← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:01]
Sonny Bunch
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Jonathan Cohn
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Jonathan Cohn
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Jonathan Cohn
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Sonny Bunch
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Bulwark Takes. I'm Sonny Bunch. I'm culture editor at the Bulwark. I'm joined here by Jonathan Cohn, who is wearing a mask because we are discussing outbreak movies, virus movies, contagion movies on the show today because, you know, we got, we got bad things in the air, Jonathan, which I know this is why you're wearing the mask. We got hantavirus on cruise ships. We got Ebola in Africa. We got the occasional monkeypox still coming up. It's. It's a nightmare out there, Jonathan. We are remote, though, so I think you can take off the mask. I think the people want to see your face. It's.
- [01:20]
Jonathan Cohn
You can't be too careful, you know,
- [01:23]
Sonny Bunch
you can't be too careful. That's my.
- [01:25]
Jonathan Cohn
Actually, you can be too careful. But.
- [01:26]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, well, that's, this is one of my takeaways from, from this series of movies that we are looking at today. Let's just, let's just set the stage for folks though, because this is a little bit random. They were like, oh, we're doing, we're doing virus movies. But it's not because things are bad, right? Things. Things don't seem good right now, John.
- [01:43]
Jonathan Cohn
They're not good. You know, we've had, in the last month, right, Getting, give or take, we've had two outbreaks of concern. One is this hantavirus outbreak on a passenger ship in the South Atlantic. Hantavirus is this disease. Normally you only get it from rodents, but there's one version that can be transmitted between people. It seems to be people on this boat have gotten it and someone, you know, we've already had some Deaths from it. There are people around the world we're tracing. We're contacting several in the United States. We're watching. It is a potentially fatal disease. And then more recently, we've gotten word of a major outbreak of Ebola in Central Africa. This one's really, I think, you know, if you talk to the people in public health, a lot scarier. Because Ebola, the numbers, we're catching this one late, the. The toll in. Out in these Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, that area could be quite devastating. Now, that jokes aside about the mask, no one I've talked to thinks we need to be worried about another pandemic here in the United States. But these are. These are very serious problems, and they highlight gaps in our global health system, a lot of which have gotten worse because Donald Trump has basically taken a wrecking ball to the agencies and programs we have to protect us against these diseases.
- [03:01]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, I mean, the, the, the gutting of the various USAID programs, you know, are. I don't know how to describe exactly our antipathy towards the who. You know, it's not. It does not seem like a great moment for a series of deadly. Not that there's ever a good moment for Ebola, unless you're watching a Wolfgang Peterson movie. But we'll get to that. We will get to all of this in a minute here. All right, so we're talking about three movies today. And the way I have kind of structured this is going from most realistic depiction of disease to the least realistic. We're going to be Talking about the 1993 HBO film and the Band Played On. We're going to be talking about Outbreak, and we're going to be talking about the 2011 film Contagion. Now, the order is going to be and the Band Played on, then Contagion, then Outbreak. Turns out that the big Hollywood blockbuster film, least realistic depiction of what happens in a, In a. In a viral outbreak situation, but we'll come to that, too. Um, but let's start with and the Band Played on, because, you know, this is a movie that comes out, as I said, in 1993. It's after the kind of real peak of the AIDS scare at the end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s. But it's also before, as we were just discussing, is before the drug cocktail comes out that helps slow the spread of hiv, helps stop, turn HIV into aids. What was the mood like when this movie drops? I mean, I like, yeah, I'm a little younger than you, but, like, not that much younger. And I remember being vaguely terrified about AIDS all the time in the 90s. And this movie does a really good job of kind of depicting the state of play at that moment. Yeah.
- [04:56]
Jonathan Cohn
So, I mean, I remember very distinctly, a little bit older than you, I remember this time very distinctly. And aids, when this movie comes out, is still a death sentence. Remember, this is a disease with basically, you know, 100% fatality rate. You get it, you're going to die. So very scary. And this movie comes out as a way of looking back, as a kind of reflection on the failure to address. To recognize it, to address it, to put all of our resources into finding ways to treat and cure it over time. And that takes us into the second part of the narrative, which is. It's very much caught up with these sort of changing perceptions, social attitudes about sexuality. This, you know, this. This movie very much captures how. And it talks about. In the early years, it was talked about as the gay cancer, the gay disease. And how much for the early years of this. Of this epidemic, it was thought of as a disease of gay people and IV drug users who, frankly, a lot of people didn't care about. And it was a time when it was a real struggle just to get Ronald Reagan, the president, to acknowledge this. It was a really big deal when the surgeon general, at that point, C. Everett Koop, talked about aids, talked about HIV in a medical way and made clear that it could affect anybody. And you see that sort of transformation take place in the movie. And we're at a time in the 90s when sexual attitudes about sexuality are changing. I think for people who are much younger, if you're lived to know that there was a time, well, maybe it doesn't seem quite so strange, but certainly when the majority of the country really did. I think if you took polls, depending on how you phrase the question, you would have detected a lot more just explicit homophobia, explicit willingness to discriminate against people who were gay, or at least they're weird, they're different. And that is all caught up in this time, in this disease. And I think the movie captures that.
- [06:52]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah. Let's talk about the differences between the movie and the book, because this is based on a book by, I believe, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter. And it. And it is very much kind of set in that. In that milieu, a lot of the film is. But it's also a globetrotting sort of thing. It's like it's all over the place. This is one of those. This is one of those early, big. HBO made For TV movies that was like this. We're going to win some Emmys. Where we're going to try and win some Emmys. I don't think this one was well received critically. We'll get to that in a second. But the. But it was. But it's. But it's an interesting film because it is like a big, important movie. This is seen as an important film. We're going to be dressing and tackling a big, important topic. What were some of the differences between the book and the. The movie?
- [07:39]
Jonathan Cohn
Well, I would say the biggest difference is that the book, although it has a narrative structure to it, is very much tries to tell a big, multi, multifaceted story of the AIDS epidemic in its early years. And so it really is quite sprawling and goes into a lot of places and goes into a lot of scientific detail that you just don't see in the movie. Now, the movie itself is actually pretty sprawling and we could talk about that. As, you know, it's a movie, whether that helped or not. But believe it or not, the movie really winnow down the story to just a handful of people when in the book there are many more players and there's much more scientific background. I remember very early in the book. I haven't actually meant to check this right before memory serves. The very opening of the book is about a Navy day. I think they call Navy Day in New York City or Ship's Day. I forget what it's called, but where there are a bunch of sailors in New York and many of them were having sex. And how this was, you know, an early instance when maybe the virus might have spread or it was a kind of preview of what was coming. That's not in the movie at all. So the main difference there, I think, is that it sort of. It narrows it down. Characters are compressed. Robert Gallo, who's the player, the scientist played by Alan Alda, who is doing the viral research and gets in this very, you know, nasty, territorial, ego driven fight over whether he's getting credit or not is sort of compressed into this. Well, into that, you know, basically being somebody, you know, solely concerned with his own credit. That's not out of the blue. He's a very controversial figure and there was a lot of turf fighting, but also, obviously he's a scientist who did a lot of really important research and is credited with doing a lot of important research.
- [09:22]
Sonny Bunch
What's interesting in all of these movies is that they have. They have kind of different messages. They're not. They're not all, strictly speaking, message Movies but they do have different things to say about like how, how we respond to these sorts of outbreaks, these sorts of problems. I think one of the real takeaways from this film is the importance of messaging and the importance of consistency of messaging. There's a big kind of subplot where the CDC doesn't want to talk about the spread is through sex, sexual activity and more frequently gay sex. Like it's hard to. I don't want to dance around this because it comes up in a lot of the discussions of this film. There was a lot of criticism from the gay community about this film. Actually. They were like this. Focusing on Patient Zero makes it seem like a gay disease. All of these characters are gay. I was the best in the business, ask anybody,
- [10:19]
Jonathan Cohn
leave it to me to get some disease nobody ever heard of.
- [10:22]
Sonny Bunch
And some. Somebody actually came in and re edited the whole thing. But this was an enormous problem in the gay community. It destroyed entire generations of gay men in San Francisco, New York, Louisiana, et cetera. And it's a real issue here that you have the government not being able to say that, not being able to message about the spread of it, how it is spread, the sexual clusters that have been identified, which causes confusion and leads to an inability to. Or a greater difficulty in slowing the spread of the disease.
- [11:00]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, I mean, it's always this challenge, right? You have a disease that, you know, absolutely, at that point in time was clearly disproportionately affecting one group of people or two groups of people. And they are a group who has been historically, and I mean historically, like through human history, discriminated against, being actively discriminated against. And there's this double edged sword. You want to, as a public health professional be able to deal with that. It's the facts on the ground. You're not going to be able to deal with the problem if you can't talk candidly about who it's affecting and how at the same time you're living in a political world where number one, you know that the more people who. The more the public as a whole perceives it as a gay disease, the less sympathetic they're going to be. And you're living in a time of an administration, the Reagan administration, that also is at best indifferent as a whole in terms of. I'm not whatever any individuals in the administration thought as a policy matter as a whole is indifferent to the gay community and how you balance that. I'm always one of those people who. I look at that and I'm very sympathetic to the people at cdc. There are a couple. There's a couple scenes in the movie where this comes up where. Where the head of the CDC lab is basically saying, look, I got to get money from this administration. I got to get funding. You need to be careful about how you talk about this. You need to be careful about, you know, whose feathers you ruffle.
- [12:27]
Sonny Bunch
Give us a number so we won't
- [12:29]
Jonathan Cohn
annoy you again until the amount of money you begin spending on lawsuits makes
- [12:33]
Sonny Bunch
it more profitable for you to save people.
- [12:35]
Jonathan Cohn
And, of course, you want to be sort of, you know, the underdog. You always want to be, you know, the hero in these sort of situations is always the brave scientist speaking out, the truth teller. And that's all true. But, you know, if you know how government works, I mean, you needed that money, too. And, you know, I've always had a soft spot for the people who know how to maneuver around bureaucracies, and that is a real skill. And I will say, I mean, look, I was young when this movie came out, younger. And I was Young in the 80s and 90s. I was still in school then. So it's hard for me to sort of. I don't think I was fully aware of what was going on politically at the time, locally, nationally. But, you know, there's a scene in the movie relatively early where they're talking about whether to shut down these bath houses and stuff in San Francisco. And it's a really fraught issue with all kinds of layers of complexity. You know, San Francisco at that point was where the gay community had gone for a place where people could be free, could be who they were, and they didn't have to be ashamed, didn't have to worry about people attacking them. And the bath houses grew out of that culture to some extent. And yet at the same time, that wasn't the whole gay community by any stretch of the imagination. And, you know, and there was a real public health concern. And there's a scene in the movie where when they're sitting around in the house of the political. There's a political operative in San Francisco. He's a very important character in the movie and in the book, he's genuinely an important character in history. And they're all kind of going back and forth. I personally thought that scene was a really. You know, for insofar as a scene in a Hollywood movie can capture that complexity, I actually thought that scene did it pretty well because you had different people arguing those different points of view.
- [14:12]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah. And you. There's also a public hearing later when they're trying to decide if they're gonna shut down the bathhouses. And you have the people who are like, I moved here because I was tired of being harassed and you know, this is where I can be. And now you're telling me I can't be myself.
- [14:27]
Jonathan Cohn
My hometown were telling me I was
- [14:30]
Sonny Bunch
a freak because of my sexual orientation until I came to San Francisco. And scientists are like, you're gonna get sick and die. Like, this is just that this is bad. You have. We have to shut these down and it in it. What's interesting about this is that it's a good. It's a good depiction of the trade offs. And I think it's a movie that empathizes with everybody enough that you can, you can have like an honest discussion of this issue without overtly villainizing any of the people in it. Which is not always the case in these movies. There's often like some crank character. We'll get to that in Contagion in a second. Who is purely villainous. Which is interesting because these look. Real life is all about trade offs. We saw this with COVID right? We saw this with people saying, you can't shut down my business. I'm gonna go out of business. Am I not. Can I not get married? Can I not bury my husband? Can I not, you know, bury my parents? Like it's. It's trade offs. Life is a series of trade offs. And this movie does, I think, a very good job of setting that stage, which is, which is always interesting. It is. Again, it's really interesting reading the kind of reactions to this movie, because originally the film, as it was cut and shot initially was all about Patient Zero, who was this gay flight attendant who was connected to the hundreds of cases of AIDS around the world because it's flying all over and infecting people. But the gay community freaked out. They were like, you can't. You can't do it this way. We got to change it. So they called somebody in to re edit it and change it and put it out. And I think it's probably slightly better as a result. It's more overarching. It's a broader look at this thing.
- [16:20]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, it is. And I think the Patient Zero part, you could get the impression from the movie that this really was literally Patient Zero who gave. That's the reason AIDS came to the United States. And that's not true. I mean, he did, you know, give to us. So I think that was a. That was. I agree. I think it was probably a good change yeah.
- [16:37]
Sonny Bunch
All right. So that's. And the band played on most realistic because it's about a real thing. This is a history and, you know, we can debate over little changes here and there, but it is, you know, pretty, pretty straightforwardly what happened. Forget whatever plans you have this weekend because you're staying at home and playing on Spin Quests. And there's never been a better time to sign up than right now. New users get $30 coin packs for just $10. All the table games you love with hundreds of slot games and real cash Prizes. That's at spinquest.com S P I N
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Jonathan Cohn
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- [17:33]
Sonny Bunch
trip starts with peace of mind. We're going to talk about Contagion next, but I want to set the stage here. This is how I first watched Contagion. I watched it at home. I watched it on vod. I didn't catch it in theaters. I watched it at home on vod. And after watching it, I started to feel a little bit sick. I was like, oh, I got a cough or something. This is. This is totally psychosomatic. I'm. I'm fine. My wife was going out of town that weekend. At the time, it was just me and her and our dog living in an apartment in D.C. she was going out of town. So I was like, go out of town. It's fine. I'll be fine. I'll be fine. She left like three hours later. I spiked 104 degree fever. And was I like. I took my dog outside one time, one last time for the night and almost passed out trying to get back into the house. Turns out I had walking pneumonia, not swine flu or whatever from Contagion, but I was actually very sick and possibly could have died. And that would have been very ironic, me just ignoring it because I was like, no, I'm just imagining things. This movie has gotten in my head. But that's how effective this movie is. Jonathan, you rewatched it when you were sitting down to watch it this time. How much of it felt like, oh, yeah, this. This all feels very familiar for I
- [18:53]
Jonathan Cohn
think it's uncanny how well done that movie was. And I'll say I just mentioned I don't remember the first time I saw Contagion, but I very specifically remember when Covid started watching it on video. I'm the kind of person, I like to lean into my fears, my anxiety. So I thought, yeah, and everyone in my family was like, you are crazy. But. But I kept. I watched it because. And I thought it was very realistic. Now, there's a reason it was realistic. They did their homework. They did research at the cd. They talked to CDC researchers. They really tried, within the confines of a movie, to get the science right, to get the policy reaction. And if you read there were a number of assessments, there's sort of two waves. Right when the movie came out and then when Covid was like, oh, let's go back and watch that movie and see what we can learn from it. And the general consensus I saw, and I'm not a scientist, just to be clear, but the consensus I saw was that they. It was pretty darn accurate in terms of the science, in terms of understanding how this would work. On day one, there were two people, and then four, and then 16. In three months, it's a billion.
- [19:58]
Sonny Bunch
That's where we're headed.
- [20:00]
Jonathan Cohn
And I think if you watched the COVID we all lived it. There was a lot there that it predicted correctly. Some things it didn't predict correctly. I think in some ways we did better. In some ways we did worse. But I thought. I thought they. I thought it was uncanny that, you know, 10 years, nine years before, how much it got right.
- [20:21]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, it's. It is wild just to watch this movie, in part because it is. It. It just feels like a scarily prescient film about the Way. More than anything else, the way everybody would react to Covid.
- [20:39]
Jonathan Cohn
They're calling out the National Guard. They're moving the president underground.
- [20:42]
Sonny Bunch
People will panic, get away.
- [20:44]
Jonathan Cohn
It will tip over.
- [20:45]
Sonny Bunch
The truth is being kept from the world. The one thing that really jumps out, rewatching it now and having just rewatched relatively recently, all the President's Men with you and Jonathan last on a. On a video podcast, is that this really is a. This is a journalism movie. Like you. It's not a journalism movie, but it is. It is a journalism movie. This is a movie about doing. Oh, boy, what do they call it? Shoe leather Epidemiology. Is. Is the. Is the phrase that is used in I Believe and the Band Played on, but it also applies here. Shoe leather epidemiology. It's about going places and finding out the truth and trying to figure out where this thing comes from in order to figure out how it got into the human population and stop its spread, which is I, you know, we're journalists. We like, we like that sort of thing. Yeah.
- [21:36]
Jonathan Cohn
It was an actually outbreak also does
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Sonny Bunch
a little bit of that too, now
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Jonathan Cohn
that I think about it.
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Sonny Bunch
Well, does the idiot version of that.
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Jonathan Cohn
It does, it does. But that's a really important part of what the CDC does. You know, these disease detectives are very famous. It's hard work and it is, you know, piecing together. It's one part science, one part investigative journalism. Who did you talk to?
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Sonny Bunch
Where were you?
- [21:58]
Jonathan Cohn
What happened? And logic. And I thought it got that right. It's a very, you know, you can see how it's a very labor intensive activity and how, you know, this is actually, it's funny this is coming up right now in this Ebola scare, which is. It stresses the importance of having surveillance systems that pick up diseases early. Early, as early as possible. They're really one of the reasons I think I mentioned at the top people are really worried about this Ebola scare in Africa is that they didn't catch it until it was a month into. We've already had, you know, when the first notice you hear of a outbreak is that the numbers are in the hundreds. That's bad because, you know there's more cases coming already because you haven't detected yet. People are just developing this disease. If you're gonna do contact tracing, that's the name for it. You know, you just think about the labor involved because, you know, it's that many more people now you have to go find. And you know, ideally you go find them, you quarantine them, and then you work your way backwards. And we saw that in Contagion. Really well.
- [22:59]
Sonny Bunch
Right.
- [23:00]
Jonathan Cohn
You know, we saw. That's the Kate Winslet character.
- [23:03]
Sonny Bunch
I need you to get me the names of everyone who service this room.
- [23:06]
Jonathan Cohn
It's an emergency. She's, you know, interviewing everybody. You know, she has that meeting in the office with. Did you know which people had been with. Hadn't been with the Emhoff character. Know the sort of. Who turns out to be the patient zero in this case. And, and of course, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's hard work. It's labor intensive and genuinely hazardous, you know, depending on the disease, obviously. Of course. Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't watched these movies by now, don't listen to this. But you know, Kate Winslet dies, she picks up the contain the disease in Cajun and she does not survive. And that is also a real thing that happens.
- [23:44]
Sonny Bunch
It's the thing that this movie really gets at again is the questions of trade offs. Right. So the disease outbreak occurs right around Thanksgiving. One of the discussions that the authorities are having in Minnesota, I believe, which is where the first big outbreak is picked up on, is what are we. All right, so we're going to shut down the mall during the busiest shopping day in America. We're gonna shut down our schools. Where are the kids gonna go? Who are. Who is gonna watch? Kids?
- [24:19]
Jonathan Cohn
When the word goes out, there will be a run on the banks, gas
- [24:24]
Sonny Bunch
stations, grocery stores, you name it. People will panic. And these are literally. These are literally the arguments we had during COVID Just, I don't know, nine years later. It was, it was the. It was. It is like looking into a. A preview of everything that would come.
- [24:42]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, yeah, I remember. I remember watching the movie the first time again. I remember what it was, but I do definitely have distinct memory of watching the movie whenever I did see it the first time. And thinking during those passages, come on. People are gonna not react that way. They're gonna, you know that the character from like the Minneapolis city council or whoever she's supposed to be, who's sort of pushing back against these restrictions because it's going to be expensive and it's gonna be so disruptive. I'm thinking, come on, that's not how people are going to react. They're going to be spooked. They're going to be. They're going to do whatever they can to stop this thing. They're going to realize how dangerous it is. Obviously, I was wrong. That movie got it right. And both. They got it right in the sense that actually these were debates that people had. And actually they were complex debates. We are still litigating some of these debates. We are still trying to figure out did we close the schools for too long, did we have too many restrictions? And smart people of similarly trying to. Similar sets of values don't always agree on these things. These are hard, hardcore questions. And the movie did a really good job of anticipating those.
- [25:42]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, I mean, in some ways the movie almost stacks the deck because the, the. The virus that is. That is in contagion has a mortality rate of what was it? 25%? 20, 25%. Covid much closer to, you know, 1 or 2% with higher, obviously certain demographics. And this is part of the debate, right? This was, this was a big part of the. Particularly now in the after effects. While, you know, if it's a disease that primarily affects the elderly or the, you know, the people with bad lungs or Whatever. Like, can we separate those groups? Can we, can we. If children are going to be unsafe in schools, can we keep those schools open? Which is, again, it's, it is a complicated argument about trade offs and safety. But this movie really did nail a lot of it, particularly with regard to my favorite character in the film, Jude Law's scammer, selling the forsythia substitute, you know, herbal remedy, whatever, whatever that is. Forsythia.
- [26:42]
Jonathan Cohn
There is no proof that forsythia works.
- [26:44]
Sonny Bunch
Who conducted the studies?
- [26:46]
Jonathan Cohn
What defines works against what strain of the virus?
- [26:49]
Sonny Bunch
Again, this is just like a thing that we saw. You can pronounce this word, Jonathan. You are Ivermectum. Ivermectin. Thank you. There we go.
- [26:59]
Jonathan Cohn
You know, I struggle with it too.
- [27:02]
Sonny Bunch
I never, I never get it right. Ivermectin or, you know, whatever else. Like there are chloroquine. Yeah, yeah, Clorox in your, in just directed directly into your veins. You know, we get it. Well, that's how we, that's how we save ourselves. And it is again, this is just like. Oh yeah, no, that, that happened. That happened. And it was a real problem. And it is still kind of a real problem.
- [27:28]
Jonathan Cohn
Very much still a real problem. Let's not forget who the Secretary of Health and Human Services is. Let's not forget who he's put into positions at HHS. I'm talking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Quite apart from the anti vaccination part of it, I mean, he also, I mean there are people, they are trying to tell you that vitamin A is better than the measles vaccine. And of course you need to spend about 5 seconds on Twitter in any of these, on any public health issue, measles or now Ebola or Hantavirus, and you will see it full of modern day Jude Laws. They're out there and you go on YouTube, they're all over the place. And it's incredible. And like Jude Law, I think what was interesting again, to his credit, this movie did so much so well. What made the Jude Law character, I think, very realistic portrayal is that number one he sounds when he presents, right? I mean, we see him as kind of behind the scenes, we see who he is. So we see he's got this sort of paranoid edge to him. But you know, they show us, we watch some of his videos, right? We see them and they see, you can see how they would seem persuasive. And of course, he's not all wrong, right? I mean, he's the guy who unearthed the story about the Laurence Fishburne character having Sort of warned his. I think it's his girlfriend, his wife, to get out of town. And again, how much of that did we see during the pandemic or we see now? Where are the. There are these fringe characters who peddle misinformation or lies. But, you know, you dig into these and you almost always find there's at least like 10 or 20% reality there. Maybe not always, but there frequently is. And that's what makes it a, hard to disentangle sometimes because you hear something like, oh, actually, I think that's correct. But then b, sort of, you know. You know, it creates this, you know, this dynamic where the people who are in power are sort of trying to anticipate this and it just goes round and round. It's just, you know, we live in this age of misinformation, which is a. Which is a real threat to public health and our general. I don't know about you, but it threatens my sanity.
- [29:44]
Sonny Bunch
Well, I know we live in a post truth age, and this is the sooner we all come to accept that we live in a. We live in an age where truth is very fungible. We'll probably be better off. The Jude Locke character is great because he does. He does a thing that conspiracy theory movies, when they get this right, they. They really get it right. JFK also has a sequence like this, but he's in a news interview situation and he just starts ratt facts and suppositions and he intermingles them and he does it in this kind of sloppy list way that's like, oh, why would you trust the pharmaceutical companies to, you know, tell you the truth about this? They have so much money that they are gonna be making.
- [30:26]
Jonathan Cohn
You won't even tell us the number of the dead, will you, Dr. Cheever? But you'll tell your friends when to get out of Chicago before anyone else has a chance.
- [30:35]
Sonny Bunch
And it's perfect. It's actually perfect. It's a perfect representation of the. The kind of ridiculous ways that the truth and the. The untruth mingle so elegantly.
- [30:50]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah.
- [30:50]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah.
- [30:51]
Jonathan Cohn
I mean, I think the one thing I got wrong is that in the movie, or maybe, you know, maybe they made a sequel. I guess if they made a sequel to To Contagion, we'd find out that Jude Law had been appointed head of the fda.
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Sonny Bunch
trip starts with peace of mind. Let's see. All right, so we've discussed. And the band played on, which is about a real virus. We've discussed Contagion, which is a very realistic movie about a fake virus. Now let's talk about Outbreak, which is a very unrealistic movie about a fake virus.
- [32:06]
Jonathan Cohn
Your town is being quarantined.
- [32:09]
Sonny Bunch
We got 19 dead. We got 100 more infected.
- [32:11]
Jonathan Cohn
It's spreading like a brush fire. What are you talking about?
- [32:13]
Sonny Bunch
Motaba's not real, right, Jonathan? I'm not, I'm not going. I'm not aware.
- [32:17]
Jonathan Cohn
Same caveat. I'm not a scientist, but I've never, I've never heard of it.
- [32:20]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, okay, but. So Outbreak is the Wolfgang Peterson action adventure movie. Stars Dustin Hoffman, Renee Russo, Morgan Freeman, Donald Sutherland, young Patrick Dempsey. It's got an all star cast is what I'm saying it is. And it is a prime example of high concept, 1990s big, well, medium budget. It's only a $50 million movie, though. That's. That. That was real money back in 1990. $50 million gets you an episode of House of the Dragon now. But the, you know, $50 million, that's a lot of money. It's a, it's a big, it's a big movie. It's got great actors, people who would go on to have great careers. Cuba Gooding, Jr. And it's ridiculous. It's a, it's a, it's a fairly ridiculous film, but I think it actually really captures the actual response people would have to being quarantined in their town. Possibly better than any of the other things we've seen so far or discussed so far today.
- [33:20]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, no, I mean, they definitely got some things right. It got that reaction. And when you think about it, given the nature of that particular virus in the movie, that the fictional virus, obviously. But you know, quarantining a town would make sense in that kind of environment. And you can see how people would rebel against also, you know, the disease. The one part I think it did get right Also we were talking about it before, but the sort of contract, you know, the contact, the, the contact tracing, the sort of putting the mystery together of where this came from. I mean it's, it's more stylized because it's Hollywood and you know, they're on a helicopter onto a boat.
- [33:58]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah.
- [33:59]
Jonathan Cohn
You know, there's the monkey and all that. You know, it's the same basic process, right. It's like, well, this person got it from this person. We know this person got here. Oh, there was this movie theater. Can we trace it back? We go back, we get this plane.
- [34:15]
Sonny Bunch
Uh huh.
- [34:15]
Jonathan Cohn
And they eventually figure out it came from this monkey that, you know, whatever. And, and the leap from monkeys to humans is a thing. The species cry. That's how these diseases sometimes appear. Ebola today, that was first detected in the 70s and one of the theories is that it was circulating for a long time in the bat population and it kind of made some kind of jump to humans or was given to humans in some of the minds of the drc, Democratic Republic of the Congo. So as I think the standard. I think it really depends on what standard we're going by here. If we're going by the standard of contagion and the band played on it was ridiculous, you know, by the standard of your standard Hollywood movie, you know, not bad.
- [34:55]
Sonny Bunch
One of the, one of the entire sub genres we have avoided for this. This. The purpose of this discussion is the zombie film of course, which you know, is. Is another kind of disease movie and has. But those are the connotations. There are different. It's. It's usually less about the disease itself than. Than standing in for some immigration or whatever, which is a whole different. That's a whole nother episode. Maybe we do a follow up on the zombie surge of the post 911 era.
- [35:23]
Jonathan Cohn
I am Legend. Right? There's a little, there's a little medicine.
- [35:26]
Sonny Bunch
I Am Legend is. Well, it's the most realistic movie about vampire zombies that are created from I think an AIDS vaccine. Is that what it was?
- [35:37]
Jonathan Cohn
I thought it was a cancer or
- [35:38]
Sonny Bunch
was it a cancer vaccine?
- [35:39]
Jonathan Cohn
I can't believe it.
- [35:42]
Sonny Bunch
It's been a while since I watched I Am Legend. Good movie. I've always liked it.
- [35:46]
Jonathan Cohn
Scary, scary movie.
- [35:47]
Sonny Bunch
Scary scary. It is a scary movie. Those are some scary vampires. But Outbreak is great. I. Could you imagine? I. So I did not see Outbreak in theaters. I. I saw it when it was on hbo. This was a. This was a pretty regular HBO film for a long time. But could you imagine having seen that the theater Scene with a guy coughing and spreading all of the germs everywhere. In a theater with people, You could just. I just imagine Wolfgang Peterson being like, yes, yes, this is perfect.
- [36:23]
Jonathan Cohn
I mean, I'm pretty sure I did see it in the theater. I don't remember if I sort of started paying attention because, I mean, think about it. If you're in any large room, if you've ever done this, and I'm a public health guy, so I do this. If you like to stop for about three minutes and just listen, you'll hear sneezes, coughing, everything. And people. You know, our bodies make noises all the time, even when we're healthy. So, yeah, that would have been. That would have been wild. I don't think I was paying attention. I don't recall paying attention to that at the time. I thought that was a really well done scene. The sort of. The way that movie portrayed Transmission different from Contagion. And this is the movie technical stuff. I don't know this stuff at all. I mean, Soderbergh, though, like, he's got these, like, flashes where, like, you stop the scene and you see where someone is touching a thing or. Whereas in Outbreak, right, you sort of followed the droplets. Remember the scene in the hospital where the droplets go in the air duct
- [37:13]
Sonny Bunch
and through the air duct? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [37:16]
Jonathan Cohn
Which I thought was good. I thought it was very well portrayed.
- [37:19]
Sonny Bunch
No, that is. It's funny because that is a very literalist way to be. Like, how do I demonstrate visually what is happening with this disease? I'll go through the air ducts. Yes, that will work. But I do love if we'll jump back to Contagion here for a second. I do love what Soderbergh did with the editing and the musical choices there. The film is scored by Cliff Martinez, who's best known for Drive and some other things. But he has this kind of techno. This kind of driving techno score that, like. It really feels like a rhythm every time somebody touches a door or, you know, touches their face, as we learn you do, a thousand, three thousand times a day. Whatever. The. Just this. This kind of constant sourcing of transmission. And you don't realize it at first. You don't realize what these. What these very intentional camera shots are doing until a few minutes into it. You're like, oh, this is the path of transmission. This is the. These are the vectors. Peanuts at an airport lounge. Never again. Never. Never. Not even once.
- [38:24]
Jonathan Cohn
You don't. You don't want to know what people cover healthcare. Like, that's like the Third, like, one of the first things you always hear is like, never eat the peanuts or pretzels. Like, never. You don't want to know because just think about it. These things are sitting out there. People are sticking their hands in. Do you know where people's hands have been?
- [38:38]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, they're sneezing all over them. Coughing. It's. It's. It's everywhere.
- [38:43]
Jonathan Cohn
Worse than that, right?
- [38:45]
Sonny Bunch
My favorite shot in this film, though, Jonathan, maybe you notice this. We. There's a prologue in an African village. And then we. We go to Dustin Hoffman, and he's got some family drama. And then we basically take a tour of the BSL labs, which is done in a single tracking shot. Where we go from BSL1, which is where a little title card says, like, flu, cold, whatever. BSL2, which is, I don't know, more contagious diseases. Then we get to, like, measles. And then finally you get to BSL4, and it's, you know, Ebola and Hantavirus, I think. So anyway, the shot is like. It's this oner. It's a tracking shot all around the lab. And it's important because it shows you in a very continuous and fluid way, the leveling up of security in these rooms, the leveling up of, you know, precautions that are taken. And I sat there thinking to myself, oh, man, this is the Copacabana shot from Goodfellas. This is actually the. This is the same shot. And then I stopped for a second. I was like, wait. And looked it up. And sure enough, Michael Ballhaus was the cinematographer on both Goodfellas and this. And I was just like, I wonder if he went to. Wolfgang Peterson was like, I can do the Copa shot, but for BSLs. And Wolfgang Peterson was like, yes, do it.
- [40:08]
Jonathan Cohn
That is wild. Yeah, it makes sense. It's the same shot, right? Except instead of, you know, slipping, you know, a couple bucks to the usher and all that, you know, you're getting put on the biohazard suit.
- [40:19]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah. Probably took less time to light. Cause you don't have to go through the kitchen. But it was a. It's a great shot and it's a great sequence. And look, this is a really entertaining movie. It's silly in a lot of ways. It is silly in a lot of ways. One of them being the paranoid thriller aspect. So we. Before the show, we were. We were talking about this a little bit. It is a little bit like, this is the thing that rankles the most with me on this film. There's a version of this film where they're just trying to stop this disease. And I think that's slightly better than the version that we end up with, which is where the military is trying to keep this disease a secret so they can use it as a weapon at some point, which, I mean, maybe, I don't know. You're the disease expert. Is this a regular thing that we do? Do we have a big collection of secret viruses that we can deploy at any point, Jonathan?
- [41:08]
Jonathan Cohn
I mean, I don't know. And if I did know, I'd have to kill you or give you the virus, I guess. You know, I mean, who knows what kind of research is going on in our bioweapons labs, et cetera. The paranoid there, first of all, by the way, you know this, but is Donald Sutherland, if I see him in a movie, should assumer in a 70s paranoid movie. It's like, I feel like he's always. That's always what he does.
- [41:33]
Sonny Bunch
That's his.
- [41:34]
Jonathan Cohn
He's in JFK too, right? He's in jfk, yeah, he's the, he's
- [41:38]
Sonny Bunch
the best sequence in JFK is where he is. He's laying out the whole conspiracy to. To Kevin Costner. It's one of my favorite, favorite moments in film.
- [41:46]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, I know. He's. He's great. So I don't know, you know, certainly right though. I mean, now we get to Covid, right? I mean, one of the coveted theories that this was a bioweapons lab in China or some kind of research lab, and it kind of walked out of a lab. So I don't know what we do and don't know. And you know, I wouldn't know. I'm not. That's not my kind of thing. I'm not clear diving it hurtling on here, you know.
- [42:08]
Sonny Bunch
All right, maybe ask your secrets, keep your secrets, Jonathan. That's fine, that's fine. But no, that, that, that's the one thing, because there's, there's a version of this film that has like a real debate again at a heightened level of like we're gonna wipe out this town with a sub nuclear blast to stop the spread of the virus. Which like, okay, I mean, a little extreme, but that's a conversation we could have, I guess. That's a debate. That's a debate Americans could have. And there's that great scene with J.T. walsh, who's playing the chief of staff of the president. And he's like, I am not taking this to the President. I am not taking a plan to murder 2,000Americans to the president. Unless we are all saying in public that we're gonna do it. Cause that's a disaster politically, which, yes, also potentially morally and ethically. But again, at least that's a debate. Once you start getting into, like, oh, well, they're doing it to benefit themselves. That's crass. I find that crass less interesting, frankly. Less morally ambiguous. Yeah, yeah.
- [43:14]
Jonathan Cohn
No, I mean, there was a clear bad guy, right? I mean, the government developed this bioweapon, and now they want to keep it secret. And that's why they're not gonna. That's why they're gonna massacre a town instead. The people. Yeah, it doesn't really, you know, and then they realize, you know, that. That. That I. I mean, you have to be pretty far on the paranoid spectrum to think that's how things would work. I mean, as we saw in the other two movies, government can get things wrong. It can mess up. But you're much. You know, that it can. You know, it's much like more likely to. Because of, you know, bureaucratic infighting or funding issues, political agendas, or the fact that, you know, the people at the cdc, like everyone else, are human beings and they're gonna make mistakes, they're gonna fuck up. And, you know, that happens. And that happens in the first two movies in multiple occasions. So, yeah, that was not. But, you know, whatever. I mean, it was. It was. It was that. To me.
- [44:03]
Sonny Bunch
I know.
- [44:03]
Jonathan Cohn
You know, it's pretty obvious their commitment to reality was out the door once we got into these sort of helicopters topping the airplane. I mean, I guess that could actually work that way, you know. Sure. But just. I mean.
- [44:16]
Sonny Bunch
Sure. That's probably more realistic, frankly, than finding one monkey in the forest of, you know, of California.
- [44:25]
Jonathan Cohn
The.
- [44:26]
Sonny Bunch
All right, so, you know, each of these movies kind of has a message that we can take away from them. Again, they're not message movies, but they have messages that we can take away from them. And the band played on. It's, you know, the importance of the consistency of messaging and search, like searching for the actual truth instead of trying to massage political reality with contagion. It's, you know, the importance of maybe having a plan in place to stop the spread of a virus that people can, you know, adhere to. What do you think is the message we should take away from Outbreak? I have one. I have a message, but I want to. I want to hear what you have to say first, John.
- [45:07]
Jonathan Cohn
I mean, I feel like that was, you know, keeping with what we were talking about. There's a reason we said 70s throwback, thriller, paranoia. I mean, very much the government is out to get, you know. You know, don't trust them. And that was the message. I got that there. You know, there might be good people working in places like cdc, but you need to be insanely distrustful of the Governor General, the defense establishment in particular. Again. And if you see Donald Sutherland anywhere, assume he's lying to you and he's conspiring against you.
- [45:33]
Sonny Bunch
It really is interesting. You have this, you know, in the 90s, we have this period of unparalleled peace and prosperity in American history. And then we also get, like, the X Files and Outbreak. It's like, really don't trust the government, though. That's. That's the number one issue. No, the lesson. The lesson. And I'm sad that you missed this, Jonathan, because it's a very important lesson. Lesson is don't smuggle monkeys into the country. This whole movie starts when somebody smuggles a monkey into the country. You know what? That's no good. Don't do that. Don't try to steal monkeys from labs and sell them for pets. The monkeys aren't pets. They're not. Unless you're Michael Jackson. No. Monkeys as pets. That's. No. That's not allowed. Don't do that. That's the. That's my lesson from Outbreak.
- [46:12]
Jonathan Cohn
Good life lesson. Good life lesson.
- [46:15]
Sonny Bunch
Good life lesson. Well, Jonathan, thank you for discussing these viral films with us. And again, I do not think anybody has too much to worry about from Ebola or Hanta, but if things start getting out of hand, watch these movies and take away the lessons from them. Don't panic. Just let's try and figure this out. Let's do a little better job this time.
- [46:42]
Jonathan Cohn
Wash your hands, too. That's good. Wash your hands.
- [46:45]
Sonny Bunch
Wash your hands. I still have bottles of hand sanitizer all over my house. Little remnants of the COVID era. All right, thanks, Jonathan. And everybody. Make sure you hit like and subscribe. Share this with your friends. You know, if you enjoyed this and you can watch these movies. I think Outbreak and Contagion are on vod. You can pick them up on Blu Ray for relatively cheap. And the Band Played on is on hbo. Max. You can watch that there and that. But we didn't even talk about the cast of that movie. But that is a. That's a really, really great. I was a little bit surprised to realize that critics were not that into it because it's. I think it's really good. It's really.
- [47:27]
Jonathan Cohn
I think it holds up better than the initial reaction. I'll just say, can I put in a plug for the book, the Randy Schultz book? It had some problems. Like any book is written in the moment by someone in the middle of the story. But as a piece of journalism, as someone who does tries very hard to write narrative journalism that is also about larger substantive issues. I think it's an incredible book if you're interested in journalism or if you really want to be transported back in time. And again, to get that theme, we were talking about how attitudes about sexuality have and haven't changed since that, that period. I can't recommend the book enough.
- [48:04]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, and the name of the book is and the Band Played on it's and the Band Played On Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic. You pick it up anywhere books are sold. So you should, you should, you should check it out. Great. Well, Jonathan, thanks for being on and we'll be back with more takes here at Bulwark. Subscribe Like Share do all those things. Forget whatever plans you have this weekend because you're staying at home and playing on spinquest and there's never been a better time to sign up than right now. New users get $30 coin packs for just $10. All the table games you love with
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