I couldn’t bear to watch ‘Contagion’ last year, but I rewatched it recently and asked the screenwriter what he would change
Written by Scott Z. Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh, 2011′s “Contagion” hit No. 10 on the iTunes movie rental chart a year ago in January. In those early moths of the pandemic, audiences were suddenly seeking out a nearly decade-old thriller depicting a fictional pandemic bearing a resemblance the COVID-19 outbreak of the past year.
I actively avoided it. The fictional on-screen calamity mirrored our own unstable reality in ways that hit too close to all my anxiety receptors. A year-plus later with uncertain light at the end of the tunnel in the U.S., I found myself drawn to the movie in order to think through, with the benefit of some hindsight, what it anticipated as well as what it missed:
• As devastating as the real world numbers have been, Burns envisioned a much higher death toll globally (26 million) than what we’ve actually seen (more than 3 million).
• Teens are gonna teen, which for some meant defying their parents and meeting up with friends in potentially superspreader, mask-free settings. You can see this play out in the film as well, with Matt Damon’s character forever trying (and failing) to keep his teenage daughter physically isolated from her boyfriend. Her at-home prom at
