In early 2020, when COVID-19 was starting to circulate in the news as a potential threat to human beings, it was reported that Steven Soderbergh's 2011 thriller Contagion was seeing an uptick in streams on televisions across the country. In 2011, Soderbergh's film was lauded by critics and epidemiologists alike for its unflinching and by-all-accounts accurate look at the hypothetical threat of a pandemic, and many Americans turned to the film in 2020 as a prophetic representation of the reality of COVID-19.
Indeed there was an uptick in viewings of many different films about disease, including 1995's Outbreak, Terry Gilliam's 1995 film 12 Monkeys, and even Shaun of the Dead, which is less about disease than it is about a zombie apocalypse. Psychologists weighed in on the very human impulse to see a tidy narrative attached to an instance of overwhelming human difficulty. In an article for Insider in April 2020, Jason Guerrasio spoke to Dr. Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center, and wrote, "Rutledge said movies are just one aspect of coping with this unprecedented situation we are living through, which can lead to depression." While it perhaps seems counterintuitive to look at disaster films in the wake of a real disaster, psychologists agreed that fictional stories could help give shape to living through an invisible threat.
Contagion may not be an entirely accurate preview of the events of 2020—it is Hollywood after all—but that does not mean that the parallels do not help to make sense of the historic events surrounding COVID-19. At the time of its release, Soderbergh was frank about his rigorous research about pandemics and his sense that it was only a matter of time before a real-life pandemic occurred. In an interview in 2020, he told reporters, “Everybody we talked to when we were preparing that film, every expert, when we asked them how will the next one start, to a person, they said, wet market, Asia, there’s probably going to be a bat involved. Literally all of them. Ten years ago, 11 years ago. So it’s not a surprise.”
