A Film Canon

Fusing the narcotic sweep of Traffic with the digital immanence of The Girlfriend Experience, Contagion follows the rapid progress of an airborne virus that appears out of nowhere, and kills about a third of the earth's population within several months. Like A Journal Of The Plague Year, there's two basic, interrelated narrative strands - one human, one viral. As far as the human narrative goes, an impressive ensemble cast provides a series of miniature narratives and vignettes relating to the plague. At the same time, the human dimension is prevented from ever becoming too pronounced by the fact that the majority of these vignettes relate to bureaucratic, scientific and epidemiological investigation, just as the majority of the screenplay is technical, procedural and concrete in nature. It's at this point that the viral narrative comes into play, not so much as a competitor to the human narrative, but as something the human narrative is continually trying to reconstruct - and it's this balance between narrative and narrative excavation that gives the film its elegance, its warm detachment. Specifically, reconstructing the viral narrative involves pinpointing the first person infected and the most recent person infected, the two thrusts of the epidemiological investigation, and the two poles, mathematical and dynamic respectively, of the film's epidemiological sublime. To that end, Soderbergh does an extraordinary job of making sheer information cinematic, dramatising the disease's terror primarily in terms of its ability to move more rapidly than both social media and the market, opening up a sublime disparity between information and information processing; the moment at which you're told that someone has suddenly and inexplicably died, or, in the case of one of the epidemiologists, at which you realise that you've become the very infective front you've been mapping. At its strongest, the film offers something like a virus-eye view, in which every character is merely an infectable surface - or, rather, a concatenation of infectable surfaces, a multiplication of interfaces beyond anything technology can immediately envisage in response (and the viral structure is proven to be particularly complex, the result of a freak viral mutation between pig, monkey and human DNA). Not only is it a supremely timely film, made for a time at which we're no longer able to foresee the future simply because we're already in it - at moments, it's impossible to think even moments ahead - but the peculiar nervous-respiratory conditions of the virus make it a film that has to be seen in a cinema, ideally amid a sea of coughs, although not necessarily, since every excitation of the optic nerve is tantamount to the screen coughing.