Ebola Out In The Adirondacks?

My high-school friend Austin once said that the only thing that scared him was the Ebola virus. I, of course, chose to disbelieve him and tried to frighten him every day for weeks, but I never managed to draw any more than the most minor flinch. I resigned myself to the fact that Austin would resist all attempts to frighten him. So it seems that where I failed, Steven Soderbergh might succeed.

Though the protagonist virus in Soderbergh’s latest film Contagion does not resemble Ebola in its symptoms, it has all the hallmarks in terms of its mortality rate and infectiousness. The victims fall not so long after they’re affected. The film, however, caters neither to apocalyptic visions nor to small-town horror dramas. The latter form is probably best represented by Outbreak, the 1995 starring Dustin Hoffman about a semi-epidemic of a disease similar to Ebola in a fictional California town.

But Soderbergh’s film treads the space between carefully. It’s a film that works to contain its storyline nearly as hard as the scientists in it work to contain Ebola. The story flashes back and forth between several characters, some of whom do little more than emphasize the global scale of the problem. The film follows a plot that manages both the general and specific—something that not many stories do successfully. In terms of disaster flicks, Titanic comes to mind before any others; the balancing act between romance/family drama is countered wonderfully by the total chaos of the sinking ship. It goes without saying that Soderbergh in Contagion isn’t quite so deft as James Cameron.

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More striking than anything, however, is the subtle horror of this film. It’s not so much the violent moments—the store lootings, people being trampled trying to get into pharmacies, houses broken into—as it is the suggestions of the disease moving surface to surface. Once Kate Winslet’s character provides what seems like the keynote address of the film, explaining that the average person touches their face 3,000 times a day and in between then we’re touching everything, the film really gets the ball rolling. Every surface becomes a magnet for disease: doorknobs, floors, tables, hands, and really anything that one might touch. Soderbergh does the audience the benefit of lingering on some of these danger areas. The horror is inescapable.

In some ways, I understood my friend’s horror after this film. Ever since leaving the theater, I’ve found myself hyperaware of touching my face and doorknobs and bathroom sinks and toilet seats and water fountains and…well, you get the point.

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All this, I should explain, is somewhat in the way of explaining my absence this weekend. On Friday afternoon, I left for a camping trip in the Adirondacks, which really should have ended sometime around 6 p.m. on Saturday evening. Nature, however, found ways to confound our reading of the trail map and we were lost in the woods for several hours after our projected finishing time, helplessly following a river until we hit a trail. At one point during this problematic adventure, I could not help but have the silver-lining-thought that at least I wouldn’t be touching getting any Ebola out there. No bathroom sinks or doorknobs in the Adirondacks!

Photos from weekend adventures may follow… Until then, keep your eyes on those evil surfaces and your hands away from your face…