was sort of singular. And again,
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: there's a term in Hollywood, I don't know if they
• 39:54
  Speaker 3: had it 30 years ago, I don't know if it
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: still exists, called non-recurring phenomenon. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: did not set off 300 My Big Fat Albanian Weddings.
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: Hollywood considered it to be a sort of one-off hit.
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: And this film was not a massive hit when it
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: came out. It did okay and then left. And it
• 40:14
  Speaker 3: didn't really leave much of a cultural impression until, of course,
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: COVID came along. And then so many points were different
• 40:22
  Speaker 3: and so many points were the same. But it's really,
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: if you're writing 100 years from now, if there's somebody
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: to write film history... Or cultural history. They will say, like,
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: this was this not very often happening phenomenon where a
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: film by years becomes popular because the events mirror so
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: closely something that happens. And I want to talk about one.
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: So I mentioned I did not see the film originally. Well,
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: one of the reasons I eventually saw it was... We
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: haven't talked about the Jude Law character yet. And this
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: is 2011. And thank you for the plug.
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: In 2008, I published a book and I was on
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: The Daily Show with John Stewart to talk about it.
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: And the book was called Plog Wars. And it was
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: about the rise of this world, which was relatively new
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: because the Internet had been around since 1989. But For
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: a long time, the Internet, and I did a little
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: history of it in the book, was more of an
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: interesting place where people would post something and then maybe
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: somebody would take down something and then add something. But
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: you had to go to use nets or other places
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: for real social interaction, the social media world that. we
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: think of, was really born in the mid-2000s in the
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: world of politics. That's where I studied it. But I
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: also noticed that blogs were exploding for everything else, sports and, yeah, medicine.
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: And so this movie was like really only about four
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: or five years into that world. And you think about
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: COVID came along when we were fully within society. the
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: everybody's online. And especially during COVID, so many people were
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: home with a lot of extra time on their hands.
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: And social media was like the only place for them
• 42:16
  Speaker 3: to directly, to have any social contact whatsoever, positive or
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: negative or everything in between. And I thought the Jude
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: Law character there was fascinating because I think that was
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: one of the very first characters in a film who
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: hit the zeitgeist of the social media conspirator. There had
• 42:38
  Speaker 3: been characters in films before who had posted something on
• 42:42
  Speaker 3: the web or downloaded something or cracked open somebody's bank
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: account on there. But he did a good job, too.
• 42:52
  Speaker 3: Because Jude Law was not known as a sniveling... villain
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: character before this, but boy, he pulled off the absolutely
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: rapacious person who happens to be sort of right a
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: little bit, you know, but that's really the challenge. And
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: I've done separate other podcasts on conspiracy theories, and that's
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: really the challenge is that we do live in the
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: world today, and you could, I don't know where you
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: can start dating this, but certainly from the Kennedy assassination onward,
• 43:25
  Speaker 3: Long before the Internet, trust in government, if you use
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: polls and you look like trust in institutions and it
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: almost doesn't matter that much, you know, your politics. There
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: is very, very little trust in major institutions and governments.
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: And so this was this film did a very good
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: job of. saying who has influence and power in those situations.
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: It's not necessarily the government. It's not necessarily... Do you
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: notice how the press plays almost no role in this movie?
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: Really, some things were not that prescient, I would say.
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: That's one of them.
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: The traditional industrial legacy press. If this movie was made
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: in the 1970s, there would be a crusading reporter from
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: the New York Times. There would be You know, some
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: conferences at networks, the president would be calling the president
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: of CBS and saying, look, you know, we have a
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: problem here or something like that. Just the talk about
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: a prediction where the large irrelevancy in often in news
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: of what was the traditional news industry. And everything, especially
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: for people who skew younger demographically, that was there too. Boy,
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: this movie was just this treasure chest of themes and
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: ideas and conditions and situations that are now so much
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: of a part of our world. And so that's why
• 44:46
  Speaker 3: I think, well, we've certainly talked about movies before, whether
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: it's Jaws or Barry Lyndon or something, where they've earned
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: their historic place in the history of film. This is
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: one of those few films that has earned a historic
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: place in the history of history.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: Well, and you mentioned it already, and I want to
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: kind of belabor the point just a moment about things
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: that films do and don't. So, and you know, I like,
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: I think what's interesting is that the reasons this film
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: is remembered is because of the things that it does,
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: the things that it's prescient about, the things that it
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: kind of got right ahead of time that should have
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: been warnings or kind of, you know, like, well, Hey.
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: If this happens, this might happen.
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: But the thing that's also very interesting are like you
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: already alluded to the things that it misses, like the
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: press being a bigger part of it, um, This movie
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: had no idea that there would be any sort of
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: bipartisan or partisan nature behind a pandemic, which is another
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: thing that we saw. It never thought about remote work
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: or anything like that. We still see people going in
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: and out of the office. There's no supply chain backups,
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: which is another thing that was like, again, talked about.
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: And then the toilet paper.
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: Right, right. No, no toilet paper.
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: Media. And I say this as somebody who's been reading
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: science fiction my whole life. I swear I have thousands
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: of science fiction story, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic in my head. And
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: at no point were there riots over toilet paper in
• 46:12
  Speaker 3: any Isaac Asimov or Robert Silverberg story.
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: And it's, and it's, it's stuff like that where it's
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: like the, the things that they thought would happen are
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: more exciting than the mundane dystopic things that we did see.
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: Like people, fighting over toilet paper or other things that
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: are just kind of, again, so just kind of what
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: one would think is just something we take for granted.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: But during a supply chain breakdown, those are the things
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: that people really kind of worry about. But you nailed
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: the point that I think is the most interesting one
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: for the choices they made and the ones they didn't make.
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: With the Jude Law character.
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: Because now we kind of have all these influencers on
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: the internet, podcasters, YouTubers, content creators alike that all have
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: a thing they're trying to do or something they're trying
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: to sell or an idea that they're trying to put
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: forward and push. And the thing that I find so
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: humorous is, yes, they nail it with the Jude Law character.
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: But the thing that seems so goofy is he's seemingly
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: the only one Really?
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: Movie?
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: One guy?
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: Come on.
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: Like, I guess we're maybe led to believe that there
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: are more of him out there in the world doing
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: what he's doing. But I like that it's just, you know,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: he seemingly exists in a vacuum, which is a very
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: kind of movie cinematic way of doing things. Because in reality,
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: it was like eight, like you've said, eight million different
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: things going on at once with eight million different hands
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: being stuck into the pot or, you know, rays trying
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: to get people's attention. And I like how the film's like, no, no,
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: it's just one guy. It's just one guy. It's like,
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, if it were easy enough to go
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: after and pin it all on one guy, I guess
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: we probably might have been able to do that. But
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: it's so I love how the reality of the situation
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: ends up being so much more multifaceted than even the
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: movie could attempt to understand. But I guess if the
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: movie just wanted to boil it down to. one character
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: representative of the many, which I think is what the
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: film is ultimately trying to do. To have one character
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: with Jude Law playing a kind of conspiracy theory blogger
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: on the internet is probably the best way to do it.
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: Not having like an army of them. I will say,
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: just to point something out, I know if you notice it,
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: I feel like it would be hard to miss. They
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: were just like, you know what would make Jude Law
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: look ugly? a fake tooth, right on top of his
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: other tooth, facing kind of off to the side. That
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: will make Jude Law look weird. It's like, what are we,
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: he can't just be like a good looking guy. He
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: couldn't just be like a charlatan, a snake oil salesman
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: who's good looking. Like they had to give him like
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: some like crooked tooth. I just, I found it very
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: funny because I was like, is that Jude Law's real tooth?
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: That can't be, it doesn't look like that, right? Nope,
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: he does not. The ugly Jude Law up 5%.
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry. Well, Chris, there's two scenes that I think
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: are missing in this movie, and I can send my
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: notes to Steven Soderbergh for his updated 2027 director.
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: I think you mean Steve. You're on the first name
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: basis with it. I hope so.
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: But first is, while it is so typical in Hollywood
• 49:02
  Speaker 3: to have these situations where one character is conflated and
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: stands for hundreds of others, I think to give a
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: sense of the chaos of the internet and social media
• 49:13
  Speaker 3: at that time, you're right that There probably should have
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: been a scene where maybe some stranger Matt Damon, is
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: watching their screen at home. And there's 500 little boxes
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: of people screaming into their own social media feed, all
• 49:31
  Speaker 3: contradictory pieces of information. Or maybe Bryan Cranston is noticing
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: this and talking to Laurence Fishburne.
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: About it.
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: And then the other part I thought was that we
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: live in a world where there... I've just actually co-written
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: a book chapter about massive attempted disinformation by different malicious
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: actors overseas who try to manipulate American public opinion and
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: use either fake influencers or surreptitiously use influencers. There should
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: have been something about other countries. I mean, if.
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: If it wanted to go that other level of predictive
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: realism is that, you know, it wouldn't just be the
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: CDC and the government and one podcaster, right? There would
• 50:20
  Speaker 3: have been a million voices. And I think it would
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: have been helpful and realistic for 2011, but certainly for
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: 2012 or 2013 or 2019 and 20, that there'd be
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: more craziness than just one representative.
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I would say it boils it down. It
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: boils some of that down a little too far and
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: to have it represented at all, but so kind of
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: underrepresented in the film. feels like such a missed opportunity
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: for the filmmakers. And given that the film is an
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: hour and 46 minutes long, just punch it up to
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: another two hours and give us a little bit more of.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: Give us a little bit.
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, again, it is a global response film because
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: we do see Marion Cotillard in Hong Kong, and we
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: see Lawrence Fishburne at the CDC, and we see Kit
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: Winslet in Minneapolis. But it is a rather American-centric film, which... Again,
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: the contagion is an international contagion because it comes from
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: a bat that ate a banana that a pig ate
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: in Macau.
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: And then it was.
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: Prepared by a chef who shook hands with Gwyneth Paltrow.
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: And so she's the patient zero and that's case zero.
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: So it is an international thing because it didn't come
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: from the United States, which is funny because we haven't
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: seen that yet in a film where it's a outbreak
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: that started here that's a genuine, like, real thing as
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: opposed to like, well, it's the I Am Legend mutant
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: disease or whatever it was in that movie. It's always
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: this kind of, you know, there is some of that
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: kind of fear of the outsider-ness in this movie. You know,
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: there's none of that as well, which is surprising. Remember,
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: there was a lot of anti-Asian sentiment during COVID. There's
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: none of that here in this movie, surprisingly, again, because
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: the film does not even, the film doesn't even hide
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: that it talks about a A American businesswoman who traveled
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: overseas and just came back. There's literally a news report
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: in the film talking about. So there are things that
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: the movie missed that I do think are interesting because
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: for the things that it missed, it did get a
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: lot of things right. But for the things that did
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: get right, there were things that it missed. And those things,
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: like you said, especially the Internet angle of it all.
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: They almost make the film feel a little bit more
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: dated than it should. But at the same time, I
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: don't know if I need that movie because I've seen
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: what that movie would look like. And I don't think
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: that cinema could be as ridiculous as some of the
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: real things we saw happen. And that's the thing that
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: I kind of take some solace in with cinema is
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: cinema is, unless it goes that far... tends to be
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: a little bit more restrained because we know that real
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: life is not always as exciting as movies. That's not
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: always the case, but not everybody's life is a movie
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: and as exciting as a film. But that's what's nice
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: about this movie is this movie doesn't take it upon
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: itself to kind of blow everything out to the nth degree.
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: It really wants to kind of tell a more grounded,
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: real story. But even in attempting to do that, it
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: does still miss a couple of things. And those choices
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: that it does make, I think, are so interesting. But
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: the choices that it doesn't make, I think, are just
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: as interesting because, again, it speaks to what the fears
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: were in 2011 and 2010 versus what the fears ultimately
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: would end up being in 2020 and the years subsequent.
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: And that's, again, just to speak to who was making
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: it when. Like, you can tell when this movie was made.
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: It was made before the pandemic. There's no way, you know,
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: like it just, you don't know how many years before,
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: but it was made years before.
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: That's for certain.
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, this is definitely a 2011 movie, and that's fine.
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: I just think it's worth registering that it was prescient,
• 53:48
  Speaker 3: it was prophetic in some ways and wasn't in others.
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: But that is always the way of speculative fiction. And again,
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: I'm a science fiction nut that has been reading science
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: fiction and reading science fiction writers talking about science fiction.
• 54:01
  Speaker 3: You talk to a lot of scientists, and they'll say,
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: you know, I watched Star Trek when I was a kid,
• 54:06
  Speaker 3: and that really inspired me to be a physicist or
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: something like that. So science and science fiction have always
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: been very adjacent to each other. The other thing, and
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: I guess this is my sort of last take on
• 54:18
  Speaker 3: this movie, which it does a very good job of showing,
• 54:22
  Speaker 3: is one argument I made to my students over the
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: years is that I... strongly am loyal to the journalistic method,
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: because I'm a journalistic professor, journalism professor. I like to
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: think I'm a journalistic professor as well as a journalism professor.
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: The scientific method and the historical method, which are very
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: much the same, in which you dispassionately try to investigate
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: something to try to find out the truth as much
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: as possible. And you follow the clue, right? So let's
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: just take in terms of, say, a forensic investigation or
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: a crime investigation, you want the police, the detectives on
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: your detective show, to not make up their mind three
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: seconds into showing up at the crime scene and ignore
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: everything else to focus on proving what they want to
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: be true. And same thing with science. Same thing with journalism.
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: I always tell my journalism students, if you're rooting for
• 55:21
  Speaker 3: the story that you're investigating to turn out one way,
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: that's a problem. You have to pull back and actually
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: be extra careful in checking any facts that you think
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: confirm what you hope is the conclusion. Do not write
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: the headline before you investigate the story, even if it
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: seems self-evident from the very beginning. We've had so many
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: examples of this. So this movie does a really good
• 55:44
  Speaker 3: job of praising science, like the idea of science, the
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: scientific method, the precision, the professionalism, while also saying, you
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: know what? science is done by institutions which are flawed
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: and fallible, and it's done by people who are flawed
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: and fallible and have the same problems and maybe loyalties
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: or error-proneness or personal. Lawrence Fishburne, his fall is straight
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: out of Greek tragedy of somebody who is probably, if
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: you looked at his record, I'm sure if you looked
• 56:21
  Speaker 3: at his resume, his CV, This is somebody who was
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: a lifer for medical investigation and following things, and he
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: makes one mistake. It's a very human mistake, but it
• 56:32
  Speaker 3: breaks the rules of science. It also breaks the rules
• 56:35
  Speaker 3: of government service and the rules of what they were
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: deciding to do for the public good. And I really
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: like that they included that, that they didn't make the
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: crazy podcaster internet nut. to be all of the bad guy,
• 56:51
  Speaker 3: and then the scientists were all just perfect and doing
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: everything super competently all the time. The humanization of the
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: scientific method in action execution was a very important lesson
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: from this film.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: I think it's important that cinema try to reflect real life,
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: but not to the point where like you've already talked
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: about people are sitting there going, well, I came to
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: the movies to get out of real life for even
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: five minutes and you can't stop for five minutes to
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: give me something other than real life.
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: What are we doing here?
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: I like that, like you said, there is some, and
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: not by some, I mean, there's a fair amount of
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: nuance to this film with the characters, especially the scientific ones.
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: And they're put in a position in this film that's
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: the unenviable one, which is they're trying to be the
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: arbiters of information for a public that is slowly growing
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: jaded with them. And what's funny is 2011 feels like
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: such a far cry from where things would end up.
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: But even in 2011, Soderbergh and Burns understood that kind
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: of push and pull, the give and take of the
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: medical field with the public and the way that those
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: two are perceiving one another. And I do like that
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: Laurence Fishburne's character does something that is, you know, not
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: it's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: it is a thing that he is doing based on
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: personal preference, choice and desire. not good science and smart decision-making.
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: He's doing it because he feels a humanistic need to
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: make things better. And I like that we see those
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: small human moments in this film because, again, the film
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: is so kind of stark in what it's presenting a
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: lot of the time that to have those kind of
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: more human emotional moments throughout a film that is kind
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: of really clinical in its presentation, I think does reaffirm
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: to me like, well, there is still good in humanity
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: and there is faith in the world, but it is
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: not necessarily visible all the time. Sometimes it's obscured because
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: it has to be. It has to be obfuscated forever.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: you know, good reason and for bad. And I think
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: for me, you know, the last thing I want to
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: say about Contagion, the smartest thing the film does is
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: that day two at the beginning of the movie, because
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: it has you the entire movie asking the question of, okay,
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: what in fact happened here? And, you know, it's, you know,
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: I talked about Zodiac earlier, a film that, and I
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: really resent this about Zodiac, that that film was dragged
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: for not having a satisfying ending. Have you read the
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: case of the Zodiac Killer? That still doesn't have a
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: satisfying ending 40.
• 59:23
  Speaker 2: 50 years later.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: So to expect that your film is going to wrap
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: up a real life case in a satisfying way that
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: doesn't have a conclusion in real life, I think is
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: kind of missing the point and missing the point of
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: what Fincher was doing in that movie, which is creating
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: a film about what is the obsession with finding out
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: the truth look like? And are there ways that you
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: can lose yourself to something that don't involve actually losing
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: your life?
• 59:48
  Speaker 3: And.
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's pretty clear that's what Fincher
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: is going for in Zodiac. And I like in this movie,
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: it has that same level of kind of withholding something
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: from the audience for as long as possible. In Zodiac,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: they do it the entire movie. And then at the end,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: they're like, we're not giving it to you at all.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: We'll give you the minorest kind of decision of like, well,
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: we'll stick our foot one toe in the pond and
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: say that we maybe thought it was arthur allen but
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: we're not gonna say it was him because that's not
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: fair because that's not what the movie's about and i
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: like that this movie understands that at the end we
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: do need to give the audience something and i like
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: that it's this kind of it's i would say it's
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: the nastiest kind of it's the punch line of the
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: if the movie's the joke the punch line is the
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: last scene of the movie because we have the The
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: company that Gwyneth Paltrow works for and the reason she's
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: in China being the reason the pandemic starts because of
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: a spillover event where a bulldozer makes bats go crazy.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: The bats move. The bats go where they're not supposed to.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: They interact with pigs. The pig then interacts with the chef,
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: and that's where the thing comes from. I like that
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: that scene is at the end of the movie, because
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: it gives you something to ponder the entire movie and
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: almost forget about. And then you see the scene with
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: Matt Damon looking at this picture on his camera with
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: Gwyneth Paltrow and the chef, and you're just like, they're
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: lingering on it for far too long, so there must
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: be some importance to it, but we don't know what
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: it is. And then at the end of the movie,
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: they show it. And it is just, I don't know,
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: like it, it always makes me chuckle because it's the
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: movie being so mean. It's like, and oh, by the way,
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: this was all started by a bat eating a banana
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: in the jungle somewhere. Like it's, it's very mean hearted
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: because like, again, like it just shows the banality of
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: things stacking up over time. You know, I watched a
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: documentary recently about the challenger disaster and it's like all
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: of these little things went wrong, but it's, it's not
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: always one big thing going wrong that causes big, bad
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: things to happen. Sometimes it's just a, it's an, it's a,
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: it's an, a summation of all these small, bad things
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: that cause a big, bad thing to happen. And all,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: you know, if one bad thing can happen, all these
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: other small, bad things can happen. And I love that
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: this movie, again, even at the end of it, it's like,
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: but by the way, It was just this one small
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: thing that happened. And all these small things are happening
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: all the time and nothing bad ever comes of it.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: You think this is the only bat that ever ate
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: a banana in the jungle that dropped it? No, but
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: it's again, I like how they even say it in
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: the movie. They're like, well, one bat and one pig
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: had one bad interaction. And there you go. Life is
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: like that.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 2: Things do just happen.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, to speak to the real world
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: of it, we don't know where COVID came from even now.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: In 2026, there's not one specific answer as to where
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: it came from specifically. And the movie shows us where
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: the virus came from. but we're not sure that the
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: characters in the movie know. I'm not sure that the
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: characters in the movie could ever find that out because
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: there are some things that the movie shows us that
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: the audience is privy to that the film is, the
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: characters are not. And I like that we as the
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: audience are given that moment at the end of the
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: movie just to kind of be like, well, see, it
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: is just this one small thing as opposed to like
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: this huge kind of inciting incident that's, you know, exciting
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: and bombastic. It's not, it's just a bulldozer's, disturbing some
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: bats okay and it's just such a mean like it's
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it's a mean movie but it leaves
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: you going out of the theater being like man that
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: movie is just a little mean spirited at the end
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: because it's just kind of I don't know like the
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: characters talk about it throughout the movie of like what
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: what could have led up to this happening and we're
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: not sure that the movie is ever going to show
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: us I mean again by saying day two we kind
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: of assume there might be a day one but there
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: might not have been a day one if I had
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: been Soderbergh I may not have even shown day one
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: I'm going to just let leave it up to you
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: know Night of the Living Dead. Night of the Living Dead.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: They never tell you where the zombies come from. And
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: that's the thing. The movie kind of deigns to give
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: you an answer. It doesn't need to. But I think
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: that's probably one of those moments of like giving the
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: audience something to walk out on that isn't tonally what
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: we've seen throughout the rest of the movie, but also
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: sends the audience out on this kind of uneasy feeling
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: of like, well, if that's all it takes, why.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: Hasn't it happened?
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: And that's kind of, you know, to go back to
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: why this movie got reappraised in a way that so
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: many films never did. It got reappraised because real life happened.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: But just think of a world where contagion is not
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: a thing anybody ever cared about, and its life was
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: as long as 2011. It's so wild to me, because
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: I do wonder what that conversation would be like in
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: a world where you could have covered... I guess, what
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: would it have been like to cover this film from
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: 2011 to 2019? That's the question that I have. Because
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: I wonder what the conversation would have been like if
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: you had covered this film in those preceding years up
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: to the real life event because I wonder if the
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: sentiment would have changed about this movie if we would
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: have had different feelings on this movie but now it's
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: kind of hard to uncork that or recork that bottle
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: and that's the thing about this movie is like it's
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: an interesting time capsule of a time and a place
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: where The mass public was very uninformed about things a
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: lot less than they are now. And now we can't
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: live in that society anymore. We're like fundamentally changed. And
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: this movie, I think ultimately serves as an interesting artifact
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: of a time and place that does not exist anymore.
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: but also of a world... It creates a world that
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: is parallel to our own that is not the one
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: we inhabit, but we could look at it and draw
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: parallels from. And also maybe, and I think that this
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: is the big takeaway, stumbling blocks to avoid in our
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: real world, which is seemingly my hope for a movie
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: like this is it serves as kind of a... a
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: prescient warning for the future, as opposed to a, let's
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: look back and remember. It's like, no, let's continue to
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: take the messages from this movie forward and know that,
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: you know, a movie like this, I think serves multiple purposes,
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: but being entertaining as one, being informative as another, but
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: also being a warning as a third. And I think
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: that this movie succeeds in all three of those ways,
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: which so many of these films just kind of feel
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: stale or boring or really bombastic. And this one, It
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: really manages to balance all three of those plates at
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: the same time, which is a very hard thing.
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 3: I think that this movie stands on everything we've discussed,
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 3: including it being a transitional movie from one era, where
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 3: if this had been made 10 years before, it would
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: have been very... big media, industrial media, top-down centric. Again,
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: the president would be meeting with the president of CBS
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 3: and NBC, and there would be a crusading reporter from
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: the Washington Post. And it would be very, could have
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: been done in the 70s type of- Yeah, China syndrome.
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 3: The centralized powers that be, what we used to call
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 3: in journalism, the golden Rolodex, Whereas a reporter wanted to
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 3: do a story on earthquakes, they'd flip through their Rolodex,
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: ask young people to look that up on eBay or
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 3: something there, but the list of contacts, paper, cards in
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: a rolling card file and say, oh yeah, there's a
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: professor at USC wrote a book on earthquakes. And like,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 3: there's a former chairman of the National Graphic Survey who
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 3: did a report on earthquakes and I'll call them, right?
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 3: And now everybody, you could say everybody's an expert. And
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 3: like Discovery Channel will have two parts on alien abduction documentaries.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: We live in a world where, for good or ill,
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 3: information is chaotic.
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 2: It's diffuse.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: It's democratized. I wrote another book called Visions of War
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 3: about the visualization of warfare. I ended in the late 1990s.
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: Now I can watch a video where all the video
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 3: was taken by Ukrainian soldiers using body cams and hundreds
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 3: of drones. And then these young Ukrainian soldiers, because they're young,
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 3: they edit it together and you get the most incredible
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 3: combat footage that no human has ever seen in history
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: outside of a fictional movie. And it's available on YouTube
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 3: every day. So we're in this amazing world now of
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 3: just being bombarded with billions of fake, misinformed, mal-informed, disinformation, whatever.
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 2: Bad faith actors as well. Yeah.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: I mean, avatars, AI, AI news, whatever. And This movie
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 3: was made just before that chaos began and is reflective.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: So it is reflective of its time, but also was,
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 3: as we said, prescient about some things. And that's why
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 3: this will be a required viewing movie even long in
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 3: the future where we learn about how a movie can
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 3: be relevant, which is something that's very interesting to ask
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 3: about any movie is, is it still relevant? And I
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 3: think this one is. And that's all I have.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: And you know what?
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: I think the last thing I will mention is they
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: didn't say YouTube in this movie once. They didn't say
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: YouTube one time, which I think speaks volumes to when
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: this came out, because there's not a single cutaway to
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: YouTubers or anything. There's Jude Law and that's it. But
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: there's no YouTube. There's no social media.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 2: It's very.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: it's a very different time. And yeah, it's a, it's
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: very rare that you have a time capsule like this.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: That's also entertaining. That doesn't feel stale. And that also
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: has a lot, you know, else going on. So like Dr.
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: Perlmutter mentioned, though, if you want to hear him and
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: I talking about things that aren't super upbeat and bright
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: films like contagion, You can find us over on the
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: CultureCast RSS feed, where we do required viewing once a week.
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: Every Thursday, we talk about films that should be required
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: viewing for one reason or another, or most of the time,
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: many reasons. Multifaceted, as one might say. You can find
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: that over on the CultureCast RSS feed. And if you
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: want to hear me and Dr. Perlmutter talking about films
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: that aren't required viewing, just talking about stuff we want
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: to talk about, you can find that on the CultureCast
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: feed as well, where the professor and I talk all
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: about just films, movies, in general, sometimes good, sometimes bad,
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: sometimes everything in between. So you can find us over there, like, rate,
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: and review the show on iTunes and Spotify in that order.
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: That's the one that helps. If you want to help
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: out the show financially, patreon.com slash culturecast is where you
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: can go to do that. Every little bit helps, but
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: more importantly, like and rate the show on iTunes than Spotify.
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 2: That's what helps the most.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: And as always, come back when we talk about something
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: that's not contagion, but, you know, might not be any
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: more optimistic, which probably won't have as much viruses.
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 3: Thanks for watching!