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Feb. 7th, 2020 08:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynWatched Contagion, the 2011 movie about an extremely dangerous, rapidly spreading, worldwide zoonotic disease that originated in food animals, jumped to humans, and proceeded to rip through a significant percentage of the world's population last night. I considered it an extremely reassuring movie, because it depicted a sensible, reasonably coordinated worldwide response, the scientists behaved like scientists and were depicted as the heroic characters, the guy screaming THE CDC LIES was depicted as a self-interested self-aggrandizing scumbag despite being Handsome Jude Law, and people by and large did their best. At least, the named ones did; a lot of the unnamed background characters, not so much.
Took me a while to realize that recommending it to people who might be worried about 2019-nCoV, which as of 8 AM EST on 2/7/20 hasn't got its own name yet, might not be the greatest idea. For me, the important part was seeing doctors being doctors and scientists being scientists and working to get results, even if what they found wasn't a cure. For other people... well, it is kind of an unflinching movie and the number of deaths reported by the end of the movie has two commas in it. And the line in the credits about 'it's not if, it's when- get prepared, now', which was meant as a warning to encourage people to do the things necessary to head off a pandemic like that before it could get under way... that probably isn't what other folks would consider reassuring either.
Ages ago on Tumblr I asked people, if I was a deity or a saint, what would I be patron of. I remember a handful of answers but right at the moment I'm thinking of one I came up with on my own: patron of unpleasant and disturbing things it is sometimes necessary to know.
(That said, it really is a good movie, but you shouldn't watch it if you've got coughing, sneezing, fever, or headache, because you'll be sitting there the whole time comparing your symptoms to the ones on screen and that never ends well.)
Took me a while to realize that recommending it to people who might be worried about 2019-nCoV, which as of 8 AM EST on 2/7/20 hasn't got its own name yet, might not be the greatest idea. For me, the important part was seeing doctors being doctors and scientists being scientists and working to get results, even if what they found wasn't a cure. For other people... well, it is kind of an unflinching movie and the number of deaths reported by the end of the movie has two commas in it. And the line in the credits about 'it's not if, it's when- get prepared, now', which was meant as a warning to encourage people to do the things necessary to head off a pandemic like that before it could get under way... that probably isn't what other folks would consider reassuring either.
Ages ago on Tumblr I asked people, if I was a deity or a saint, what would I be patron of. I remember a handful of answers but right at the moment I'm thinking of one I came up with on my own: patron of unpleasant and disturbing things it is sometimes necessary to know.
(That said, it really is a good movie, but you shouldn't watch it if you've got coughing, sneezing, fever, or headache, because you'll be sitting there the whole time comparing your symptoms to the ones on screen and that never ends well.)
