This post is saving a long comment that FB wouldn't let me post for length, but I had it penned and I would have put it up here anyway so that it doesn't get lost amid the many FB memes I post. I rewatched Contagion recently during lockdown and posted a link to youtube video of the musci and lyrics of U2's "All I Want Is You," which plays over the final scenes in the film, and what follows is an interchange between my friend Rob and myself about the film.
Me:
Can't stop listening to this song since I rewatched Contagion and the
played it at the end over-top of Matt Damon's character setting up the
prom dance for his daughter at home with the boyfriend who now has his
inoculation bracelet, as Damon pauses looking at the pictures he found
of his deceased wife ... they wrapped a lot up in that one scene about
the struggle of being human.
Rob:
I agree. Those scenes were powerful n hopeful/nostalgic at the end of a pretty grim series of events!
Me:
Nostalgic but
also, I thought, still painful and looking at character. I found the
portrayal of Paltrow's character the most interesting on this watch. I
think that one of the things that most drives Damon's character's
reaction in finding the pics is the
mystery of her doing what she was doing, because he works at being a
good husband and father. And it's not really a moral or justice
commentary on her action. I think it really is meant to be shown as a
painful mystery. That doesn't necessarily negate any possibility of
moral commentary being made on adultery, but the film is examining
another point, or at least I think it is. I think that the whole way
through, she has a kind of unfocused stare that bespeaks in modern life a
quiet or masked desperation. I think that the whole way through her
scenes, you see somebody who is not malicious, not saying things about
what a loser her husband is, but somebody who is going through a lot of
motions that your culture tells you you're supposed to go through when
your company sends you on trips around the word: gambling at the casino,
shaking hands with the chef, taking pictures with everybody, but always
with this lack of focus that hints at wondering whether you're being a
good "fulfilled" modern person, whether you're doing what you're
"supposed" to do in these situations (I think you see that most in the
blowing on the dice and things like that ... the "excitement" you're
supposed to show when having fun in places like this, but always a
little wondering whether you're getting it right) ... and then the same
unfocused look (which Paltrow does well, and seems almost like a
trademark of hers, just like everybody knows the pensive stare in the
eyes of Harrison Ford that Abrams had to get him to break out of to do
Han Solo again convincingly) and the same distant stare when she calls
her old flame and the unsure "if that's a thing you would like me to
do," that look of doing something because, well that's how things
happen, right?, at least in all the modern stories you have been told. I
think that what drives the final scene effectively is Damon's effort at
rebuilding life for his daughter in the midst of the pain of the
mystery of what happened with his wife (I've become a big fan of
Damon's, he definitely has his stock characterness, but I find it pretty
relatable, and what I really like is his choices of roles ... just
recently rewatched Downsizing, which I think is an incredible commentary
on the precarity and preciousness of life ... and rewatched Adjustment
Bureau, which of course has the always-good Emily Blunt ... I think
something about his sensibilities breaths some life into places you
usually don't think about it too: I like SNL's political commentary and
some of their individual players' characters, but there's also a good
bit of stuff in which they get stale, and I noticed that, when Damon
hosted, the whole thing felt fresher because some core human thing got
injected through things like his Christmas skit with Cecily Strong and
his being the finally revealed "Tommy" from the Weekend Update's
recurring character "Angel, the girlfriend in every boxing movie" ...
and the whole thing he has going with Jimmy Kimmel is among the most
creative parodies on late night and has really had a staying power as a
gag [although I didn't like the "who's the father?" one at all ... the
topic was very morbid fascination]).
Rob:
I think u r
correct in that the movie doesn’t really comment on g.p.’s character’s
moral choices. I’m not sure if the influence of the modern world is the
culprit behind her character’s actions. I really think it is more the
case of a person putting their own
desires over the commitments to others she had made. Good old sinful
impulse at work there. When I was married, I was the stay at home
husband taking care of young kids while my wife enjoyed a high profile
job n travel n all that stuff. I think Damon’s character deserves better
than what he got. In the midst of all the chaos, he remains true n
steady, parenting the child he has left through the worst. Steady,
faithful people aren’t often painted as heros, but that character is a
hero to me!
Me:
Oh, I definitely
think he's a hero, and I definitely think he deserves better. And, as I say, I
don't think seeing this other side precludes examining the story for whats
there on a justice side for his character and maybe even a moral side for hers.
But I think the commentary I'm thinking of on her is, I guess, not so much
about whether the modern world is the influence that causes, but more about her
as a sort of emblem or representative of humanity in the modern global world,
which I mean in a little bit different way than metaphorical symbol but maybe
still a little bit like it (I spent waaaaay too much time on metaphor theory in
relation to other figurative language when doing comps). I think part of what
the film examines is that, in our globalization, we are a bit in over our
heads. We have ideas like "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas"
because we still think of the physical distance between us and Vegas like a safety
buffer (ironically, while we keep it in mind in hoping it's a buffer, we have
also become alienated somewhat from our own embodied nature through the speed
of travel, it doesn't register with us that a thousand miles is a thousand
miles because of how quickly we can cover it ... heaven help us if we ever find
a way to make the Star Trek teleporter more than just fiction; even if the
material side works, we're going to wind up the psychological version of Jeff
Goldblum in The Fly), and THAT becomes sort of an "if you build it, they
will come" in the form of "something should happen in Vegas that you
would want to stay in Vegas" (I think this thing occurs on the consumer
side that is a bit like the technological imperative, that we feel like, if
something is potential in the package we paid for and we don't use it, we're
somehow wasting it; I remember being on the BX 12 bus hearing a guy talking
about sports on his cel phone loudly and thinking, you know, if we hadn't built
the cel phone, we would have never thought there was a need to discuss sports
scores right now on a crowded bus with a bunch of people also having
conversations on their phones; we feel like, if we don't use up the airtime we
paid for, then we overpaid), and we still sort of have these ideas of distances
as buffers that we don't realize we have broken when we broke the barriers of
getting ourselves there and back so quickly. We wanted to travel at jet speeds
but thought that we were going to be the only ones who could or that we got to
decide who else got to, as if we could put up a sign that said "no viruses
allowed on this plane" and it would be obeyed, just like, once we could go
to Vegas hundreds of miles away for a weekend, we thought that we could tell
what happened in the weekend in Vegas to stay there (and there's a bit of
social justice at play in this one ... if all the naughtiness that happens in
Vegas stays there, then it's a pretty infectious place to live for those who
can't leave Vegas because they live in the industry there, or on cruise lines,
in both of which places promiscuity among personnel is supposedly rampant, and
there I do think there is a bit more of a metaphor between the virus and
lifestyles that sink in when people live in and services the zones where we
think we get to go to have fun and then leave it there). I think maybe there is
a bit of critique of not taking consequences into account (still one of my
favorite lines, maybe in all of lit, at least for being both funny and very
insightful, in one of the last two Tiffany Aching books in Terry Pratchett's
disc world series, I think the last one, which makes it the last book in the
whole series, actually published posthumously, when Tiffany's personal favorite
excuse from the people she has to help, as their witch, out of the scrapes they
get themselves into, is "I didn't know it would go boom," when it
says "Goes Boom" in big letters on the side of the box it came in).
I think that one of the things that tipped me to thinking of
the film Contagion like this is the abruptness of her death and the lack of
exposition of any kind of interaction with MD;s character versus the amount of
exposition you get through flashback. The process is sort of doing a character
archeology in the same way the researchers are doing an archeology of the path
of the virus's transmission. There I think there is a much more straight-up
metaphorical relation: researching the virus is symbolic of trying to figure
out the human behavior being interjected in flashbacks of her trip, trying to understand
why we do the things we do. There's definitely a moral component and free will,
but I think we also have a lot to learn about the psychological forces that
impinge on it. The exposition of her character just seems too intensive to me
and intensive beyond the issue of infidelity to be simply about that. It
doesn't hold a real revelation placement, for one. You get pretty early on that
she cheated, because the male voice on the phone mentions having sex recently
and then she gets back to her house and it seems pretty obvious that it was not
MD she had been talking to, if she is returning to him ... and then, just like
that, she is dead, but then you have all this screen-time of her in the casino,
making that the sort of setting that is important for some reason before you
get the full researcher archeology of the timeline in which that is where it
definitely started its spread (I think, along the lines of interpretation, that
having so much time in the casino before you have the end-of-film revelation that
that is where the spread started, happens not just so that you get this
revelation feeling about the physical spread of the virus, but also so that the
setting can saturate you brain a little bit and make you focus on her
disposition there as a character exposition that works hand-in-hand with the
revelations about the physical spread of the virus). And then, in that packed
ending sequence, pretty much right alongside the final revelation scene of the
bat dropping the stuff in the pig pen and her shaking the chef's hand, you get
Damon's discovery of the collage of pictures on the camera as a last kind of
emotional exposition in the midst of the trying to move forward and create a
meaningful life experience for his daughter. I think that that is one of the
things that really endeared me to the film on this watching, the layers of
human issue and human experience in the midst of this pandemic. setting.
I think that one of the things that the social distancing in
the present situation can do is to teach us to pause and think, take time to
"be still" and, if not "know that I am God," at least
reflect more on why we do the things we do, what ways of thinking we let in the
door that make it easier or harder to have the presence of mind and the
disposition to do the right thing. I don't think it is good for us to stay
always like this because there is something quasi-holy in contact with other
human beings, but sometimes we need to step out of being swept in the jet pace
of the world we have created and realize that we might be bringing narratives
on our travels with us that, in their impact on our disposition, will make it
harder to be good (to answer that question so wonderfully put by the drunken
angel singing a Lou Reed song in Wim Wenders's Far Away So Close, "why
can't I be good?") , the same as we bring viruses on a plane without
realizing it because we don't listen and take into account the fact that those
kinds of things can be carried with you and can be spread "under the
radar." I always like that moment at the end of Her when, after the OSes
have departed, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams are on the rooftop, forced to take
a moment in the void left by the OS "relationships" to reexamine
human relationship (I thought that film also had some strong exposition of the
embodied nature of human existence and relation by contrasting it with the OS
thinking ... I've thought for a while now that it's important to the
understanding of the Incarnation to see that it's important that it says the
Word became "flesh" [sarx] and not "body" [soma], I think
of flesh as kind of the squishiness of human bodily experience, and while it's
important that that is not the more sort of abstracted holistic concept of
"soma," it does dovetail and mesh with that concept because, for that
ancient mindset, body was not defined by extension in three dimensions [they
did think about breath, height, and depth, but it was not what defined
"body"], it was defined by relationality: the body is the way you
relate to the soil through tilling it, to God or the gods through cultic acts,
to your spouse by physical conjugal acts, to your kids through hugging them ...
and the way we experience "body" is through the squishiness of
"flesh" ... "Why had [Harry] never appreciated what a miracle he
was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?" [Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows, 692).
OK, enough exposition lol ... but I will probably copy and
paste this out to my blog.
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