Loading summary
Transcript24 lines
- [00:00]
A
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 bad things in the air, Jonathan, which I know this is why you're wearing masks. We got hantavirus on cruise ships. We got Ebola in Africa. We got the occasional monkeypox still coming out. 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.
- [00:35]
B
You can't be too careful, you know,
- [00:37]
A
you can't be too careful. That's my.
- [00:40]
B
Actually, you can be too careful.
- [00:41]
A
But. 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 don't seem good right now, John.
- [00:58]
B
They're not good. In the last month, 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, 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, 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. And out in these countries, 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.
- [02:16]
A
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, For a series of deadly. Not that there's ever a good moment for Ebola unless. Unless you're watching a Wolfgang Peterson movie. But we'll get to that. We'll get to. 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 viral outbreak situation. But we'll come to that, too. But let's start with and the Band Played on because 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, yeah, I'm a little younger than you, but 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 what the state of play at that moment. Yeah.
- [04:11]
B
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 of. 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 in a time in the 90s when sexual attitudes about sexuality are changing. I think for people who are much younger, if you're live today, 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.
- [06:07]
A
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. It was it 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 globe trotting 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. It 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 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 addressing and tackling a big, important topic. What were some of the differences between the book and the movie?
- [06:53]
B
Well, I would say the biggest difference is that the book, although it has a narrative structure to it, it very much tries to tell a big 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 a movie, whether that helped or not. But believe it or not, the movie really winnowed 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, what 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 there. 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.
- [08:37]
A
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 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. 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.
- [09:29]
B
I was the best in the business. Ask anybody, leave it to me to get some disease nobody ever heard of.
- [09:36]
A
And somebody actually came, 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.
- [10:15]
B
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 administration, the Reagan administration, that also is at best indifferent as a whole in terms of 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 I'm very sympathetic to the people at cdc. 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. Give us a number so we won't annoy you again until the amount of money you begin spending on lawsuits makes
- [11:48]
A
it more profitable for you to save people.
- [11:50]
B
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.
- [13:27]
A
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.
- [13:42]
B
My hometown were telling me I was a freak because of my sexual orientation until I came to San Francisco.
- [13:50]
A
And scientists are like, you're gonna get sick and die. Like, this is just that this is bad. We have to shut these down. And 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 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. Who is purely villainous. Which is. 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.
- [15:35]
B
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.
- [15:48]
A
That was. I agree.
- [15:49]
B
I think it was probably a good change.
- [15:51]
A
Yeah. 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. We're going to talk about Contagion next, but I want to. 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 totally psychosomatic. 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 it was. I was like, 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.
- [17:21]
B
I 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 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 two waves right when the movie came out, and then when Covid, everyone 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. That's where we're headed. And I think if you watched the COVID we all lived it. There was a lot there that it predicted correctly.