It all started from China and an animal, a pig contaminated by a bat. Called MEV-1, the virus soon spread around the world. The toll is extremely heavy: the deaths number in the millions.
There is all the same good news: a vaccine ends up being found against the virus during the hundred minutes particularly anxiety-provoking that "Contagion" lasts. Because it is indeed cinema and fiction that it is about.
VIDEO. The "Contagion" trailer
Steven Soderbergh's film has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent weeks, due to the Covid-19 coronavirus crisis. In the United States, it even rose to the top ten films most downloaded from iTunes last month, a feat for a feature film released in theaters almost ten years ago. In the same epidemic vein, the film "Alert! With Dustin Hoffman, released in 1995, was also in the top 100. These two films have in common that they draw on reality to show a new danger (the Motaba virus of “Alert!” Evokes Ebola , that of "Contagion" recalls Sras).
Fiction can also anticipate reality in this matter. In his novel "The Eyes Of Darkness", the American writer Dean Koontz already imagined in 1981 a pandemic caused by a born virus, such as Covid-19, in the city of Wuhan.
The anxiety of social disintegration
Like many other works of the same genre or pouring into a more horrifying register, their interest does not necessarily lie in the credibility of the virus staged, but rather in the way they depict the anxieties that the disease carries with it. Starting with the fear of the unknown, of what is foreign.
"A virus is not only dangerous by itself," explains Laurent-Henri Vergnaud, science historian at the University of Burgundy. Seasonal flu is also killing people. It is however accepted because it is known and integrated into our social imagination. The danger is circumscribed in the minds of individuals ”. How deadly is a virus? How contagious is it? While waiting for clear answers, the only priority first is distrust, even fear of the other.
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Because the consequences of an epidemic on bodies may be glaring, especially when the decline is as spectacular as in zombie films, they are even more dangerous for social ties. An impact already underlined in Antiquity by Thucydides in "The Peloponnesian War" in a passage on the "plague" striking Athens, recalls Patrick Zylberman, professor emeritus of health history at the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health . “Obviously, he didn't have the science we have today. Her description of the epidemic and its societal effects remain very fair and striking and she did not fail to be picked up and looted. ”
"Desire for destruction" and "reservoir of knowledge"
When the epidemic takes a turn as extreme as in zombie movies like "28 Days Later", or "Zombie", or a series like "The Walking Dead", the prospect of a war of all against all becomes a reality. The state, the police or even the army become obsolete. "The disappearance of social and political institutions [...] forces the few survivors to set their own rules for living together", as summarized by the philosopher Hugo Clémot in his article "A reading of epidemic horror films" published in 2011.
In these conditions, individual heroism is the only remedy. The last bond that remains, the one that is the most difficult to break, very often remains that between a parent in his child or between two spouses.
VIDEO. The trailer for "28 Days Later"
Does this mean that fiction can only offer an additional dose of anxiety when it comes to an epidemic? Not so simple for Bertrand Vidal, author of the book "Survivalism". "Apart from a context of contagion, these films also express the desire for catastrophe and destruction that there is in us," advises the sociologist. This desire for destruction is inseparable from that of the tabula rasa : to represent the destruction of the world is also to imagine the after, the new world after the destruction of the old world. "
In the very special case of survivalists, these people preparing for a collapse of civilization caused by one or more factors, these films and series are even one of the only and unique ways to anticipate what will happen. Fiction is then transformed into "a store of knowledge, a resource for reality", explains Bertrand Vidal. In North America, "zombies studies" have even crept into the ranks of very serious scientists to understand epidemics.
For a wider audience, a fiction focusing on an epidemic can even have an effect all the more positive if it pours into excess. "By exaggerating evil in fiction, for example in the form of zombies, this can help reassure when it occurs for good in reality," concludes Bertrand Vidal. It is an understatement of reality by the maximization of danger. "