My Mirror column:
Two films about contagious infections, in the starkly different milieus of the USA and Kerala, point to the cracks in which a virus can really make a home.
Films about pandemics have catapulted to unprecedented fame in the last two months, as people across the globe seek out fictional material that resonates in the age of Covid-19. Two of the better films available to stream online in India are Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 medical thriller Contagion, where a highly infectious fictional new virus makes its way from Hong Kong to the USA, and Aashiq Abu’s 2019 Malayalam film Virus, which depicts how the state of Kerala dealt with the outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018.
“It doesn’t have anything else to do,” says Dr Cheever, looking unimpressed.
It’s a droll little moment in a relentlessly grim film, but you barely register the comment as dry humour because you’re too busy registering it as fact. Contagion makes it very clear that human beings are on the back foot here. Unlike the virus, we have a great deal to do if we’re to protect the species from the deathly microscopic foe – and from ourselves.
For there are two seemingly contradictory facts about human beings that both Virus and Contagion make visible. First, that the virus piggybacks on the existence of community: the fact that human beings live with each other, and don't seem to know quite how to do without. Second, that human beings are quick to suspect each other, and the way the virus can really conquer is if our leaders choose to divide and rule.
Contagion opens
with an off-screen cough that may or may not have had the same chilling
effect in 2011 that it does now. In 2020, we are more than primed to
watch the film’s opening sequence of people going about their closely
proximate urban lives as a series of dangerous acts – pressing elevator
buttons in public places, clutching the same steel pillar on the metro
that a thousand other hands have clutched, sitting next to each other on
planes, in stations, at bar counters, in hotel casinos. Kate Winslet,
playing an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer called Dr Mears, has
the job of contact tracing – finding out who the first American
casualty, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), may have met and infected in
the days before her death, and thus hoping to prevent the further spread
of the virus.
Virus unfolds in a less transnational context, but contact tracing is very much at the centre of the narrative. A medical volunteer called Annu (Parvathy) conducts a painstaking investigation, following up with patients and their friends and family members to try and establish the links between seemingly unconnected cases. She is aided in her task by Kerala’s fairly well-organised administration – the fact that there are tickets given out at government hospital, for instance – and by increasingly ubiquitous technology – the presence of time-stamps on mobile phone photos, for instance. But what is really striking about the film’s depiction of the process is not just Parvathy’s sharp instincts, but her sensitivity.
In fact, sensitivity is what distinguishes the actions of almost all those who populate Aashiq Abu’s film: doctors and nurses most of all, but drivers and attendants, and because this is Kerala, even ministers and bureaucrats.
If Contagion maps all the ways in which an infectious disease can bring out our worst selves as a society – people profiteering off potential fake cures, panicked hoarding of goods that creates grocery store shortages, stampedes and food riots – Virus suggests that it is also possible to combat our fears. The mother of a young man who has died is surprised that Annu is willing to have tea in her house. The ration delivery for her place is now dropped off on the road, with the driver honking before leaving. When a crematorium is chosen for the last rites of Nipah patients, villagers in the vicinity block the road in fear. But a set of volunteers is found to conduct the rites elsewhere. In a revealing conversation, the district magistrate says that enforcing the cremation through the use of police force would have been the easiest thing to do – but the point is to try and do it without. Even the debate about whether it is unsafe to bury the bodies of virus-affected patients is conducted without rancour or religious fervour, and resolved with the scientifically approved solution of deep burial.
As an ill-prepared India waits for whatever is to come in the next few weeks and months, we have a socio-political climate that tragically encourages the well-off to turn away from the poor, while turning Muslims into scapegoats by testing the participants of one ill-advised religious gathering rather than all those that have taken place. Watching Virus makes it clear that we will sink or swim based on our ability to allay each others' fears and suspicions, not stoke them.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 April 2020
Two films about contagious infections, in the starkly different milieus of the USA and Kerala, point to the cracks in which a virus can really make a home.
Films about pandemics have catapulted to unprecedented fame in the last two months, as people across the globe seek out fictional material that resonates in the age of Covid-19. Two of the better films available to stream online in India are Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 medical thriller Contagion, where a highly infectious fictional new virus makes its way from Hong Kong to the USA, and Aashiq Abu’s 2019 Malayalam film Virus, which depicts how the state of Kerala dealt with the outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018.
In both films, one is constantly struck by the use of terms that most of us are only beginning to learn –
“incubation period”, “treatment protocol”, “index patient”. Both films
deal with zoonotic viruses that have entered the human body from animals, and the fear factor derives from the fact
that the scientific situation we are dealing with is not just new, but
unknown – and therefore extremely difficult to predict. In an early
scene in Contagion, the scientist working on a vaccine seems to almost marvel at the novel virus. “It's still changing,"
she tells the head of the Centre for Disease Control, Dr Ellis Cheever.
"It's figuring us out faster than we’re figuring it out.”
“It doesn’t have anything else to do,” says Dr Cheever, looking unimpressed.
It’s a droll little moment in a relentlessly grim film, but you barely register the comment as dry humour because you’re too busy registering it as fact. Contagion makes it very clear that human beings are on the back foot here. Unlike the virus, we have a great deal to do if we’re to protect the species from the deathly microscopic foe – and from ourselves.
For there are two seemingly contradictory facts about human beings that both Virus and Contagion make visible. First, that the virus piggybacks on the existence of community: the fact that human beings live with each other, and don't seem to know quite how to do without. Second, that human beings are quick to suspect each other, and the way the virus can really conquer is if our leaders choose to divide and rule.
Virus unfolds in a less transnational context, but contact tracing is very much at the centre of the narrative. A medical volunteer called Annu (Parvathy) conducts a painstaking investigation, following up with patients and their friends and family members to try and establish the links between seemingly unconnected cases. She is aided in her task by Kerala’s fairly well-organised administration – the fact that there are tickets given out at government hospital, for instance – and by increasingly ubiquitous technology – the presence of time-stamps on mobile phone photos, for instance. But what is really striking about the film’s depiction of the process is not just Parvathy’s sharp instincts, but her sensitivity.
In fact, sensitivity is what distinguishes the actions of almost all those who populate Aashiq Abu’s film: doctors and nurses most of all, but drivers and attendants, and because this is Kerala, even ministers and bureaucrats.
If Contagion maps all the ways in which an infectious disease can bring out our worst selves as a society – people profiteering off potential fake cures, panicked hoarding of goods that creates grocery store shortages, stampedes and food riots – Virus suggests that it is also possible to combat our fears. The mother of a young man who has died is surprised that Annu is willing to have tea in her house. The ration delivery for her place is now dropped off on the road, with the driver honking before leaving. When a crematorium is chosen for the last rites of Nipah patients, villagers in the vicinity block the road in fear. But a set of volunteers is found to conduct the rites elsewhere. In a revealing conversation, the district magistrate says that enforcing the cremation through the use of police force would have been the easiest thing to do – but the point is to try and do it without. Even the debate about whether it is unsafe to bury the bodies of virus-affected patients is conducted without rancour or religious fervour, and resolved with the scientifically approved solution of deep burial.
As an ill-prepared India waits for whatever is to come in the next few weeks and months, we have a socio-political climate that tragically encourages the well-off to turn away from the poor, while turning Muslims into scapegoats by testing the participants of one ill-advised religious gathering rather than all those that have taken place. Watching Virus makes it clear that we will sink or swim based on our ability to allay each others' fears and suspicions, not stoke them.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 April 2020
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