‘Contagion’ or How Disaster Movies “Educate” the Masses

Hollywood movies are usually presented as a form of entertainment, but their plots often conceal a specific agenda. “Disaster movies”, films about the end of the world through various mass crises, are particularly interesting as they all follow the same basic formula and glorify the same entities. In this article, we’ll look at the disaster movie ‘Contagion’ and how it “teaches” its viewers who to trust and who not to trust during a crisis.

Most people watch movies to be entertained. Well, I for one can say that there was absolutely nothing entertaining about Contagion. In fact, the only difference between this movie and state-sponsored educational movies shown in schools is that with Contagion you actually have to pay to be indoctrinated … and to see Matt Damon. During the cold war, students were shown videos instructing them to “Duck and Cover” in case of a nuclear attack. Contagion conditions the masses to expect martial law and to throw themselves at the first available vaccine in case of a crisis.

Featuring Hollywood mega-stars like Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, Contagion is a big-ticket Hollywood movie, but also an infomercial promoting specific national and international agencies while encouraging specific behaviors from the public. The plot of the movie appears to follow the big H1N1 scare of 2009 that left many citizens uncertain about the actual risk of the virus. Indeed, after months of terrifying news crowned by a massive vaccination campaign, an important portion of the population concluded that the H1N1 scare was grossly exaggerated and and thought that a vaccine was unnecessary.

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