Contagion (2011), Soderbergh and Burns

For years I’ve considered Steven Soderbergh’s films to be an interesting challenge to Hollywood’s limitation on political art. His work takes on a variety of topics, from different angles, but I accept as an organizing thesis his quote (paraphrased), “I am guided by problems in representation. Specifically trying to rise to the technical difficulties in representing a given issue.” I may be bending his vocabulary slightly towards my interest in the Marxist aesthetics of Fred Jameson, but I’m sure it is close to the original quote. Contagion (2011) is one of Soderbergh’s central films. It is an example of Capitalist Realism understood not as by Mark Fisher but as by Devin Fore, that is, an aesthetic strategy for mapping the closures in ideology and political possibility brought about by late capitalism. The literature of Roberto Bolaño is one of the most accomplished efforts in this direction. Such ‘pessimistic’ work is in fact necessary for provoking the imaginary of the possible, of following Jameson’s lead in an American Utopia towards locating the smothered but incubated utopian crystals lodged in the infrastructure and enduring historical remnants of our crumbling age.

I write this in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, but the reading of Contagion I offer here was developed after its first release. This is the best opportunity we’ve had so far to test the film’s thesis. What we watch in under 2 hours is a narrative hypothesis of our Late Capitalist society responding to one of its mortal fears, here a supervirus, but I think it would be determinate as well for other social horrors like an asteroid or an ice age. I will return to the question of whether it is ultimately about ‘fear itself’ as opposed to the more literal problem of the virus. But let’s situate ourselves first of all in the world that ensconced itself in the mid-90s as led by the solitary US superpower, flanked by the ascendant but novel Chinese authoritarian state-communism. The absence of the Soviet Union in this era is often understood as symbolically the absence of any alternative, to the capitalist path, to US hegemony, to creative solutions. In short, the film is able to narrate just this isolation from history, where all roads must follow the disfigured thinking that we are doomed. The resolution to the outbreak predictably obeys the hierarchies and privileges of contemporary life, where the rich pay for a serum that will not be administered to those in need and will follow a logic of profit rather than of the humane. 

While it may not be obvious from every perspective, the 2020 that coronavirus is stalking features some groundswell of hope in restoring the utopian possibility of humane solutions, of hope in breaking the capitalist monopoly over the future. This is not represented by the Sanders campaign in a vacuum so much as the global web of movements and struggles that it allies to, from the anti-globalization/anti-war marches to Occupy to the Arab Spring to the ongoing upheavals in Latin America. One aspect of the film lauded by critics was its control in not becoming a zombie or mass mob film, and I would add here the laurel that neither does it betray false hope in a non-existent alternative. Rather, the landscape for divergence is bleak, and the course of the narrative must follow the by-laws of the WHO and other power-players like the US corporations and the Chinese state elites. The emergent global left has yet to assert any power capable of challenging these forces, and in a particularly pessimistic story-line, we see instead the paranoid conspiratorial confusion brought about by this sector’s sideline relegation, centered around Jude Law’s role as a self-serving anti-corporate muckraker in the vein of Democracy Now! reportage.

What I want to placehold as a conclusion here for the moment is that between ‘fear itself’ and the social contagion metaphor of a virus lies the more dynamic concept for understanding our world: health. From a dystopian or cynical perspective, health has been impoverished to the point that it has no positive content. We live in fear of death and mediate our lives through anxieties of deteriorating access to life. Health cannot be defined, but it is marketed as defense against death or suffering, as buying some time. On the other hand, one of Sanders’ recent self-criticisms made during the Neil Young digital rally, would have been to more forcefully promote the prospect for pairing an arts culture to the political and economic transformation promised by Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Health can also stand for the realization of human powers, and it certainly might better describe a society of artistic flourishing. Thus, in Contagion’s contribution to the realist tradition, we don’t have to view it as a representation of an entirely hopeless world. The virtue of mapmaking, of realism’s capacity to orientate incisive political questions, places such interventions as valuable tools in the struggle for a socialist response to crises, and the horizon of rediscovering in the concept of health a social flourishing.