Contagion and Fear: What Would Happen if Sh-t Really Hit the Fan?

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Amongst the ongoing fears of plague, peak oil, and drastic climate change which adorn our era (and at the timely tail end of a lingering cough and cold), I saw Steven Soderbergh's new movie Contagion last week. The movie poses a scary what-if: what would really happen to our social fabric if a real swine-flu pandemic spread like wildfire, similar to the little-covered one in 1918 that made one third of the human race sick and killed a whopping 1% of humans? What would happen to our state of mind, our sense of basic goodness itself, if we no longer trusted that we could even touch each other?

Soderbergh has made decent interwoven narratives before, like in his movie Traffic, and Contagion has a good pace and eerily realistic plot in its first half, although it seems to lose some momentum later on. It was definitely interesting to watch while I still had a slight cough, wondering if others in the audience were going to turn around and stare at me, or quarantine me to the theater's front row.

Without going too much into detail, Contagion is a flawed but very good movie, definitely worth immersing yourself in. You may not want to touch anyone for at least an hour afterward, which is the mark of its well-achieved mood and good editing. The biggest flaw is without a doubt Jude Law's character (sorry), who appears as a villainous blogger (yes, apparently bloggers are evil), set out to spread misinformation and profit off of the public panic, marketing a false cure to the millions of visitors to his site. Meanwhile, the government officials of the movie are hardworking and warrior-like. Clearly Jude's furniture-chewing, snaggle-toothed performance is meant to say something about the zeitgeist, and Soderbergh's view that print media shouldn't die, and also that we'd be absolutely screwed without a strong public sector if any real crisis hit (sorry, Tea Party). I agree with these  views, but the point is made in a crude way, as if the screenwriter is not very savvy about the age of social networking, and believes that the internet is just a series of tubes.

More importantly, and more dharmically, the movie got me thinking about what would actually happen to our state of mind in a crisis. Would we all go Conan the Barbarian on each other, letting fear and selfishness dominate? Or would our inner compassionate selves shine through? Does crisis make us empathize or protect ourselves irrationally? What do you think? When the sh-t hits the fan, do we human beings get more enlightened, or more savage? I'm just not sure.