Contagious

Today I went to see Contagion, a movie about a run-away deadly virus, which was apparently the most popular film in the U.S. since it opened in theatres a few days ago. On an intellectual level, it seems odd that a film about something immensely tragic can be a source of entertainment. Particularly when you think about the timing of its release — a weekend of national mourning.

Yet it is entertaining. Steven Soderbergh really knows how to tell a story. The audience is caught up in the awful narrative, and barely has time to catch its breath before the next human drama, unexpected tragedy or nail-biting race against time.

I think the key is in the way fictional narrative is precisely opposite to reality. The problem with reality is that nothing really makes sense — things just happen, and we find ourselves desperately trying to write a narrative after the fact, in our attempt to explain the unexplainable.

Yet in a fictional narrative an author can use even the most calamitous events as a way to create the illusion of an ordered universe. A story may be filled with death and tragedy, but at the end of the story there is redemption. Not the kind of random little bits and pieces of saving grace that we are left with when real life throws things at us, but something else entirely.

In a fictional world, an author can build meaning into the very fabric of reality, into the arc of time itself. In particular, a well architected story can convey the sense that the choices we make matter, that people matter, that all of our struggles and attempts to connect have not been in vain.

Yes, there is suffering in these narratives, and sometimes great pain and loss. Yet thanks to the magic of storytelling, we walk out of the theatre having been given the one thing we crave most in life — a feeling that somehow, underneath it all, the universe makes sense.

4 thoughts on “Contagious”

  1. How would this change (or not) if we had your “multiverse movies”? Would the existence of multiple paths for the story with potentially different endings (under the viewer’s control) remove some of this power of the narrative? Or would it perhaps give more power because it becomes the viewer’s choices that can make a difference, not just the author’s?

  2. I’m not sure it would make a difference. The presence of an author, making decisions that shape your experience of the fictional universe, would distinguishes both linear story and multiverse story from the haphazard randomness of reality.

  3. I was thinking that if there are many story paths—some where the characters live and some where they die, some where the boy gets the girl and some where he doesn’t—then the experience of redemption or things making sense might be diminished. If the story can be different each time you experience it then it loses that sense of timelessness and things having to turn out the way they did. That all makes it seem more like real life. I guess maybe I’m not sold on the idea of multiverse movies in general. Can you imagine Casablanca in a multiverse format?

  4. (Okay, I just went back and reread you post on multiverse movies and you pretty much exclude Casablanca from the candidates. Still.)

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