The Drama of Death: Steven Soderberg’s film Contagion

Contagion, a film directed by Steven Soderbergh

Starring: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Ehle, and Sanaa Lathan

(Screenplay by Scott Burns)
Warner Brothers, 2011

There may have been a time in which the arty folk and the money folk were in different casts and crews in film, but that time is not now: some of the best artists are to be found in large-scale entertainments, giving depth and weight to work that might have been easier to dismiss without them.  Contagion is a disaster film at the core of which is infectious disease; and it is genuinely informed by science and politics, and features talented actors such as Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, and Laurence Fishburne, directed by the gifted, idiosyncratic Steven Soderbergh.  The disease occurs at the connection of three different species; it spreads quickly and terribly, inspiring government response and public panic, while plowing through very particular lives.  Human commitment and vulnerability are acknowledged, are part of the story we see, as doctors work to understand the disease and find a treatment, and families are torn apart by sickness and grief.  It often feels very real, but, of course, this is a movie; and so some of the dialogue is obvious—a scientist (Fishburne) tells his wife (Lathan) to come to him but do not reveal the urgency to anyone, and she subsequently tells a friend who tells everyone; another scientist (Ehle) is a good daughter and a selfless doctor, and is told so more than once; a janitor (John Hawkes) reminds the well-placed male scientist that he too has family he is concerned about (disease and fear move across class and ethnicity).  Jude Law plays an internet journalist spreading false information, exploiting the epidemic for fame and money; and, possibly too crudely, is given bad teeth as evidence of his flaw, although he is both appalling and fun to watch.  Some of the resolutions of the story are surprising, such as the death of two well-placed women; but others are not, as in a protective father’s acceptance of a young man in his daughter’s life, and a powerful man’s sacrifice for a poor boy.  The film reminds the viewer that the global reach of industrial and marketing practices is subject to the wildness of nature, and something dangerous can be born; and shows how humanity is likely to respond with reason and science, with greed and hysteria, with compassion and selfishness.  The film is a major effort, and looks good, but I did not think of it as beautiful; and while I can admire all the actors in it, some of whom are among my favorites, I was not surprised that Gwyneth Paltrow, an actress of charm and cool temperament, of intelligence and instinct, was the alpha and omega of the film.  She is a complicated figure; and, here is a figure of both joy and destruction, an emblem of intimacy and danger, a manifestation of the endless human puzzle. 

Tragedy and Transcendence

Gertrude Stein, in her plainly declarative, repetitious, elaborating, embracing sentences, said of painter Henri Matisse: “This one was certainly a great man, this one was certainly clearly expressing something.  Some were certain that this one was clearly expressing something being struggling, some were certain that this one was not greatly expressing something being struggling” (“Portraits and Other Short Works,” Library of America's Stein: Writings 1903-1932, page 281).  Stein gives a picture of a man whose work was interpreted by different persons, some of whom understood and appreciated what he was doing and some of whom did not, the traditional story of an artist, especially an experimental one.  It is important to remember that some of the best loved and greatest artists suffered for their difference, for their craft and passion and vision; important to remember as it is part—though not all—of their truth and it may make us a little more tolerant, if not understanding, of the artists we ourselves come to know.  That the general public and sometimes family, friends, and lovers do not understand the commitment, content, and design of an artist’s work intensifies the difficulties of being an artist, of bringing new work into the world while also dealing, badly or well, with the usual demands—of citizenship, of love, of survival—in the world.  The individual artist, reminded of the confinements, pressures, and priorities of society, is often engaged in a struggle to achieve something that is both personal and impersonal, original and inflected with response to established and respected tradition, of the moment and for all time.  The artist, taking materials available to all, materials that do not interest most, is involved in a unique quest, a search of transformation and transcendence.

In reading some of the description of Gertrude Stein’s life, and how she came to be an art patron—a friend to artists, an owner of their work, a facilitator of relationships—I was impressed by how intimate and simple were the lives of now famous artists, how vivid the memory.  One artist spreads news of the work of another artist, Pissarro talking with others about Cezanne; or one gallerist, Vollard, introducing Cezanne, Daumier, Manet, Renoirs, and Gauguin to those who might appreciate them.  We are told of Henri Matisse and his wife that “The Matisses had had a hard time.  Matisse had come to Paris as a young man to study pharmacy,” before becoming interested in painting and influenced by Poussin and Chardin,” in the cultural history and memoir that is “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” (Stein: Writings 1903-1932, page 695).  “Under the influence of the paintings of Poussin and Chardin he had painted still life pictures that had considerable success at the Champ-de-Mars salon, one of the two big spring salons.  And then he fell under the influence of Cezanne, and then under the influence of negro sculpture.  All this developed the Matisse of the period of La Femme au Chapeau” (695).  Description of the cost and effort of a Matisse painting—of fruit that had to be bought and preserved for the time it took to complete a painting of it—and the strain and stress of that is given.  “Matisse worked every day and every day and every day and he worked terribly hard” (696).  It is always significant that how hard an artist works is emphasized, as much of what he does can look like leisure or play to people who do not understand it.  Many people still think work is only of the body, or only what one is forced to do, or paid to do; what begins outside of oneself, for reasons apart from oneself. The artist works with imagination, and insight and intellect; he or she works for and within the inner life, an inner life that can bring hope or despair, clarity or confusion, to the world.  The cruelty and ignorance of the world continue everyday due to the paucity of compassion and knowledge that is found in art; an absurdity or a tragedy, or both.

When Matisse put on exhibit at a salon the painting “La Femme au Chapeau,” it was “derided and attacked and it was sold” (697)—and sold to Gertrude Stein, beginning a friendship.  It was a picture that defied conventional presentation, in which a woman’s face showed different colors and forms.  It was hard for some observers to consider that maybe this painter did not want to see or say the usual thing in the usual way.  It is often hard for people to understand that.  I recall seeing my first Matisse in person at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan many years ago; I think it was a large red painting of pink people dancing in a circle, a strange work, a strangeness I welcomed, as I wanted what was different, free, new, thoughtful, work that separated the individual from the dull and the familiar and brought a new vision, a new world.  I still welcome strangeness.

I have been talking, via electronic mail, with a friend about writing, the kind of conversation in which there is as much misunderstanding as understanding.  I have been focused on fiction and he on memoirs; I on writing, he on teaching.  He is a responsible adult, with a wife and child, regular work and a house; and when he declared that he preferred essays to fiction, and teaching to writing, I told him that I was sorry about that, and thought that there was something deep in that to be explored.  He was disappointed in my response.  I explained that I used to love to write different things as a very young person, but as I got older, it became easier and easier to become alienated from creative writing—from fiction and poetry—as the world has ways to distract and discourage us (for instance, with talk of duty and practicality).  It is easy for a man or woman to be seen as derelict or monstrous for insisting on one’s own creativity and value as an artist—it may be possible, with time, to become a derelict or monster.  However, I did not say that we can be afraid of our own passions, our own imagination, our own will to freedom; and we can betray ourselves.  I said to my friend that I thought fiction allowed more freedom and imagination than essays; a freedom and imagination for which we are sometimes punished in the daily world.  He said that he did not think he had the talent for that kind of work, and did not see the point of it without hope of doing it well.  Later I thought that he had a very precise, possibly too precise, idea of what fiction entailed (work that is easily smooth, moving naturally, highly emotional), rather than an effort involving discipline and thought and a wide range of expressive forms.  Sometimes, rather than following an established idea for art, one has to allow oneself to go where one is inclined, however strange that might be. 

When Gertrude Stein asks Alice Toklas what she thinks of Picasso’s work and Toklas says it is ugly, there is this useful Stein insight about originality and imitation: “Sure, she said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it” (681).  It reminds that me that often the initial reception given to important works—whether books or dance or film or music—is marked by comments about how awkward and contradictory and rhetorical and wild they seem.  One is either lacking in manner, or too mannered.

Sometimes the world gives us a fact more brutal, more strange, more tragic than what we have been inclined to imagine; and, for many people, that happened on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked by plane, and another hijacked plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field.  The arts—dance, fiction, film, and music—have been taking aspects of the experience, of the surprise and terror and grief and anger and healing—and expressing and transforming it; and now at the site in downtown Manhattan where stood the twin towers of the World Trade Center there will be a commemoration of the loss in the form of two pools of water that reflect absence, an embodied contradiction.  That is what art does: express the difficult.

The Leading African-American Literary Critic of His Generation: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his book Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora

(Commentary)

Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Civitas/Basic Books, 2010

When I heard about Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s book Tradition and the Black Atlantic, I was excited: it sounded as if it might be a return to the kind of early work Henry Louis Gates did that had impressed me, and made me think of Gates as a significant literary and cultural figure, someone of generational and iconic weight and value: Black Literature and Literary Theory, Figures in Black, and The Signifying Monkey.  In years past I thought his republication series focused on the work of black women writers was rare and important, though I was not inclined to read it, and I had liked some (not all) of the journalism Gates had done for The New Yorker, as well as some of his special projects (a feminist anthology, a global culture dictionary, a web site), but found aspects of his more populist work (defending sexist and violent hip-hop, and doing television programs on genealogy) less interesting, if not dismaying.  Gates’s devotion to the realization of W.E.B. DuBois’s encyclopedia project was more than a feather in his cap; it was the whole damn bird in his hands.  Those are the kinds of accomplishments I associate with him, even as I expect more. 

The short text Tradition and the Black Atlantic comes wrapped in the praise of Gates’s associates, colleagues, and friends: Cornel West, Arnold Rampersad, Paul Gilroy, and Anthony Appiah.  Yet, when I got my hands on the one-hundred-and-sixty-three or so pages of Tradition and the Black Atlantic, padded to be longer with notes and index, a work published through Gates’s imprint, Civitas, with Basic Books (Perseus), and I began to read it—I read the book quickly in little more than an afternoon—I thought that the book did have elegance, intelligence, and wit, and that it touched on subjects that once had interested me very much, and still interested me somewhat.  In his introduction (page xii), Gates admits, “The four chapters of this book in their original form were written between 1989 and 1992 in an attempt to organize my thinking about the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and the American ‘culture wars,’ which were raging within and about the academy at roughly the same time…”  Tradition and the Black Atlantic is a book written in much of the language of that era, a language inflected with references to deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and political economy that was considered high cultural theory, though it was not particularly connected to high culture—to classical music, ballet, opera, or painting—except that it was used to describe and explore popular English and European (and some American) fiction and poetry that with time and study had begun to be taken seriously as literature; and it became a language used to examine history and modern social issues, especially regarding class, gender, and ethnicity.  I always thought such a language made more sense for Europeans, with those hundreds of years of cultural history, with a genuine knowledge of and relation to high culture, much more sense than for most Americans (notoriously moving from barbarism to decadence without reaching civilization); and yet it was easy to see how such an analytical tool—looking at the roots, styles, values, and contradictions in the play of poetry and power—would appeal to minorities who wanted to dissect and reconstruct social identities.  Reading Tradition and the Black Atlantic was like listening to old songs, or looking at old photographs; that’s nice, but how directly relevant is it?  

Some of the issues in Tradition and the Black Atlantic—identity, how it is experienced, perceived, discussed, and represented in culture and repressed in politics—remain important to one extent or another, but the figures and topics have changed.  Gender and sexuality no longer have the same subversive or theoretical charge as they did twenty years ago (discussion of them in society now tends to be very practical, having to do with more women seeming to keep their jobs during the recent economic recession than men, and the fact that more men are taking responsibilities for household chores; and with the momentum for same-sex marriage, which seems to be steamrolling conservative opposition).  Ethnicity may be another matter. 

Hip-hop, with its partying and crude sexuality, with its materialism and violence, with its misogyny and homophobia, more than ever dominates the black public image, despite Barack Obama, Colin Powell, Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, Wynton Marsalis, Beyonce Knowles, Alicia Keys and the like: hip-hop’s mix of rapping and music, with its sampling of older musical work, gives it a vibrancy of form that makes attractive its frequently reactionary and retrogressive content; endowing it with international appeal, enlarging the embrace of some of the worst imagery ever associated with blacks.  Why have critiques of such destructive content had little effect?  (Is it that the frivolous and ignorant think of hip-hop as fun and true, and that the educated, like the powerless but aware, receive it as symbolic rebellion?)  That, I would love to know; and also, to offer just a few examples in a different direction, I would love to have more commentary on the work of writers such as Percival Everett, Martha Southgate, David Bradley, Henry Van Dyke, Hal Bennett, Carl Phillips and Reginald Shepherd, and the music of Billy Strayhorn, Betty Carter, Cassandra Wilson, Lizz Wright, Cecil Taylor, Don Byron, Christian McBride, Jessye Norman, Awadagin Pratt, and the films Losing Ground, Sidewalk Stories, Chameleon Street, Eve’s Bayou and, among others, The Great Debaters.  The paintings and sculpture of African-American visual artists could use more attention too, as could the better work of certain folk artists in different fields and genres.  In England, writer Zadie Smith and actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and rock singer Kele of Bloc Party have made their own giant splashes, as had the androgynous singer Ephraim Lewis, before he died; and Ejiofor played a cross-dressing designer in Kinky Boots, and Kele is gay and alludes to that experience in his songs.  I do not recall Gates mentioning any of these persons in Tradition and the Black Atlantic.  Each year, each decade, offers new subjects, and ever more human and humane content. 

Has Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a literary critic and scholar, for instance, made the case for new additions to the literary canon (which is different from anthologizing or celebrating already accepted, revered, or historical writers)?  In Tradition and the Black Atlantic Gates writes about Stuart Hall, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, as well as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Raymond Williams, Edmund Burke, Fanon, Derrida, and Lacan, in these dated pages that have been augmented with some contemporary asides, attempting to make current comparisons and connections (the election of Barack Obama, the shifting American political landscape, and the resulting anger and paranoia among some citizens are noted: Tea Party, anyone?).

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is concerned with identity and problematic social position and, like anyone, is to be commended for appreciating complicated identities and the tensions among them, though it would be much more fascinating to explore the many examples of people doing diverse, new, and wonderful things.  The career of Henry Louis Gates Jr. alone is proof of the good that can be done even in an imperfect world.  It could be illuminating to identify the attitudes, ideas, principles, and strategies in successful African-American lives, and to use that as the basis of a progressive social theory (what I see when I look at Barack, Oprah, Jessye, Wynton, Beyonce, and Henry Louis himself is a commitment to craft, cultivation of the self, and thoughtfulness, as well as a sensitive, sensuous response to experience and the finer things in life, much of which translates into adaptability and sociability, with a respectable degree of public responsibility); and the resulting theory could not be any worse that what has been created before, some of which has enlightened us, but none of which has liberated us.  Gates himself notes the insights, kindness, and attention to local phenomenon of professor and writer Stuart Hall, to whom Gates dedicates the book Tradition and the Black Atlantic (I suspect kindness registers with Gates because Gates—Skip, to his many friends—himself is kind; and he may recognize it as something both familiar and rare).  Gates probes the work of film director Isaac Julien, appreciating the multiplicity of black male identity in Julien’s Looking for Langston, his modernist artistry, his critical politics, and the sensuality and softness of his imagery.  Yet, it is impossible for me not to think that Denzel Washington’s career is many times more significant than all the black British film artists Gates writes about, just as James Baldwin—who broke ground in Another Country by simultaneously dealing with art, class, race, gender, sexuality, and the pain, potential, and deceptions of individuality in New York and Paris—is more important than the black British writers Gates salutes.  Has Gates considered dedicating himself to a prolonged study of either, and sharing the results?  Has Gates written about Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, or Toni Morrison’s Paradise, books that present dynamic black communities, full of connection and conflict?  I respect academic work, but I am ambivalent about it too, as many academics have the habit of ignoring much of the broader world beyond the academy, until elements in that world form a controversy or fashionable trend, as had the work of black British artists and thinkers, work with art-house styles and theoretical references.  Too often popular culture is ignored, unless it has the aura of the downtrodden and low (that nastiness gets called authenticity), such as with hip-hop.  Beauty, when it is popular, is suspect; as are intelligence and eloquence, when they are popular—it can be hilarious to watch an academic demur when a popular cultural figure is cited with respect, the academic’s face averted, and feet moving backward, instinctively achieving distance.  However, I am curious, as well, to know more about how Gates sees the larger world, not merely the African-American or black British world.  Much of the commentary by Gates in Tradition and the Black Atlantic is sophisticated and suave, and somehow both far-reaching and limited in focus (like fumigating an entire house after seeing a few ants—or putting out a few potted plants and being convinced that one has constructed a garden).  I may be guilty of comparable, if less elegant, gestures in these notes, which are not exactly a proper review, page by page, idea by idea.  Although now, months after reading Tradition and the Black Atlantic, I could not bear to read the whole thing again, I did look at a few pages that actually said some things—not especially complex, but certainly true—that I consider interesting:

“If Looking for Langston is a meditation on the Harlem Renaissance, it is equally an impassioned rebuttal to the virulent homophobia associated with the Black Power and Black Aesthetic movements in the sixties” (57).

“To the extent that black British cinema is represented as an act of cultural politics, it then becomes vulnerable to a political reproach as elitist, Europeanized, overly highbrow.  As a black cultural product without a significant black audience, its very blackness becomes suspect” (64).

“For as we know, the history of African Americans is marked by noble demands for political tolerance from the larger society, but also by a paradoxical tendency to censure our own” (67).

“So the very newest generation of black British cultural critics are brave, resourceful, and dialectical when they seek to recuperate everything that was right about the 1960s movements of ethnicist self-affirmation” (68).

“The hermeneutics of the 1970s killed the author; the politics of the 1980s brought the author back” (74).

“The old leftist critiques of the commodity have a usefully confining tendency: The critiques set up a cunning trap that practically guarantees that the marginalized cultures being glorified will remain marginalized.  The authors of these critiques knew just how to keep us in our place.  And the logic was breathtakingly simple: If you win, you lose” (78).