Contagion and Viral Propagation

What is Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (2011) about if not fear?

The plot runs like any pandemic/virus/zombie movie: the first case, the spread, the quarantine, the panic, the destruction, the desperation of trying to survive. But somewhere in the middle of the film Soderbergh subjugates the suspense of trying to develop antibodies and vaccines underneath a more troubling examination of the contagion of fear in crises. Which is making me meditate on how contagion, as a figurative term, works with regards to information spread.

In comparison, Outbreak (1995) is emotionally arresting because it tells the story of a small core of characters who risk their lives against an airborne e-bola type virus. 28 Days Later (2002) investigates military corruption by making zombie-ism germ-like. I Am Legend (2007) takes the post-apocalyptic approach and features one man against the monsters. Blindness (2008) looks at human evil in the face of a pandemic of blindness. All of these films concentrate on coloring in the shades of good and evil when human infrastructure falls apart in the face of mass sickness and death. They all have a sense of inherent pathos to them in that they hint that the good of the few perhaps cannot outweigh the evil of the panicking masses.

Contagion does this too, and also goes further. After a while, the virus's deadliness doesn't even seem to be what's perpetuating the panic anymore - it's our mass communication outlets, individualism within globalization, and sense of entitlement towards resources and treatment. For example, Jude Law's Alan Krumwiede is an insurgent blogger hell-bent on exposing favoritism in the CDC, but his exclamations are more evidence of the questions of valid information distribution than any governmental or organizational conspiracy. Likewise, Laurence Fishburne's Dr. Ellis Cheever tells his fiancée to leave Chicago before the quarantine announcement goes public, which is evidence that in the end, we'll might choose our few individual loved ones over helping strangers.

Contagion makes me think about the spread of information. In the last short story in A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, a music promoter in a future-set New York uses paid "parrots" to hype a live concert. The marketers behind these promotions used to have to study epidemiology in order to learn about things "going viral," but that information model has become outdated: "'No one says "viral" anymore,' Lulu said. 'I mean, maybe thoughtlessly, the way we still say "connect" or "transmit" - those old mechanical metaphors that have nothing to do with how information spreads. See, reach isn't describable in terms of cause and effect anymore; it's simultaneous.'"

If Egan's prediction comes true, and I am inclined to think that she's on track, we are headed for a system of spreading information that mirrors contagion, even going beyond viral spreading. Blogs link to blogs, Facebook and Twitter share everything, newspapers go under, social media values the instantaneous and the individual over the informative, and we end up spreading information in a frenzy that seems panicked. I think it's already happening now, and I worry that our individualism is egging it on. No, it's not about life and death here, but there's definitely a paradigm of survival going on--we all want relevance, significance, and influence.

It's not a phase, it's a process.

This morning, as I clicked "save as PDF" on my masters thesis, I brought an end to my formal education. The funny thing is, I don't feel like anything is ending. I wrote my thesis on emerging adulthood in HBO's Girls, and now, thesis done, at twenty-six and officially beyond the official age restriction by which developmental psychologists categorize emerging adults (18-25), I no longer feel allowed to use that label for myself. But I'm still emerging.

Emerging adults live their twenties in a state of exploration-of careers, relationships, friendships, worldviews, travels-without settling on one life pattern. It's a documented period of upheaval, intense setbacks and overhauling questions of identity, but it also is a time of great freedom and ambition. Emerging adults constantly ask, who am I and what will I become? None of this is comforting, nor should it be. The only saving grace is that we hope, one day, it will all resolve itself.

But my thesis has perhaps showed me otherwise. The crux of my argument revolves around the fact that Girls may be proof that emerging adulthood is not a phase of life to get through, but rather a process. As Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna try on different identities for size, their narratives of self-exploration lead not necessarily to a clear and confident sense of self, but rather to a transformation of that self and, paradoxically, a lack of closure. The way the narrative works doubles this impulse, by accumulating moments based on emotions rather than plot. Things that come seemingly out of nowhere shift the story in directions no one saw coming, but these moments make everything feel more human--and messy. It is as if the entire series, in character and story pattern, is working away from enlightenment and towards confusion. Or at least change. Instead of funneling constantly towards conclusion, Girls investigates the middle of a cycle without hinting at the end of it. The narrative of emerging adulthood, in Girls and my own life, is ultimately not a phase but a process.

So, using my age and finished education to mark an abrupt end to my emerging adulthood is silly, because I can't declare myself "done" and "adult" when the phase itself is actually just a process that potentially never ends. Maybe the real rite of passage out of emerging adulthood and into full adulthood is not the formative threshold one crosses--a degree, owning a home, a marriage, kids--but the moment when you realize that you, as a person, are constantly in production.

Perhaps recognizing that this is a process is actually the first real step in leaning towards, or actually acknowledging, my adulthood. I actually really enjoyed the process of writing the thesis, whatever the outcome. So I'm trying to listen to that feeling of staying in the present in my writing, to dive into the uncertainty with a disregard for any concluding significance the process might generate. As I emerge as an adult and a writer, maybe this uncertainty of process is actually the key to everything.

I'm almost getting it kind of together.

L'auberge espagnole over the years

Some people have comfort food. I have comfort movies.

Last night was such a comfort night; a long, work-filled weekend called for indulgence with slik (Danish for candy) and the movie that made me fall in love with Europe: Cédric Klapisch's L'auberge espagnole (2002). I estimate this was probably around the 50th time I've seen this French film, and it never disappoints, because it evolves with me over the years.

the multilingual, multinational cast of L'auberge espagnole 

Let me give you a history of my decade-long relationship with this film, in the hope that if you have felt your identity expanding thanks to travel, you'll understand what I'm talking about.

Age 15: Mme Follett shows us the film in French class to teach us about cultural exchange and Erasmus. I fall instantly in love with the idea of living in Europe, sharing an apartment with young people and speaking a hodgepodge of European languages.

Age 16: I buy the DVD and work on saying the lines error free. My sister, best friend and I are proud of the fact that we recognize the subjunctive tense when Martine says "je suis triste que tu partes" and that we now know colloquial expressions like "elle a un mec" and "c'est un vrai bordel."

Age 18: I show the film to dozens of my college friends. I expect their unabashed enthusiasm for it, but it's met with lukewarm enjoyment instead. My friends seem not to have the crazy obsession with Europe which I do. Although I'd always known I would, I finally declare a major in French at the end of my sophomore year.

Age 20: I watch the film on the eve of my departure for Paris. I've turned the goal of living in Europe into a temporary reality by going on junior-year exchange. My heart patters and my stomach drops when the opening line of the film strikes a new meaning: "Tout a commencé là, quand l'avion a décollé." (That's when it all started, when the plane took off.")

Age 21: I come back from France after my year abroad dead-set on returning. Like Romain Duris's Xavier, I have trouble explaining my experiences, how I've changed, and what I learned, to my family and friends back home. My life in America now seems like the entr'acte to a fabulous play in Europe.

Age 22: After my senior year of college I barter my way back to France with a position as an English teaching assistant in Bretagne. As I traverse the streets of Brest looking for a place to live, I remember how Xavier says that when you first arrive in a city, everything is unknown and virgin territory for you. After having walked these streets 10, 20, 1000 times, you see yourself as you once were, newly arrived but now forever changed. I see an ad for a shared apartment which turns out to be the exact incarnation of l'auberge espagnole. Like Xavier, "j'aurais donné n'importe quoi pour qu'ils m'acceptent." Luckily, they accept me and I have the most incredible year of my life.

Age 23: Back in Boston after a year of teaching and an expired visa, I itch to get back to the camaraderie and international life I had in France. I therefore apply for graduate school in a bunch of European cities, hoping to combine the two things I love: film and Europe.

Age 25: On my birthday, after nine months in Copenhagen, things come perfectly full circle. While my sister and same best friend visit, we go to a street festival and spot Christian Pagh, the Danish actor in L'auberge espagnole. I tell him that the film is the reason I'm here, and everything feels right.

Yesterday: I'm about to hand in my master's thesis in film studies, and I can feel the whole world opening up in front of me. I'm no longer the idealistic teen I once was, but I also feel like "I'm French, Spanish, English, and Danish. I'm not one, but many. I'm like Europe. I'm all of that."

My personal B(r)est version of L'auberge espagnole

Flesh and Blood

This post may be a bit raw, but there's reason for it. Just warning you if you're squeamish, you may not want to read on.

Only hours after going under the knife this past Tuesday, I found myself holed up in bed, watching two particularly fleshy dramas: Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies and NBC's Hannibal. 

Don't ask me why those were the two media outlets I latched onto after having a growth removed from my ear. You would think that while popping painkillers I would want to escape from what I had just experienced under local anesthesia, or that movies and shows about flesh and blood would not be the right comfort. But nope! I'm silly.

Two different depictions of flesh became clear while I watched--one in Warm Bodies, and the opposite in Hannibal. Warm Bodies is told from the point of view of a romantic zombie who falls for a human. I know, it sounds gimmicky, but it works, mostly thanks to Nicholas Hoult's convincing zombie/human balancing act. As his character 'R' eats human brains or receives a knife in his chest, his dead flesh and that of the humans he eats seems trivial and unimportant, just a corporeal encasing. All that matters is the heart and soul that makes up these creatures, not whether their flesh is decaying or alive.

R in Warm Bodies does not have a warm body. 

On the other hand, Hannibal is all about flesh and blood as signifier. Killers, cannibals, and even cops are defined in this show by their fascination with, ability to identify, and temptation to destroy, flesh. It's a very gruesome show, with lots of splattering and high-production-value gunfire. It's too bad the narrative tends not to explain itself well, dropping plot leads and secondary characters who could be intriguing too quickly in order to concentrate on its monotonous central pair, Dr. Lector (played by Danish heartthrob Mads Mikkelsen) and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). With more investigation into the killers and less role-play between deranged psychiatrist and afflicted subject, the show could the enthralling psychological thriller it strives to be. But that's not my point.

My point is that I feel so immune to flesh and blood on screen, but in real life it's still very raw. I was awake during the procedure on Tuesday, which meant that from my reclining position I got to see my own blood get sucked into a tube and a piece of my ear get clipped off, trimmed, and reattached. As it was happening, I had the strange distance of a curious moviegoer, wondering what they were doing next and why my blood was so pink. But since I've been out of there and the pain has surfaced, I get queasy whenever I picture that sliver of my own skin lying on the surgical table.

Which is reassuring, in a way. I'm glad to realize that our cinema culture of ultraviolence has not completely penetrated my everyday relationship towards flesh and blood. I'm still sensitive, like my throbbing ear.

Melodrama and Performance in The Real L Word

You may remember my admission to a guilty pleasure a while back. Well, today's the day to indulge my newest fascination with trash television: The Real L Word.

To escape some temporary melodrama of my own (involving a suspicious mole on my ear), I started watching Showtime's very melodramatic reality series about a group of lesbian women in Los Angeles. As the title betrays, the show is the 'real-life' version of the fictional precursor The L Word. The girls are both more butch and more glam, if that's possible, than in the fiction, and the drama feels concocted and underwhelming like another namesake, MTV's notoriously bad The Real World. 

Reality drama. For some reason those two words sound oxymoronic when placed next to one another. This got me thinking about how The Real L Word creates its melodrama, because it pulls its stories from people's everyday lives. Just because the show is about lesbians doesn't necessarily mean their lives are inherently more interesting or dramatic, and of course there are those who will argue that a show like this normalizes and banalizes the queer community by focusing on a particularly femme  subset.  But in general, doesn't real life tend not to have nicely composed story arcs and narrative progression? Judging by that deduction, I'd say that reality television must capitalize on and then mold the events of these people's lives into a narrative.

Film theorist Jane Feuer writes that the key to melodrama in television, which we see most heavily in soap operas, is excess: "The concept of melodrama [is that of] creating an excess, whether that excess be defined as a split between the level of narrative and that of mise-en-scene or as a form of 'hysteria.'" In other words, melodramas exaggerate emotions, enhance climaxes, and are generally a bit excessive. 

So how does The Real L Word create melodrama out of a steady yet narratively weak stream of events?

First of all, I think the show's producers did a very good job casting people who know how to perform for the camera. Romi may indeed be a very emotional person, but she also knows how to play it up. Whitney, the most enigmatic and fascinating to watch, always has a rotation of girls in and out of her bed and head, but I wonder how much of the draw is well-oiled star behavior. These girls know how to ham it up for reality tv.

Secondly, the editing of the show is actually quite crafty for a seemingly trashy reality show (props to Showtime), because it pulls topics into episodes while still maintaining a serialized pull across episodes and seasons. For example, the first season starts each episode with a Q&A of the characters on certain 'lesbian' topics: coming out, femme vs. butch, Dinah Shore, etc. These topics then dictate the loose narrative structure of what we see for that hour, while still incorporating the larger story lines about relationships that form the center of the drama. We wait for the topic to pop up, i.e., who will be coming out on this episode? as a sort of MacGuffin that gives way to bigger themes like trust, betrayal, loyalty, cheating, and so on.  This overarching structure gives the editors the ability to play up the emotional climaxes so needed in a melodrama.

Lastly, music is everywhere. Mostly contemporary, sometimes queer, artists provide the soundtrack, which is tweaked and matched to every little emotion in there. Again, performance and editing go hand in hand when it comes to the music, so that even if we didn't feel own own, direct emotion coming mirroring a scene, the music underscores this emotion and makes us feel it.

I'm not necessarily recommending that you watch this show, but perhaps you can appreciate the way it is crafted to a particular end...

Boston, or Melancholia

I'd been avoiding it for a while. I knew Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) would get under my skin. When it popped up on tv as my mom and I were sifting through on the search for something to watch, she insisted we see it (for her, for the third time), and I obeyed. I was right - it shook me. This was April 13th, 2013. 

Two days later, on April 15th, two homemade bombs ravaged the finish line of the Boston Marathon, tearing limbs and lives away from innocent supporters of my hometown's most heroic race. I had left a spot two miles away from the explosion an hour earlier. Needless to say, this got under my skin and shook me harder.


Melancholia is about the world ending; the Boston tragedy is about a piece of it ending, and recovering. Melancholia ends without any hope of renewal, as a blue planet hurtles towards Earth and obliterates its inhabitants (as a dramatic metaphor for depression). Yet in the obliteration that those two bombs caused on Monday lies an inspiring amount of hope as runners, Bostonians, and supporters take back their city. This aftermath is what Melancholia doesn't show when it fatalistically explores segments of humanity in their final moments. Though the colliding planet is no fault of their own, the main characters of the film display varying grades of human complexity (in that we're both decent and inhumane) in crises. In picking up the pieces in the aftermath of violence that was also no fault of their own, Boston's residents are decent and resilient, which totally overshadows the hurt that a lone, inhuman monster unleashed on the city.

As I vacillate between logical detective work, trying, along with the news, to figure out how and why a person would commit such a terrible act, and sadness for the casualties and amputees and their families, I can't help but remember hearing how some marathoners ran 28.2 miles instead of 26.2 as they kept running down the road to the nearest hospital to donate blood. And I then think of Justine, Melancholia's late hero, who builds a fort to give her nephew some solace before impact.

We don't know why this happened or if we can make it better, but we try.

The Unruly Man?

Masculine aggression in film and tv has been puzzling me lately.

As part of my thesis, I've been working through Kathleen Rowe's theory of "The Unruly Woman," a transgressive character type in the genre of comedy who disrupts gender conventions by exhibiting an unbecoming physicality. The unruly woman is slobbish, loud, and funny. Think Roseanne Arnold and Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids and you've got the idea. Thanks to her comedy, the unruly woman is able to pose her female physicality as problematic and laughable in order to subvert expectations of women on screen, thus occupying a feminist position.

Is there such thing as the unruly man, though? If we try floating the idea of gender conformity to men in film and television, we get figures like James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Edward Cullen, who rather become their physicality and use it to assert their masculinity. In other words, their bodies are never at odds with their characters, and these bodies actually trigger or reinforce their character's causality.

I'd like to examine cases, though, where physicality goes to the extreme and ends up possibly subverting these characters' own power. We watch them move from protagonists to antagonists when this happens. Perhaps this is where we find the unruly man.

One actor portrays this principle beautifully (or brutally). Matthias Schoenaerts, star of Rust and Bone (2012) and Bullhead (2011) is a burly 6'2" and gained a massive 70 pounds of muscle for Bullhead, in which he plays a cattle farmer who gets mixed up with illegal testosterone.  Similarly, in Rust and Bone, he is an underground boxer who smashes competitors' teeth out for a living. I won't give away any plot details of these films, because they are excellent and you should watch them, but I will say that in both instances, the third-act story arcs involve Schoenaerts's physical strength in tricky, dangerous situations.

Schoenaerts in Rust and Bone

Another classic example of this physical brutality indicating a mental spiraling is Fight Club's Tyler Durden. He starts off as a sexy, violent ideal, but his (imaginary) presence has damaging physical effects on his alter-ego's body. And more recently, there's Adam in Girls, who is often shirtless, takes out his aggression issues on his woodworking projects, and escalates to unhealthy, borderline sexual assault in the end of the second season. He is the only one of my examples to be somewhat redeemed, when he runs (again, shirtless) across Brooklyn to save Hannah from her crippling OCD. By the way, Hannah is another unruly woman - she and Adam make a great unruly match.

Of course, men's self-destruction through fights, drugs, alcohol, or other means happens a lot in movies and television (Hank Moody, anyone?) but I think what's different here is that in the characters I describe, their physical nature does not coincide with acceptable forms of masculinity. Instead of being commended for their strength, and their ability to use violence to overcome the bad guys, they have traits of the bad guys brewing in them. They are too strong, too agressive, too threatening. Most of all, they can't keep this agression in check, and it costs them the viewer's sympathy as favorable representations of men. When I watch these men, I am constantly negotiating my own distance from them, trying to forgive them for their corporal mistakes, and trying to dig into their interiority which their bodies so problematically eschew.

I have no idea if others have this reaction when they watch strong, conflicted men who take their emotions out using violence. But I am definitely glad that these characters exist, however threatening they feel, because underneath their exaggerated hypermasculinity lies stirrings of the current crisis of masculine identity that deserves more attention in the media. The question remains, though: can the unruly man take up a feminist position that advocates for a more nuanced portrayal of men in the cinema?