Marco Grosoli
Albeit no longer occupying a central place in terms of cultural hegemony, as a mass industry cinema still manages to capture significant reverberations of social events. The 2008 stock market crash has already left abundant traces in mainstream Hollywood and televisual productions—to name but a few: Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 2009), Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore. 2009), Too Big to Fail (Curtis Hanson, 2011).
It is by no means surprising that Steven Soderbergh has dedicated considerable efforts lately to this topic. His third film (King of the Hill, 1993) was already a rather crude depiction of the post-1929 crisis; many of the works by the director of Che (2008), while remaining unproblematic pieces of mainstream entertainment, underline their economic contexts very explicitly (for instance, the marginality of industrial production in recent times was. in quite different senses, at the core of both Out of Sight, 1998. and Bubble, 2005). The Girlfriend Experience (2009), The Informant! (2009) and especially Contagion (2011) all directly relate to 2008 economic crisis and its consequences.
This chapter closely analyzes Contagion (2011) as an allegory of the crisis of finance capital, and of the global consequences thereof. My approach substantially relies on the "positive hermeneutic" famously developed by Fredric Jameson; in other words, my aim is to spot through formal analysis the implicit Utopian inputs lying under the ideological dystopia in the narrative—hopefully as a token of what can still be detected in mainstream movies in terms of "political unconscious." even in today's relatively marginalized Hollywood.
Although this will not be an auteunst reading, a brief summary of Soderbergh's Traffic (2000) and Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen (2001, 2004, 2007) will prove indispensable as my argument goes on.
The former is a drama composed of four intersecting stories that variously revolve around drug trade between the United States and Mexico: a patent allegory for globalization and the new dynamics it sets in place (Baker 2011: 18-19). The common theme uniting all four stories is arguably the necessity to question rethink and ultimately blur the borders between the public and the private, especially in the cases of the two "heroes": Ohio State Supreme Court Justice Robert Wakefield, appointed by the president as the anti-drug czar, neglecting his own addicted daughter but eventually getting back in touch with her. and the Mexican cop, who asks for the construction of a well-lit baseball field to keep Mexican children out of the streets as the reward for his dangerous work as an infiltrator to reveal the large-scale complicity between dealers and local police—a task that demanded the difficult sacrifice of his own best friend and colleague. What is most interesting is that Traffic is (in his own words) Soderbergh's "45 million dollar Dogme movie": (Baker 2011: 74)1 he used "handheld camera, available light, and the appearance of improvisational performance" (19) to enhance a shaky, ultra-realist appeal. But the film is also peculiarly marked by yellowish and bluish tints violently characterizing the Mexican (the former) and Ohio (the latter) sequences. The symbolic implications of this choice are clear: the seemingly shapeless camera work suggests that under globalization, laws and rules increasingly lose their relevance in favor of the immoral almightiness of Exchange. Yet the geographical use of color suggests an abstract spatiality as the ultimate Law of globalization—an abstract principle somehow opening up the space even for moral distinctions and ethical choices, as in the case of the judge and of the Mexican cop.
As for the Ocean's heist trilogy, the reader should refer to "Competing Modes of Capital in Ocean's Eleven" (Tait 2010), a very convincing analysis of the first episode (as well as. somewhat marginally, of the other two) by R. Colin Tait. Two aspects will be considered here. The first is that the gang Danny Ocean pulls together each time in order to rob Las Vegas casinos allegorizes the Utopian impulse to counter inhuman present-day corporate global capital with another form of capitalism belonging to the past. Indeed, the fact that this band is made of a dozen or so males, each bound to his own professional specialty, and whose collective cooperation depends on a strict oiganization and coordination of time, unmistakably reminds us of the notion of Fordism. The point is that Jameson's "positive hermeneutic" as applied by Tait in his essay, the analytic detection of the Utopian underside of ideology, matches the film so closely that it would not be so preposterous to assume Soderbergh's explicit intention in this respect. The second aspect is that, coiporate global capital being the enemy, and in particular its late vertiginous financial turn sweeping the last vestiges of Fordism away (see Baker 2011: 21-2). it is easy to infer that casino gambling essentially stands for stock market speculation, although Tait never directly states so. The trilogy achieves its end in 2007; one year later, the stock market crash would eventually compel any allegorical account of financial speculation to drastically change its scope—as Contagion effectively does.
Contagion tells of an epidemic disease suddenly spreading worldwide, and killing millions of people, as reflected through various individual narratives. Among the main characters are: Beth Emhoff (the patient zero, who caught the disease during a business trip in Hong Kong) and his husband Mitch, trying to protect himself and his daughter after the death of both his wife and son; Dr. Cheever and Dr. Mears at the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) trying to limit the diffusion; Alan Krumwiede. a blogger sensitizing the public awareness of the fact that health institutions are concealing important issues (namely a working vaccine, named Forsythia. which Alan successfully tests on himself); Dr. Orantes of the World Health Organization, who is sent to China to inspect the origins of the disease and is abducted by some villagers who want the vaccine straight away.
There can be very little doubt about whether the epidemic stands for the stock market crash—notoriously triggering a chain reaction potentially dragging the whole world into a very deep economic crisis. A number of signs point at that. Zero-patient Beth contracts the illness in a casino, already an allegory for stock market speculation in the Ocean's trilogy. She got it while playing a game she could not handle properly ("I have no idea what's going on, but it's fun!"), very much pointing at the way detached-housed middle class members like Beth and Mitch have "played with fire" with credit (that is. with subprime loans) without being aware of the size of its danger, but being the first to receive the negative effect of economic chain reaction. The first form of contagion in the very first scene takes place when she passes a credit card to a casino worker. Another man is infected by her blowing on a chip. The virus has been engendered when a pig ate a piece of food infected by a bat. consequently tainting pig meat, invoking two of the most widespread insulting metaphorical epithets designating generic capitalists, the "vampire" and the "pig." State authorities are initially reluctant to spread the news since they are afraid this might affect the forthcoming shopping weekend; and when later in the film a character lists the places that will get assaulted in the wake of general paranoia, the first he mentions are banks.2
Indeed, this issue is particularly relevant in that it indicates that the epidemic is directly influenced by the general perception thereof. The more the panic concerning the disease, the easier it will spread—pretty much like the basic dynamic of financial speculation according to common sense: the more it looks like getting worse, the more it will, while the more trust is given to the stock markets, the more they are likely to rise again. Hence Contagion's recurrent visual leitmotif, an out of focus master shot with a fully focused small camera on one side recording what we barely see in the background: the crisis and its perception are mutually connected.
This is why Contagion extensively deals with the fight over the extent to which information should be rendered public: the CDC versus Alan, the blogger who accuses drug companies of spreading the virus, to ration and delay the already-known vaccine in order to make profit out of it. with the complicity of governmental organizations. Arguably the most ambiguous figure of the film. Alan is almost always wrong. The vaccine the government spreads, which Alan supposes to be just an experiment, proves to be ultimately effective. Forsythia. his own supposed actual vaccine, proves to be a fraud. Governmental organizations have truly no role in the spreading of the virus. Yet. he is once right, when he accuses Dr. Cheever on a live television debate of having let his own relatives know about the secure places to go before the official public announcement. The pressure on CDC will prove crucial, since the resolving vaccine is not discovered within the organization, but rather by an unofficially outsourced maverick doctor (Dr. Sussmann). and by Dr. Ally Hextall, who is the "bridge" connecting the organization and Sussmann even when the former orders (in vain) the latter to stop his research. So while Alan is wrong on any other side, he is right in pressuring the CDC. because only when the former lowers its defenses is the vaccine discovered
Alan is thus neither a positive nor a negative character. The point is elsewhere. Alan is the spot where the film's allegory is inscribed into the film itself. In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson (1992) has shown that the conspiracy plot is inherently allegorical, in that it strives for a totalization that can never be achieved. Allegory stands precisely for a structurally failed totalization of meaning (Jameson 1991: 167-8). Alan is a self-proclaimed conspiracy theorist who sees drug companies at the very top of a conspiracy haunting the world. But the place that guarantees the closure of the effort to totalize must remain empty. drug companies are ultimately not guilty, they are not responsible for what is happening, so it is useless to make them into the ultimate scapegoat. He is very right though as an instigator of tension. In other words, as Jameson might put it. the allegory fails when it posits the closure of its totalization as a definite content, it just falls into ideology. On the contrary, this striving for totalization is actually Utopian when it is a matter of form—that is, when it is no more than a formal antagonism (Jameson 1981: 71-89). Similarly, the film itself can be understood as an allegory of economic world crisis precisely insofar as the virus is not a symbol of the stock market crash. Although it inescapably stands for the chain effect of economic collapse, it is not simply that. Later on. my paper will explain why the attribution of the meaning of the virus is ambiguous and not one-way. as such implying the ambiguity pertaining to allegory proper instead of symbol (see Jameson 1991: 167-8). For the moment, it is enough to point out that the film discards the approach of the films by Michael Moore, or of the documentaries regarding the crisis (like Inside Job, Charles Ferguson, 2010). It is not a matter of explaining a mechanism people ignore, of individuating the ones responsible and of blaming them publicly. It is not a matter of pointing at banks' greed, who handle world debt in order to make profits from it. just as the drug companies accused by Alan do with diseases. The issue is structural, and we should resist the populist temptation to personify it. The properly utopian/allegorical approach would rather consist of establishing a tension between the (structurally unattainable) revelation of truth and its own ideological mask. What is the place for this "ideological mask" in Contagion? To answer this question, first of all one must bear in mind that in representation, "never more so than in the present age of a multinational global corporate network." it is a question "of social totality itself"; in our global world, narrative more often than not "conflates ontology with geography" (Jameson 1992: 4). The main topic of Contagion is very much a world reunited under the aegis of the same crisis burning everywhere, so it inevitably involves the representation of social totality. Jameson repeatedly stresses the eminently spatial or geographical nature of conspiracy plots, as a direct emanation of our global asset (see Jameson 1992: 9-85). If one accepts to regard this world epidemic as the ultimate conspiracy, for it is faceless, acephalous, unintentional and viral, unlike the simply anthropomorphic conspiratorial plots imagined by Alan, then the film's attempt to represent social totality must inevitably be a spatial/geographical one. Narration constantly, rapidly shifts from one place to the other, it "endlessly processes images of the unmappable system" (Jameson 1992: 4) much more so than in Traffic. Indeed, in that other Soderbergh tale about globalization, the narrative alternation between the four stories was rather traditional, whereas here the collective, dispersed, fragmented and manifold nature of narrative structure is much more uneven and irregular: a number of characters are abandoned in the way (Sussmami) or introduced very late (Cheever's wife), or die unexpectedly in the middle of their narrative arc (Mears). It thus looks like globalization is even less mappable than before, entering a terminal phase where totality is even farther from representability than in the times of Traffic.
This "impossible mapping of a geographic kind is what the film declares to pursue from the very beginning: the second scene shows the first symptoms of contagion in Hong Kong, London, Tokyo. Minnesota. However, the point is that this promise of a global kind of representation will not be maintained. The action basically takes place entirely in the US—and although it is the World Health Organization that spots the origin of the virus, it is the US alone that finds the vaccine.
Shall we conclude that Contagion is a blatant ideological nostalgia for the centrality of the United States in a time where its geopolitical supremacy is increasingly questioned, first of all because of economic uncertainties? In a way. this is certainly true: the vaccine injected in the end all over the world so that everything could be restored exactly the way it used to be, without any structural change, cannot but recall the hundreds of billions of dollars the Federal Reserve has injected into the credit System after 2008 to convince everyone that the old financial game could go on exactly like before the crash—an ideological claim if ever there was one. However, like for the Ocean's trilogy, it is certainly possible to "argue the proposition that the effectively ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily Utopian" (Jameson 1981: 276): not only must one detect ideological impulses, but "also seek, through and beyond this demonstration of the instrumental function of a given cultural object, to project its simultaneously Utopian power as the symbolic affirmation of a specific historical and class form of collective unity" (281). In order to do so. one must typically rely on the inconsistencies of a given text. There is one single story sticking out of Contagion's "US hegemony." It is the story of Dr. Orantes, who flies to China and is eventually kidnapped by some Chinese villagers. Once she gets freed, and as soon as she learns that her WHO bosses have delivered placebos instead of the actual vaccine to the villagers, she chooses to come back to the village to make sure the local population get it instead of going back to WHO headquarters in Geneva. As such, she is a sort of linking figure between the local and the global, between the reality of "Main Street" and the abstraction of "Wall Street" finance capital. The palpable implausibility and irresoluteness of this isolated and quite pointless episode indicate that the resolution of these binary oppositions, the stabilization of these polar tensions, can only occur elsewhere in the text, namely through something that does not oppose these two poles in such a naively frontal way as "Dr. Orantes's choice" does. In other words, this part is a symptom of contradictions whose resolution is precisely the task of the larger US-based part of Contagion. In this respect, the centrality of the US here is not only an ideological burden, but also an active Utopian plea for a mediation between the local and the global, and between "Wall Street" and "Main Street," of a State kind what evidently lacked in the Chinese segment. The Utopian point would thus be less the US than State as such; in effect, the discovery and the widespread distribution of the cure wholly revolve around the CDC. Some kind of State regulation is decidedly wished for: no wonder the Dogme-like shapelessness of Traffic, dating back to earlier and less critical stage of globalization, is replaced by a much stiffer visual asset.
After all, Jameson himself considered the State the ultimate example of a Janus-faced ideological/utopian entity (see Jameson 1981: 287-8). He gets back to the ideological/utopian couple some years later in Archaeologies of the Future, a study on literary science fiction and the Utopian impulses therein—and once again the State is at the core of a possible new Utopian concept of collectivity. More precisely, Jameson argues that the point is not so much the Utopian content of some narrative, which is as such viable to fall into ideology, but rather the Utopian imagination one can detect in its form, most notably in "their [that is. of the themes of the Utopian content] function to demystify their opposite numbers" (Jameson 2005: 211). In other words, the Utopian imagination of a new collectivity can be formulated "not by spurious syntheses or the ironic superposition of our opposites. but rather by going all the way through that contradictory content and emerging on the other side" (179). In our film, the Chinese episode stands precisely for such a false conflation of the opposites claiming for a form of collectivity that escapes it: something neither local nor global, neither sustaining "Main Street" nor "Wall Street." Such entity is again the State: Jameson (2005: 218-25) explicitly mentions federalism as a possible Utopian way to come to terms with centralization and dispersion, obviously the main binary couple of our globalized times. Quite tellingly, the United States depicted in the film, while bearing absolutely no trace of nationalism whatsoever, are much less the site for heroic governmental centralized decisions than a federation, a set of states (Minnesota. Georgia. California. Illinois and a few others) that the film ceaselessly jumps between. So what is stressed is not so much the US as such, but rather the genuine federation they (according to Jameson [2005: 224]) have never really been: their Utopian potential more than any ideological affirmation.
Nevertheless. Jameson (2005: 231-2) admits that the federalist model as such is far from enough to imagine a new Utopian collective entity: what is first of all needed is the disruption of our seemingly eternal present.
For it is the very principle of the radical break as such, its possibility, which is reinforced by the Utopian form, which insists that its radical difference is possible and that a break is necessary. The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break.
Contagion is evidently a dystopian narrative; since dystopia is "a negative cousin of the Utopia proper" (Jameson 2005: 198), its content is equally ideological, and expresses the faith that a little help (the Federal Reserve injection) can restore a pre-crisis state with regard to which no real alternatives are really needed. However, within this content lies a disruptive potential that must be detected and acknowledged as what specifies the otherwise too generic notion of State-as-regulator that the film also seems to suggest. In other words. Contagion "unconsciously" imagines underneath its ideological content a different collectivity—not by overtly illustrating it (which would fall again into ideology) but rather by forcing us to think a collective entity being able to keep together the State and a radical rethinking of the relationship between the Public and the Private.
CDC is here the (capitalist) State-as-we-know-it. It is first of all the guardian of individual freedom, at the price of keeping separated the Public and the Private. "Our best defense is social distance." says Dr. Cheever. According to this approach the contagion is avoided simply by keeping people separated. This scheme is however highly insufficient as epitomized by the one who is effectively in charge of this, that is Dr. Mears, who rapidly gets infected and dies. Significantly, Dr. Mears refused all along the friendly care of a recently-met Minnesota colleague. Isolation is thus not the answer. It is easy to spot the related post-2008 analogies here. The current crisis in Europe has primarily to do with die disparities between the low-rated debt of richer countries (such as Germany, Finland, the Netherlands. Austria) and the wonyingly high one of Greece. Italy. Spain and a few others: the lack of any concrete will to break the countries' isolation has so far only rendered the crisis worse and worse.
Secondly. CDC embodies the tendency of the contemporary State to passively adhere to the perpetual "homeopathic" self-change of late capitalism, its capacity to engulf in itself any possible radical change or heterogeneity. In the film. CDC manages to get the vaccine only by breaking its own rules, that is. by collecting research results that it officially prevented the outsourced maverick Dr. Sussmann from conducting. However, this flexibility is not the final answer either. Procedures internal to the organization are too slow and risk letting innumerable people die worldwide before the vaccine is fully disposable. What solves this impasse is Dr. Hextall's decision to test the vaccine on herself, allowing the processes to decisively speed up. Her gesture radically questions the borders between Private and Public—it is no less than a transgression of CDC rales and of the distinction it presupposes. On the contrary, the opposition Sussmann-CDC she was equally called to mediate fully remained within the standard frontal opposition between the Public on one side and the Private on the other. A few words should also be spent about Hextall's casting. Contagions cast is an all-star one: Matt Damon Jude Law. Marion Cotillard. Gwyneth Paltrow. Laurence Fishbume. Kate Winslet. Elliott Gould. Dr. Hextall is played by Jennifer Ehle. a much less famous actress: her own casting choice thus signals a shift from that peculiar way to triumphantly intertwine the Public and the Private we call "Stardom."3 A few moments after her daring self-injection, as a further confirmation of the necessity to blur this line, she says while giving the medicine to her father that he has been her major inspiration all along since "he was the one who went to work and saved lives when the others stayed at home." What is crucial is that Dr. Hextall explicitly refuses to step into the spotlight when Cheever asks her to. Such a gesture would have reconciled the Private and the Public, presenting the State as the guarantor of the actions of "remarkable few" (in the words of a CDC officer publicly praising them during a conference); in doing so. Dr. Hextall maintains instead a certain tension between the two. while remaining within the horizon of the State.
This point is perhaps clearer in the light of another antagonism set in place by Contagion. On the one hand, there is the State (the CDC), whose isolationism misses the point but proves nonetheless useful to beat the epidemic. On the other hand, there is Alan with his grassroots informational demagogy, excessively blaming the State and willing to rhetorically confer the power to the people through democracy as new media participation. None of them defeats the other in the end. but their tension, as mentioned in an earlier section of this chapter, positively affects the overall situation since it pushes the CDC to overcome its limits. The fact that a parallel montage right before the end shows them both doing what they have always been doing (the lab work, Alan goes on filming things on the streets and putting them on the Internet) suggests that their antagonism is maintained as such, and is not to be solved in either way, since they are but two sides of the same coin—no wonder people start to accuse Alan of making money out of his campaign, which is exactly what Alan accused drug companies and CDC of. It is not a matter of being for or against the State, for the mediation of an institution or for the people's free self-determination. It is a matter of deeply reconfiguring the relationship between the Public and the Private and hence re-inventing the State without getting rid of it as such. The scene immediately after that parallel montage, the penultimate one. is a striking confirmation. It takes place in Mitch's house, who so far repeatedly and almost violently prevented his teen daughter Jory to see her boyfriend Andrew. Here is what happens according to an anonymous Internet Movie Database synopsis:
Jory finds a box in her room from her father telling her to be ready at 8:00 pin. Inside there is a dress. Jory goes downstairs and sees her father has made up the living room for a makeshift prom night since she is unable to leave the house yet. There is a knock on the door. It is Andrew, who got the vaccine and is now sporting his vaccination bracelet proudly—they can finally be near each other. He is going to be her date for the night. The two of them begin to dance. Upstairs, Mitch is in the bedroom, looking for his camera, when he turns it on and sees pictures of Beth during that final business trip that cost her her life. He breaks down crying. Mitch goes downstairs to take pictures of Jory and Andrew. Mitch watches them dance.4
According to the anthropological cliche, the prohibition of incest, or "handing one's son/daughter to someone else, has generally been considered the original gesture of whatever one might call "society." This is clearly a new beginning—as Mitch crying at Beth's pictures emphasizes that the old situation is gone forever. But this new beginning cannot be separated from a radical redefinition of the relationship between the Public and the Private: hosting a prom night in one's living room suggests first of all an unprecedented interpenetration between private spaces and public ones.5 Whatever global mapping the narration seeks to achieve with its reconstruction of a social totality united by world crisis, it has to take into account first of all this basic spatial coordinate.
Blurring the private and the public comes dangerously close to what recent political theory has usually called the commons: sharing property, goods, services et cetera as the concrete basis for an alternative to present-day crisis. Following especially Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek often insists on the necessity for the State to manage the effective establishment of the commons horizon. But he also insists that the key element of this establishment must be none other than the dictatorship of the proletariat: the key function of the State must be granting the coincidence between the Universal and what is excluded from the social tissue—the latter being the definition itself of proletariat (see Žižek 2009: 125-31). It would be too much to ask a Hollywood movie to bear traces of this, even if it comes from the director who dedicated a four-hour, two-part epic to Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Yet there are some timid indications thereof. The second scene is a dialogue between a janitor at CDC and Dr. Cheever. The two briefly talk about football, and then the former asks the latter to have a look at his son, who apparently suffers from attention deficit disorder. Most likely, the janitor cannot afford medical insurance. Cheever politely refuses and unconvincingly promises to find him another doctor. Next time the viewer sees this janitor is when he accidentally hears Cheever telling his wife to reach a secure place before the general alarm is publicly announced: the janitor triggers a rumour that ultimately undermines Cheever's credibility. Thus, he is depicted rather overtly as the excluded whose inclusion is a matter ultimately raised by the global crisis. In effect, when the distribution of the vaccine takes place, on the basis of lotteries using birthdays, as soon as Cheever gets one for himself and his wife he gives his own to the janitor's child. This is followed by a New Deal-ish handshake between the doctor and the janitor, very emphasized by Soderbergh's direction, which one would have rather expected in a social drama from the 1930s. By all means, we are very far from any hypothesis of dictatorship of the proletariat: here the janitor is simply included in. without any trace of the conflation between the excluded and the Universal. Yet. if this inter-class resolution might seem an ideological easy way out, the Utopian is on the side of the dialogue: Cheever explains that shaking hands used to be "a way for showing a stranger that you weren't carrying a weapon, in the old days. [...] You offered your empty right hand to show that you meant no harm. [...] I wonder if the virus knows it." This is the crucial point: sociality is ambiguously compared to the virus, for it is fundamentally ambivalent, in that it cannot be made of a mere principle of inclusion, but rather of a strictly dialectical and inherently problematic reversibility between inclusion and exclusion—which, in a way, is also at the core of the dialectic of the proletariat, although this is not specifically the case. Earlier in the movie, the virus was erroneously reputed to have been incubated in some fish species—much later on. Dr. Orantes learns that the Chinese word for "fish" sounds exactly like the English "you." Elsewhere, there is a very explicit 180° shot-and-reverse-shot editing together two men both staring at the camera: a sick one and a sound one next to whom, in the background. Dr. Mears is running to apply a mask to the former. Such a staging emphasizes that connectivity. as underlined by the editing trick, can be venomous as well as it can be saving. The inherent ambivalence of sociality also belongs to media: in Contagion. they can separate (as the official TV announcements do) as well as they can bring together, as with the cell phones allowing Andrew and Jory to keep in touch.
At any rate, this is the reason why the epidemic is not a symbol of the stock market crash, but an allegory: there is a structural ambiguity pertaining to what the epidemic designates, in that it can stand for society itself as well as for the economic crash. This also implies that the Utopian claims the film implicitly formulates regarding a collectivity able to get past the crisis have to lay their own foundations paradoxically on the economic crisis's own presuppositions themselves.
This is what Contagion suggests in its very final scene. The film began with "Day 2" but ends with "Day 1," that is. with the depiction of how the virus was born in the first place. This visualization of the virus only in the moment it has been finally defeated unmistakably recalls Jean-Pierre Dupuy's reversed teleology of catastrophe: in order to avoid catastrophe, we have to posit it as something which already happened (Dupuy 2005). Thus, the end of catastrophe overlaps with the beginning. The solution of a catastrophic event is strictly and paradoxically retroactive: it posits its own presuppositions.
This also means that the way out of catastrophe is inscribed into the catastrophic event itself. Hence the necessity to closely watch the images of this final scene. The IMDB synopsis again:
A construction crew from Beth's company AIMM was cutting down trees in a forest in China. That caused some bats to fly out. One bat was infected with the virus. It grabbed a piece of banana and perched above a pig's pen. It dropped the banana piece which we are to assume had the virus on it. A pig eats it and is eventually slaughtered at market for food. A chef handles the dead pig, touching the inside of the infected pig's mouth with his bare hands. He goes out to dining room and poses in a picture with Beth holding hands, transferring the virus to her and starting the chain of events.6
The first tiling to be noticed is that the primordial origin of it all lies in capitalist exploitation—here: the ravaging of nature for construction purposes. But even more than this unnecessary confirmation of our allegorical hypothesis, what matters is the form of this bit. On the screen, the sequence does seem as unadorned, dry and essential as this synopsis put it. Thanks to a very tight editing, and to camera movements mostly drawing limpid lines clearly connecting one object to the other through semi-pans, this sequence appears as nothing but a mute series of relations, a bare chain of connections. This is very important, because here the film points to its own form, all the more since from the content's standpoint it tells the viewer nothing s/he does not already know—the shift from content to form being the very key of the shift from ideology to Utopia.
Effectively. Contagion's overall visual style is aptly resumed by these few shots. Soderbergh uses digital camera against its ordinary presuppositions: he keeps it generally very still, and when he moves it, the movements are very straight and clear; he chooses ultra-traditional angles one would rather expect from classical 1930s or 1940s Hollywood, daringly playing with focus in order to design square, elementary geometries within the frame which are integrally continuity-oriented. As Aaron Baker (2011: 62) brilliantly put it. Soderbergh's films "function 'beneath' and 'beyond' Hollywood continuity." This means that whereas Hollywood typically conceives continuity editing as engendering the effect of an invisible flow of images. Soderbergh's visual stylization builds up continuity as if emphasizing the way every carefully constructed single shot relates to the following. In other words, spatiality is vehemently stressed—as it is by making montage ceaselessly jump from one location to the other. Simultaneity is repeatedly stressed. Time, on the other hand, is severely compressed, as epitomized by the highly discontinuous plot's timeline, passing from Day 2 to 3 to 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 18, 21, 26, 29, 131, 133, 135. Unsurprisingly, at a certain moment Jory exclaims: "Why can't they make a shot that keeps time from passing?" Moreover, the very tight concatenation of events leaves little to no room for emotional depth—thai is. of course, temporal/subjective depth; violence and pathos themselves are considerably understated, albeit such a burning topic would have easily prescribed to overemphasize them. Violent events (say. fights over food and medicines) are often left to the background of the frame, behind the imperturbably unfolding main action.
The film thus strongly privileges space over time. Indeed, in Contagion, the fluid passing of time belongs to the ideological level of the narrative, the one smoothly flowing from dystopia to the ideological Utopia of coming back to the pre-crisis situation with just one injection without changing anything really. However, we have already repeatedly spotted a Utopian counter-movement which conceives instead the end and the beginning as one and the same. According to this counter-movement, as synthesized in the very final "Day 1" scene, disruption and the formulation of spatiality ultimately coincide: the illustration of the disruptive virus is nothing but a spatial articulation. This is exactly Jameson's view on what contemporary Utopia should be: a disruption of current modes of spatiality as dictated by globalization in order to reinvent a new and alternative kind of spatialization (see Jameson 2005: 211-33). Interconnectedness is what the epidemic, the global economic crisis and sociality as such ultimately share. By emphasizing spatiality through its own form. Contagion seemingly suggests that the interconnectedness the global crisis has traumatically thrown at us is the lesson society should learn to go past it and re-invent itself.
An explicit allegory of the global economic crisis following 2008 crash, at a surface level Contagion seems to praise the Federal Reserve's injection of capital, its ideological agenda to restore the situation like it used to be. without any systemic change. On the other hand, the film bears several traces of a sort of Utopian counter-hypothesis. It suggests that the crisis, and even the ultimately insufficient FR move, contain precious indications as to the way we might be able to get past it. It is the global finance predicament that has showed once and for all our global interconnectedness—something we cannot pretend any longer not to see, even more than in the earlier stages of globalization. It also showed that the strong presence of the State is indispensable. More generally. Contagion forces us to think of a new society which will have to keep together a strong State able to come to terms with the geopolitical contradictions of globalization's inevitable universal interconnectedness, including strictly financial ones; a radical rethinking of the relationship between public and private dimensions; the structural dialectic link between inclusion and exclusion—a kind of reversibility any new hypothesis of society cannot neglect any longer, nor mask behind an indiscriminate general inclusion. The film does not describe this society, but provides its basic structural elements for us to think of a collective form that might combine them together.
More than ever, the political unconscious of our societies is faced with the necessity to find out imaginary solutions for contradictions that are more and more burning. This analysis hopefully demonstrates that several Utopian impulses are still waiting to be detected, even in contemporary mass cultural products.
1 In 1995, director Lars von Trier and a few others signed "Dogme 95," a manifesto advocating a series of shooting rules and procedures supposedly guaranteeing an effect of flagrancy and authenticity to the filmed images.
2 A brief dialogue utterly devoid of narrative relevance provides a kind of "negative proof" of the fact that the immediate symbolic referent of the epidemic has to be economic. Dr. Cheever firmly rejects the hypothesis that terrorists might be behind it all: the main reason for paranoiac mass mobilization in the decade prior to 2008 being discarded, the one coming after that is then indirectly but rather safely assumed. In other words, the film overtly tells us that it is not a matter of terrorism: thus, it has to be the economy, the other great worry having followed terrorism in the U. S. agenda lately.
3 "Questions raised at the level of the plot can be resolved at the level of performance, as the audience's attention is displaced away from the issues at stake in the fiction onto the way in which stars exhibit themselves under the pressure of those issues" (Maltby 2003:387).
4 http://www.imdb.com/title/ttl598778/synopsis (last seen on August 10th, 2012).
5 An earlier sequence provides another symptom of this need for another public/ private dimension, all the more significant as this scene has absolutely no narrative end at all. and as such sticks definitely out of the action's texture: Mitch trying unsuccessfully (for strict safety reasons) to have his wife buried in the family grave.
6 See http://www.imdb.coni/title/ttl598778/synopsis.
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