Abstract
With the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, infectious disease rose to the center of political, social and private life all over the world, in a sudden and enormously destabilizing way. Yet humanity is anything but a blank slate when it comes to our understandings about contagion and our reactions against it. In Going Viral, Dahlia Schweitzer explores stories in popular film and television about deadly infectious disease outbreaks. She refers to these stories using Priscilla Wald’s term “outbreak narrative” from the latter’s seminal book Contagious (2008). Schweitzer’s book is intended to shed light on why these stories became so popular over the past few decades. She suggests it is because they speak very meaningfully to common fears stemming from large social and political developments.
The contemporary period has seen the rise of information technologies and intensified globalization, and these in turn have fed widespread concerns about “porous borders” and hostile invisible “Others,” along with a sense of vulnerability within our sprawling social networks that transcend the customary limitations of space and time. Channeling sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck on “risk society,” she highlights how the growth of scientific prowess has come with a growing concern that our achievements can harm us just as much if not more than they help us.
On her personal website, Schweitzer describes herself first and foremost as a “pop culture critic and writer.” Her other academic work focuses on different topics but her approach is comparable, taking interdisciplinary and politically-animated forays into the history of popular cultural artifacts and tropes; for instance her recent work on the solitary private detective or “private eye.” She also teaches on film and media at NYC’s Fashion Institute of Technology. In addition to being an academic, she is a novelist and electronic dance musician.
In Going Viral she identifies several typical visual and thematic features of popular outbreak narratives, which clearly connect to contemporary fears. For instance, she notes how common it is to see maps and charts detailing the prevalence and spread of infection, as well as borders – whether defended, maintained, broken through or broken down. After introducing her notion of the outbreak narrative, she structures the rest of the book according to three overlapping types of outbreak narrative, centered respectfully on globalization, terrorism, or post-apocalypse. She does not acknowledge it as such, but her methodology is arguably in keeping with a broad tradition stretching from the writings of Siegfried Kracauer through to, more recently, Douglas Kellner. The approach is to treat the content of films as if they are akin to sociocultural dream images. In other words, she treats popular films and television series as reflections of a kind of general social mind’s emotive preoccupations concerning historical material realities.
Her book is a well-placed contribution for theorizing about the enormous contemporary popularity of films about pandemics and zombies, and her analyses are generally convincing. Probably her most interesting insight is that these stories connect to fears of outsiders, which in turn is endemic to right-wing extremism. There is a direct connection between the concomitant risings of global capitalism, far-right populism, and outbreak narratives. At times it can be difficult to anticipate where Schweitzer is going, and she rarely recaps where she has just taken us. There are many pertinent insights here, it just is not always clear how – or if – they all fit together. Still, this is a book that had to be written, and all things considered Schweitzer did an admirable job. Medical sociologists and media studies scholars may find it increasingly relevant in the coming years, especially in light of the major shock to the world system wrought by COVID-19.
In The Pandemic Century, Mark Honigsbaum looks at a different area of the social construction of disease outbreaks. Instead of popular culture, his interest is in scientific knowledge and intervention, and how they are often based on faulty assumptions. Honigsbaum notes how scientists, fixated on their current paradigms, keep being pushed by new pandemics to reveal the insufficiencies of the scientific and medical presuppositions of the times. Interventions aside, disease outbreaks are often propelled by environmental degradation.
Honigsbaum is a writer, investigative journalist and historian focused on medical science and infectious disease and has written for several newspapers. He has three other trade books on the history of contagion – two on influenza and one on malaria. In the present work he surveys a variety of disease outbreaks in a rough chronology. Starting with the Spanish Flu, he proceeds through tales of plague, parrot fever, Legionnaires’ disease, AIDS, SARS, Ebola and Zika. In relatively brief chapters, the book gives thorough overviews of these pointed episodes in medical history, focusing on scientists and policymakers. The history is full of bungles, bloopers, and strange ideas that people were very confident of at first and then later proved to be very misguided. This is where the “panic, hysteria and hubris” of the book’s subtitle make their appearance. We get what feels like a backstage view of all of the embarrassing wrong turns and colorful misguided crusades that the official experts initiated.
While some of these tales are entertaining in their absurdity, the greater part of the book is spent narrating history through thickets of technical details. Often, the upshot – when there is one – gets buried in the weeds. There is too much scattered information in here to make it appropriate for a college course, but it does provide an interesting bird’s eye outline of the inside dramas of professional pandemic preparation and response over the past century. The book is well-suited for lay readers with a sweet tooth for science and medical history, and of course an interest specifically in pandemics.