Microsoft Word - Dissertation_GoingViral

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles

Going Viral:

Outbreak Narratives in Contemporary American Film and Television

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

in Film and Television

Dahlia Schweitzer

2018

Dahlia Schweitzer

2018

ii!

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Going Viral:

Outbreak Narratives in Contemporary American Film and Television

Dahlia Schweitzer

Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Television

University of California, Los Angeles, 2018

Professor Denise R. Mann, Chair

Going Viral: Outbreak Narratives in Contemporary American Film and Television

examines American film and television outbreak narratives, studying how the repetition

of characters, images, and story lines has produced a formulaic narrative that reflects and

shapes new paradigms of disease and fear. American films and TV shows are situated

several historical trajectories: anxiety about emerging viruses and a shrinking, border-less

world, as in films like Contagion, the insertion of bioterrorism starting in the twenty-first

century, as in television shows like 24, and the current fascination with manifesting the

end of the world, as evidenced in TV shows like The Walking Dead and films like I Am

Legend. While there are other texts that discuss zombies films or science fiction, this

dissertation examines not only outbreak narratives in film and television, but puts them in

conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news organizations that have

capitalized on public fears about our changing world.

iii!

The dissertation of Dahlia Schweitzer is approved.

John T. Caldwell

Stephen D. Mamber

Toby Miller

Denise R. Mann, Committee Chair

University of California, Los Angeles

2018

iv!

Contents

Preface 1

Introduction 3

1 The Outbreak Narrative 50

2 The Globalization Outbreak 86

3 The Terrorism Outbreak 128

4 The Postapocalypse Outbreak 169

Conclusion 224

Notes 238

DAHLIA SCHWEITZER

Curriculum Vitae, March 2018

PUBLICATIONS

Books

In Press L.A. Private Eyes, Rutgers University Press, 2019.

2018 Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World, Rutgers University Press, 2018.

2014 Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster, Intellect/University of Chicago

Press, 2014.

Journal Articles

2017 “Pushing Contagion: How Government Agencies Shape Portrayals of Disease,” The

Journal of Popular Culture, 50.3, 445-465.

2017 “Having a Moment and a Dream: Precious, Paris is Burning, and the Necessity of

Fantasy in Everyday Life,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 34.3, 243-258.

2016 “When Terrorism Met The Plague: How 9/11 Impacted the Outbreak Narrative,” Cinema

Journal, 56.1, 118-123.

2015 “The Mindy Project: Or Why ‘I’m The Mary, You’re The Rhoda’ Is the

RomComSitCom’s Most Revealing Accusation,” Journal of Popular Film and Television,

43.2, 63-69.

2010 “Opening the Body in Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer,” Jump Cut, Summer 2010.

2010 “Who is Missing in Bunny Lake?” Jump Cut, Summer 2010.

2000 “Striptease: The Art of Spectacle and Transgression,” The Journal of Popular Culture,

34.1, 65-75.

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

2017 “How iZombie Reinvents the Zombie Paradigm,” Console-ing Passions Conference, Greenville,

NC, July 27 – 29, 2017.

vi!

2016 “When Terrorism Met The Plague: How 9/11 Impacted the Outbreak Narrative,”

Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Atlanta, GA, March 30-April 3, 2016.

2016 “War Beyond the Battlefield: Gender, Bodies, and Bioterror,” panel organizer and

chair, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Atlanta, GA, March 30-April 3, 2016.

2015 “The Walking Diseased: Zombies, Viruses, and a New Kind of Dystopia,” presented to

the Film & History Annual Conference, Madison, WI, November 5-8, 2015.

2015 “Contagious Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, and the Outbreak Narrative,” presented to

the Cultural Studies Association Annual Conference, Riverside, CA, May 21-23, 2015.

2015 “When Viral Pandemics Met Economic Globalization in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion:

A Hollywood Not-in-Love Story,” presented to the Society for Cinema and Media

Studies Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada, March 25-29, 2015.

2014 “Gender and Genre in Office Killer,” presented at New York University’s Monstrous

Media Conference, New York, NY, February 14-15, 2014.

Preface

In 1995, I saw a movie called Safe at an art house theater in downtown Washington, DC. Written

and directed by Todd Haynes, the film left me speechless. As the enigmatic Carol White, the

normally luminous Julianne Moore’s radiant beauty becomes whiter and fainter as the film

progresses; she is the victim of a disease no one can diagnose, much less cure. There is no

question that Safe is significant not only as a work of cinema but also as an accurate reflection of

a particular moment in American history and a prophetic statement about how, in an identity-

based culture, diseases would, in the subsequent decades, become another middle-class way to

categorize ourselves, manage our problems, file our grievances, and find our communities.

As the years passed and AIDS shared the media spotlight with SARS, Ebola, and avian

influenza, I grew fascinated not only with the fear that these viruses could stir up but also with

the ways that they changed fundamental social interaction. Suddenly, “personal space” could

mean the difference between life and death—or so the media headlines would have you believe.

The healthy-looking person beside you could kill you. The plane you are about to board could be

flying hundreds of viruses around the world.

It was not just that viruses impact our interpersonal interactions, but they impact our

understanding of the world; they are talking points for politicians as much as box office fodder

for Hollywood. Why do we fear these viruses so? And why, over the last few years, have we

become so preoccupied with visualizing our demise? Zombies in a postapocalyptic dystopia have

become a meal ticket for publishers and producers alike, as readers and viewers are hungry for

the next visualization of what our world may become or what we, as humans, can become.

The outbreak narrative has become a parable for our fears, evolving to depict our horrors

of contagion, of the world, of monsters, and of becoming monsters. It is a template that adapts

with changing cultural and social anxieties, as well as a guidepost that tells us where we are

going and where we have been. How provincial we were back in 1995, when a deadly virus from

Africa only threatened the small town of Cedar Creek, when viruses could forge romances and

bring lovers together! In 2011, the world was a much colder place, full of isolation while still,

perversely, heavily interconnected—a virus was capable of crossing the world in the blink of an

eye. Now The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010-present) one of the highest-rated basic cable shows of

all time, visualizes for its viewers week after week just how brutal the future can look and how

quickly we can get there.

The biggest question is why. Why are we so drawn to these narratives? Why is a film

cycle launched in the mid-1990s continuing to reap box office rewards and gain television

ratings? Why are we so afraid of viruses halfway around the world? Why are we obsessed with

zombies? How does the outbreak narrative reflect anxieties about globalization, risk society, and

neoliberal capitalism?

This book attempts to answer these questions and more by tracking the permutations of

the outbreak narrative as it moves into the twenty-first century and by studying the intersections

between fields of medicine, politics, media, and representation. This book attempts to understand

why we fear the things we do, how film and television feed those fears, and why we cannot stop

watching.

Going Viral

Introduction

Plague remains a virulent metaphor: a powerful and historically lethal way of labeling enemies

and outsiders, a disturbing vector for our fears surrounding the fragility of the social bond, and a

puissant figuration of the conceptual and psychic infectiousness at work within psychoanalytic

thinking and its reception.

—Jennifer Cooke, Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film

American film and television outbreak narratives surround us, even if we are unaware of their

presence, repeating particular characters, images, and story lines in service of a formulaic

narrative that both reflects and shapes paradigms of disease and fear. The “outbreak narrative”

generally begins with the discovery of an emerging infection and follows it as it spreads,

documenting the journey to contain or neutralize it. Some versions incorporate terrorism, while

others use zombies. Some destroy the world, while others save it. Many dwell on corporate and

government conspiracies, while still others reflect upon what the world would look like if most

of us—including those corporations and governments—were dead. All variations of this template

reflect various real-life anxieties about emerging infections and potential pandemics,

occasionally relieving these anxieties in the neatly removed world of the Hollywood screen, but

often feeding them as well. It is with this feeding of the fear that I am most intrigued.

The outbreak narrative reveals anxieties related to three types of increasingly ineffective

boundaries: first, between the personal body and the body politic; second, between individual

nations; and third, between “ordinary” people and potentially dangerous disenfranchised groups.

Significantly, the outbreak narrative also reveals various ways these anxieties have been

constructed and commodified. While fears of viral outbreaks can be valid responses to actual

threats, they also reflect latent and/or hyperbolic anxieties triggered by changes in how the world

now works. It is not as simple as “disease has impacted our understanding of globalization,” or

“globalization has impacted our understanding of disease.” It is that these outbreak narratives—

and the anxieties they reflect—feed into larger narratives constructed by government

organizations, journalists, and Hollywood to fuel an ever-expanding relationship among fear,

power, and money. Fear requires a multiplier in order to spread, whether it be word-of-mouth

rumor, print media, radio, film, or television.

While it is true that fear may be a result of a

particular situation, it is also a product of social construction, shaped by cultural scripts that

instruct people how and of what to be afraid. In order to understand fear in a contemporary

society, one must assess that society’s culture and the ways fear is shaped and expressed within

it.

For example, during the 1950s, the language of bodily invasion and immune system

failure pervaded film: in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956), emotionless alien

duplicates slowly replace the population of the fictional California town of Santa Mira, and in

Invaders from Mars (Menzies, 1953) a young boy realizes that residents of his town are being

taken over by aliens. This acted as a metaphor for the imagined threat to the American body

politic at the hands of Communism. However, starting in the 1990s, the outbreak narrative turned

these metaphors literal. The threat was no longer from the outside but from the inside, not so

much a threat to the body from aliens or monsters or Bolsheviks, but the body literally acting as

a threat. Significantly enlarged microscopic views of deadly germs attacking bodily cells became

visualizations of this new kind of invasion. Outer space was replaced with inner space, the body

“simultaneously an uncontrollable mutineer and a vulnerable victim.”

This idea—that one’s own body cannot be trusted or protected—is illustrated in Todd

Haynes’s film Safe (1995). Carol White (Julianne Moore) is an ordinary housewife in the

affluent suburbs of Los Angeles who develops multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS). MCS often

begins as allergic reactions to chemicals and synthetic products but can spread to include almost

everything, including one’s own body. When Carol starts to show symptoms (nosebleeds,

weakness, coughing, vomiting, and convulsions), no one takes her seriously, including her

husband, doctor, and psychiatrist. Safe plays with both the metaphorical and the literal, leaving it

unclear whether Carol’s symptoms are psychological or physical. The film acts as a transition of

sorts from an era when such fears were metaphorical to now, when these fears feel alarmingly

literal.

Safe is also an eerily prescient film that predicted just how much we would become

obsessed with our own immunities and how little that obsession could save us. In 2014, Haynes

emphasized that the themes of Safe still remained relevant, that we are a culture struggling with a

sense that our immunity is in peril.

Haynes has also acknowledged that Safe is an analogy for

the AIDS crisis, with MCS acting as a surrogate virus for the human immunodeficiency virus

(HIV). While MCS forces the immune system into overdrive, making almost everything

potentially hazardous, HIV makes it harder for the infected person’s immune system to fight off

infections and diseases—literally rendering the immune system deficient—which also makes

almost everything hazardous to those infected. In other words, while MCS reduces the body’s

ability to defend itself because the immune system is in overdrive, HIV reduces the body’s

ability to defend itself because the immune system has been weakened.

During the 1980s, not only did HIV/AIDS heighten awareness of the immune system—

how it works as well as how it fails to work—but it also exacerbated the failure of the scientific

community to rid the world of infectious diseases. Following World War II, many thought the

scientific community had done exactly that. Antibiotics had basically eradicated contagious

diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis, and during the 1960s, infectious disease was seen as such

a declining specialty that medical students were told to concentrate instead on “real problems”

like cancer and heart disease.

But then AIDS hit, with its mounting death tolls, and no one could

stop it.

The threat of highly contagious disease often creates fear, and much like contagious

disease, this fear can spread like wildfire. AIDS act both to reminded people of that fear and as

an indicator of other emerging viruses to come. AIDS reinforced concerns that all boundaries—

but especially bodily ones—are porous and that there is no real protection against microbial

invasions. Government organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(CDC), journalists, and Hollywood capitalized on these fears for attention, power, and money.

For example, in “The Killers All Around,” published in Time magazine in September 1994,

Michael Lemonick writes,

Protozoans, bacteria, viruses—a whole menagerie of microscopic pests constantly

assaults every part of our body, looking for a way inside. Many are harmless or easy to

fight off. Others—as we are now so often reminded—are merciless killers . . . The danger

is greatest, of course, in the underdeveloped world, where epidemics of cholera,

dysentery and malaria are spawned by war, poverty, overcrowding and poor sanitation.

But the microbial world knows no boundaries. For all the vaunted power of modern

medicine, deadly infections are a growing threat to everyone, everywhere.

This kind of hyperbolic language is not unusual. Articles about viruses often sensationalize in

order to sell magazines under the guise of providing information. However, while it is true that

the danger is great in “the underdeveloped world,” this article uses that danger to set up the “us

versus them” trope that will persist within the outbreak narrative, stigmatizing the “primitive and

dangerous” other so threatening to those in the developed world. The article also exaggerates the

fear of death “to everyone, everywhere.” Many dangerous viruses, including Ebola, are not

actually deadly when proper medical care is available. Nonetheless, hyperbolic language

continues to be a common accompaniment to information about emerging viruses. Even though

concerns about microbial enemies are not new, it was in the 1990s that they—often described

with the term “emerging viruses”—appeared both as a coherent concept and as a deadly threat.

The notion of “emerging viruses” is generally credited to Stephen S. Morse, professor of

epidemiology at Columbia University, who chaired the 1989 conference “Emerging Viruses: The

Evolution of Viruses and Viral Disease.” In 1993, Oxford University Press published his book

Emerging Viruses, which was selected by American Scientist as one of the top science books of

the twentieth century. Morse also coined the phrase “instant-distant infections,” referencing the

idea that we are only “a plane ride away” from a “chain of lethal transmission.”

Morse was also

credited, as well, for establishing links between the largest and smallest scalar extremes. For

example, he drew attention to the ways large-scale events like urbanization, globalization,

environmental destruction, and war would have a direct impact on the microbial level.

This

meant that, in turn, altering local behavior could then have global repercussions. For instance, an

outbreak in a small African or Asian village could have a global impact.

In 1991, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) convened a committee of scientists

and health experts, including Morse and his colleague Joshua Lederberg—geneticist,

microbiologist, and winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—to put together

a report on the effects of global change on American health and security. Lederberg is the one

whose quote (“The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is a virus”)

opens one of the most successful and influential outbreak narratives, the film Outbreak

(Petersen, 1995). In his article “The Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases,” Nicholas B. King

argues that this report transformed Morse’s ideas “into a civic advocacy campaign, distilling a

complex constellation of ideas into a coherent yet flexible discourse intended to convince policy

makers of the national consequences of global change.” Significantly, King observes, this report

was written at a time when the public health community, and infectious disease researchers in

particular, was reeling from decades of budget cuts.

The public health community desperately

needed to remind the public (and the government) of its importance.

Right on cue, Richard Preston’s article “Crisis in the Hot Zone” was published in the New

Yorker in 1992. It detailed what transpired when a strain of Ebola broke out at a primate

quarantine facility in Reston, Virginia, not far from Washington, DC, and the efforts of two

virologists from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) to

contain the outbreak. The strain was an airborne version of Ebola, which, if humans had been

susceptible to it, could have been extremely dangerous. (Human-to-human transmission of the

Ebola virus is not airborne but rather spreads via direct contact with infected bodily fluids.)

However, the virus was only lethal to monkeys, and so the outbreak was eventually stopped, but

only after all the monkeys had been killed. While Lederberg is not quoted in the article, it was

Lederberg who initially told Preston about the outbreak, encouraging him to look into it.

Appropriately, Preston references the report commissioned by the NAS in the article (calling it a

“frightening report”) and quotes its description of the Reston event (a “classic example of ‘the

potential of foreign disease agents to enter the United States’”), adding that the incident had

“scared a lot of epidemiologists.” Preston goes on to frighten his readers further by summarizing

that the report warns that “not only emerging viruses but also mutant bacteria . . . have become

major and growing threats to the American population . . . We lack the forces to deal with a

monster, at the very time that a monster could appear.” Additionally, and here Preston quotes

from the NAS report directly, “‘We can also be confident that new diseases will emerge,

although it is impossible to predict their individual emergence in time and place.’” He ends his

article with an interview with Stephen S. Morse, asking him if an emergent virus “could wipe out

our species.” Morse replies that HIV “might actually do the job,” offering up the possibility of an

aerosolized form of HIV that “would circle the globe in a flash,” conceivably killing “one in

three people on earth.”

The article proved such a success that Preston was offered both book

and movie deals based on the events in Reston.

Not only did Preston draw connections among Ebola, HIV, and other emerging viruses,

but he cast the scale of what would otherwise have been a small successfully contained outbreak

upward, transforming an anticlimactic story in one primate facility into “a narrowly averted

disaster and harbinger of pandemics to come.”

Not only does this transference, from local to

global, mirror Morse’s link between scalar extremes, but it is also what journalists would later

mirror when writing about these new hot-button topics (emerging diseases! pandemics! viral

outbreaks!). For example, as Stephen S. Hall writes in the New York Times in October of 1994,

Ebola is a virus to which the adjective “deadly” clings like spandex . . . It can kill up to

90 percent of the people it infects . . . First people would develop fevers and then they

would begin to bleed from every orifice—suffering nosebleeds, bleeding gums, bloody

diarrhea, bloody vomit, bleeding eyes—until, in a viral end game, they would be reduced

to a feverish slush of blood, a single soggy imploding hemorrhage (thus the name

“hemorrhagic” virus). Once it was loose in the camps, the Ebola virus would hop from

refugee to refugee, then to aid workers, U.N. peacekeepers and the volunteer doctors and

nurses who minister to the dying. In less than two weeks, carried far and wide by soldiers

and relief workers returning home, Ebola virus would disembark on three continents.

Pandemic, panic, public health disaster.

In the blink of an eye, according to this article, Ebola could hop between patients and doctors,

and “in less than two weeks” go global. Hall goes on to offer the disclaimer that this scenario had

not yet happened, that it was merely a scenario concocted by infectious disease experts during an

annual meeting, but his disclaimer falls far short when it is followed by the unsettling declaration

that if this worst-case scenario were to come true, “no national or international agency (not even

the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) would be

equipped to do much about it.”

Screenwriter James V. Hart, hired by producer Lynda Obst to write the script for the Hot

Zone film adaptation, did extensive research for the project, including going to USAMRIID and

speaking with the virologists who had been involved with the Ebola outbreak. He recounts that

“the biggest problem they had with the Ebola outbreak at the monkey house was the fact that no

human being died.” If one human being had died, they would have been able to “get government

funding to begin work on a vaccine, on anti-serums, on controls about people coming in to this

country with infectious diseases . . . All they wanted was to scare the shit out of people, so they’d

have some more juice to go back to Congress and get more funding for virology research, for

virology protocols, for infectious diseases—how they’re diagnosed—for immigration controls,

checks at airports.”

Since monkeys were the only casualties, it was easier for everyone to look

the other way.

In the 1991 report prepared for the NAS, there were also threats that justified funding, as

well as recommendations for how those funds should be spent on a national scale. Specifically,

the report targeted American policy makers and framed its arguments in terms of American

public health and national security. The report emphasized how emerging diseases—defined as

“clinically distinct conditions whose incidence in humans has increased”—provided multiple

potential threats to the United States “because of global interdependence, modern transportation,

trade, and changing social and cultural patterns,” as well as population growth and migration,

changes in sexual behavior, new medical treatments and technologies, breakdowns of public

health measures such as sanitation, and immunization, among others. Recommendations

revolved around surveillance, training and research, vaccine and drug development, and

behavioral change, fusing national self-interest with global humanitarianism, and national

security with international health.

Disease surveillance, a core part of Morse’s plan, involves

gathering and tracking information, and analyzing and interpreting large volumes of data

originating from a variety of sources—primarily hospitals—in order to enable doctors and

scientists to keep track of what might be new and emerging diseases.

Alexander D. Langmuir, who had consulted with the Armed Forces Epidemiological

Board before acting as the director of the epidemiology branch of the CDC from 1949 to 1970,

initially popularized the term “surveillance,” with its overtones “of military or intelligence

activities” (at odds with the dull bureaucratic paperwork more traditional disease reporting

entails) in order to support his argument that epidemiology was a defense expenditure.

associating the CDC with national defense priorities, Langmuir managed to capitalize on fears of

biological warfare during and after the Korean War in order to reinvigorate funding for the CDC.

Langmuir later recalled that the “emotional hysteria”

about biological warfare at the time “was

unbelievable and worse the higher one reached into the establishment.” Recognizing the power

of this fear, Langmuir used it to sneak a detailed plan and budget for the CDC through military

intelligence, accompanied by “a plain unvarnished statement of the potentialities of BW

[biological warfare].”

Langmuir, who had originally become involved with biological warfare

when he was a member (and then chair) of the Department of Defense’s Committee on

Biological Warfare, warned that the nation was vulnerable to “sabotage of food and water

supplies” and that epidemiologists needed to provide “the first line of national defense.”

In December 1950, just a few short months after the war with Korea began, several key

publications were released regarding biological warfare, explaining to the public what they

needed to know. The executive office of the president, with input from Langmuir, published a

report that detailed how easily America could be a target for biological warfare. The Federal

Civil Defense Administration and the US Army also published pamphlets to inform the general

public. These pamphlets warned that ventilation systems, as well as food and water supplies,

could be used to spread plague, typhus, cholera, smallpox, anthrax, and a host of other biological

agents. According to Elizabeth Fee, chief of the history of medicine division at the National

Library of Medicine, and Theodore M. Brown, professor of public health and policy at the

University of Rochester, “These official pamphlets communicated a curious mix of anxiety,

information, and reassurance,” discounting some rumors while also feeding others with the

assertion that “an invisible biological warfare attack could come at any time, without warning.”

In April 1951, Langmuir even starred in a television program produced by the

Department of Defense and the US Federal Civil Defense Administration—What You Should

Know about Biological Warfare—that argued for the importance of the public health system as

the country’s best defense against biological warfare.

In the program, Langmuir gave several

demonstrations using everyday tools to display how easily a city could be contaminated with

infectious material. For example, he demonstrated how easily a pathogen could be aerosolized

using a dry ice and a blender or spread via a city’s water supply. The only recourse? To build a

“complete biological warfare defense system” that would be based on the existing public health

system but with more effective tools and facilities. His vision would, in many ways, shape the

future development of the CDC.

Though President Truman was scaling down all nondefense budgets in order to fund the

war with Korea, “epidemiologic intelligence” was listed as a defense expenditure and therefore

remained protected.

By 1951, it was the CDC, rather than the National Institutes of Health

(NIH), that assumed responsibility for protecting the nation against an attack involving

biological weapons.

Ironically, Fee and Brown found it “very difficult, if not impossible, to discover much

evidence for any real threat of biological aggression against the United States around the time of

the Korean War.”

The arguments they found were based purely on hypothetical scenarios

rather than actual facts. In a perverse twist, the nation with the most fully developed commitment

to biological warfare was the United States; research into biowarfare had begun during World

War II and expanded in the decades that followed.

It is worth noting that Langmuir’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a practical

training program for young epidemiologists, was created using military funds. A two-year

applied training program with an emphasis on fieldwork, the EIS was developed to prepare

trained field investigators to deal with biological warfare. These young epidemiologists later

went on to act as directors of the CDC and the National Heart Institute, assistant director general

of the World Health Organization, executive director of the National Foundation for Infectious

Diseases, Surgeon General, and many more high-level positions, further spreading Langmuir’s

ideas to influential places.

Concerns about biological warfare persisted throughout the latter half of the twentieth

century. Richard Preston, the author of “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” also became interested in

bioterrorism a few years after his article appeared in the New Yorker, and in 1998, he published

The Cobra Event (Random House, 1998), a fictional account of bioterrorist attacks in

Washington, DC, and New York City. In fact, Preston testified in front of the Senate that same

year during hearings on American preparedness for biological warfare. The Cobra Event had

such an impact on President Clinton that he not only passed the book along to Defense Secretary

William Cohen and House Speaker Newt Gingrich but also subsequently announced the

development of a series of antibioterrorism initiatives for which he requested an additional $294

million from Congress in his budget request for the 1999 fiscal year. Furthermore, Secretary of

Health and Human Services Donna Shalala would open her article “Bioterrorism: How Prepared

Are We?” for the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal with an outline of The Cobra

Event, writing that the thought-provoking novel raises this question: “How do we successfully

contain and combat the threat of bioterrorism?”

Shalala overlooks the book’s fictional status.

Stephen S. Morse—the man who may have coined “emerging disease” as a coherent concept and

who told Preston in the “Crisis in the Hot Zone” article that HIV might kill one in three of the

world’s population—left his university position in 1996 to join the Defense Advanced Research

Projects Agency (DARPA) as manager of the Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures

program.

Much as the line between fact and fiction would prove blurry, so, too, would the line

between the scientific community and the military industry.

Given this carefully cultivated fear, it should be no surprise that in 1999, Congress

allocated $121 million in funding to the CDC’s newly created bioterrorism preparedness and

response program to begin enhancing the nation’s epidemiology and laboratory systems. This

funding would increase to approximately $194 million in fiscal year (FY) 2001.

President

Obama’s proposed budget for FY 2015 included $1.5 billion for programs solely devoted to

civilian biodefense ($211 million less than biodefense appropriations in FY 2014) and $948

million to pandemic influenza and emerging infectious disease programs. Biodefense programs

were defined as “federal programs focused on prevention, preparedness, and response to attacks

on civilians with biological agents and accidental releases of biological material,” and pandemic

influenza and emerging infectious disease programs were defined as “federal programs focused

on preparedness and response to large, naturally occurring, and potentially destabilizing

epidemics.”

The rhetoric of biological threat also spawned a flurry of biodefense legislation in the

United States: The Bioterrorism Act, Project Bioshield, the Biosurveillance Project, The National

Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS), the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile, as

well as a host of classified bioweapons projects.

The 2014 federal budget for civilian

biodefense would total $6.69 billion. Of that total, $5.86 billion (88 percent) was budgeted for

programs that had both biodefense and nonbiodefense goals and applications, and $835 million

(12 percent) was budgeted for programs that had objectives solely related to biodefense.

Bioterrorism was a very real fear by the start of the twenty-first century; the presence of

“agents suitable for biological weapons development” was one of the justifications for going to

war with Iraq in 2002.

Ruth Mayer writes that the debates around the second Iraq War in

particular demonstrate the power of this fear: “While, obviously, the large-scale bioweapons

programs . . . did not exist . . . the rhetoric of biological threat on its own proved powerful

enough to override important objections and to legitimate the war for many.”

The well-

publicized outbreaks of Ebola and HIV during the 1980s and 1990s, followed a few years later

by September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks, served as a reminder of America’s vulnerabilities

to viruses, biowarfare, and terrorism. All three could threaten large-scale attacks seemingly

anywhere at any time.

Released in 2002, John Murlowski’s Contagion (not to be confused with Soderbergh’s

later film) revolves around the aftermath of an attack upon the American president, shot in the

neck with an Ebola-infused dart. The choice of Ebola was deliberate, Murlowski explains,

precisely because it would tap into a fear that most viewers would recognize: “The producers

wanted to keep it simple and primal.” The hospital is quarantined and the terrorist tries to use the

cure as leverage. While Murlowski admits the timing—so soon after both the anthrax and the

9/11 attacks—was coincidental, the film’s production team was “well aware of terrorist threats,

both homegrown and foreign,” figuring that it was only a matter of time until the United States

would suffer a terrorist threat: “One just had to look at the politics at the time in the Middle East

and see the collision course we were on.”

The persistent appearance of bioweapons in the news only intensified these fears. On

October 5, 2014, at the height of an Ebola outbreak, the retired captain Al Shimkus, then a

professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, told Forbes that in the

context of terrorist activity “it doesn’t take much sophistication to go to that next step to use a

human being as a carrier.” Terrorists would not even have to isolate the virus. They could find an

Ebola outbreak and intentionally expose themselves.

A couple weeks later, on October 17, 2014, the Fox News website published an article

entitled “Could Ebola Virus Become ‘Bioterrorist Threat’?” The article quickly abandons the

ambiguity of the title, quoting Amanda Teckman—then an administrative assistant at Seton Hall

University, who had written about the dangers of ignoring Ebola in a 2013 Global Policy Journal

article—in the second paragraph, where she declares that “the government should be concerned

about [weaponization], because if it does happen it could be devastating.” By the fourth

paragraph, the article tells us how easily it could happen, this time quoting Dr. Ryan Hall, a

forensic psychologist who has written about psychological trauma associated with bioterrorism.

Dr. Hall declares, “If you want to do the equivalent of a dirty bomb all you need is a bag of

[vomit].” The article also quotes Scott Gotlieb, a physician and former Food and Drug

Administration official during the George W. Bush administration, who confirms that turning

Ebola into a bioweapon would not take a lot of sophistication.

On that same day in October

2014, the Blaze published an article entitled “GOP Congressman: Ebola as a Terrorism Tool

‘Should Be on the Radar Screen.’” The second paragraph of the article quotes North Carolina

Congressman Robert Pittenger, who agrees that Ebola “could be a place for terrorists to

engage . . . They are unrelenting. If they could get infected with the virus, they could try to pass

it on to others.”

Given this discourse of fear, is it any wonder that people are terrified of a virus that is

relatively difficult to transmit? As of January 2017, there were only four laboratory-confirmed

cases of Ebola diagnosed in humans in all of U.S. history. Only two of those people had

contracted the virus in the United States—both nurses, treating an infected patient—and they

recovered. And yet security agencies, journalists, and politicians continue to parrot the same

talking points, in part to draw attention to their agendas and in part, perhaps, to justify their

existence, their actions, and their funding.

Much as Langmuir had a few decades before, many involved with public health during

the 1990s would capitalize on the newly energized fear of emerging viruses post-AIDS in order

to shift attention and funding back to them. Following the release of the 1991 NAS report, the

CDC and the cabinet-level National Science and Technology Council (NTSC) issued their own

reports repeating the NAS’s initial findings with “little modification.” In 1995, the CDC

launched an online journal entitled Emerging Infectious Diseases, and the World Health

Organization (WHO) established the Division of Emerging and Other Communicable Diseases

Surveillance and Control. In October of that same year, during a US Senate hearing on the topic,

Joshua Lederberg, clearly given to dramatic sound bites, referenced Morse’s concept of instant-

distant infections with his warning that “the microbe which felled one child in a distant continent

yesterday can reach your child today and seed a global pandemic tomorrow.”

Emerging viruses

had become terrifying possibilities, rich with the potential for death and destruction—perhaps

even that of the entire world. To make matters worse, experts kept insisting that America was

unprepared and public health departments underfunded.

In a May 1994 column for the New York Times entitled “The Doctor’s World,” Dr.

Lawrence Altman, the first doctor to work full time for a daily newspaper, wrote that “not so

long ago, Government officials and medical leaders all but pronounced the end of infectious

diseases as a major public health problem,” but new and emerging diseases like AIDS, Lyme

disease, Lassa fever, Ebola, and Marburg had proved that prediction wrong. Altman argued that

“overconfidence about infectious diseases has weakened public health systems in this country

and elsewhere, jeopardizing their ability to detect and prevent new and old ones.” Citing a “new

Federal report, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” Altman proposed that the

United States needed “an infusion of up to $125 million a year to carry out a plan to provide the

vigilance and rapid response needed to contain infections.”

While Altman did not specify which federal report from the CDC encouraged this

funding, it is likely to have been the one largely repurposed from the 1991 NAS report. Altman

also argued for increased “surveillance,” a key element in Morse’s disease agenda. Using

Morse’s style of language, Altman declared, “The single most important weapon in any

country’s defense against infections is its disease surveillance system.” Altman also mentioned

that the CDC needed more Federal resources to support the national disease reporting system,

warning that the surveillance systems had been so weakened by budget cuts that there was no

national system in place to monitor or defend against current and future problems.

Ironically, in a Time magazine article written by Michael Lemonick and Bruce Crumley

during the 1995 Ebola outbreak, Dr. Peter Piot, who had investigated the first Ebola outbreak in

1976 and headed the United Nations AIDS program, explained that, even though it was

“theoretically feasible that an inflicted person from Kikwit could go to Kinhasa, get on an

airplane to New York, fall ill and present a transmission risk there,” the outbreak would still

likely stop at that point.

Piot’s argument was that “the Ebola virus is ill-suited to sustaining an

epidemic: it kills victims so quickly that they don’t have much chance to infect others.” He also

emphasized that “the virus is not all that easy to pass along. Unlike the most highly contagious

illnesses—tuberculosis or influenza, example, Ebola can’t be transmitted with a sneeze or

cough.” He reassured his readers that “most people, especially those outside Zaire, have little to

fear from Ebola.”

But reassurances will not sell magazines. And so the article still has the alarming title

“Return to the Hot Zone: The Gruesome Ebola Virus, Dormant for 16 Years, Has Arisen to Kill

Again in Zaire. Will It Spread?,” and it concludes with the question “haunting” public health

officials: “Suppose we get a virus that is both deadly to man and transmitted in the air?” The

article reminds readers of the sobering fact that the virus does not even need to be a new

organism. An existing virus could turn deadly, “since viruses undergo mutations” that sometimes

make them more virulent—much like Morse warned to Preston might happen with HIV, creating

an aerosolized form of HIV that “would circle the globe in a flash,” or as happened in Reston,

Virginia. The final warning of the article by Lemonick and Crumley is that “the next time the

Ebola virus emerges from the jungle, it might be much harder to control.”

And just like that,

the article cancels out any calming reassurances that Piot may have made. Significantly, the

coauthor is the same Michael Lemonick whose article “The Killers All Around” contained such

dramatic statements as this: “For all the vaunted power of modern medicine, deadly infections

are a growing threat to everyone, everywhere”; “It’s getting harder to enjoy a meal, make love or

even take a walk in the woods without a bit of fear in the back of the mind”; and “By now nearly

every disease organism known to medicine has become resistant to at least one antibiotic, and

several are immune to more than one.”

Reassurances will also not yield increased funding for health initiatives. It should come

as no surprise that even articles like Lemonick’s for Time magazine push Morse’s agenda, using

virtually the same talking points as Altman did for the New York Times. After building up

reasons to be afraid, Lemonick advocates increased vigilance by public health authorities, a

strengthening of surveillance and information-gathering networks, improvement of health

conditions around the world, and the development of new drugs. While all these will be

“enormously expensive,” Lemonick argues that the price of doing nothing “may be measured in

millions of lost lives.”

Funding requires support, so is it any wonder that, in 1996, thirty-six

medical journals in twenty-one countries focused all or part of their issues on the topic of

emerging viruses?

The concept had taken hold, as a marketable idea, a political agenda, and a

source of fear.

Writers rushed to capitalized on consumers’ renewed interest. For instance, journalist

Laurie Garrett, who had been working on her own book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging

Diseases in a World Out of Balance, accelerated production so that it would come out before

Preston’s book version of his “Crisis in the Hot Zone” article. The Coming Plague was released

on January 1, 1994, and it was a New York Times bestseller for nineteen weeks. Her focus, unlike

Preston’s global view, was on how years of declining public health, combined with economic

inequality, were to blame for the rise in emerging diseases. She declared that “humanity will

have to change its perspective on its place in Earth’s ecology if the species hopes to stave off or

survive the next plague.”

In his review of Laurie Garrett’s book for the March 1995 issue of Public Health Reports,

Stephen A. Morse, director of the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Laboratory at the CDC (not to

be confused with the aforementioned Stephen S. Morse of DARPA), warns that “advances in

medicine, such as antibiotics and vaccines, have caused many people to become complacent,

believing that infectious diseases are no longer a major domestic problem. As a result, resources

for infectious diseases have dwindled.” Morse describes Garrett’s book as “a wakeup call.” His

review would dramatically be titled “The Year 2000: Only a Plane Flight Away from

Disaster?”

Since drama sells copy—and movies, and books, and even public policy—this kind of

dramatic language would continue to be embraced and the idea of a global threat perpetuated and

carefully groomed. Published in September of 1994, Richard Preston’s book, The Hot Zone: The

Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus (Random House), spent almost two years

on the hardcover and paperback bestseller lists. Part of its appeal was, unquestionably, that it was

a “true story.” Preston thanks both Stephen S. Morse and Joshua Lederberg in the credits for the

book, grateful to them for “philosophical guidance,” for bringing world attention to the concerns

expressed in the book, and for “decades of thinking and commentary by Lederberg.”

The book,

like the original article, emphasizes the threat of global annihilation at the hands of microbes.

Page sixteen of the book, for example, utters a warning that is reiterated throughout: “A hot virus

from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four hour plane flight from every city on earth.”

his blurb for the book, Stephen King describes The Hot Zone as one of the most horrifying things

he has ever read, while a review in the British Medical Journal concludes with the promise that

the book “is likely to leave you wondering when and where this enigmatic agent will appear next

and what other disasters may await.”

The success of these two books, combined with the previous New Yorker article and the

books and television shows they would inspire, directly contributed to the frequency of television

news reports about emerging viruses. The fear spread further as real life fueled viral-related fears

all the more. Ebola would hit the major African town of Kikwit, Zaire (now known as the

Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1995, intensifying fears of a worldwide epidemic. The

outbreak was heavily featured by American news media, with “virtually every major news

organization [drawn] to the hitherto unknown city of Kikwit.”

Weekly magazines published

cover stories on the virus, and network news programs such as ABC’s Nightline and PBS’s Nova

devoted special episodes to the outbreak. Even CNN aired a special report, “The Apocalypse

Bug,” on May 14, 1995. Not only did the May 22, 1995, issue of Newsweek focus on this new

fear of viruses, but it even had a graphic cover with the words “Killer Virus” in large bold

lettering and the subheading “Beyond the Ebola Scare—What Else Is Out There?” The issue also

included numerous articles exploring different aspects of viral panic, including “Why Viruses

Push Our Hot Buttons,” “Outbreak of Fear,” and “A World of Viruses.” Suddenly, small stories

about a few sick people could be big news, because a few sick people could now kill the world.

Dr. Robert J. Howard, director of strategic communication at the CDC from 1991 to 2000,

describes the front lawn of the CDC during the spring of 1995 as

the scene of an ever growing constantly expanding number of reporters, satellite trucks,

cameras, and literally miles of cable associated with radio, television, and newspaper

coverage. Live programmes, taped programmes, hourly updates, and every aspect of the

epidemiology, recognition, treatment and control of a severe viral hemorrhagic illness

most Americans had never even heard of, played itself out in the homes of Americans.

News programmes and newspapers seen and heard by Americans detailed countless

perspectives and angles of this tragedy. Internet homepages were created to update the

latest case counts and deaths, and videocrews from around the world were dispatched to a

small village in Zaire. Thanks to modern satellite media, Ebola hemorrhagic fever had

arrived.

All this, despite the fact that not a single American had died from the virus.

While it is no surprise that journalists and Hollywood would embrace this new topic, it

would also be no accident. For example, Brigitte Nerlich and Christopher Halliday analyzed

media coverage of the avian flu outbreak in the United Kingdom in 2004. They found that the

initial surge in UK media coverage—before the virus had even been detected in the UK—was

not triggered by any of the typical reasons certain risks are embraced (e.g., easy-to-write human

interest stories), but rather due to an increasing amount of activity by pressure groups,

professional bodies and politicians, and the WHO, in particular.

Nerlich and Halliday go on to

argue that the “underlying motive of heightening awareness for an impending pandemic was

probably to use the scientific status of experts to cause a shift in public policy, e.g. to increase

national and global resource allocation for public health.”

Contrary to the usual knee-jerk

reaction of blaming media for stoking the fire of fear, distorting and hyperbolizing the truth in

order to gain readership and viewership, Nerlich and Halliday write that, in this case, the media

are actually more of a “direct conduit of scientific information,” not so much distorting a

message as heating it up by presenting it to the public in easily digestible bundles.

And these

easily digestible bundles could then be used to justify increased national and global resource

allocation for public health.

In August of 1996, Turner Publishing released Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC:

Tracking Ebola and the World’s Deadliest Viruses. It was written by Joseph B. McCormick,

former chief of the CDC’s special pathogens branch in Atlanta and mentioned extensively in

both Preston’s The Hot Zone and Garrett’s The Coming Plague, with his former colleague at the

CDC (and wife) Susan Fisher Hoch, along with medical thriller writer Leslie Horvitz. The book

capitalized on the “Ebola craze” by providing personal accounts of people who had spent

decades fighting and researching Ebola as well as other less known outbreaks. “Level 4” is a

reference to the biohazard unit in the CDC where scientists examine some of the most lethal

pathogens known to man. HIV, by comparison, is most often handled in a Level 2 environment.

The publication of this book, following Preston’s and Garrett’s literary success, is not surprising

but provided more fuel for fears of Ebola and other exotic viruses.

American sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, who has written extensively about the relationship

between science and society, frequently focuses on the consequences of unchecked scientific

progress and its unquestioning acceptance by the public. She explains the mutually beneficial

relationship between science and mass media as follows:

The quest for publicity is increasingly prevalent in the medical and biomedical

communities. Those working on the costly frontiers of modern medicine must maintain

their legitimacy and their sources of public support. Many researchers believe that

scholarly communication is no longer sufficient to maintain their enterprise, that national

visibility through the mass media is strategically necessary to assure a favorable public

image and adequate research support . . . They employ sophisticated public relations

techniques and communication controls to manage the news. The press is receptive to

their efforts. Promising therapeutic advances and dramatic medical interventions are

front-page news.

To help scientists “manage” media, Robert J. Howard from the CDC published a guide in 2000

entitled “Getting It Right in Prime Time.” Currently included on the CDC’s website as part of its

Emerging Infectious Diseases journal, Howard makes suggestions on how to develop a

communication strategy and objectives with an emphasis on maintaining proper perspective. He

concludes with the following message, clearly inspired by Morse’s emphasis on scalar extremes:

“Even though cases of Ebola virus infection had not yet reached the shores of the United

States . . . what happens in Zaire or the Sudan today may well be a U.S. problem tomorrow. ‘We

live in a global village’ and ‘diseases are only a plane flight away’ are messages that everyone

can understand.”

After all, if we live in a global village and, as Lederberg declared, a microbe

in a distant continent “can reach your child today and seed a global pandemic tomorrow,” no one

and nowhere are safe. While it is true that these are messages everyone can understand, they are

also messages that can inspire fear and messages that are not always accurate or productive.

In that same issue of the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal, Vicki Freimuth, professor

of health and risk communication at the University of Georgia, and Polyxeni Potter, managing

editor of Emerging Infectious Diseases, along with independent researcher Huan W. Linnan,

published another instructional article, this one entitled “Communicating the Threat of Emerging

Infections to the Public.” This article emphasizes that while communicating with the public had

usually been left to the press, AIDS, combined with “the emergence of new infectious

organisms, microbial resistance to therapeutic drugs, and a new emphasis on prevention” had

made the role of communication an important and necessary component of public health

practice. The authors argue that this shift had occurred simultaneously with the rise in public

interest in health information caused by aging baby boomers and the spread of electronic

publishing. They emphasize, “Even the best-crafted message is useless if it fails to reach the

intended audience.”

So how to reach that audience? Freimuth, Potter, and Linnan are quick to specify the pros

and cons of various types of media, including news, entertainment, advertising, and the

importance of using as many types of media as possible. For instance, the America Responds to

AIDS campaign included “television and radio public service announcements, printed materials

(posters, booklets, brochures, billboards, bus ads), telephone hot lines, AIDS prevention

messages integrated in movies and television shows, and specific AIDS information

disseminated electronically through the Internet.”

While mass exposure is beneficial, it is

popular entertainment in particular that effectively educates audiences, since behavior is often

learned through modeling. Not only does entertainment media reinforce certain behaviors, but it

also taps into audience’s emotions. This is important because, as the article outlines, “When the

audience responds emotionally, the educational message is more likely to influence their

behavior than when they respond only rationally.”

Having witnessed the successful use of mass communication by fascist propagandists

during the World War II, groups like the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO) began investing heavily in print, radio, and film. Nicholas B. King

observes that these organizations saw film in particular as an effective way of educating the

public. Knowing that the films with the greatest impact were both entertaining and informative,

the United Nations contracted with commercial filmmakers and, in 1948, released an educational

film devoted to the state of the world and disease control entitled The Eternal Flight. Over an

animation of a train bearing a large skull representing cholera passing from city to city, the

narrator warns, “New means of transportation brought the world tight and close together, making

it one tremendous and congested city. From a disease-infected zone, the traveler now became,

unwittingly, a carrier of deadly germs. Wherever he went, the germs stayed and spread.” Later,

over a visual montage of air travel footage and world maps, the narrator declares, “Today there

are no distances . . . The people of the world are one people . . . Modern transport poses new

dangers of complete, universal contagion.”

If modern transport posed new dangers, the media would be more than happy to exploit

these new dangers for ratings and box office dollars. Peter Stearns, in his book American Fear:

The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety, points out that, “as foreign news declined on

nightly telecasts during the 1990s—a fruit of the cold war’s end—health news increased,

catching American fear where it now seemed to live.” Stearns also argues that this shift was

exacerbated by the fact that “growing numbers of Americans had become accustomed to taking

media presentations for reality, blurring the lines between entertainment and news and accepting

an ever mounting diet of fear in the process.”

This tendency has only increased in recent years.

According to a survey conducted in 2016 by Ipsos Public Affairs, “fake news headlines fool

American adults about 75% of the time.” This survey was “the first large-scale public opinion

research survey into the fake news phenomenon,” a phenomenon that garnered widespread

attention during the 2016 American presidential campaign.

In a study conducted by Sheldon Ungar for the British Journal of Sociology, he found

that, before 1994, coverage devoted to diseases like tuberculosis and cholera was “sporadic and

of limited scope.” However, 1994 would mark the “‘coming out’ ceremony for infectious

diseases in the popular media.” These diseases would now be placed firmly on the public agenda,

possibly catapulted “ahead of nuclear war and climate change as the primordial source of

apocalyptic anxieties.” Annual coverage of emerging diseases also increased significantly

between 1993 and 1994 and even more between 1994 and 1995. Starting almost at zero in 1989,

by 1995, there would be forty stories in that year about emerging diseases on the three major

American television networks. Ungar details several noteworthy occurrences that “all but

guaranteed” the rise in media coverage. His first noteworthy occurrence was the publication of

the reports mentioned earlier, such as those from the CDC and the NAS, as well as the

publication of books such as those written by Garrett, Preston, and McCormick. Ungar states

that, by using a “rhetoric of endangerment,” these publications aimed to “animate the problem

and convince reluctant publics of the magnitude of the crisis.” This rhetoric was reinforced by

two other noteworthy occurrences: the apparently “sudden onset of novel diseases that attracted

short-lived bursts of attention,” such as the 1993 outbreak of hantavirus carried by rodents in the

American southwest (generating eight television news stories), as well as the 1994 outbreak of

plague in India (generating nine in a single week). A breakout of antibiotic-resistant bacteria

fueled ten stories in 1994, with four more in early 1995.

What makes this change in coverage even more striking is that there was not just a shift

in quantity but a shift in style as well. This new influx of stories evolved from episodic to

thematic, allowing them to address the topic of emerging disease more broadly, referencing

Morse’s scalar approach to the ways local behavior could have global repercussions. Viruses

now had mass significance. While it is difficult to argue whether the books and articles on

emerging viruses fueled attention for the viral outbreaks or the viral outbreaks fueled attention

for the books and articles, Unger argues that what tied everything together was a converging

element: the “Hollywood factor.”

The way infectious viruses are appropriated by Hollywood may provide the greatest

insight into the viruses themselves and the world we live in. After all, few things reflect social

trends and anxieties like film and television. Cultural theorist Douglas Kellner observes that

films “are an especially illuminating social indicator of the realities of a historical era, as a

tremendous amount of capital is invested in researching, producing, and marketing the product.

Film creators tap into the events, fears, fantasies, and hopes of an era and give cinematic

expression to social experiences and realities.”

To put it simply, Hollywood reads the zeitgeist

in order to translate it into box office profits.

However, this kind of “social reflection” is not limited to film. In fact, during recent

years, it has been increasingly hard to distinguish between film and television, as premium

television demands larger and larger budgets and cinematic cinematography, and personnel

(including directors, actors, and producers) move from big screen to small screen and back to big

again. Most significant may be the fact that more and more people are watching television and

film in the same place—at home. While the lines continue to blur between film and television,

the outbreak narrative in particular does not rely on medium specificity. Rather, it is a rhetorical

pattern that persists across media forms and platforms. I will discuss the characteristics of this

pattern in greater depth in chapter 1.

Desperate to capitalize on the success of Preston’s article and subsequent book, as well as

the new fear of emerging disease, both Warner Bros. and Fox raced to release their outbreak

movie first. Fox stuck close to the Preston original—even naming the movie Crisis in the Hot

Zone—with Ridley Scott at the helm and Robert Redford and Jodie Foster as the leads. In

contrast, Warner Bros. went for a more fictionalized take with Outbreak, directed by Wolfgang

Petersen and starring Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo. Initially courted by the producers of both

films—even receiving the two scripts on the same day—Petersen told Entertainment Weekly that

he decided to do Outbreak because “sometimes you can tell a better story with fiction.”

Determined to be first, producer Arnold Kopelson sent Petersen and his crew to begin shooting

in July 1994, before the script had even finished, announcing in the trades that production had

begun.

Things had been rocky for Crisis in the Hot Zone for a while, as script rewrite after

rewrite met dissatisfaction from either a star or someone on the production team, but after this

announcement, things fell apart for good, and Fox pulled the plug. Petersen’s version was

released on March 10, 1995, and went on to gross $67,659,560 domestically and almost

$200,000,000 worldwide.

It arguably established the template for the outbreak narrative—a

template that would be followed and built upon for years to come.

Other outbreak narratives quickly followed. The television show The X-Files (Fox, 1993-

2002, 2016-present) got on board the outbreak narrative trend, airing “F. Emasculata” on the Fox

network on April 28, 1995. The episode fuses a pharmaceutical conspiracy with an Ebola-esque

virus that spreads via prison inmates, killing its victims within thirty-six hours of infection.

Similarly, on May 8, 1995, NBC aired Virus, also known as Formula for Death (the DVD title).

Starring Nicolette Sheridan in the lead role as a CDC researcher, Virus revolves around a plague

outbreak in Los Angeles. Universal Studio’s contribution to the outbreak narrative, 12 Monkeys,

directed by Terry Gilliam, premiered on December 27, 1995. Based on Chris Marker’s short

film La Jetée, it tells the tale of a convict’s journey back in time to discover the truth behind a

man-made virus that has killed most of the human population. Starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine

Stowe, and Brad Pitt, it earned almost $170 million worldwide.

It can take years to bring a film to the screen, and the synchronicity of outbreak films

around 1995, much like the synchronicity of bioterrorist narratives during the start of the twenty-

first century or the current success of zombies, are examples of cultural ideas developing in

parallel, drawing from the zeitgeist to explore similar themes. For Douglas Kellner, films also

have “an aesthetic, philosophical, and anticipatory dimension” that provides “artistic visions of

the world that might transcend the social context of the moment and articulate future

possibilities.”

For example, the shot of the notice board in 28 Days Later (Boyle, 2002), lined

with posters of people gone missing, bears an uncanny resemblance to similar flyers posted in

New York following 9/11. However, the film was shot prior to 9/11, and the shot had been based

on images Danny Boyle saw following an earthquake in China. The pilot episode of Fox’s 24

(2001–10), which aired on November 6, 2001, and had clearly been filmed long before 9/11,

features a 747 exploding over the desert near Los Angeles, with the terrorist (Mia Kirshner as

Mandy) parachuting out of the plane seconds before it crashes. As a concession to the similar

events that had happened on September 11, the shot of the plane exploding was cut from the

episode, but the rest of the episode remained intact. Another example is Robin Cook’s novel

Vector (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1999), in which he depicts a series of anthrax attacks by mail in

New York City, two years before they would happen in real life, providing a template for how

the real-life events might later unfold.

Fears of viral outbreak would eventually include West Nile fever and SARS (Severe

Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and grow steadily more global in scope. By the time Steven

Soderbergh tackled the outbreak narrative with the film Contagion in 2011, fears had shifted to

include avian and swine flu. But while the viruses may have changed, the basic template of the

outbreak narrative stayed the same, evolving only to reflect different modes of transmission, a

heightened awareness of how easily diseases can spread around the world, and evolutions in the

source of the current fear. For example, outbreak narratives released shortly after 9/11, like

Contagion (Murlowski, 2002), Global Effect (Cunningham, 2002), and season 3 of 24 (Fox,

2003–2004) would reflect the vulnerability many would feel to terrorism and, specifically,

growing fears of a bioterrorist outbreak. More recent outbreak narratives, such as I Am Legend

(Lawrence, 2007) and The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010-present), would circumvent the initial

outbreak or terrorist attack scenario, reflecting instead on what the world might look like after

the virus has done its work—after the kinds of death tolls predicted by hyperbolic headlines had

already ravaged the human race.

All of this is not to imply that fears of a viral outbreak are insane or implausible.

Populations are large, travel is rapid and accessible, developing countries are still building proper

sanitation infrastructures, and people come and go from all across the world. Viral outbreaks are

to be expected. However, the way media (and here I refer to both journalistic and entertainment

media) exploit and sensationalize headlines—a situation compounded by the fact that we now

have access to information twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—facilitates the spread of

both correct and incorrect information and encourages the spread of fear. Americans do

experience an inordinate amount of fear about things that are relatively remote to their

experience (like Ebola outbreaks); as a society, it is common for Americans to exaggerate threats

to our existence in ways that betray our relative safety, comfort, and hence guilt vis-à-vis the rest

of the world; and the media does contribute to the problem by further exaggerating and broadly

circulating these unwarranted fears. Peter Stearns recalls how Americans heard about the Pearl

Harbor attacks: “They might soon see pictures of carnage in newspaper and magazines and, if

they chose, could add detail in the newsreels at movie houses. But they had the news before the

visuals; the visuals were far less graphic (and were in black and white, not color) and, above all,

were less ubiquitous. Even if one were prone to the mesmerization of disaster, it was simply

harder to engage sixty years ago.”

Now, however, with multiple ways to watch, and more than

enough full color detail, it has become much easier to engage with—and much harder to avoid—

the information, however accurate or inaccurate it may be.

In particular, fear of Ebola, much like fear of terrorism, demonstrates how certain

responses are disproportionately shaped and intensified by the government, the media, films, and

television shows. These responses, in turn, shape government policy, journalistic coverage, and

the films and television shows we watch. Many outbreak narratives opt to use variations of

Ebola, a virus that has never been an actual threat on American soil but that triggers panic

nonetheless whenever supposed threats of the virus arise. And that panic has political

consequence. For example, the WHO acknowledges that public perception of Ebola has

influenced official policy. Professor Melissa Leach, cofounder of the Ebola Response

Anthropology Platform and lead social scientist in the UK and WHO Ebola scientific advisory

committees, explains in an interview on the WHO’s website that during the early- to mid-1990s,

Ebola had been portrayed “as a global threat, a fierce predator emerging from tropical areas in

Africa and spreading rapidly to the rest of the mobile and interconnected world.” This portrayal

was both shaped and exacerbated by films and books, all of which “created fear about Ebola

hemorrhagic fever in western populations.” Leach emphasizes that “the perception that the 1995

outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ‘was going to spread to the rest of the world’

was one of the factors that built political momentum leading to the revision of the International

Health Regulations in 2005.”

Fear of Ebola persists. In December 2013, when Ebola resurfaced in Guinea, West

Africa, continuing for more than two years and spreading to Liberia and Sierra Leone, with a few

isolated cases elsewhere, it caused widespread panic on American soil. After it was revealed that

Dr. Craig Spencer rode the subway and went bowling in New York shortly before being

diagnosed with Ebola, his actions met with hysteria. Despite the fact that Ebola spreads via

contact with blood or other bodily fluids, not via touched surfaces or the air, the bowling alley

was closed, and some New Yorkers threatened to boycott the subway.

Spencer was only the

fourth person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, and he survived. Nonetheless, a

2014 poll conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research and Shaw &

Company Research from August 10 to 12 of 2014 found that 62 percent of Americans were

concerned about Ebola reaching US soil and 30 percent of those were “very concerned.” About

one in four (27 percent) also felt that infected Americans should not be allowed to return to the

country for treatment. Current worry over Ebola is almost identical, the survey found, to

concerns over the spread of the H1N1 swine flu in 2009 (65 percent) and the H5N1 bird flu in

2006 (61 percent).

Similarly, according to a 2015 survey from national pollster McLaughlin &

Associates, 74.2 percent of likely American voters said they fear a terrorist attack,

though the

actual odds of dying from a terrorist attack are 1 in 3.5 million.

These statistics provide a vantage point onto some of the consequences of globalization—

for instance, that the world feels smaller and more interconnected, with increasingly porous and

ineffective boundaries—as well as the way perceptions of risk can irrationally fuel hysteria. In

their article on the social amplification and attenuation of perceptions of risk, Roger Kasperson

and Jeanne Kasperson, both of whom are American risk analysts and researchers, outline the

elements that shape those perceptions. First is the extent of the media coverage and, specifically,

“the volume of information provided”; second, “the ways in which the risk is framed” then, in

turn, shapes the public’s perception of that risk; third, the way the information is interpreted; and

fourth, “the symbols, metaphors, and discourse enlisted in depicting and characterizing the

risk.”

What makes these viruses cause so much fear is not only the amount of coverage they

get—in both print and online media, in both fictional and nonfictional formats—but also the

specific information provided and the way the risk is framed (unfortunately, often in hyperbolic

fashion). Additionally, this fear is fueled by the metaphors used to visualize both the risk and the

associated factors, as in the scientists who may save the day if given enough funding (typically

white and American), the shadowy other responsible, knowingly or unknowingly, for spreading

the infection (often and interchangeably Asian, African, or Muslim), and those infected (usually

innocent, frequently white).

If one understands fear of Ebola as a microcosm of cultural fears of contagion and

disease, the seemingly inflated percentages from the 2014 poll make sense. Ebola—arising from

the depths of Africa to threaten the world—has become the perfect disease metaphor, complete

with its not-so-latent racism. Many storylines for both cinema and television continue to use

variations of Ebola as a default virus, as a stand-in for AIDS, SARS, sarin gas, avian flu, anthrax,

swine flu, MERS, or any others from the seemingly endless list circulating in news headlines. In

marked contrast to AIDS, which may have been the first “emerging virus” to catch people’s

attention during the last decades of the twentieth century, Ebola progresses faster, without HIV’s

long latency period, and its visually horrific and dramatic symptoms lend itself more readily to

film and television thrillers. It can also be cured, which is crucial for narrative resolution, and it

does not tap into deep-seated homophobia. In a more cinematically egalitarian fashion, Ebola

affects everyone regardless of sexual orientation or practice. The crux with these new emerging

viruses is that one can catch them by doing nothing at all—or so the media would have you

believe.

In May 2005, the editors of Nature magazine wrote that the threat of avian flu is

“enormous” and that it was now a “plausible scenario” for “millions of people [to be] killed in

highly developed countries within months” before ultimately impacting tens of millions

worldwide, leaving the global economy in tatters. In fact, the editors declared, “each human case

that occurs in Asia is potentially a global threat.” Despite the fact that “the science and medicine

of flu have advanced substantially,” the editorial lamented the “remarkably little progress” made

to mount an effective public health response. Ironically, the editors acknowledge that “the

potential for panic is, if anything, greater given the impact of television and the Internet” without

admitting any culpability in feeding that panic.

This specific kind of hyperbole—warning of death tolls in the millions—shows no sign

of abating, and scientists are just as prone to it as journalists. For instance, Dr. Michael

Osterholm, director for the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of

Minnesota as well as associate director of the Department of Homeland Security’s National

Center for Food Protection and Defense, predicted a death toll of 180–360 million due to an

imminent pandemic, possibly the avian flu, in an article that appeared the July/August 2005 issue

of Foreign Affairs and was reprinted in the New York Times. In his article, Osterholm declares

that the reality of a coming pandemic cannot be avoided, and that if an influenza pandemic

struck today, the world would change overnight. Foreign trade and travel would shut down,

global and national economies would come to an abrupt halt, international vaccine supplies and

health care systems would be overwhelmed—and panic would reign!

Osterholm, much like Lederberg and Morse, has been preaching the pandemic threat

since the mid-1990s. In November of 1997, he published an article in Newsweek stating that the

smallpox virus was in the hands of several rogue states, possibly including Iraq. Then, at a

symposium held by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense, he pronounced that there

was no doubt Iraq had smallpox, based on his experience as a personal advisor on bioterrorism to

King Hussein of Jordan. Osterholm had significant impact in high places, according to one Bush

administration official, and his claims would fuel the Bush administration’s belief that Saddam

Hussein’s bioweapons program had illegal stores of smallpox. In 2003, Osterholm warned of

deadly mosquito-borne infections, such as Rift Valley fever, malaria, and dengue: “It’s going to

happen. As water runs down a hill, it’s going to happen.”

But it still has not, and it will not, according to evolutionary epidemiologist Paul W.

Ewald of the University of Louisville, for the same reasons that there has been no large-scale

lethal epidemic of mosquito-borne disease since malaria was wiped out in the 1940s: window

screens and air conditioning. Ewald also argues that the SARS virus is not a threat, though,

through an emphasis on SARS worst-case scenarios, both the WHO and the CDC have spread

fear and economic havoc worldwide. Many estimate the cost of SARS to local economies to be

more than thirty million, and stigma has also been an effect, as “Toronto was cut off by the

WHO travel advisory through much of April 2003,” and “Chinatowns were deserted in all the

major cities.”

Like avian flu, SARS is thought to be a disease of animals (in this case, civet cats) that,

through mutation, began infecting humans in late 2002, killing about eight hundred people out of

around eight thousand known to be infected. It never became a pandemic. In order for it to

spread more widely, it would have needed to be more effective at transmission. This is the

quandary that prevents most viruses from becoming pandemics: in order to keep its host mobile,

the virus has to become less virulent. Unless great numbers of people immobilized by illness are

packed into close quarters with the healthy—a disease factory that does not exist today—a

pandemic is virtually impossible.

Nonetheless, in September 2005, headlines in various media outlets, including BBC

News, the Guardian, and the Telegraph, proclaimed that a new flu pandemic could kill 150

million, with David Nabarro, one of the most senior public health experts at the World Health

Organization, vouching for these numbers. Science writer Michael Fumento says that these types

of figures “are tantamount to wild guesses,” blaming politicians, public health officials, and

journalists for crossing the line between informing the public and starting a panic. He also

blames journalists specifically for intentionally citing the more alarming of the “experts.”

Specifically, Fumento criticizes Dr. Irwin Redlener, head of the National Center for Disease

Preparedness at Columbia University. During a nationally televised interview on September 15,

2005, Redlener asserted that one billion could die from avian flu, giving the television program

permission to introduce the topic with the following chilling words: “It could kill a billion people

worldwide, make ghost towns out of parts of major cities, and there is not enough medicine to

fight it.”

Similarly, in October 2005, Pittsburgh microbiologist Dr. Henry Niman warned that the

situation was “extremely critical,” that the current strain of avian flu had an “unusually high

mortality rate,” and that people should stock up on antiviral medication and devise a plan to

isolate themselves with “enough food and water for an extended period of time,” since the

government would not be able to supply “advice, assistance, or an immediate vaccine.”

Dr.

Niman and others quote figures such as a 50 percent mortality rate for those infected with avian

flu. However, what these figures do not reveal is that, much like Ebola, the small number of

avian flu deaths have occurred in “poor countries with substandard medical systems” and that

most people who reveal symptoms are already weak.

Many people do not show symptoms at

all, and people in urban areas rarely come into contact with birds, greatly reducing risk of

exposure. Nonetheless, Klaus Stohr, former head of the World Health Organization’s Global

Influenza Programme, predicted seven million deaths worldwide. Shigeru Omi, regional director

for the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office (WPRO) for a decade, claimed one hundred

million. Dmitri Lvov, director of the Ivanovsky Research Institute of Virology at the Russian

Academy of Medical Sciences, expected one billion fatalities.

In actuality, there were forty-one

victims in 2005, twenty-seven in 2006.

However overblown, these exaggerations of scale are a common feature of disease scares.

In the 1990s, for example, newspaper reports predicted that, in the United Kingdom, “as many as

100,000 people would perish from an incurable brain disease due to BSE” (Bovine spongiform

encephalopathy, or mad cow disease). By 2005, there had been 150 deaths due to the disease.

Similarly, even though SARS led to only a couple hundred deaths, alarmist accounts continued

to circulate. Rather than spread the information that the death tolls were far lower than expected,

the media treats each outbreak as a prelude to new viral pandemics.

Much of this is accepted without argument; overreaction is seen as safer than

underreaction. Even the success of The Hot Zone was hardly hindered by critics who deemed it

sensationalized and inaccurate. When science writer David Quammen spoke with experts like

virologist Karl Johnson, a major character in The Hot Zone, Quammen discovered that Ebola

does not have the same impact on the body as described by Preston: “People do not dissolve.

Their internal organs do not liquefy. People do not shed bloody tears . . . in the majority of cases,

there’s no dramatic bleeding.”

However, unlike other threats, such as global warming or gun

control, with viral outbreaks, “there is no vocal opposition requiring the media to present

‘balanced’ stories,” so critics like Quammen are in the minority. To make matters worse, many

of the quotations in articles about viruses come directly from scientists and/or the CDC, making

potential critics even less likely to deem the articles hysterical and inaccurate.

A rare backlash incident occurred in 1976, when the CDC grossly overestimated the risk

of swine flu. In response to an outbreak at Fort Dix that resulted in the death of one army recruit,

the CDC launched a federal immunization campaign—the first of its kind—that would result in

some forty million vaccinations.

President Gerald Ford, as part of a $135 million effort, made a

plea on national television “to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States.”

However, when the death toll held steady at one and a British study suggested “the swine flu

virus is actually less virulent than other recent forms of influenza,” the media critiqued Ford and

the CDC for “an inflated response to a minimal danger.”

In August 1976, a New York Times

editorial condemned experts for “making the most pessimistic projections from . . . scanty data,”

pointing out that worldwide surveillance had “failed to find a single additional case of swine

flu,” and that other nations, such as Britain, France, and West Germany had known better than to

push a comprehensive mass vaccination program.

In December 1976, another New York Times

editorial opined that the public health panic had merely been a political ploy for the CDC to

“increase the size of its empire and multiply its budget,” as well as a “sorry debacle” that

exemplifies “the misunderstandings and misconceptions that have marked Government

approaches to health care during the last eight years.”

Similarly, John Barry, a scholar at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research, writes in

an op-ed in the August 10, 2002, New York Times, “the emergence and spread of any new

disease is something to take seriously, but the reaction to the West Nile virus has been

characterized not by seriousness but by hysteria.” A few days later, on August 13, 2002, the

Chicago Tribune labeled Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the CDC, “part of the problem for

calling the virus ‘an emerging infectious disease epidemic,’ despite the fact that medical experts

throughout the United States saw no reason to panic . . . By way of comparison, West Nile had

killed eleven people so far that summer, whereas the flu kills thirty-six thousand per year.”

Wendy Orent, American anthropologist and author of Plague: The Mysterious Past and

Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease, argues in her article “Chicken Little”

that “evolutionary biology tells us that the worst-case scenario—a lethal, transmissible, world-

destroying flu—cannot happen, any more than Ebola or Marburg can steal out of the jungle and

destroy the human race.”

If a disease has a high mortality rate, it will kill those infected before

it can spread too far. If it is highly contagious but not fatal, it will spread, but those infected will

recover. And thanks to window screens and air conditioning, mosquitoes have limited impact to

spread disease. For these reasons, Orent continues, “We do not need a ‘new Manhattan

Project’ . . . to protect us from pandemic flu. We need an inoculation to protect us from disease

hysterics.”

100

Similarly, Dr. Marc Siegel, of the New York University School of Medicine, says

that the likelihood of an avian flu outbreak in 2005 had been exaggerated, and that if “anything is

contagious right now, it’s judgment clouded by fear.”

101

However, despite these isolated criticisms, flu experts, science writers, public health

officials, and Hollywood have continued to lead us down the same path, regardless of whether

the threat is avian flu, swine flu, Ebola, SARS, or whatever new virus is trending. Fear sells—

and brings grant money. Or, as John Munch (Richard Belzer) puts it on the Law & Order:

Special Victims Unit episode “Savant” (NBC, Oct. 16, 2007), “Fear feeds capitalism. Panic sells

gas masks.”

In all forms of emerging viruses media—from articles in Time magazine to television

shows and Hollywood blockbusters—science is used to make fear of a viral outbreak seem

credible, which is why it is appropriate that the outbreak narrative would germinate in the words

of science writers and scientists and in the genre of science fiction. Science fiction films and

television shows intentionally create an atmosphere of credibility, depicting something we have

not yet seen in our actual lives but that we might one day discover. As Vivian Sobchack

describes, the tension arises from the anticipation of this potential manifestation—not if it will

happen but when: “Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the

‘willing suspension of disbelief’ on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific

credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and

philosophy . . . While we are invited to wonder at what we see, the films strive primarily for our

belief, not our suspension of disbelief.”

102

This same premise also occurs in books and articles when predictions are made about the

180 to 360 million people who will die as a result of the next pandemic. If a scientist or doctor

says it, then it must be true. If enough scientific credibility exists elsewhere in the book or article,

then the hyperbolic aspects, in turn, will appear more plausible. Another way of adding

credibility to a potential pandemic is to compare it to an earlier outbreak, such as the flu

pandemics of 1918 and 1997. For instance, in their analysis of media coverage of the 2004 avian

flu outbreak in the United Kingdom, Nerlich and Halliday found that historic outbreaks were

referenced twenty-nine times in a sample of fifty-one articles.

103

Our fears of—and fascination with—viral outbreaks have only intensified since the early

1990s as a result of several factors: one, a growing fear of viral outbreaks following the

discovery of HIV in 1981; two, the continued efforts of Morse and his colleagues to draw

attention to emerging viruses; and third, the increasing pervasion into daily life of disaster-driven

news media that virally spreads news of impending death and catastrophe, allowing perceptions

of risk to increase exponentially. Significantly, it is not that we now live with more risk than

before but that we have become more aware of those risks. As German sociologist Ulrich Beck

points out, “It is not clear whether it is the risks that have intensified or our view of them. Both

sides converge, condition each other, and because risks are risks in knowledge, perceptions of

risks and risks are not different things, but one and the same.”

104

Current conditions of

communication and information access guarantee the spread of risk perception to more people,

and faster, than ever before.

The fears that manifest on the news or in our lives feel especially discomforting because,

in the twenty-first century, science and technology were meant to have eradicated uncertainty

and risk. At the very least, they were meant to make our lives more controlled and safe.

However, it is precisely science and technology, as well as globalization, which have created a

new set of risks. We cannot protect ourselves against the dangers of radioactive emissions, global

warming, viral outbreaks, terrorism, or an eroding ozone layer. Significant to these risks is not

only the inability to insure against them but that they are not limited to a particular geographic

area, demographic, or temporal dimension.

105

Pandemics—and specifically fear of contagion—trigger a specific kind of fear and

anxiety created by events with no end point or temporal dimension. For instance, according to

American sociologist Kai Erikson, a specialist in the social consequences of catastrophic events,

emergencies without distinct beginnings or ends “are often harder to deal with” than events, like

earthquakes, which happen and then end. In this case, “the danger one is exposed to has no

duration, no natural term; and as a result one remains in a permanent state of alarm and

anxiety.”

106

Erickson talks specifically about toxins, but toxins work much like contagions:

“They contaminate rather than merely damage; they pollute, befoul, and taint rather than just

create wreckage . . . And the evidence is growing that they scare human beings in new and

special ways, that they elicit an uncanny fear in us.”

107

Like toxic emergencies and global

terrorism, globalized contagion is open-ended and messy. There is nowhere to hide. Anyone,

anywhere may fear infection, however implausible those fears may actually be.

The outbreak narrative—with its explicit depictions of viral outbreak, its portrayals of

bodily failure and decay, its literalization of ineffective borders and dangerous sources of

contagion, and its portrayal of changing understandings of health and disease—is uniquely suited

for an investigation of these fears. After all, its fusion of science fiction and horror allows it to

explore not only our darkest fears of where the world might be headed, but to do so in a way that

can feel chillingly plausible, bridging the gap between fantasy and reality. How a society

responds to disease, especially epidemic disease, can illuminate its relationship not only to

science and medicine, but also to illness, fear, death, and identity. Studying how outbreak

narratives evolve can provide a useful starting point for tracing the evolution of that response.

As I have outlined, “emerging viruses” as a concept began penetrating the cultural

consciousness and public discourse in the mid-1990s. Since then, outbreak narratives have

continued to be popular and to resonate with changing anxieties in the American cultural and

social fabric. I will focus primarily on feature films, television series, and miniseries produced in

the United States from the mid-1990s to the present. The case can be made that US audiences are

still the preferred audiences for blockbuster production and distribution. They are the more

lucrative audiences, and American premieres prime the engine of a franchise as it moves around

the globe. Therefore, engaging with particularly American fears and desires at a narrative level is

still a common practice despite the increasingly transnational nature of film and media

production. Engaging with American texts also allows me to focus on American fears and

American audiences.

While Peter N. Stearns, in his book American Fear, admits that Americans are not totally

unique, an examination of American media can still provide an interesting case study for

exploring the evolution and construction of contemporary American fear. As Stearns argues,

American reactions to fear have “exhibited distinctive features in recent decades,” and changes

in American approaches to fear have made many Americans more vulnerable to fear and anxiety

(despite the actual reduction of risk), with “fear as a foundation for national unity in the absence

of confidence in more positive programs.”

108

Fear, in fact, would be the Republican Party’s foundation for national unity during the

Presidential campaign of 2016. In many ways, fear was the theme of the Republican National

Convention of that year. During the convention, former Republican House speaker Newt

Gingrich warned that major American cities were at risk of being lost to terrorists with weapons

of mass destruction and that Hillary Clinton could have indirect links with Lucifer, a sentiment

shared by Presidential candidate Ben Carson and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Former mayor

of New York City Rudolph Giuliani declared, “The vast majority of Americans do not feel safe.

They fear for their children.”

109

In addition to reinforcing the legitimacy of the fear many may

feel, this could make those who, in fact, did feel safe wonder what they were missing. Journalist

Dylan Matthews describes Trump’s convention speech as “one of the darkest, most foreboding,

and aggressively fearmongering speeches in modern political memory,” a description of a world

“where citizens are living under constant threat of attack.” Despite the fact that this is not true,

and “America has more or less never been safer,” fear was the capital and the Republicans were

trading on it.

110

Chapter Outline

Going Viral proceeds roughly chronologically—as well as thematically—from the mid-1990s

through present day. It aims to situate the outbreak narrative in several historical trajectories: the

growing anxiety fueled by emerging viruses and a shrinking, borderless world; the insertion of

bioterrorism into that initial anxiety starting in the twenty-first century; and the current

fascination with manifesting the end of the world. There is no clear-cut start or stop to these

trajectories. Rather, they are layers and variations upon an initial idea. Examining these texts in

thematic groups, as well as individually, offers an opportunity to understand how popular culture

interprets social and historical events and how Hollywood, in turn, capitalizes on these

interpretations.

Chapter 1 introduces the outbreak narrative template in terms of film cycles—series of

films associated with each other, much like a genre, but which maintain financial viability for a

shorter length of time. This limited viability is a result of film cycles being more closely tied to

current events, as well as a frequently shorter production time. This kind of repetition allows for

key tropes—both visual and thematic—that are either repeated and reinforced or slightly

tweaked in order to maintain cultural and social currency.

As covered in chapter 2, “The Globalization Outbreak,” the original outbreak template

focuses on the repercussions of globalization and the ultimate failure of national boundaries as

prophylactics, as well as fears of conspiracy and government mismanagement. Films like

Outbreak and Contagion depict a world reimagined as increasingly unbounded zones of

containment, protection, and vulnerability, and demonstrate how our understanding of that world

would shift from 1995 to 2011. Globalization is portrayed as, if not the cause of pandemics (at

least partly), then their facilitator, while the networks of world health organizations often result

in the discovery and distribution of the cure or vaccine. As globalization leads to the increased

threat of a viral outbreak, some to argue for a return to antiquated borders, but the lesson most

commonly drawn here is that this would be impossible. These narratives also integrate issues of

human responsibility in terms of environmental destruction, placing blame on human presence in

remote locations—a result of progress and capitalistic expansion—for the emergence of the

virus.

Starting in 2000, the outbreak narrative began to incorporate not only these types of

concerns but also newly energized fears of terrorism and, specifically, of a bioterrorism attack.

Chapter 3 looks at “The Terrorism Outbreak,” featuring plots centered around the threat of

biocontamination, inaugurated either by terrorists, as in the miniseries Covert One: The Hades

Factor (CBS, 2006) or season 3 of 24 (Fox, 2003), or corporate greed, as in Toxic Skies (Erin,

2008), Formula for Death, and the X-Files episode “F. Emasculata.” This narrative became

increasingly common following 9/11, when fears of terrorism intensified, as did the idea of the

terrorist as the infected (or the infected as terrorist). Government and corporate conspiracy also

became frequent tropes, demonstrating an increased loss of faith in “the system” and fears of

vulnerability, even in our own homes.

Most recently, the outbreak narrative has begun to explore what happens after the viral

outbreak, in films like I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007) and television shows like AMC’s The

Walking Dead (2010–present), TNT’s The Last Ship (2014–present), or FX’s The Last Man on

Earth (2015–present). This is the subject of chapter 4: “The Postapocalypse Outbreak,” where

the viral outbreak has already decimated populations, as well as social and governmental

infrastructures, reflecting our current fascination with portrayals of postapocalyptic wastelands

and a return to a more primal society. 28 Days Later and I Am Legend provide breathtaking

vistas of abandoned cities, empty roads, and desolate buildings, almost romanticizing the end of

the world. The Walking Dead shows us over and over again what a world would look like

without people to maintain it, clearly fascinated with the dissolution of society and the end of life

as we know it.

This chapter also includes a discussion of the contemporary zombie figure, which reflects

contemporary fears of disease, especially those of a viral pandemic, demonstrating the new

hybrid of science fiction/outbreak narrative. Danny Boyle, director of the film 28 Days Later,

said that he wanted to redo the traditional portrayal of zombies in order to reflect contemporary

fears of disease, especially those of a viral pandemic. Boyle describes his film as “a warning for

us as well as entertainment.”

111

The recent proliferation of zombie narratives can also be seen, in

part, as a reflection of a larger tendency to position the elite at war against the masses, the special

few against the undifferentiated and perpetually hungry many. Interestingly, in certain zombie

narratives—often parodies such as Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004) or iZombie (CW, 2015–

present)—the focus is on the integration of zombies into existing social and governmental

infrastructures.

Part of the pleasure of the outbreak narrative for the viewer is the way it manifests

disease and information vectors, and the way it simplifies moral ambiguities, which allows the

viewer to judge—and even despise—the “othered.” In Outbreak and Contagion, for example, we

can literally trace the disease and information vectors, watching them outlined on maps that

display the path of the outbreak. In 24 (Fox, 2001–2010), Covert One: The Hades Factor, and

Toxic Skies, it is clear with whom to ally and whom to despise, for whose death to cheer, whose

crimes to condemn. And zombie narratives, whether they be as straightforward as Resident Evil

(Anderson, 2002) and Dawn of the Dead (Snyder, 2004), or as nuanced as The Walking Dead or

iZombie, revel in how permissive it is to smash, gouge, spear, or slice the zombied other.

Viruses remains a powerful and infectious metaphor, a way to demarcate “dangerous”

people, a way to draw attention to the flaws and frailties of the bonds between people and

between nations, and a way to spread and construct fear. As Peter Stearns writes, “we have

come, as a nation, to fear excessively.”

112

And one of the things we fear most is infection, both

literal and metaphorical. The proliferation of digital media—our ability to digest all the

information, all the time—makes this fear even more infectious. The power of panic—as well as

the fear of infection—can now be multiplied the world over. Going Viral offers an attempt at

working through these fears via an analysis of the outbreak narrative and everything it represents

and feeds.

The Outbreak Narrative

Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.

—Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

As defined by film studies professor Amanda Ann Klein in her book American Film Cycles:

Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures, film cycles, like film

genres, are “a series of films associated with each other through shared images, characters,

settings, plots or themes.” However, unlike genres, cycles “are financially viable for only five to

ten years. After that point, a cycle must be updated or altered in order to continue to turn a

profit.”

This small period of financial viability is due to the fact that film cycles are specifically

keyed to capitalize on specific historical and cultural events and/or the success of other films.

This topicality and limited sustainability is a major characteristic of film cycles, as is the fact that

they are often produced quickly in order to respond to these current events or trends.

Another characteristic of film cycles, keyed to their need to refresh and reinvent, is their

play between dominant and subordinate traits. Leger Grindon explains that, at any given

moment, there will be a dominant narrative convention—for instance, in terms of outbreak

narratives, an emphasis on globalization as the key factor in the spread of disease. However,

“repetition and predictability eventually become wearisome, so a subordinate trait . . . moves to

the dominant position.”

This can be seen with the terrorism outbreak narrative, for instance,

where the subordinate trait of untrustworthy governments or corporations (otherwise known as

“the establishment”), as seen in earlier films like Outbreak (Petersen, 1995), began to play a

larger and larger part in later films and television shows.

A “cycle approach” is especially valuable in the context of media industry convergence.

Current technological and industrial conditions have led Hollywood to rethink medium

specificity, with producers speaking in terms of “content” rather than films, television shows, or

video games. As John T. Caldwell explains in his article “Welcome to the Viral Future of

Cinema (Television),” a set of wide-ranging forces—“the subcultures of production workers,

conglomeration, branding, repurposing, convergence, and shifting economic and labor

relations”—have not only blurred the lines between film and television scholarship but also

caused film and television to become inseparable. Caldwell outlines just how inseparable the two

have become, not to mention how “film now functions mostly as a subset of television and

electronic media.” This relationship can be seen in several ways: “First, in the current function

film serves in the business practices of the new media conglomerates; second, because feature

films are largely created by the very same production communities in Los Angeles that create

prime-time television programs . . . ; third, because feature films since the 1980s have

increasingly mimicked televisual form from an aesthetic and technical viewpoint; and fourth, the

viewing conditions of film . . . now incorporate the reception conditions that have defined

television for more than fifty years.”

When this article was published in 2005, it was DVDs that allowed the viewing

conditions of film to incorporate the same reception conditions as television. Now however, with

Hulu regularly streaming both box office hits as well as almost every broadcast television show,

with Netflix expanding their production of original series content, and with Amazon allowing

users to purchase both movies and individual television episodes or a “season pass” in addition

to creating their own original series content, medium specificity feels like an anachronism. A

cycle approach, therefore, can best position us to understand popular visual culture in the

contemporary period, where films, television shows, and video games can not only feature the

same or overlapping content but also are often produced, written, or directed by overlapping

people. A cycle approach focuses on trends that traverse media, observing patterns and traits,

capitalizing on specific aspects of the cultural and social zeitgeist.

Interestingly, the outbreak narrative, once suited for the big screen, seems to have

evolved onto smaller and smaller screens, both television and smart phones, showing up as

made-for-TV movies, television shows, and games where you either fight the virus (The Great

Flu and Killer Flu are two examples) or where you are the virus trying to kill the world (such as

Plague, Inc. or Pandemic 2, a browser-based game that was very popular in 2008 during the

swine flu scare). While big screen versions include Outbreak, I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007),

and Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011), a much more significant number are made-for-TV movies

and miniseries. Outbreak narrative television shows are increasingly popular, including The

Strain, The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–present), The Last Ship (TNT, 2014–present), and the

recent reboot of 12 Monkeys (Syfy, 2015–present), as well as specific episodes of shows such as

Person of Interest (CBS, 2011–2016), Madam Secretary (CBS, 2014–present), Law & Order:

Special Victims Unit (NBC, 1999–present), and Blindspot (NBC, 2015–present). There is

something appropriate about these narratives turning up on television, since television has such a

unique relationship to news, information, entertainment, and catastrophe.

By virtue of their formula for success, cycles, even more persistently than genres, recycle

and repurpose many of the same elements, creating a sense of familiar enjoyment that can be

traced from the original throughout subsequent films.

The familiarity—or predictability—

becomes part of the pleasure. One of the fascinating qualities of the outbreak narrative is that,

while the cycle is routinely updated and altered to reflect changing cultural moments, there are

still tropes that remain consistent. In particular, there are six key thematic tropes that have

shaped visual depictions of infectious disease on-screen and off: one, the idea of the necessary

accident; two, the othering, which creates the “them” in the first place, stigmatizing individuals,

geographic areas, and/or lifestyles deemed threatening; three, establishing and policing security

where these others pose a threat; four, contagious diseases bringing us together, unifying “us”

versus “them”—the infected versus the uninfected; five, a constant emphasis on making the

invisible visible, using maps, charts, or microscopes; and six, a fear of progress, with

globalization as one form of progress. These tropes show up again and again in the outbreak

narratives themselves (both the nonfiction and fiction versions)—until the apocalyptic outcome

of an outbreak renders some of them irrelevant (there are no charts or microscopes or other forms

of technology in The Walking Dead, for instance). The film Outbreak is a useful case study to

demonstrate how the utilization of these tropes feeds a larger cultural narrative of fear and

anxiety, a narrative that grew and evolved during subsequent decades.

Within these thematic tropes, there are several key visual characteristics that have now

become common enough to represent viral outbreak at a glance, regardless of whether they

appear in a newspaper or on a movie screen. These visual tropes are also used to feed the larger

cultural narrative. Outbreak narratives, after all, are highly visual, and the visual signs

compensate for what cannot be seen. Maps and charts, for example, become ways of visualizing

the gravity of a threat. Maps render a faraway continent suddenly close and very real, as well as

tracing the otherwise invisible path of disease vectors. Charts translate an otherwise unseeable

threat into graphics and numbers. In Outbreak, for instance, the scientists diagram the chain of

infection on a white board, each individual person connected both to whoever infected him or

her, as well as to those he or she then infected. Rudy Alvarez (Daniel Chodos) infected Henry

Seward (Leland Hayward III), at which point the new strain emerged. Seward, in turn, infected

Corrine, his fiancée (Dana Andersen); Tracy H. (Jenna Byrne), who infected Jason H.; Mrs.

Logan (Ina Romeo), who infected Baby Logan and Arthur; and someone named Neal. As each

subsequent patient is identified, his or her personal interactions are added to the chart. Maps,

charts, and networks, whether of commerce or information, emphasize and visualize

connectivity, representing “a flattening or erasure of difference.”

Barriers are another repeated visual trope in the outbreak narrative. In the opening scene

of Outbreak, for example, the Americans are wearing such opaque masks that, when they

explore the village, we cannot even see their eyes, much less their faces. The next time we see

Billy Ford (Morgan Freeman), he is wearing equally opaque sunglasses. During the introductory

sequence at the CDC, the emphasis is on doors and windows, each laboratory a secure and

confined space, some of the doors even looking like bank vaults. The barriers can be tangible, as

in masks or protective gear or metal doors to block out dangerous microbes, or they can be

political, as with quarantine regulations, travel restrictions, or border policies. Significantly, as

Nicholas B. King emphasizes, while the intention of these barriers may be to act as prophylaxis,

they—much like the networks, maps, and charts—serve to reflect vulnerability and fear about

the frailty of both geographic and corporeal borders in the face of viral agents and vectors.

These visual tropes, much like thematic tropes, can be wielded and manipulated by Hollywood,

journalists, and politicians to create and assuage panic in the face of disease.

The first key thematic trope is the necessary accident. In the three types of outbreak

narrative (globalized, terrorized, and zombified), transgressions and accidents are essential. The

necessary accident supplies dramatic tension, propelling the plot forward. Quarantines—or the

equivalent—inevitably fail. Someone (a zombie, an infected victim, a terrorist) gets out or

something (a zombie, a virus, a bomb) gets in. To illustrate, one of the central conflicts at the

heart of the TV movie Pandemic (Hallmark, 2007) is the businessman who defies quarantine,

slipping out of the carefully contained area where all the other infected people are being held,

because he considers himself too busy and important. His ego results in numerous deaths as he

spreads the virus in his wake throughout the city of Los Angeles. The same thing happens in the

TV movie Black Death (CBS, 1992), this time with a congressman who tries to flee town, taking

the infection with him. The disease always manages to spread, even to the scientists wearing

protective apparel. Any attempt at quarantine on a large scale appears meaningless, and people

are infected regardless of precautionary measures.

In his aptly titled essay “Contagion and the Necessary Accident,” Bill Albertini explores

the impossibility of containment in the outbreak narrative, despite the fact that containment is

often the issue with which the cycle is most concerned. The issue of containment is, quite

literally, at the center of Containment (CW, 2016), reflecting our continued interest in building

higher walls and stronger borders. Initially, the “cordon sanitaire” is supposed to last only forty-

eight hours, but it gets extended and extended through the first season. Shipping containers and

armed enforcers are set up along the perimeter to prevent those on the inside from getting out

and those on the outside from getting in.

In the outbreak narrative, security no longer means protection but containment, keeping

the infected away from the uninfected. The infected are written off as worthless, and all that

matters is keeping them inside and contained. We see this trope again and again. In outbreak

narrative after outbreak narrative, the military or the National Guard shields the borders while

the disease rages within, demonstrating not only the institutional unity of military with medical

but also making visible the permeability of boundaries both on a body-level and on a political

level. Biological security becomes political security. Bodily failure becomes failure of the body

politic.

Security—and how to maintain it—is a pervasive theme in all outbreak narratives. The

traditional understanding of contagion hinges on the dangers of close contact, underscoring a

literal threat to bodily boundaries, but contagion can also be seen as a metaphoric threat for

larger, national boundaries. The crux of the outbreak narrative, Albertini argues, is this “tension

between the desire for containment and an opposing and powerful desire for accidental exposure

and infection.”

After all, without the accident, there would be no plot, no juicy conflict, no

drama to play out on the screen. As viewers, we wait for it. There is even a predictable pleasure

in watching the rupture occur. The accident is an essential but discomforting reminder that our

bodies—much like our prophylactics—are unable to protect us. It is a metaphorical allusion to

the inevitability of invasion, exposure, and infection—in a way that strategically removes

responsibility or blame. Its occurrence also reinforces our fear of that inevitable mistake in our

actual lives.

In Outbreak, there are multiple accidents, some fatal and some merely empty threats to

foreshadow the tragic accidents that will inevitably occur. The original viral spread is initially

due to the faulty containment of the virus in 1967; monkeys carrying the virus scampering out of

reach of the bomb blast that otherwise demolishes the infected village. One of these monkeys is

later trapped and smuggled into the United States, thus bringing the virus from Africa to

California. Ironically, the first shot of the ship sailing to California occurs seconds after General

Ford (Morgan Freeman) says the virus is contained. A “fake” accident occurs when Major Salt

(Cuba Gooding Jr.) vomits within his protective suit and pulls his mask off. Fortunately, at that

point, the virus is not yet aerosolized, so nothing happens, but the threat reminds us of the ease of

exposure. Another “fake” accident occurs when Casey (Kevin Spacey) finds a tear in Sam’s suit

(Dustin Hoffman). Luckily, he finds it before the two of them walk into the lab, and so Casey is

able to repair the suit in time. However, this acts as foreshadowing, since Casey’s suit will

eventually tear, allowing the virus to infect him, and then, in turn, through yet another accident,

he infects Robby Keough (Rene Russo). Another significant accident occurs in the laboratory at

the Cedar Creek Hospital, where Henry (Leland Hayward III), a distracted lab technician,

accidentally shatters a test tube of blood, the infected substance spraying all over his face. This

accident—and Henry’s subsequent trip to the local movie theater—is what spreads the virus

throughout the hospital and Cedar Creek. Without accidents, the virus would never have left the

African continent, the CDC would have successfully contained the virus, and/or Casey and

Robby would not have been infected. In fact, without the initial breach, the infected monkeys

would never have survived the bomb blast.

“Othering” is the second key thematic trope of the outbreak narrative, both as a way to

reflect on how a disease would (and could) spread and as a way of placing blame and indulging

implicit racism and stigma. When Richard Preston was asked why Ebola continues to be so

terrifying, he explained: “It’s the nonhuman other that all human beings are contending with in

many different ways.”

This trope is not reserved only for entertainment purposes but also has

historical and journalistic precedent. For example, Sheldon Ungar, in his analysis of American

media coverage of the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Zaire, found that every source under consideration

contained the view that Zairian “conditions are perfect for breeding a plague,” repeatedly

referencing the collapse of the public health system, the “staggeringly corrupt government,” the

soldiers “preying on a frightened populace,” and describing the capital as “defined by decay.”

Donna Haraway theorizes that, in response to the disease genocides that accompanied the

European penetration of the globe, “the ‘colored’ body of the colonized was constructed as the

dark source of infection, pollution, disorder, etc. that threatened to overwhelm white manhood

(cities, civilization, the family, the white personal body).”

Similarly, in an article for the Washington Post entitled “The Long and Ugly Tradition of

Treating Africa as a Dirty, Diseased Place,” Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne examine the

tradition of describing not only the African continent in this way but also the African people as

“savage animals.” They examine the history of comparing African people to uncivilized primates

and focus specifically on a Newsweek story that suggests “African immigrants are to be feared,

and that apes—and African immigrants who eat them—could bring a deadly disease to the

pristine shores of the United States of America.”

The disease, in this case, is Ebola, and the

article, predictably, warns that Ebola is on its way to American soil, “all but ignored by the

popular press and public.” The reason it is ignored is because the article’s theory (that Ebola is

within bushmeat smuggled into the United States in luggage) is nonsense. As best as scientists

can ascertain, Ebola is transmitted via bats, not meat. However, Newsweek, much like other

media sources, continues to threaten that this is a valid risk, an insinuation that is not only

misleading but irresponsible.

Also note the contrast between the ape-eating Africans and the

“pristine” United States.

Unfortunately, this pattern is nothing new. Immigrants and foreigners have historically

been seen as “contagious” and “diseased.” Alan M. Kraut, in an essay entitled “Foreign Bodies:

The Perennial Negotiation over Health and Culture in a Nation of Immigrants,” describes how, at

the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were seen as a threat to public

health, specifically the bubonic plague, while the Irish were charged with bringing cholera to the

United States in 1832. Italians were also stigmatized for polio, while tuberculosis was called the

“Jewish disease.”

During the 1990s, Haitians who tested positive for HIV were held at Camp

Bulkeley in Guantanamo Bay and denied entry under a 1987 law barring immigration of HIV

positive individuals into the United States.

Even now, in the twenty-first century, immigrants are seen as diseased and contagious. In

July 2014, Representative Phil Gingrey accused immigrants from Central America of carrying

deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus, and tuberculosis.

In July 2015,

Donald Trump declared that “tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border” in the

bodies of immigrants.

Outbreak narratives allow for and encourage this kind of stigmatizing of

individuals or locations deemed contagious or ripe for “plague breeding.” This method of

stigmatizing individuals or locations can be seen as a retaliation against the more homogeneous

unity advocated by globalization, a way to redraw lines rendered meaningless by the process of

globalization. Othering also becomes a way of creating reassurance that the virus is only meant

for “at risk” people, enforcing a sense of difference and distance. Disease is consistently

imagined as a foreign threat, traveling from the outside in, with—as Geddes Smith, author of

Plague on Us, argues—quarantines as little more than attempts “to put a fence around an entire

nation.”

In the outbreak narrative, the threat always comes from the outside in, spread via physical

contact, breathing, technology, science, and/or conspiracy, but almost always originating in Asia

or Africa, traveling from east to west. In The Andromeda Strain (Wise, 1971), the virus comes

from outer space. In this case, it is literally aliens (a term also used to describe foreign

inhabitants of the nation) who are to blame. The reference may be more abstract, but the process

(othering) is the same. At that point in American history, Hollywood films were often centered

around extraterrestrial threats. By the 1990s, however, it was common for the viral threat to

come from an African country, even if it is repurposed by the American military as a bioweapon,

as in the case of Outbreak. Not only does the virus come from an overtly primitive and dirty

African village, but it is then transferred to “the pristine shores” of America via monkey,

smuggled in by an Asian man, conveying layers of stigma and negative association. In

Contagion, the virus comes from Asia—linked to the country’s alleged lack of hygiene among

food workers and the underclass—even if the spread westward is due to an American company

and an American blonde. In World War Z (the book, written by Max Brooks and published by

Three Rivers Press in 2007 ), the outbreak begins in China; however, in World War Z (the movie,

directed by Marc Foster and released in 2013), the outbreak begins in South Korea. Thomas R.

Feller posits that the reason for this change is the fiscally responsible reason that “China

constitutes the world’s second largest movie market after the US and the filmmakers did not

wish to offend the Chinese authorities who could ban the film from being shown there.”

In the

miniseries Covert One: The Hades Factor (CBS, 2006), the virus was developed by Americans

but spread by treacherous Muslims. The racial profiling may shift, but the other (whatever his or

her skin tone) remains just as threatening, just as stigmatized.

In both real life and in the fictionalized outbreak narrative, it is not simply that diseases

are blamed on an unfortunate group but that modernization is offered as the antidote to the

diseased and dangerous “relics of ‘primitive’ other.” Outbreak, for instance, opens in a tribal and

disease-ridden African jungle space, which is in marked contrast to the next scene, set in the

organized, protected, sterile, modern US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases

(USAMRIID)—the browns and greens of the jungle all the more chaotic when juxtaposed with

the white sterility of the laboratory. The village is also full of tribal music, thatched roofs, dying

people, and monkeys, while the “virology section” of the USAMRIID is neatly

compartmentalized into “biosafety levels,” lists of levels and corresponding viruses

distinguishing each section from the next. When the film returns to Africa, this time with the

medical researchers, the Westerners walk into the village in their masks and yellow suits, their

prophylactics emphasizing their boundaries—metaphorical, technological, and literal—

protecting them from the disease and dirt, the dead and dying.

This kind of distancing from a threatening person or group of people continues to be just

as relevant offscreen as on. The strident declarations by Donald Trump to ban all Muslims from

entering the United States and to deport illegal immigrants are just another manifestation of an

attempt to draw a line in the sand between “good people” and “hazardous people,” when, really,

those lines have become indistinguishable. In terms of 9/11, the obvious “other” was the Arab

terrorist and the menacing Al Qaeda, but Elizabeth Goren argues that the first signs of distancing

were the “actual erection of physical barriers around the disaster site itself,” as if to contain the

horror. This internal distancing was “mirrored by a strongly perceived invisible separation that

developed between those outside and those within the zone of disaster.” Those directly affected

by the disaster were seen as “contaminated carriers of the catastrophe, who had to be almost

quarantined” in order to protect others from the social contagion of what they had experienced.

The “contagion” of 9/11 was also evident in the way people fled the city after the event, either

permanently or temporarily, tourists choosing other, “less tainted” destinations for their holidays.

Ground Zero became, like patient zero, something to be shunned and avoided, an attribute

further enhanced when the relief centers were moved off-site and uptown. The implication was

that somehow the horror and trauma could be contained and localized.

A third key thematic trope is a focus on establishing and policing security in a world

where “others” want to harm “us.” Contagious diseases instill fears of sharing bodily fluids,

bodily contact, or even just air space with potentially infectious creatures (animal or human,

depending on the disease). If the horror, trauma, and microbes are geographically specific, then

the aim is to get as far away from them as possible. This mentality persists, even when irrational.

For example, after the Orlando shooting in June 2016, many Americans were shocked to

discover that gay men cannot donate blood. The Food and Drug Administration banned gay and

bisexual blood donation completely in 1983, revising the ban slightly in 2015 to allow gay men

who have been celibate for a full year to donate. This qualification also applies to gay men in

long-term relationships.

So one way to establish security is by literally drawing a line between “good bodies” and

“bad bodies,” “good blood” and “bad blood,” and never the two shall mix. This can be done on a

legal level, as in the FDA’s ban, or it can be done with literal lines on the ground, through a

quarantine, or by suggestion, through social distancing. In Outbreak, the entire town of Cedar

Creek is quarantined, and then within that quarantine, the sick people are first isolated in the

hospital and then fenced into a tented area after they become too contagious to share the hospital.

Contagion (2011), rather than using traditional quarantine, depicts the use of social distancing,

where individuals are told to remain three feet away from each other at all times. In

Containment, social distancing expands to four to six feet. Staying home or wearing masks

enhances the social distancing. Most people also stay indoors and wear masks.

Masks are also worn throughout Containment—both official medical masks and

improvised masks, like a scarf wrapped around the head. Masks are a visual code for fatal

infection. Scientists and medical personnel begin wearing masks even before the danger of the

virus is determined, but things are serious when ordinary civilians start wearing masks as well, in

addition to gloves and maintaining personal distance. In these narratives, there is layer upon

layer of protection, layer upon layer of isolation, plastic and glass separating the characters from

each other. Because they have run out of body bags in Contagion, when Erin dies, she is tightly

covered with plastic and taped shut. Her body is sealed to contain potential contaminants, to

reduce the risk of potential exposure. Even the air around her could be fatal. We also see Jory

Emhoff (Anna Jacoby-Heron) kept apart from her boyfriend, only able to text him and to look at

him through a window. While her father is being watched at the hospital, she communicates with

him through a telephone and through a window.

Fear of infection makes one especially aware of the distance between bodies, making a

suspected carrier feel uncomfortably close. Metaphorical lines are drawn between those who are

not infected and those who are deemed infectious or more likely to be infectious. While it may

be unattainable, distance from disease is an aspirational ideal. It is no coincidence, Jacqueline

Foertsch writes, “that Sir Thomas More’s Utopia is an island before it is anything else . . . The

utopic desire for boundaries that hold ignites the rhetoric of the reactionary right throughout the

cold war and AIDS eras, with destruction of these seen as equivalent to apocalypse.”

The utopic desire for boundaries that hold continues to ignite political rhetoric. Donald

Trump, for instance, argued in an interview with CNN in 2015 that the United States has a

“porous border” and that this is not acceptable: “To have a country you have to have a strong

border, a really strong border.”

He repeated this argument throughout much of his Presidential

campaign messaging, including in a TV spot from January 2016. In that particular campaign ad,

Trump demanded a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States (keeping out “the

questionable other”), as well as calling for a halt on illegal immigration via Mexico by building a

wall (keeping out another type of “questionable other”). He concluded the ad by reiterating the

argument that building higher and more effective walls “will make America great again.”

Another example occurred during the November 2014 campaign season, when former senator

Scott Brown, running for a senate seat out of New Hampshire, managed to pull all these

metaphors together in one dizzying array, predicting that ISIS terrorists would sneak in via

“porous” boundaries to spread Ebola, a prediction eerily similar to the plot of The Hades

Factor.

Unfortunately for Trump, the outbreak narrative demonstrates that boundaries, walls, and

safety apparel are never fully effective. For example, the prison is quarantined on The X-Files

episode “F. Emasculata” (Fox, April 28, 1995), but the virus still spreads. The soldiers and the

potentially infected are quarantined in The Hades Factor, but the virus still spreads. The hotel is

quarantined in season 3 of 24 (Fox, 2001–2010), but the terrorists have more of the virus at their

disposal. In Global Effect (Cunningham, 2002), Meredith Tripp (Carolyn Hennesy) attempts to

quarantine South Africa, but the virus reaches the United States, anyway. The quarantine is

violated in Pandemic and Containment by people defying orders and sneaking out of the

containment zone.

The fourth key thematic trope is that, even though it separates us, contagious disease can

also bring us together. The word “contagion,” comes from the Latin contagio, meaning to touch

together (con—“together with”—combined with the base of tangere—“to touch”). Integral to the

word’s origin is this bringing together, the formation of shared human bonds, and the connection

and contagion therein. This is similar to the way that, on one hand, a traumatic event can isolate

(no one else knows what you experienced; no one else can understand) but, on the other hand, a

large-scale traumatic event can unify, creating a bond or community among those affected

(because no one else knows what you all experienced). E. Ann Kaplan writes that, following

9/11 in New York, she felt a connection to strangers that she had never felt before: “On the

subway, too, we looked at each other as if understanding what we were all facing. For at any

moment, it seemed, another attack could take place . . . And we were in this together.”

Similarly, in Outbreak, the mayor of Cedar Creek (Kurt Boesen) tells Robby Keough: “Cedar

Creek is a small town. We’re like a family. Everybody’s scared.” Everyone suffering through a

virus is bonded together by the virtue of their shared suffering, much as those not yet infected

can band together to avoid infection.

Contagious diseases create communities based on an “us against them” mentality,

unifying groups of infected as well as groups of uninfected. In Robin Cook’s 1997 novel,

Invasion, one of the protagonists says of a deadly virus from outer space that arrives on Earth

that “knowing it is happening and that all humans are at risk, I feel connected in a way I’ve never

felt before,” as if “humans are a big family.”

Diseases also act as social equalizers, affecting

both rich and poor (although how rich and poor are affected can vary widely). In The Walking

Dead, Dawn of the Dead (Snyder, 2004), Blindness (Meirelles, 2008), and Carriers (Pastor and

Pastor, 2009), we see how outbreaks create new kinds of families, survivors banding together in

groups to form new types of social structure. Most overtly, the epidemic in Outbreak brings

Robby and Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) together, their romance rekindled by the act of saving

the world.

The fifth key trope of the outbreak narrative is the emphasis on making the invisible

visible. Part of this fixation stems from the fear of the seemingly healthy carrier. One of the most

terrifying elements of contagious disease is that of the carrier who does not appear infected,

innocently or maliciously spreading the virus in his or her wake, and against whom one must

defend one’s self. Typhoid Mary may have been one of the main instigators of this archetype—

spreading tuberculosis to those around her while appearing to be in perfect health—but there

have been many more since her, both in real life and on-screen. While there is no carrier in the

first Andromeda Strain (since the infected people are already dead) and the carrier is

conspicuously sick in Black Death, starting with Outbreak and intensifying with Contagion, the

seemingly healthy carrier plays a significant role, underscoring the threatening implications of

the latency period. The fear revolves around questions such as these: How can you protect

yourself if you do not know from what (or from whom) you need protecting? How can you

protect yourself if you do not know who is infected? The longer the virus takes to show

symptoms, the more people will inevitably be infected. This is why viruses with high mortality

rates do not spread as much; the carriers die before they can infect others.

Another part of this fixation stems from the fear that what you cannot see can kill you—

and in terms of microbial threat, there is much that cannot be seen. Autopsies are one way of

seeing the unseen, cutting open the body to reveal the otherwise hidden wreckage wrought by the

virus. In Black Death, Sara (a.k.a. patient zero) is autopsied, thus revealing the enormity of her

illness. “Dear God, this is one node!” shouts one of the doctors slicing Sarah open, before

running to put on two additional pairs of gloves. In Outbreak, following Robby’s autopsy of

Jimbo (Patrick Dempsey), she tells Sam that “it looked like a bomb went off” inside him, that

“all the organs were liquefied.” After peeling the top of Beth’s scalp in Contagion, the medical

examiner (David Lively) says, “Oh my god.” His assistant (Andrew White) asks if he should

take a sample. The medical examiner replies, “I want you to move away from the table.” “Should

I call someone?” the assistant asks. “Call everyone” is the dramatic reply. In all three of these

cases, we do not get to see what the doctors see, but we can surmise from their reactions that

whatever lies inside these bodies is truly terrifying.

In response to the fear of the unseeable, outbreak narratives also fetishize the closeup, the

magnification, the zooming-in to expose that which would otherwise remain unseen. For

instance, the cover of Time magazine’s September 12, 1994, issue featured magnified microbes

and the title “Revenge of the Killer Microbes.” On May 20, 1995, the cover of the Economist

featured a skull within a petri dish and the headline “Disease Fights Back.” Outbreak narratives

frequently call attention to their high-powered microscopes, emphasizing the extreme close-ups

of these invisible viruses. Sometimes they even feature animated sequences that depict the virus

“at work,” all with the aim of making the invisible contagions visible.

In this regard, outbreak narratives owe a significant stylistic debt to early public health

films, which also struggled with how to visualize the invisible. A frequent trope of scientific

documentaries and public health films is that microscopic view that allows us the pleasure of

seeing what we cannot otherwise see. Kirsten Ostherr describes the “‘aesthetic of astonishment,’

in which pleasure revolve[s] around the fascination of seeing previously unimaginable views,

including enlargements of bacteria and other revelations of the invisible, disease-carrying

microbes that surround us.”

Ostherr traces how directors of global conspiracy films in the

1970s, educational AIDS videos in the 1980s, and viral outbreak narratives in the 1990s all used

digital-imaging technologies to make visual the invisible (with the naked eye) nature of

contagion with increasingly realistic-looking animation as well as shot after shot of maps, charts,

and lists tracking the virus’s spread. Filmmakers, like doctors, are trying to visualize viruses in

order to trace and follow the path of disease. Both need to see it in order to understand it and

control it.

A pivotal scene in the original 1971 film Andromeda Strain features a dramatic zooming-

in that results in the discovery of the elusive virus, depicting a mesh screen with a hole in it, the

virus finally isolated and exposed in the tear. Screens are supposed to keep things out, but here is

an example of a border that fails to protect, defenseless against the penetration and destruction

performed by the virus. In a scene that might be painstakingly slow by today’s standards, each

click of the microscope is dramatically emphasized as we come closer and closer to the virus and

the torn screen. There is a similar—albeit quicker—sequence in Outbreak and in the remake of

Andromeda. The answer can be found if you know where and how to look and if you can look

closely enough. When the scientists finally isolate the Motaba virus, Sam, Casey, and Major Salt

gather around a set of monitors, looking at the impact of the virus on healthy kidney cells. First

we see the impact after one hour, then after several hours, and then after a couple more. For the

grand finale, the microscope enlarges to allow us to see individual viral organisms, and then once

more to see them closer, and then once again, and then one last time as Major Salt says, “Sirs,

Mr. Motaba.” The camera tracks even closer at this point onto the viral organism. Mr. Motaba

shows up again, this time in a side-by-side comparison with the original virus from 1967, as

General McClintock (Donald Sutherland) and General Ford (Morgan Freeman) discuss what

should be done next, their lies about not recognizing the virus exposed in the parallels between

the two viruses.

Public health films incorporate animated epidemiological maps to help visualize the

spread of these invisible viruses. Hollywood films, too, use this kind of imagery—not only as a

narrative tool or to make invisible global networks visible, delineating between “sanitary and

unsanitary zones,”

but also to add yet another dose of chilling realism to the spread of their

epidemics. The invisible made visible is seen repeatedly in outbreak narratives, as it is a way to

cognitively map the unknowable world system. Viewers see not only the virus but also the paths

the virus takes, the actual transmission of the disease as it is traced, studied, and (possibly)

neutralized. These sequences help construct the illusion of a conspiracy narrative, heightening

the suspense as we watch the disease pop up in countries around the world. In Contagion and

Outbreak, we have shot after shot of charts visualizing the virus’s spread, reminders that

globalization has only exacerbated the speed with which disease—and panic—can travel. Most

alarming, however, is that, despite this emphasis on making the invisible visible, technology has

limits. Digital models may help identify the virus, but they cannot reveal the economic, political,

and social forces behind it.

In one of the most unsettling scenes in Outbreak, one of the infected individuals goes to

the movies with his girlfriend. As he sits in the theater, he coughs, and we can see, thanks to

computer generated imagery, the minute particles that fly out of his mouth as he does so,

emphasizing how deadly the unseen can be. The camera follows those particles—leaving

everything else out of focus—as they spread throughout the theater, entering the mouths of the

laughing crowd. It is a very self-reflexive moment, as when the film first came out, most people

were watching it in a movie theater, also sharing contaminated and circulated air.

These types of visualizations also serve as reminders of the sixth and final key trope: fear

of progress combined with the development of an integrated “risk society.” These narratives are

conservative in the sense that they always recommend caution, slow change, a halt to

development. Progress is the issue, with globalization as one form of the progress. Globalization

has eroded borders that might otherwise protect us, and when combined with technology and

transportation, globalization also exacerbates the speed with which disease—and panic—can

penetrate what borders are left. In 1992, for example, in Black Death, the virus merely travels

from California to New York. However, in 1995, in Outbreak, after the virus travels from Africa

to Cedar Creek, California, globalization is barely mentioned. The only implication that the virus

might have global consequences (after it wipes out the United States) occurs when General

McClintock (Donald Sutherland) instructs those in the White House briefing to “be

compassionate but think globally” as he tries to sell them on his plan to bomb Cedar Creek.

Beyond that, there is no mention of the fact that the rest of the world exists. In fact, there are

only two maps in Outbreak: one in the CDC epidemic control center and one in the White House

briefing room. Tellingly, both show just the United States. In 2007, in Pandemic, the virus

hitches a ride on a flight from Australia to Los Angeles, those on board vulnerable to the virus

lurking inside one of the passengers. The distance may be great, but there remains a clear course

of travel, from point A to point B.

However, with each passing year, as travel and viral spread increase, the course of travel

complicates. In 2011, it was a drastically different scenario in Contagion. The opening of

Contagion, for instance, cuts from city to city, country to county, our only indication that we are

in a new location the text on the bottom of the screen. The virus passes effortlessly from one

geographical point to the next, from one ethnicity to the next, from one body to the next. A clear

travel trajectory has been replaced with an infinitely interlocked network. Even Beth, the original

spreader of the virus from Asia to Europe and the United States, as global marketing operations

manager of the American corporation Alderson International Mining and Manufacturing

(AIMM), is a symptom and result of increased globalization, much like the cause and spread of

the disease, itself.

A constant in the outbreak narrative is the issue of blame, although who (or what) is to

blame can and does shift. While the Muslim, African, or Asian “other” is often to blame for

instigating the outbreak in the Western world, the extent and speed of the spread is attributed to

human development; “progress” is often critiqued for causing, if not the outbreak itself, its

spread. Frank Furedi observes the frequency of perceiving “human activity through a narrative

that emphasizes its selfish, destructive, and toxic behavior” and argues that this is what

“underpins our culture of fear.”

The sense of culpability in our own destruction is a major

theme in both our culture of fear and the outbreak narrative. For example, in The Hot Zone,

Richard Preston writes that AIDS, Ebola, and any other emerging diseases are “a natural

consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere,” an immune system response against humanity

by earth herself.

This idea of environmental retribution is most often manifested with the message that, by

moving things that should not be moved, destroying habitats that should be preserved, we

unleash the virus, and then have no one to blame but our greed. Or, like the medicine man says in

Outbreak, “This is what happens when men go chopping down trees where no man should be.

The gods got angry. This is punishment.” As demonstrated in the Andromeda remake and in

Contagion, recklessly destroying ecosystems can have detrimental consequences. The

Andromeda Strain specifically warns about the hazards of abusing the environment, exhausting

natural resources that the world will one day need. In the film, the president is about to begin

underwater mining in order to tap into resources beneath the ocean. Activists are protesting but

to no avail. However, the antidote for the Andromeda virus lies precisely in these same

underwater mines. The warning received from the future is that exhausting this resource will

leave the world unable to combat viruses like Andromeda. As Dr. Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt)

puts it, “It’s a slime from the bottom of the ocean that could save us, something we were

prepared to obliterate.” The cautionary message behind Dr. Stone’s statement is that mankind

must heed restraint and not the ego. The virus is contained only because the antidote still exists

in untouched mines.

In his explanatory sequence at the end of Contagion, Steven Soderbergh demonstrates

how globalization and modern living have stripped away traditional food sources from people

and animals, forcing both to eat what they would not normally eat as their traditional habitats are

destroyed in the interest of capitalistic advancement. We see in Contagion the same breached

boundaries Fraiberg wrote about twenty years prior: “boundaries ‘breached,’ or at least ‘leaky,’”

including “those between human and animal, between animal-human and machine, and between

the physical and the non-physical.”

Or, as Eugene Thacker and Alexander R. Galloway write,

“These emerging infectious diseases are composed of assemblages of living forms: microbe-flea-

monkey-human, microbe-chicken-human, microbe-cow-human, or human-microbe-human,”

unnatural combinations that should not happen and would not have happened had it not been for

globalization. Fruit bats, as used in Contagion, are significant to the film’s critique of capitalism

and environmental destruction because, as Laurie Garrett observes, they “are so stressed by the

combination of apparent rising temperatures in the upper canopy of the rain forest and human

encroachment that they are increasingly going into human areas in search of food . . . and passing

ancient viruses, via either their saliva [when they feed] or their urine.”

Environmental trespass

breeds disease, and then globalization spreads that disease.

In a Newsweek article from 2003 entitled “How Progress Makes Us Sick,” Geoffrey

Cowley describes that what specifically turned AIDS into a “holocaust” was not just the virus

itself but also the “proliferation of roads, cities, and airports” that allowed the virus to spread.

The implication is that the price we pay for development is an increased susceptibility to

emerging diseases and an increased risk of self-destruction. Torin Monahan argues that the Fox

television show 24 functions as a “metaphor for modernity” by depicting the new social order

and impacts of globalization. While the show portrays the necessary global flows of people and

goods essential to a healthy economy, it also depicts how these same flows exacerbate

vulnerabilities such as terrorism, military intervention, and economic instability.

Both the

fictional and the nonfictional tap into the same set of vulnerabilities and capabilities.

In 1995, Geoffrey Cowley wrote in an article for Newsweek entitled “Outbreak of Fear”

that “most experts [had] thought of new viral diseases as accidents of genetic mutation.” But they

had become “less fearful of random genetic change and more terrified of the effects of human

social change.” Cowley provides several specific examples. For instance, the emergence of HIV

in sub-Saharan Africa can be linked to trucking and tourism, as well as war and commerce.

Experts assume the virus had existed for decades before it emerged in the 1970s but simply

would not have escaped the isolated rural villages without the trucking and tourism industries

that brought the world to Africa or the war and commerce that brought the villagers out into the

world. Sex work, in particular, thrived both along the truck routes and in the rapidly growing

cities. Throughout the world, rapidly growing cities like these have also put unprecedented

numbers of people closer together—many of whom are in the developing world, where access to

sanitation, clean water, and health care is limited—but they also have move people into once

rural areas. Encephalitis, for instance, has become an issue in rural areas of Wisconsin not only

because more and more people are moving into those areas but also as a result of ecological

disruptions in those locations, creating more places for the mosquitoes to breed.

All the

examples indicate the impact of human action, Morse’s causality of local to global coming into

play.

Heather Schell, however, sees the issue of responsibility a little differently. She interprets

the drive to posit humans as the ultimate cause of epidemics as a way to maintain a fiction of

general human control. This fiction is a rebuttal or response to concerns about the lack of human

control. Schell argues that recent science fiction is less assured of human control, as evidenced

by the failure of medicine and technology to “repel the onslaught of disease organisms.”

see this in films like I Am Legend, where the cancer vaccine turns people into zombies, or

television shows like The Walking Dead, where the CDC is unable to do anything to help and

does not even know how the infection started. Science fails when it creates a deadly virus

(Covert One: The Hades Factor, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil [Anderson, 2002]),

technology fails when it creates a machine that tries to kill and cause destruction (The

Andromeda Strain, Resident Evil, The Walking Dead). In order to compensate for a lack of

control in real life, these narratives are created to shift blame and make sense of the world around

us.

These narratives that shift blame often incorporate the language of conspiracy.

Conspiracies, as observed by Frederic Jameson, can act as attempts to map the structure of an

otherwise unknowable global system. In his analysis of conspiracy films in The Geopolitical

Aesthetic, Jameson writes that conspiracy theories are an “unconscious, collective effort at trying

to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us in a late twentieth century

whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic

impersonality.”

Conspiracy theories, after all, create a sense of agency and purpose for that

which cannot otherwise be understood. They reflect the assumption that, for better or for worse,

“everything is connected,” that everything has a purpose, that there is a master plan.

This effort

to make sense of “where we are” via conspiracy theory is a sign of how much people need to

believe in a hidden agenda to make sense of the chaos of contemporary life. In Outbreak, the

fault of the virus may not initially have been with the government, which tried to destroy the

virus when it was first discovered in 1967, but it is a government conspiracy that allows the virus

to spread. It is a government conspiracy that prevents Sam Daniels from doing his job and delays

the resolution of the epidemic.

Outbreak narratives frequently integrate conspiracy with the issue of responsibility:

government conspiracy, as in Outbreak or The Hades Factor, or corporate and government

conspiracy for economic gain, as in Toxic Skies or in the X-Files episode “F. Emasculata.” The

X-Files, despite its campy tone, managed to tap into many of the same anxieties and conspiracy

fears that would permeate future outbreak narratives. In the episode “Deep Throat” (Fox, Sept.

17, 1993), for example, Scully asks, “Doesn’t the government have a right and a responsibility to

protect its secrets?” Mulder replies, “Yes, but at what cost? When does the human cost become

too high for the building of a better machine?” Scully, ever the voice of reason and compliance,

retorts, “These are questions we have no business asking.” One of the central themes of the show

is Mulder’s attempts to ask the questions he has no business asking, while Scully tries to reason

with him to toe the line and accept the easy answers. The two act as foils to illuminate not only

the depths and complexities of government and corporate conspiracies but also the lies we tell

ourselves and the questions we do not ask so that we can sleep at night. In the episode “Squeeze”

(Fox, Sept. 24, 1993) Mulder observes, while looking at one of their captured targets, “All these

people putting bars on their windows, spending good money on high-tech security systems,

trying to feel safe? I look at this guy, and I think, ‘it ain’t enough.’”

The impossibility of truly effective safety pervades all outbreak narratives, reinforcing

the theme that all boundaries are porous and indefensible. In The Hades Factor, for instance, an

American government–engineered virus spreads on domestic soil, having fallen into terrorist

hands. In Toxic Skies, it is, perversely, a pharmaceutical company that deliberately weakens

American’s immune systems so as to make higher profits. That which should keep us safe

actually makes us sick. In The Walking Dead, there is always a threat of attack, either from

zombies or other humans. There is no safety, even in the fortified town of Alexandria. Similarly,

in every season of 24, Jack Bauer must fight to keep America safe from yet another threat. Ruth

Mayer argues that fictional texts are better able to reflect and respond to real-life events than

political and journalistic nonfiction texts because the markedly fantastic dimension of fiction

gives it more freedom to reflect on current fears and fascinations.

With its markedly fantastic

elements—squirting pustules, rotting zombies, frothy seizures, and blood-filled eyes—the

outbreak narrative has no shortage of elements with which to tap into the unconscious.

In 2016, the CW network hopped onto the outbreak narrative bandwagon with

Containment, its version of the Belgian television show Cordon (vtm, 2014). Containment,

which would not be renewed for a second season, premiered on the CW network on May 7,

2016. The show looks at what happens when a deadly virus breaks out in Atlanta and authorities

are forced to quarantine the area of the city immediately surrounding the local hospital’s

Infectious Disease Center. Before the initial premiere, the network launched a trailer that

encapsulates some of the show’s highlights while also providing insight into why the show

failed.

The trailer opens with a man in a white medical coat speaking to a woman behind a

window. A surveillance camera monitors her, indicating that she is somehow a threat, worthy of

monitoring. “You understand the precautions we need to take, Dr. Saunders?” the man asks, his

back to us. She nods, and we can see blood caked around the bottom of her nose, which,

according to Hollywood code, is an instant red flag. “Tell me one more time,” he says. Now we

see his face, his clean and orderly appearance in clear contrast to hers. This triggers a flashback

to Dr. Saunders administering her rounds earlier that day. At this point, she looks the height of

professionalism. Her first patient of the day, she tells us via voice-over, “presented with flu-like

symptoms.” Immediately, there are two more red flags: one, the “flu-like symptoms” that,

according to Hollywood code, signify imminent outbreak; and two, the man hovering behind the

sick patient is wearing a taqiya, which is also Hollywood code, this time for “danger.” To make

matters more suspicious, the patient himself is Syrian, Hollywood code for “terrorist.” The

female doctor recounts, “There was no exposure to fluid, no high-risk contact,” but we know this

is irrelevant. When the virus wants to spread, it always finds a way—because Hollywood has

shown us that people always make mistakes. Instantly, as if on cue, the female doctor remembers

lending the sick patient her pen. She now holds it in front of herself gingerly, as if it is still

contagious—which it probably is. This is how the virus was transmitted. Containment does not

need to tell us. We can read the signs, interpret the code. We have seen it all before.

At this point, the trailer cuts to another location, this time an Atlanta train station, where

the MARTA train just pulling in. Those on the platform step forward to board the train, but the

train leaves without stopping. This is another red flag. Social order is beginning to fray at the

seams. Trains are not abiding protocol. Our suspicions are further reinforced by the police

officers shepherding everyone out of the station. As veteran viewers of television and movies, we

are experienced at collecting and assimilating all the clichéd red flags Hollywood serves up. We

know this cannot be good for the citizens of Atlanta.

Cut to another scene, this time a briefing for police and CDC officials. There are

whispers among those in the room as to the cause for the briefing. It is quickly revealed that the

initial patient with the “flu-like symptoms” is patient zero and that the virus is not presenting as

anything that can be identified. This is another frequent device in the outbreak narrative, since

anything that could be identified could be solved, or at least managed. But when it is an

unknown or mutated strain, that is when narratives can get away with their unrealistic and

accelerated death tolls, and that is exactly what happens in Containment.

At this point, the cuts get faster, giving us quick glimpses of the police interviewing the

Syrian family harboring patient zero, children at the hospital waiting for a doctor who does not

appear, the hospital being locked down, police with riot gear, blood on the walls, masks on faces,

doctors declaring the virus fatal and highly contagious, and shots of Dr. Saunders getting sicker

and sicker before dying. The hospital and the surrounding area is cordoned off under threat of

national security. Interspersed with all these shots are title cards: “We can’t see it,” “We can’t

contain it,” “We can’t control it,” and “Ordinary people will defy the odds.” The fundamental

tension of the series becomes the mayhem that ensues within the quarantine zone—the familiar

struggle to contain and control both the virus and the infected—and the chaos shown at the end

of the trailer hints toward this.

So if the outbreak narrative is as relevant as I argue that it is, if it taps so acutely into

contemporary American fears, why would a show like Containment be canceled after only one

season? Why would a show that hits so many of the outbreak narrative tropes not be a

resounding success? While there are other explanations, to be sure, including the fact that

Containment diverged dramatically from the CW’s standard teenage fare, one key reason for the

show’s failure lies in the concept of the film cycle.

In a chart constructed by Richard Nowell for his book Blood Money: A History of the

First Teen Slasher Film Cycle, Nowell outlines what he sees as the evolution of the film cycle

arc, using the first teen slasher film cycle as his example. The cycle begins with the “Pioneer

Production,” which he lists as Black Christmas (Clark, 1974). A Pioneer Production is a film that

tests the waters or breaks the ice of whatever new cycle is about to be formed. The “Speculator

Productions,” which he lists as Halloween (Carpenter, 1978) and Silent Scream (Harris, 1979),

are stage two. Out of these, the successful one becomes the “Trailblazer Hit.” This is the film

that rakes in the box office cash and establishes that particular cycle as successful and worthy of

imitation. In this case, it is Halloween. Stage three is for those films attempting to capitalize on

the success of the Trailblazer Hit. These “Prospector Cash-ins,” as Nowell describes them, are

Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980), Prom Night (Lynch, 1980), and Terror Train

(Spottiswoode, 1980). These films mimic the Trailblazer Hit in order to capitalize on its success

but are usually more cheaply made. Out of these, the successful ones are the “Reinforcing Hits.”

The success of those leads to stage four, the “Carpetbagger Cash-ins”—films trying to capitalize

on the success of the Reinforcing Hits, often even more cheaply made. In this category, Nowell

lists eleven films, all from 1981, including Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner), Final Exam (Huston),

Happy Birthday to Me (Thompson), and My Bloody Valentine (Mihalka).

The outbreak narrative fits the same pattern as Nowell’s teen slasher cycle. It, too, has a

Pioneer Production, Speculator Productions, Trailblazer Hits, Prospector Cash-ins, Reinforcing

Hits, and Carpetbagger Cash-ins (see figure 1). Interestingly, however, the outbreak narrative

cycle can be fleshed out using three distinct “waves.” The first wave, originating in the mid-

1990s, focuses on the impact of globalization and progress, while the second wave, beginning at

the start of the twenty-first century, focuses on increased fears of terrorism. The third wave,

which reflects the current moment’s fascination with what the world would look like after a viral

outbreak, begins with the cult classic Braindead (Jackson, 1992) and the success of Capcom’s

original Resident Evil video game in 1996. Its peak popularity, however, occurred during the first

two decades of the twenty-first century. Its success was so great that this wave warrants an

additional category: Stage 5, “Parody and Other,” includes not only zombie parodies, such as

Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Steers, 2016), and The

Walking Deceased (Dow, 2015), but also the web series Bite Me (Machinima, 2010–2012), about

three die-hard gamers who find themselves in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, and the web-

based “reality” show Fight of the Living Dead: Experiment 88 (YouTube Red, 2016), in which a

group of YouTube stars try to survive a simulated zombie apocalypse. I also include the FX

television series The Strain (2014–present) in this category because of the way it fuses zombie

and vampire tropes with infection. These lists are by no means complete. They are merely

intended to provide a sense of not only the scope of the outbreak narrative but also how its three

distinct waves evolved.

In the case of the original wave of the outbreak narrative, the “Pioneer Production” is

arguably the television movie Black Death (also called Quiet Killer), which aired on CBS on

March 24, 1992—just a few months before Richard Preston’s infamous article “Crisis in the Hot

Zone” was published in the New Yorker. Black Death began the shift from disease-of-the-week

movies to pandemic narratives. Disease-of-the-week movies—a slightly snarky title for a

particular breed of made-for-TV movie focused on people struggling with an illness or disability

(frequently blindness or cancer)—became popular during the 1970s and 1980s. These TV

movies were often melodramatic and cheaply made, lending them a distinctive and easily

duplicated style.

In Black Death, based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Gwyneth Cravens and

John S. Marr, an infected girl flies home to New York after a camping trip in California—

tapping into fears of disease spread via air travel—and threatens to infect the city (and then the

world) with the Black Plague, which she most likely caught from a squirrel via flea bites—

tapping into fears of zoonotic diseases. Zoonotic diseases (those spread from animals to humans,

like rabies and Ebola) would surface again and again in later outbreak films, such as Outbreak

and Contagion (2011). Realizing that Sara has died of the plague, a pandemic that spread

throughout Europe during the fourteenth century killing an estimated two hundred million

people, Dr. Nora Hart (Kathleen Jackson) tries to warn the authorities, but the mayor refuses to

do anything, more worried about causing a panic than stopping a plague. This is another plot

device that appears frequently in future outbreak narratives: those in power are usually reluctant

to take action due to the economic and social repercussions of panic. Already, in 1992, the

various tropes of the outbreak narrative can be seen in their infancy, foreshadowing their future

impact.

Per Nowell’s chart, the Pioneer Production is followed by the Speculator Productions, out

of which one (or more) becomes the Trailblazer Hit. In this case, the Speculator Productions can

be seen to be early versions of the outbreak narrative, such as the made-for-TV movie The Stand

(based on the book by Stephen King), which aired on ABC in May 1994, about what happens

after a virus kills off most of humanity; the made-for-TV movie Virus (also known as Formula

for Death), which aired on ABC in May 1995, in which a virus breaks out in Los Angeles; and,

of course, Outbreak, released by Warner Bros. in March 1995. Outbreak, with its box office

draw of almost $190 million, would become the clear Trailblazer Hit.

In the years to come, the Prospector Cash-ins would appear. Most of these would be TV

movies or straight-to-video releases—like Pandora’s Clock (NBC, Nov. 10,1996), about a

deadly virus on a flight from Germany to New York City (reinforcing the threat of air travel, or

as Dr. Roni Sanders [Daphne Zuniga] warns in Pandora’s Clock, “The world’s airline system is

a potential instrument for viral holocaust”), or Venomous (Raymond, 2001), about genetically

modified rattlesnakes released from a secret government lab and that spread a deadly virus

(reinforcing threats of government conspiracy, biowarfare, and zoonotic diseases), or Pandemic

(Hallmark, 2007), about the bird flu spreading through Los Angeles, transmitted from Australia

via an airline passenger (reinforcing again the threat of air travel as well as faulty quarantines).

These were campy low-budget affairs, but they still helped keep viral outbreaks on the television

screen and in the cultural consciousness until Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011).

Contagion—with its worldwide box office of $135 million—would be the last big-budget

big-screen viral outbreak blockbuster, helping to wrap up the first incarnation of the outbreak

narrative. As the only one of the Prospector Cash-ins to truly succeed, it was be part of the

Reinforcing Hits category, indicating to Hollywood that the cycle still had some juice left, and

giving the CW network enough confidence to produce Containment. Containment would then be

a Carpetbagger Cash-in, an attempt to recycle the same formula as the Trailblazer for at least

some of that film’s profits. The box office success of Contagion, on the other hand, can be

partially explained by the fact that it updated the original outbreak narrative template by making

the spread of the virus more global. While using all the key tropes, it also aimed to update the

formula. Having director Steven Soderbergh at the helm and acclaimed screenwriter Scott Z.

Burns as the writer also helped Contagion rebrand the outbreak template and grant it legitimacy

and artistic integrity. However, Containment did almost nothing to reinvent the template, and by

2016, the original format of the outbreak narrative template had been stretched too thin. Without

significant alterations, the show was doomed to fail.

While terrorism and conspiracy are not new to Hollywood, the twenty-first century

embraced their integration into the outbreak narrative cycle. This second wave of the outbreak

narrative had the low-budget Contaminated Man (Hickox, 2000) as a Pioneer Production, an

early integration of biowarfare and terrorism into the theme of viral outbreak. After 9/11, this

incarnation picked up steam. The Global Effect (Cunningham, 2002) and Contagion (Murlowski,

2002) may not have hit in the box office, but 24 became a massive success, and season 3 (Fox,

2003–2004) revolved entirely around the threat of a bioterrorism. The idea of viruses as terrorist

weapons has now become commonplace, manifesting in the television remake of 12 Monkeys, ,

episodes of The Blacklist (NBC, “The Front,” Oct. 20, 2014), Blindspot (NBC, “Bone May Rot,”

Oct. 12, 2015), and Person of Interest (CBS, “Reassortment,” May 24, 2016), and back to the big

screen with Inferno (Howard, 2016).

This same kind of film cycle structure can be found with the third outbreak narrative

wave, the postapocalypse or postoutbreak incarnation. This wave launched with the Resident Evil

videogame (Capcom, 1996) and The Walking Dead comic (2003) and proved its potential with

the first Resident Evil movie (Anderson, 2002) and the release of 28 Days Later (Boyle, 2002).

In the subsequent years, Reinforcing Hits like Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Witt, 2004), the Dawn

of the Dead remake, Resident Evil: Extinction (Mulcahy, 2007), and 28 Weeks Later

(Fresnadillo, 2007) proved that zombies were far from dead. By the time The Crazies (Eisner)

and The Walking Dead (AMC) television show premiered, both in 2010, this incarnation was in

full stride. The incarnation was in such full stride, and the tropes so familiar, that this wave even

began to spawn parodies, such as Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004) and Pride and Prejudice and

Zombies (Steers, 2016), as well as Carpetbagger Cash-ins such as Planet Terror (Rodriguez,

2007), iZombie (CW, 2015–present), and even a YouTube Red “zombie reality show,” Fight of

the Living Dead: Experiment 88 (2016).

While the outbreak narrative does not fall as neatly into Nowell’s film cycle categories as

the horror genre, plotting the films out using his categories can help visualize how one feeds into

the next. For instance, the film Carriers may have just cost $10 million to make, but it only

grossed $5.8 million worldwide, making it a clear commercial disappointment. However, its

depiction of a world devastated by a viral outbreak, with most of the population dead and the few

survivors forced to figure out a strategy for this new world, resonated enough with audiences,

writers, and producers to be returned to again and again. This incarnation of the outbreak

narrative set a template that would prove profitable and was likely inspired by The Walking Dead

comic, which was first published in 2003. The success of the Resident Evil franchise, I Am

Legend (Lawrence, 2007), Zombieland (Fleischer, 2009), The Walking Dead, World War Z, and

The Last Ship further solidified this new wave of the cycle.

Because plots within each wave of the outbreak narrative mirror each other so

transparently, there is less medium specificity than might exist within the tighter constraints of

some film genres, where a television show must be evaluated completely different than a movie.

The outbreak narrative is remarkably consistent regardless of whether it is on a television show

or a movie, a miniseries or a book. The message is the content, and the medium itself becomes

irrelevant; the same story is repurposed regardless of screen size or delivery mechanism. The

outbreak narrative traverses between the big screen and the little screen with little variation,

launching with a made-for-TV movie, hitting its stride with big-screen spectacle, and reinforcing

itself with television shows and miniseries and journalistic depictions of real-life outbreaks. In

other words, the outbreak narrative, is not only a rhetorical pattern between individual films but

also a pattern that persists across media forms and platforms—television, movies, and even the

written word. The outbreak narrative continues its transmedia appeal, pulling from books (The

Andromeda Strain, Black Death, The Stand, Formula for Death, Pandora’s Clock, I Am Legend,

World War Z, 28 Days Later, The Hades Factor, The Last Ship, The Day of the Triffids), video

games (Resident Evil), and comic books (The Walking Dead), and even manifesting in board

games (Pandemic) and phone apps (Plague, Inc.). As briefly outlined in the introduction, the

outbreak narrative gained initial attention with a combination of media texts, including those

early articles like “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” books like The Coming Plague and The Hot Zone, as

well as television movies like Black Death, news items on AIDS and Ebola, and the cinematic

success of Outbreak. The message crossed all platforms: A virus was coming to get us.

The outbreak narrative, through its fantastical and metaphorical representations of real-

life anxieties—on many types of screens, dispersed through many types of networks—provides

portrayals of scenarios ripped from our nightmares and our headlines. We may fear these

scenarios—we may even relish them within the safety of the screen—but what remains

unwavering is that while the cycle may update, the outbreak narrative remains keyed in to the

pulse of the zeitgeist.

If one is searching for manifestations of America’s fear of viral contagion, its fears that

deadly diseases or deadly carriers will migrate from primitive unknowns to America’s neatly

groomed suburbs causing panic and social breakdown, then the place to turn is the outbreak

narrative. Displaying not only a preoccupation with the body’s vulnerability to disease, the

outbreak narrative seems equally—if not more so—concerned with what the repercussions of an

epidemic, of an American infrastructure beset by fear and infection, would look like. The

consequences of contagion—immunological, political, social, ideological—are at the heart of the

outbreak narrative.

The Globalization Outbreak

How the world is framed may be as important as what is contained within that frame.

—Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window

While the impossibility of truly effective safety pervades all outbreak narratives, this fear would

grow more pronounced as the impact of globalization grew more visible. In particular, the

combination of eroding barriers and rapid global communication would change both the world

and the outbreak narrative. Viral outbreaks would make us afraid of globalization—of the

encroachment of germs, bacteria, and their carriers—and outbreak narratives would feed into this

fear. After all, globalization does exacerbate the threat of infection, and so film and television

narratives can easily emphasize the insecurity of boundaries, regardless of whether the infection

is literal—spread via zombies or viruses—or metaphorical. In turn, in a viral fashion, these

Hollywood narratives encourage an increase in pandemic reporting, putting us on the lookout for

more juicy stories, more dramatic retellings, primed for the real-life outbreak we have been told

to expect. And so the cycle of fear spreads.

The Cold War, despite the panic and anxiety it caused, had also established a certain

bipolar, black-and-white stability under which individuals, organizations, and governments could

be unambiguous about their stations and locations in life. When it ended, geo-politics became far

more nuanced and confusing, opening the door for new superpowers like China, Brazil, and

India to emerge. By the end of the twentieth century, the worlds of finance and commerce had

almost completely globalized. This was due to a rapid-fire succession of historical events and

political alignments: the end of the Cold War in 1989; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991;

the creation of the European Union in 1993 and the launch of the euro in 1999; the signing of the

North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994; a steady erosion of trade barriers throughout the

eighties and nineties; faster, cheaper transportation by car and by plane; and the proliferation of

electronic communications, such as cell phones and the Internet.

Traditional understandings of the nation-state grew increasingly outdated as globalization

grew in power and relevance, as illustrated by transnational labor, the global outsourcing of

production, the growing distribution of products worldwide (cultural and otherwise), and the

reliance of military and law enforcement personnel on networked machines. Political, economic,

and social activities became worldwide in scope. Roland Robertson, sociologist and theorist of

globalization, attributes to this era a “compression of the world and the intensification of the

consciousness of the world as a whole.”

As individual governments and nations saw their power erode, multinational corporations

saw their power increase. This led to the further proliferation of networks into everyday life and

everyday function. Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker write that the “networks of

FedEx or AT&T can be seen as more important than that of the United States in terms of global

economies, communication, and consumerism.”

Corporations of this magnitude can now play a

large role in “determining the economic, political, and social welfare of many nations,” allowing

them to control “much of the world’s investment capital, technology, and access to global

markets.”

The growth of these corporations and their networks further encouraged the shift from

the vertical and hierarchical to the horizontal and networked. In fact, Galloway declares these

decentralized networks to be “the most common diagram of the modern era.”

These shifts had another, more personal impact. As national identities evolved or

evaporated, so, too, did traditional understandings of individual identity. When the World Wide

Web was first invented in 1991, it “formed the basis of a new type of networked

communication,” that was mainly a variety of generic services that you could join or utilize, but

the service itself would not automatically connect you to others. However, with the advent of

Web 2.0, shortly after the turn of the millennium, “online services shifted from offering channels

for networked communication to becoming interactive, two-way vehicles for networked

society.”

Technological networks became even more integrated into everyday lives, into how

we presented and shaped our identities, both online and off, bringing individuals together—while

still physically separated—through a complex web of connections. Perversely, while people were

more networked than ever, they were also more isolated.

All these shifts—financial, commercial, technological—changed the way life would be

experienced and understood. In 1996, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells described the

contemporary world as based on networks and paths of flow(s).

His perspective reflects the

movement of an increasingly globalized world, as newer, more flexible and capillary models

were replacing older hierarchical structures, exemplified most familiarly by the innovations of

Microsoft, Google, and others.

Much like globalization, these shifts also enhanced the sense of

being “a citizen of the world” and the increasing irrelevance of national borders. Sites like

Blogger (1999), MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), and YouTube (2005) created online

connections and communities, networks that had little to do with nation-state boundaries or

geographic location. Nation-state boundaries and geographic locations could be (and would be)

superseded by rapid global communication.

In turn, global communication and global networks changed the way we understood time

and space, eradicating temporal and spatial limitations in order to bring the farthest reaches of

the globe into homes and onto screens. Ideas and information could now circle the world in

seconds. This had an impact that transcended mere economics. These technological innovations,

as well as the steady expansion of networks—both local and international—combined to create a

moment arguably defined by rapid global communication. The proliferation of digital

technologies and networks of electronic connectivity mirrored chains of infection, permitting

users to send information worldwide in the blink of an eye. Thanks to the ubiquity of media in

our lives, information—and its accompanying media platforms—has become all the more

pervasive, all the more viral.

Over the last twenty years, network discourse has proliferated with an epidemic intensity.

Galloway and Thacker argue that “Peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, wireless community

networks, terrorist networks, contagion networks of biowarfare agents, political swarming and

mass demonstration, economic and finance networks, online role-playing games, personal area

networks, mobile phones, ‘generation Txt,’ and on and on” have become integral to every aspect

of our lives.

It has become increasingly difficult to find people or locations that are “off the

grid.”

In turn, viral epidemics have been collapsing time and space since the mid-nineteenth

century, “rendering seemingly stable geopolitical and biological distinctions tenuous, if not

moot.”

This kind of collapse has become even more pronounced in the twenty-first century, as

technology and networks shrink the world and change our relationship to it. For instance, in

Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006), M (Judi Dench) has a subdermal microchip inserted in James

Bond’s (Daniel Craig) arm so that she can track him. “So you can keep an eye on me?” he asks

her. “Yes,” she replies. “Don’t worry about keeping in touch. We’ll know where you are.”

Technology renders physical location irrelevant.

Further enhancing this notion of always being “in touch,” a couple hours after the

November 2015 terrorist attack in Paris, Facebook activated “safety check,” a safety feature

triggered by geolocation to allow users in Paris to mark themselves safe, thus reassuring other

users who may have been unable to get through with other methods of communication. First

introduced in October 2014, this feature is activated during natural disasters or crises, such as

Tropical Storm Dianmu in Vietnam during August 2016 or the bomb explosions in Thailand that

same month. Significantly, a Facebook spokesperson told Politico that “the feature is not used

during longer-term crises, like wars or epidemics, because such emergencies have no clear start

or end, making it difficult to determine when an individual is ‘safe.’”

It is precisely this

quality—the inability to distinguish when the threat is over—that makes epidemics so terrifying.

If geographical factors are no longer relevant, they are also no longer protective, leaving

ordinary citizens vulnerable. Global (rather than local) health and security have become pivotal

issues (in real life and in Hollywood), partially due to the seemingly constant threat of worldwide

infection spread via juicy stories and dramatic retellings. Human networks have become

“conduits of viral destruction,” with air travel, in particular, making “especially apparent the

intricate networks of human existence and human interdependence.”

Or, as Thierry Umutoni

(Fana Mokoena) says in World War Z (Forster, 2013), “The airlines were the perfect delivery

system.” This wave of the outbreak narrative—the globalization outbreak—plays off the fear that

global boundaries are now fully porous. Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011), for example, expands the

traditional outbreak narrative seen in Outbreak (Petersen, 1995). Rather than focus on one town,

Soderbergh portrays the struggle of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and

the World Health Organization (WHO) to keep up with a terrifying epidemic that hits Hong

Kong, London, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Tokyo almost simultaneously. Contagion, a

Prospector Cash-in that became a Reinforcing Hit in the outbreak narrative film cycle, is a useful

text for demonstrating the differences between modern and postmodern outbreak narratives

because it emulates some of the original Trailblazer Hit (Outbreak) while reinventing the cycle

enough to stay relevant. Significant differences are that Contagion reflects the postmodern era of

globalization, including its emphasis on global communication, networks, and the transnational

body. Much as Contagion is not about a hero saving the world, it is also not about disease, per

se, at least not in the conventional sense. We do not see bodies oozing with pus or torn open.

When people get sick, they tend to die fairly quickly and/or quietly. The specific terms of the

disease seem to be fairly inconsequential. The emphasis, instead, is on a general threat to the

world, a world that is both increasingly borderless and interconnected.

Contagion also depicts an increased awareness of the ways that globalization and

technology have exacerbated the speed with which disease—and panic—can travel, fueling

terror over the potential of both to harm and destroy. These fears feed into the desire for a return

to walls and barriers, as demonstrated by the popularity of politicians like Donald Trump and

Scott Walker, who advocate for an end to immigration and the creation of reinforced borders, as

well as by referendums like Brexit in 2016, in which the United Kingdom withdrew from the

European Union—all actions that call for a retreat from contemporary globalized standards.

It is not merely the nation that has become less relevant as a result of globalization, but

the individual has become less relevant as well. The shift of scale and scope does not only apply

to the physical sprawl of the virus or to the locations featured in the film or television show. The

shift of scale also applies to the protagonist. When scope is huge, conflict is no longer man-to-

man or even country-to-country. It is network-to-network. The individual action movie hero has

been replaced with teams—teams of scientists, military personnel, and politicians—often located

in different cities, if not different countries. There is no one person for whom you really cheer,

no one person with whom you identify. Networks are favored over singularity. Rather than

pitting good versus bad, the postmodern globalization outbreak narrative looks instead at the

ways different organizations work together, how the global infrastructure operates, and how

people themselves interact with each other. In a globalized and interconnected world, major

networks and infrastructures are our only recourse toward solving a large-scale epidemic. When

a disease hits on such a massive scale, it is no longer just about the virus or a particular hero but

about the networks and the organization of such networks and their effectiveness (or lack

thereof).

In comparison, in earlier (modern, colonial) eras of globalization, villains and heroes

were clear, geographical locations defined, and the narrative worked toward a happy resolution

(closure). This is evident in Outbreak, for instance, where the hero is clearly Colonel Sam

Daniels (Dustin Hoffman), who defies authority to save his ex-wife and then the world. Who to

blame is equally clear: corrupt military men are responsible for the conspiracy while primitive

Africa is to blame for the virus. However, in later (postmodern) eras of globalization, heroes are

elusive, othering does not fully take, geographical locations are fluid, and the resolution is only

partially satisfying because we see how easily these sorts of things can happen (and happen

again!). For example, in lieu of a hero, the Andromeda Strain remake (A&E, 2008) features a

network of scientists—employed by the government (another network)—and a rogue journalist

who work together to save the world and expose government conspiracy. The villains are other

government employees (forming a different network) trying to keep the conspiracy under wraps.

Both villains and heroes are networks and the geographical area threatened by the virus is

worldwide (as opposed to the tiny town of Piedmont decimated in the original Andromeda

[Wise, 1971]). The resolution is uneasy, as the government tucks its Andromeda sample away

for later use. In Contagion, the network of scientists—working with or for government networks,

most conspicuously represented by the CDC and the WHO—try to understand how the outbreak

happened and struggle to stop it. The villain is the virus, the geographic scope worldwide. Both

films emphasize the impact of a globalized, networked world in which individuality has been

forsaken for the network.

Based on variations within the outbreak narrative, there seem to be two possible

responses to the increasingly rhizomatic modes of contemporary life. The first response, as seen

in Outbreak, favors one iconic character who has the fate of the world on his or her shoulders.

This structure continues to resonate through films like I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007) and World

War Z, both of which revert to heroic tales of salvation in a nostalgic and familiar fashion. The

continued appeal of the classical hero in these narratives can be seen as a response to the shift

from hierarchical social ordering to the horizontal and networked sprawl common to the twenty-

first century, much like the acceptance of the hypersovereignty that would emerge after 9/11. For

instance, the hero in I Am Legend is Robert Neville (Will Smith), a successful scientist who

somehow survives a man-made plague that turns everyone around him into diseased vampire-

zombies. His precise status as a hero is debatable, depending on which ending you prefer (more

about that in chapter 4), but it is clear, however questionable his methods, that the fate of the

world does rest on Neville’s shoulders. Similarly, in World War Z, the fate of the world rests on

the shoulders of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), who must save it from being taken over by zombies.

These single heroes reflect the characteristic of the thriller genre, “whose emphasis has

always been on heroic individualism and personal, rather than collective, agency.”

Ironically,

World War Z (the book upon which the film was based) avoids giving us a single perspective,

emphasizing the lack of one preeminent individual protagonist. There is no privileged narrator,

much as there is no privileged geographic location. Each chapter switches to a different

character’s voice. In contrast, in World War Z (the movie), there is a clear and deliberate attempt

to reduce the networks to a single hero (Gerry Lane).

The second response includes those that refuse to simplify in this way, such as Steven

Soderbergh’s Contagion, or The Andromeda Strain remake. Instead of echoing more traditional

action films, which offer the single action hero with whom to ally, in these outbreak narratives,

the single hero is often missing, replaced by the prevalence of networks or by a woman. The role

of the hero is revamped to reflect not only a new kind of hero but a new kind of national identity.

As Stacy Takacs outlines, the definition of “hero” becomes less about gender difference than

difference between patriot and “other.” With a “global context defined by the dissolution of the

geographic boundaries that once stabilized an ‘inside’ through contrast to ‘outside,’ the very

concept of patriotism had to be redefined,” Takacs writes. Post-9/11 spy thrillers, for example,

“with their mixture of male and female, black, white, yellow, and brown agents,” demonstrate

just how much multiculturalism has become a defining feature of post-9/11 American identity,

“how expansive the conception of patriotism became.”

For these narratives, gender and race

matter less than citizenship, allowing the role of the hero to expand to include not only women

but teams of people—of mixed race and mixed gender—working together.

There are several potential reasons for this shift. One, as stated above, is that gender

matters less than citizenship, allowing the role of the hero to be redefined. Two, coding

networked agency feminine or making the hero a woman acknowledges the limitations of the

traditional melodramatic hero in a risk society. The female scientist (unlike, for example, the

male CDC scientist in season 1 of The Walking Dead [AMC, 2010-present]) often has the

winning combination of rational thought and empathy that allows her to save the day—a

nurturing yet brilliant persona who can care for her patients without any of the male machismo

driving the frequently antagonistic male military characters.

A variation of this can be seen in the original Andromeda Strain. In the book upon which

the film was based, Dr. Leavitt is a man. In the film, Dr. Leavitt is the only female working in

the lab. In The Andromeda Strain: Making the Film (Bouzereau, 2001), director Robert Wise

describes his reaction to screenwriter Nelson Gidding’s suggestion to make Leavitt a woman.

Nervously envisioning “Raquel Welch in a submarine again,” Wise called “two or three

scientists” who assured him that having a woman as a scientist would be fine, that there are

“many fine women scientists” and adding one “would not violate the film at all.”

During the film, Leavitt receives much the same treatment as her male colleagues.

Bonnie Noonan, author of Gender in Science Fiction Films, 1964–1979, observes that, other than

having a separate dressing room, all the team members go through the same grueling

decontamination procedures and complete equally challenging work. The significant difference

is that, in creating Leavitt as a woman, Gidding endowed her with particular characteristics that

can be read as analogous to the circumstances of the woman scientist. She operates differently

than her colleagues in a “particularly gender coded way.” For example, Noonan writes that,

unlike her research partner, Dr. Jeremy Stone—who is methodical and reliant on tradition—

Leavitt is intuitive. He pressures her to be thorough and to follow established procedures, leading

her to experience self-doubt. When she observes the organism mutate, arguably the most

important development in the film, she initially believes she has imagined it. This intuitive nature

can be seen as a female characteristic. Leavitt is also the only member of the team with two

obvious handicaps: her glasses—a mark against someone whose profession requires microscopic

observation—and epilepsy—a condition she keeps secret, knowing that “no top lab would have

her if they knew,” explains Stone, in defense of Leavitt’s secrecy.

There is no such sympathetic

explanation for Peter Leavitt’s epilepsy in the original novel. When The Andromeda Strain was

remade in 2008, it featured two female scientists, both of them attractive, one played by Christa

Miller and the other Viola Davis.

A third potential reason for the repeated use of female lead characters is that it allows the

outbreak narrative to appeal to a female audience. This strategy can be seen as an embodiment of

a “distinctive Hollywood storytelling mode” that David Holloway describes as “allegory lite”: a

commercial aesthetic “packed with different hooks pitched at different audience groups,”

providing multiple audiences multiple ways into the story and “alienating as few customers as

possible.”

If the outbreak narrative has replaced the disease-of-the-week TV movie, perhaps the

character of the female scientist is a nod to the traditionally female audience that watched many

of those original movies, especially when they appeared on networks like Hallmark.

The connection of the outbreak narrative to the science fiction genre provides a fourth

reason for its reliance on female scientists. Science fiction frequently depicts women as

scientists, assistants to scientists, or students of science, displacing their expected roles as

housewife and contented mother.

And so the outbreak narrative—as a fusion of soap opera

with science fiction, of the B Movie with melodrama and/or horror—provides a natural home for

the larger-than-normal role of the female scientist.

And this role is larger-than-normal. In 2013, the New York Times published an article by

Eileen Pollack entitled “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” The article references

a recent study by Yale researchers that found physicists, chemists, and biologists (both male and

female) are more likely to view a young male scientist favorably than his female equivalent. In

fact, only 14 percent of physics professors in the United States are women. Pollack quotes

astrophysicist Meg Urry, who investigated why there are so few women in the sciences. Her

results support the argument that female scientists are underappreciated, made to feel

uncomfortable, and encounter roadblocks along the path to success. Specifically, Urry also

argues, “American men can’t seem to appreciate a woman as a woman and as a scientist; it’s one

or the other.”

Real life notwithstanding, in outbreak narrative after outbreak narrative, whether

television show or film or made-for-TV movie, the character of the female scientist is integral to

the discovery of the virus’s cure and, in turn, to saving the world. Observing gender roles,

noticing who has information and who does not, who finds the cure and who does not, who

controls the story and how, provides a more nuanced understanding of the film and television

texts and the ideology behind them.

In an analysis of the key texts analyzed in this book (see

figure 2), all but three have female scientists or female doctors (or both): 28 Days Later (Boyle,

2002), World War Z, and The Walking Dead. All the women, with the exception of Dr. Ruth

Leavitt (Kate Reid) in the much earlier Andromeda Strain are also traditionally feminine and

attractive women.

The least classically feminine one from the current texts is the first incarnation of Dana

Scully (Gillian Anderson) on The X-Files (Fox, 1993-2002, 2016-present), whose no-nonsense

persona is meant to contrast with Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), her partner. Her subordinate

status was emphasized by the fact that the studio initially required Anderson to stand a few feet

behind her male partner on camera. “I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to

be the sidekick,” Anderson says. “Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see

a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience

couldn’t deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!”

However, as the show progressed,

Scully was able to walk alongside Mulder and grew more classically feminine.

Beyond this, the outbreak narrative features a long list of gorgeous and physically fit

female scientists, played by actresses like Nicolette Sheridan, Rene Russo, Madchen Amick,

Tiffani Thiessen, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, and Mia Maestro, all of whom save the day by

stopping the virus. Many of them are main characters, and if they are supporting characters, it is

as part of an ensemble cast in which they figure prominently. Two of them (Robby Keough in

Outbreak and Kayla Martin in Pandemic (Hallmark, 2007) are supervisors. None, with the

exception of poor Ruth are “nerdy” or antisocial. And all, again with the exception of Ruth,

appear to be in their thirties, if not younger. Two are married: Robby (Outbreak), but the

marriage is on the rocks; and Charlene (The Andromeda Strain, 2008), but the husband and

children are far away from the top secret lab where she is stationed. The one who is dating

(Sophie Amsden in Covert One: The Hades Factor [CBS, 2006]) dies before the relationship can

progress or conclude. Olivia Moore (Rose McIver in iZombie [CW, 2015-present]) dates

unsuccessfully. The rest are single. But in general, these female scientists do their jobs without

romance and without a need for male approval. In fact, they often do their job in spite of male

disapproval, like in Toxic Skies (Erin, 2008), where Tess Martin (Anne Heche) perseveres

despite the efforts of the mayor of Spokane (Kevin McNulty), the CEO of Kellor (Barclay

Hope), and Major Stein (Tobias Slezak) to quash her investigation.

Interestingly, it is the journalist who often provides the voice of male authority. In certain

outbreak narratives—The Andromeda Strain remake, Containment (CW, 2016), or Contagion

(2011), for instance—the journalist plays an actual role within the plot, acting as a character

within the general narrative rather than merely as a commentator upon it. In fact, during the

climax of Outbreak, Sam Daniels becomes a guerilla journalist in order to find the cure for the

virus. Despite being ordered to respect a media blackout, he barges his way into a TV station so

that he can broadcast news of the virus to the country and plead for the location of the missing

monkey. Both hero and journalist, he becomes the ultimate voice of authority.

In most outbreak narratives, however, the journalist is outside the actual narrative, rarely

speaking with any of the central characters unless it is via interview questions or press

conferences. In this case, the journalist’s primary purpose is to relate the immediacy of the

events. He or she is either on the scene or reporting from a news desk, acting as the audience’s

go-between. In the television miniseries Pandora’s Clock (NBC, 1996), ICN news is the link

between the passengers trapped on the plane and the outside world, a mediating voice that links

the viewers in the diegetic world of the film to the quarantined passengers and the film’s

audience. Similarly, in Pandemic (Hallmark, 2007), we often see the news footage directed at us,

as if we are watching the news ourselves, before cutting to the footage itself within a screen, as

we see a character watching the news, before cutting to shots of the journalist or the press

conference happening in front of us, without the buffer of the TV cameraman’s eye. All these

cuts emphasize the shared space of the reporter and the viewer, both diegetic and nondiegetic.

Another result of having a journalist mediate the events is that their lack of knowledge—

emphasized as we cut to a military or political briefing room where the full story is known—

emphasizes how controlled and limited our access to the truth often is. Sometimes, characters

like Alan Krumweide (Jude Law), the news blogger in Contagion remind us that journalists may

even intentionally mislead us to further their own agendas. Krumweide, specifically, tells his

readers that the homeopathic treatment Forsythia will is a cure from the virus, even though there

is no proof of this fact, so that he can get a share of Forsythia’s profits when sales skyrocket.

.Other films make the point, as well, that politicians, much like everyday people, may also find

100

out their information via the broadcast news, occasionally knowing no more than we do about

horrific and catastrophic events. In Pandemic, for example, we cut from location to location,

seeing the televised news first in the governor’s office, then hearing the news on the radio in the

mayor’s car, then on the television in the home of an ordinary citizen, emphasizing not only the

viral spread of media information but also that this is the way most people experience

catastrophe—through the frame of a screen, through the vector of an information network.

In addition to complicating the role of the hero, outbreak narratives often complicate the

role of the villain. Categories are fuzzier as blame becomes harder to place. In The Andromeda

Strain remake, for example, just as in Containment, the government is guilty of cover-up and

conspiracy, but the actual spread of the virus happens accidentally, with no one group or

organization to blame. In Containment, CDC Dr. Sabine Lommers (Claudia Black) is the one

who institutes the cordon sanitaire, but, as is discovered later in the season, she also conceals the

identity of the true patient zero and the illegal gain-of-function studies that led to the current

virus mutation sweeping through Atlanta. Dr. Lommers’s culpability is her involvement in

setting up Dr. Burns (David McKahan) with a lab to recreate the deadly virus, thus creating the

potential for the inevitable outbreak. However, as the show and Lommers repeatedly make clear,

her intentions are never malicious but, rather, to strengthen America’s bioterrorism capabilities.

In this case, the “villain” is a patriot who puts the needs of a country ahead of the needs of a

group of quarantined individuals, which makes it harder to vilify her.

In Contagion, right from the start, Soderbergh makes it clear that Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth

Paltrow), is the one responsible for spreading the virus worldwide, infecting people who then

spread the virus themselves. However, the exact origin of the virus—and the “necessary

accident” that brought it to Beth—is unclear until the very end of the film, at which point, the

101

notion of “blame” becomes even more complex. This can be seen in contrast to previous

incarnations of the outbreak narrative, where the othering was more clear and seemingly more

“successful” (i.e., where blame stuck). Now the othering does not fully “take” because anyone

can travel in a global world; it is the global context that is the causal agent, not some easily

identifiable other.

The final sequence of Contagion interrupts the otherwise linear progression of the film to

flash back to the very beginning, gradually revealing the virus’s origin. The last moments of the

film are a critique of global corporate capitalism and environmental destruction, with some

additional racial and gender inflections. First, a bulldozer for AIMM, the company for which

Beth Emhoff’s company worked, razes a tree for an unexplained demolition project, sending

displaced bats flying over a pig farm, where a bat drops a piece of fruit (necessary accident #1).

This fruit is then eaten by a pig that is shipped to a restaurant to be cooked (necessary accident

#2), where a Chinese chef with poor hygiene habits spreads it to Beth Emhoff by shaking her

hand (necessary accident #3).

Even if she is not solely responsible for the outbreak, Soderbergh is still very clear about

blaming Beth for her actions. When Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) traces Beth’s final

steps through recordings delivered to her by the casino, we do not see what Leonora sees. While

Orantes watches the “clinical version,” the version the audience sees is a more emotional

version, a version shot on a handheld camera, a version that bobs and weaves, as if filmed by a

person in the crowded casino rather than by a security camera fixed to a wall. The version we see

is warm and joyous, full of light and noise, the frame saturated with golds and yellows, in

marked contrast to the clinical surveillance footage, neutrally colored and filmed at an objective

and automated distance from the action. This contrast is played up every time Leonora watches

102

the footage.

The “surveillance footage” that we watch is not surveillance footage at all. Instead, it

reflects the innocent and lighthearted joie de vivre that existed in a previral world, in a world

before Beth spread a virus from China to Minnesota, before millions of people died, before the

air we breathed and the surfaces we touched killed us. If our perspective had been as removed

and neutral as Leonora’s footage, our opinion of Beth might have been just as neutral, and then

the disease vector, much like the narrative itself, would be less pointed. However, the “fake

footage” provides a stark contrast with the rest of the film—where contact is minimal and

barriers frequent—and is instrumental for communicating Beth’s carefree former life, with her

overindulgence in gambling, sex, drinking, and food. The “fake footage” both exposes her

character and creates a perspective from which it is easy to condemn her.

A reference to the fear of progress evident in most outbreak narratives, this trope of the

“misbehaving female leaving lives in her wake” feels as old as the link between the spread of

disease and transgressing boundaries. Kirsten Ostherr, in her book Cinematic Prophylaxis:

Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health, describes How Disease Is

Spread, an educational health film from 1924. The crux of the film is that a diseased traveler

goes about her day, shopping and eating out, spreading germs carelessly in her wake. We are

shown, in graphic detail, how easily the disease is spread, and the very real impact of

inappropriate and reckless consumption and socializing. None of this would be happening if the

woman had just stayed home. Furthermore, the film links the disease-spreading process “to

particular scenarios that only occur in modern, urbanized consumer culture. The

commodification of activities such as transportation, communication, and food service creates a

circuit of exchange that enables diseases to spread through networks of production and

103

consumption.”

This is only one of several parallels between this particular film and Contagion, which

would not be released for another ninety years. Not only does How Disease Is Spread attempt “to

train viewers to imagine germs that they cannot actually see,”

but most significantly, it casts a

middle-class white woman as the villain whose inappropriate behavior gets this whole thing

started. As Ostherr writes, “In this vision of modernity, the middle-class white woman is

representative of the domestic sphere and serves as an antidote to the evils of the public sphere—

but only if she stays at home,” thus casting the “misbehaving middle-class white woman” as one

of the “problematic subjects of modernity.”

This is unsurprising since outbreak narratives are

frequently conservative in the sense that they always recommend caution, slow change, a halt to

development. Beth, as our disease vector, is seen as one of the problematic subjects of

modernity, with her appetite for adventure, whether via ood, sex, corporate success, or travel. It

is not merely that she is a carrier but that she is a voracious and jet-setting one. Interestingly, this

fits in with Soderbergh’s body of work. As Joshua Clover argues, these epidemiological vectors

can be seen as a progression from the “entangled libidinal liaisons of Sex, Lies, and Videotape

[released in 1989 and Soderbergh’s first feature film], and the lines of commerce and political

debt of Traffic [released in 2000].”

First there was sex, then there was commerce, and then

there was sex, commerce, and disease.

Unlike Outbreak, which establishes a clear binary between primitive Africa and “the

pristine shores” of America, Contagion contains some aspects of that kind of othering (

stigmatizing individuals, geographic areas, and/or lifestyles deemed threatening), but it also

complicates this othering. For instance, while the disease may originate in a “dirty” country, it is

a blonde (how pristine can you get, in terms of Hollywood’s visual code?) with immoral

104

behavior who brings it back to America, not an ethnic minority guilty of illegal animal

smuggling. Similarly complicated, while the “root” cause of the virus can be traced to the action

of an American company, it is the Asian chef who does not wash his hands or wear gloves who

spreads the virus to Beth. Rather than setting up a more traditional hero–villain binary,

Contagion makes visible the constant and impossible-to-control flow of bodies, goods, and

information in our twenty-first-century life.

Brent Bellamy argues that Contagion does not just depict the struggle to contain the virus

“but also figures the representability and manageability of the globe as a problem,” as well as

“the way disease, rumour, speculation, and capital spread around the world.”

This more

complex take on disease is a reflection of the more complex interconnectedness of contemporary

globalization. After all, we cannot just blame “natives” for being superstitious and unhygienic.

We cannot always simplify right versus wrong, just as we cannot always contain a virus. The

globe is now the issue. The antagonist, if there is one, is the virus. The hero is the amalgamation

of all the various organizations, doctors, and scientists determined to stop the virus.

Another complication to the expected hero–villain binary in Contagion is the positioning

of government officials as the “good guys” who clean up the mess, finding a cure and a vaccine

so the world can be put back together. This may seem surprising in a post-9/11 world, when

conspiracy theories are as common as tales of bureaucratic ineptitude, but the impact of this

decision is significant. Within Soderbergh’s films, he generally seems less concerned with

simple good versus bad; in his film Traffic, he portrays the illegal drug trade from different

perspectives: dealers, abusers, and law enforcement officials. In Contagion, it is not only that he

is not interested in simple good versus bad but also that he is concerned with a depiction of

globalization’s complexities, exploring the logistics and policy questions that bring us together

105

and separate us. International infrastructures, for instance, often struggle with the tensions

between increased globalization and government regulation, between the local and the national

as well as between the national and the global. Another conflict depicted in Contagion is

between the CDC (as a federal institution) and state health departments. As Contagion

screenwriter Scott Z. Burns explains, “Even though the CDC is the government’s best defense, it

doesn’t have primacy over state health departments, and for them to get involved, any state’s

department of health has to invite them in . . . When an outbreak doesn’t respect state lines, you

start having issues with different policies on either side of [the] state line and that can get very

complicated.”

This shift toward understanding the world as intricately interconnected, both global and

tiny at the same time, manifests in an emphasis on two kinds of simultaneity: a simultaneity in

viral spread—in that a virus from China is a virus in London is a virus in New York, all

seemingly overnight—as well as a simultaneity in information spread, in that an outbreak in

China can feel like an outbreak in London, because information is everywhere at once.

Contagion emphasizes both kinds of simultaneity: the world is ostensibly a level playing

field, everything visible at the same time, geographic distance notwithstanding. The movie

flashes from country to country, city to city, continent to continent, with speed and ease, as if

everything were just around the corner, as if we, like the virus, were everywhere. When scientists

finally isolate the virus, we get a montage of the same information projected in conference rooms

around the world at the same time, emphasizing the simultaneity in information spread, vectors

of data operating much like vectors of diseases.

In contrast, nothing spreads in the original Andromeda Strain, a historical relic from an

era when borders still existed. Borders, bodies, and information are all contained. Even the

106

outbreak is contained, and since the victim’s blood turns into powder, there is not even blood to

drip. There is no sense of trajectory or travel. The only trajectory in that film is downward, as

demonstrated by the lengthy “decontamination sequence.” The characters make their way

through a five-level decontamination, each level deeper underground, each level automated, each

level increasingly isolated, as a disembodied computer voice directs the characters. Almost

everything in the lab is automated, including robots for handling the microbial cultures, as well

as the central computer and the nuclear device set to destroy the lab in the event of

contamination. The six scientists and the two survivors from Piedmont are the only elements not

automated. All the drama takes place in the lab, under the microscope, with as much as possible

computerized and isolated. The spreading is still minimal and geographically contained twenty-

four years later in Outbreak. Despite its trajectory from Africa to Cedar Creek, with a minor

appearance in Boston, the virus’s exposure is limited and quarantine is maintained.

Released in 1996, a year after Outbreak, the television miniseries Pandora’s Clock, based

on the novel by John J. Nance, is all about geographical trajectory but between rigid borders. A

deadly virus is thought to be on a plane traveling between Germany and New York. When the

potentially infected passenger has a heart attack, London will not let the plane land for medical

care, determined not to let the virus out within its borders. The pilot tries for Frankfurt and is also

denied permission to land. The same thing happens with Dutch air traffic control. Even Canada,

Greenland, and Iceland deny the plane permission to land. Eventually, the American air force is

summoned to escort the unwanted plane down covertly onto an American base in England.

However, England finds out about it, and the plane is forced to move yet again, this time to

Africa. The primary issue in this miniseries becomes who owns the land and who owns the air

above it. National boundaries are inflexible, and even the air space above each respective country

107

is claimed and nonnegotiable, marked by boundaries that cannot be crossed.

In 2007, the Hallmark channel aired its own outbreak narrative miniseries, Pandemic.

Pandemic still features geographical specificity in that the virus clearly travels (via plane) from

Australia to Los Angeles International Airport. A quickly made quarantine proves ineffective,

and one arrogant businessman gets out, the virus spreading in his wake. As he makes his way

across Los Angeles, everyone with whom he has contact becomes infected. We are told that

outbreaks of the virus are also happening in other cities around the world, even though they do

not appear in the miniseries; this narrative, is firmly centered on the Los Angeles outbreak. So

while there is not geographical specificity in terms of the outbreak, there is geographical

specificity in terms of what we see. The focus is on Los Angeles. The situation worsens when

another passenger, a convicted drug lord in the custody of the FBI, also manages to escape

quarantine. Despite two escapees, the spread of the virus is still restricted to a handful of easily

distinguished people. Pandemic can be seen as an intermediary between the more geographically

limited films and television shows before it, when borders were resolute, and the outbreak

narratives that came after, when borders were anything but.

For example, the remake of The Andromeda Strain, which aired in 2008, only one year

after Pandemic, depicts a very different world. Quarantine zone after quarantine zone are

violated. The virus gets out, killing civilians and military personnel as it spreads further and

further from Piedmont. Birds pick up the virus, and then it gets in the water, rushing into

neighboring states, threatening to reach Las Vegas and an international airport. As Dr. Charlene

Barton (Viola Davis) warns, “One international flight and Andromeda is worldwide.”

Starting with Pandemic and the Andromeda Strain remake, before hitting its critical and

commercial peak with Contagion, the outbreak narrative began focusing more intensely on the

108

failure of global boundaries rather than city boundaries, depicting and feeding into anxieties

surrounding the revelation that these constructed barriers are not as real as we wish them to be.

Unlike Outbreak, where the virus is primarily confined to Cedar Creek, in Pandemic, the virus

travels from Australia to Los Angeles, California, before threatening the world. In The

Andromeda Strain, the virus first destroys Piedmont, Utah, before threatening neighboring states

and the world. In Contagion, there is not even an initial local outbreak. In Contagion, everything

spreads; every boundary is crossed. The virus seems to emerge in Hong Kong, London, Chicago,

and Minneapolis simultaneously. After all, the plot focuses on the impact of a virus that has gone

global within the first few minutes of the film, portraying an outbreak and the corresponding

efforts by scientists and public health officials worldwide to contain it. The film also depicts the

ensuing panic as thousands of people die before scientists discover the vaccine. National

boundaries leak as the virus hops from Kowloon, Hong Kong (population 2.1 million) to

London, England (population 8.6 million), to Minneapolis, Minnesota (population 3.3 million),

to Tokyo, Japan (36.6 million)—all within the first four minutes of the movie. The world is now

one big network of cities and population numbers. Similarly, the global spread of zombies is the

central narrative of World War Z, a significant shift from most other zombie narratives, which

are much more geographically limited. In World War Z, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) must save the

world before he can save his family.

Another way to trace the evolving depictions of the world through outbreak narratives is

by looking at the proposed solutions. For instance, in both of the Andromeda Strain movies and

in Outbreak, as well as in Pandora’s Clock, Global Effect (Cunningham, 2002), and John

Murlowski’s Contagion (2002), the government’s response to the respective epidemics is to

threaten to blast away the infected area with a nuclear bomb. When the virus is localized, a

109

nuclear bomb is considered a viable option. In these narratives, a nuclear bomb is no longer the

ultimate threat but the lesser of two evils. It is a tool of sterilization, or, in the words of Resident

Evil 2: Apocalypse (Witt, 2004), “sanitation.” In Resident Evil 2, the all-controlling Umbrella

Corporation actually does this, annihilating Raccoon City. In Global Effect, the strategy for

containing the virus is to blow up South Africa. There is even a moment when one of the military

advisors draws a big “X” through South Africa on the map, advocating the necessity of cutting

off the foot to save the body. Even if it is the wrong move—which all the films emphasize that it

is, largely because of the innocent civilians caught in the blast—a nuclear bomb goes from being

the unthinkable to being a reasonable plan B, at least until the virus spreads too far. When the

virus is contained, as it is in Outbreak and Andromeda, a nuclear bomb seems to be the best

solution. However, in Contagion (2011), as in World War Z, the disease has gone too far,

infected too many people. A single nuclear bomb would no longer solve anything; it would have

to blow up the world. Interestingly, a nuclear bomb is used at the end of season 3 of The Strain

(FX, 2014–present); however, it is the villains who set it off. The bomb is part of a coordinated

plan to conquer Manhattan and black out the sun. First, the Master (Robin Atkin Downes)

spreads the contagion to build his army, and then he annihilates whatever is left with the bomb.

In Outbreak, Pandora’s Clock, and the original Andromeda Strain, there is a fixed sense

of geographic distance and narrative resolution. These older films paint a localized

understanding of the world that now feels dated (but safer) by comparison. There is a sense of

trajectory, a need to get from point A to point B, from one border to the next. The pressure

comes as a result of time and distance. How are we going to get to the girl? How are we going to

find the monkey? How much gas is left? In contrast, the newer outbreak narratives, more global

in scope, become less a tale of a few sick people and a need to get from point A to point B. They

110

are studies in global circulation. Geographical specificity is not an issue. We are seemingly

everywhere at once. Pandemics have no end point or temporal dimension. Soderbergh further

emphasizes the irrelevance of national, state, or local boundaries in Contagion by abandoning

captions that distinguish our geographical location after the first time each city is identified. We

never even see Beth Emhoff on a plane. She just arrives at each new destination. Disease has

evolved from a constrained and tidy threat to a terrifying international phenomenon that can

spread in the blink of an eye, capable of killing millions while government infrastructures

struggle—and often fail—to keep up.

Regardless of plot specifics, many outbreak narratives emphasize how faulty existing

regulation or infrastructure can be when it comes to dealing with any large-scale threat (a threat

that feels larger the more recent the outbreak narrative), depicting how quickly social order can

collapse. The scenes of panic and mayhem in Contagion feel especially realistic because they

echo similar scenes aired on the news. Images of riots—such as the ones in Ferguson, Missouri,

in 2014 following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer or in Venezuela

in 2016, where armed guards transported the nation’s food and stood watch over grocery stores

as street gangs and civilians fought for supplies—could have seamlessly been edited into

Contagion. These types of scenarios are not merely ones Americans have been warned about.

These types of scenarios happen now, even if without the viral component, and the makers of

Contagion aimed to portray these scenarios, as well as the various details surrounding the

science of the outbreak, as accurately as possible. As Contagion screenwriter Scott Z. Burns

says, “I was certainly aware there were other pandemic movies, but I wanted to do one that really

felt like what could happen.”

Science fiction films and television shows intentionally create an atmosphere of

111

credibility in order to enhance the unsettling impact of their narratives, but Soderbergh and

Burns went above and beyond, even enlisting several key experts to work on Contagion as

consultants, including Laurie Garrett, author of the nonfiction bestseller The Coming Plague,

who worked closely with Burns on the script. W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection

and Immunology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, also served as a

consultant on the film, helping to design the virus itself and constructing production models, as

well as teaching the actors how to perform certain tasks. His lab served as inspiration for one of

the labs built for the film, and the director of that cinematic lab was named “Ian” after the

original doctor.

The production designer based the war room on the CDC’s actual war room.

Even the virus itself, Burns recalls, was actually based on the Nipah virus, which affects bats in

Southeast Asia, and the genetic sequence used in the film is accurate.

Unlike World War Z and

The Strain, which paint spectacularly melodramatic portraits of apocalyptic futures full of

zombies, vampires, and destruction, films like Contagion and Andromeda are more minimalist

and realistic. And that is precisely why they are so chilling. The more realistic the film or the

television show, the more it plays into and feeds off our fears.

However sensational many aspects of the show could be, accuracy was also important for

Containment. The CDC was “involved from pretty early on, even in the pilot stage,” explains

Melinda Burns, research assistant for the show. Burns says the show kept her “busy with various

research projects for even the smallest of elements.” Producers and writers for the show

interviewed CDC specialists in epidemiology and virology “to get a general understanding of

how viruses work and what the CDC protocol is during an emergency outbreak situation.” The

show even hired a CDC consultant to read all the scripts as they came out to flag things that

warranted further discussion, as well as to offer more general advice.

Not only does this

112

emphasis on accuracy allow a film or television show to be more chilling, but it also elevates it

from campy schlock to a more serious piece of craftsmanship.

As hyperbolic as the premise of Containment may sound, it is still credible. The threat of

biological warfare escaping containment, intentionally or unintentionally, is a real one, much like

the threat of governments using found viruses for biowarfare. In fact, between 1949 and 1969,

the US Army intentionally conducted 239 secret germ warfare tests by releasing “bugs”

throughout the United States, including at Washington’s Greyhound bus terminal and a national

airport, and in the New York City subway system and San Francisco. Leonard A. Cole, the

director of the Terror Medicine and Security program at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School,

quoted from “Special Report No. 142: Biological Warfare Trials at San Francisco, California,

20–27 September 1950” in his book Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over

Populated Areas: “Nearly all of San Francisco received 500 particle minutes per liter. In other

words, nearly every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at normal

breathing rate (10 liters per minute) inhaled 5,000 or more fluorescent particles . . . per minute

during the several hours they remained airborne.”

In addition to those experiments, the army

also sprayed simulated germs into the air at a number of bases, including Fort Detrick, Maryland;

Fort Belvoir, Virginia; and the marine training school at Quantico, Virginia. The army insisted

that the bacteria used in the tests was harmless, but it caused at least eleven cases of pneumonia

and at least one death, and more than five hundred workers connected with biological warfare

activities suffered infections, according to the army’s count.

Ian Sample, writing for the Guardian, explains that, more recently, public health experts

warn that “controversial experiments on mutant viruses could put human lives in danger by

unleashing an accidental pandemic.”

(This is actually what happens in some zombie outbreak

113

narratives, where controversial experiments on mutant viruses result in an accidental pandemic

of zombies—but more about that in chapter 4.) The repercussions of disrespecting the power of

both science and technology are specifically emphasized in the Andromeda remake. At the close

of the miniseries, for example, Dr. Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt) talks to a reporter. Stone

acknowledges that while technology and science may have saved the world this time, “it was our

arrogant misuse of both that got us into this trouble in the first place. Just because we have

acquired a technological or scientific capability doesn’t mean we should rush out to use it.”

Modern society is based on the fact that rules are to be obeyed and protocol to be

followed. Outbreak narratives, however, aim to provide a credible vision of what happens when

those rules are not obeyed, when an arrogant misuse of science or technology backfires. They

depict what happens when the infrastructure stops working in ways that, while hyperbolic, also

aim to be plausible enough to terrify—or at least unsettle. Policemen are supposed to catch bad

guys, and 9-1-1 is supposed to be there to help you. However, in an outbreak, the police, along

with the military and the National Guard, are not interested in protecting you. They are interested

in containing you. Infrastructures intended to keep society together suddenly vanish, the illusion

of a functional society disappearing in a blink of an eye—or twenty-eight days later, as the

movie with that name implies. The crux of narratives like Containment, Contagion, World War

Z, and I Am Legend is how a city (or the world) falls apart once there is an outbreak, how quickly

it runs out of food and military personnel, and how isolating it can be to be trapped in the middle

of it when no one can help. In Containment, it is not only that cell phones are turned off. Calling

9-1-1 does not work because there is no one to answer.

This feeling of isolation is a complex one, but it lies at the heart of many outbreak

narratives either literally or metaphorically—or both. In his book The Culture of Fear Revisited,

114

sociologist Frank Furedi examines “the relative weakness of institutions which link the

individual to other people in society” and the way that contributes to an intensification of

isolation. In contemporary society, many “are literally on their own,” he writes, and “many of

society’s characteristic obsessions—with health, safety, and security—are the products of this

experience of social isolation.”

In other words, isolation always exists in contemporary

society—compounded by technological networks that enhance communication while facilitating

physical isolation—but outbreaks enhance this existing isolation with fears of contagion and

death.

This kind of enhanced isolation was felt following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In

his book, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety, Peter N. Stearns

compares the difference in emotional response to the attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Arguing

that American responses to the two events were significantly different, Stearns writes that,

following 9/11, “Americans were over three times as likely to be afraid, and the level of their

fear, when expressed, ran much deeper as well.” Americans were also much less likely to express

“statements of confidence in American government.” This was despite the fact that shock was

great following both attacks and the death rate and symbolic components were similar (in that

the two events were symbolic attacks of key expressions of American power). One of the

fundamental differences was that American culture had changed between 1941 and 2001: “The

2001 data and collected stories reveal a marked increase in attention to self and family. . . .

Despite some comfort in postdisaster displays of unity, it was easier to believe that threats had to

be faced as individuals and as families, not in terms of society as large.”

Director Steven Soderbergh emphasizes this sense of isolation in Contagion through

composition, color, editing, and lighting. In contrast, in the earlier Outbreak, there is no such

115

emphasis on isolation, and families are often seen together. In fact, one of the most disturbing

scenes in the film is at the Cedar Creek movie theater, where local residents share the same air,

clustered together, allowing the virus to spread. Even Jimbo (Patrick Dempsey) gets a warm

embrace from his girlfriend, when he is conspicuously sick, thus spreading the virus to her. Fear

of contagion, much less fear of intimacy and social contact, appear nonexistent. The twenty-first

century, however, as depicted by Soderbergh, encourages a greater emphasis on the self, on

isolation, and on the realization that distance—in other words, action you take rather than action

that doctors or government officials take on your behalf—may be the only thing that can prevent

infection.

A frequent technique Soderbergh uses to separate his characters from each other and

from us is to put obstructions between them and the camera, as well as between individual

characters. For example, during the scene when Beth has her seizure, our view is obscured by the

kitchen counter, as we seem to be following her son’s point of view. In this shot, we see most

clearly the cabinet doors and only a fraction of Beth’s body as she convulses on the floor. Our

vantage point is also low, much like that of her young son. In this case, Soderbergh seems to

provide us with someone’s point of view, which partially justifies the obscured view.

However, when Mitch (Matt Damon) finds out that his wife is dead, we get a different

kind of indirect shot. In this case, we are not following anyone’s point of view, but instead go

back and forth between peering awkwardly over Mitch’s shoulder and then the doctor’s,

obscured from a proper close-up of either one’s face, or even a direct shot of either one.

Soderbergh makes us feel as if we are outside the conversation, eavesdropping, an unseen fourth

party, which makes the scene more awkward than it already is. Mitch is unable to accept the fact

that his wife is dead, and the doctor is unable to explain what happened to her. Even the body

116

language is telling. Soderbergh films the two men in such a way as to emphasize the distance

between them and the lack of physical contact. Not only is there is no physical contact—no

gesture of condolence—but the doctor stands with his arms folded while the woman behind him

holds her own neck, as if retreating into herself. This body language, as well as the distance

between the characters (the black of the woman’s sweater separating her definitively from the

white of the doctor’s jacket), emphasizes their isolation from each other. Physical contact, after

all, can be deadly.

We continue to get obscured shots throughout the film to emphasize this sense of

isolation. For example, when Mitch takes a cab home from the hospital, the camera is placed

between the two front seats, looking up at him, the out-of-focus chairs separating us from him on

either side, two big blobs of black reinforcing a sense of imprisonment already implied by the

diagonal lines to either side of him. Mitch, it is clear, is trapped and alone. Similarly, when Dr.

Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) catches the virus, she, too, is imprisoned by her surroundings.

Soderbergh shoots her blocked in by barricade upon barricade, devoting a third of the frame to

the dark door of her hotel room—and only a thin sliver to Erin’s reflection. She is “imprisoned”

by the walls of the bathroom as they reflect in the mirror. Our view of her is layered, indirect,

and narrow, and it is not even actually her. It is just a reflection, a representation of a being.

Another type of barrier that Soderbergh uses throughout the film is glass. We repeatedly

look at people through windows, windshields, and glass walls. Many of the buildings and

airports within which Soderbergh shoots have glass walls, creating a terrarium-like effect for the

people “trapped” within these buildings, as well as allowing Soderbergh to shoot through the

glass walls, further emphasizing the terrarium effect. For example, when Cheever (Laurence

Fishburne) and Mears have their first meeting, Soderbergh films them through glass windows,

117

“imprisoned” not only by the glass but also by the beams holding the glass in place. Glass, after

all, is a frequent separation device because it allows you to see without contact, and it is

unsurprising that Soderbergh would use so much of it in this film since, it is, after all, arguably

more isolating to see something that you cannot touch. A similar kind of beam-like window

structure is seen in the hospital, when Jory Emhoff (Anna Jacoby-Heron) arrives to see her

father. We see her first through a glass door, and we watch her lay eyes on her father from within

the window frame, as if she were the one in the terrarium. It becomes clear, however, that Mitch

is the one in the actual terrarium, quarantined by the hospital personnel until they can determine

if he is still contagious.

In Soderbergh’s world, all buildings seem to share the same glass walls, emphasizing

protection and confinement and alienation. This stylistic pattern is repeated over and over. As

Mears meets with her team to plan their strategy against the virus, the initial shot places them in

layers of rectangles, isolated together from the world around them, the Minnesota Department of

Health conference room seemingly designed by the same architect who designed the CDC

offices in Atlanta and the AIMM offices in Minnesota.

Another recurring motif of isolation in Contagion is telephones—and the physical contact

that they replace. Reflective of our increasing loss of physicality and alienation from each other,

as well as the compression of space the film emphasizes, people frequently talk to each other

through the telephone. In fact, the film opens with a telephone conversation. Beth, alone at an

airport bar, talks on the phone with her lover—her lover whom she left without saying good-bye.

Their good-bye, which, thanks to the virus becomes their final good-bye, takes place over the

phone. It is implied that they have just had sex. Supposedly, they just had an intimate moment.

But all we see is one woman, alone at a bar, on her phone. We hear his voice, but we do not see

118

him. We just see her, holding a small rectangular black box to her face. That has become our

substitute for intimacy. Similarly, Mitch finds out about his son’s death through another small

black rectangular box. While under quarantine, Mitch and his daughter communicate by

telephone, separated by glass, unable to have any actual contact. Intimate relations are now

frequently mediated via digital communications through black rectangular boxes (phones or

computers or tablets). Ironically, by today’s standards, a phone call is unusually intimate when

compared to the default of texting.

Images of separation and isolation are so much more frequent in outbreak narratives that

the rare image of intimacy, real interpersonal intimacy, feels awkwardly out of place. We see this

intimacy when Cheever gives his wife the vaccine. We still get a sense of voyeurism, peering at

our characters from an awkward vantage point behind the armchair, but this time, the warm light

and yellow, gold, and red tones, in addition to the framing of the two figures, creates a sense of

intimacy and security rather than hostility, danger, or isolation. If the scene had been shot with

the blue tones Soderbergh uses frequently throughout the film to signify the location of

Minnesota, or the hot yellows and reds he uses to represent Hong Kong, or even the greenish

yellows of Tokyo, the scene would read differently, creating an uneasy and ominous atmosphere.

However, because of the warm tones, we get a rare moment of intimacy between Cheever and

his wife as he gives her the ultimate gift: an early dose of the vaccine.

Near the end of Contagion, Soderbergh uses similarly constrictive framing to shoot

Cheever giving his personal fast-tracked vaccine to the son of Roger (John Hawkes), a janitor at

the CDC. In this case, the framing also creates a sense of intimacy reinforced by the provocative

impact of two men shaking hands, which, as we have been shown throughout the film, is a

gesture that can be deadly. As Cheever explains to the janitor’s son, shaking hands is a sign of

119

trust, demonstrating that neither man is carrying a weapon. At the height of a global epidemic,

shaking hands is tantamount to using a weapon, and so for the two men to shake hands

demonstrates both trust and a renewed sense of intimacy in a world that is starting to heal. The

light, providing us with the silhouette of the two men, provides even more focus on the men and

their handshake, neatly centered in the frame, drawing our eyes in and directly to it.

This kind of self-sacrifice occurs a couple other times in the film—for instance, when Dr.

Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) tests the vaccine on herself in order to avoid losing time to official testing

protocol, or when Dr. Orantes (Marion Cotillard) discovers that a fake vaccine is being used to

discourage terrorists. Earlier in the film, she is kidnapped by Sun Feng (Chin Han) and taken to

his village. His strategy is to use her as leverage to make sure the people in his village get the

vaccine as soon as possible. Since it takes months for the vaccine to be developed and then

produced, Orantes bonds with the villagers as they wait together for freedom and safety. When

the vaccine is finally delivered to Feng in exchange for Orantes, everyone is happy—at first. But

then Orantes discovers that the vaccine is a fake that was engineered merely for her release. She

has grown so connected to the villagers, her former friends and neighbors, that she races back to

the village to warn them, startling her boss, who expected Orantes to be more self-serving, to

exemplify the me-centric attitude more common within the outbreak narrative cycle, when self-

preservation trumps self-sacrifice. As an example of this attitude, Colonel Ferrus (Louis Ferreira)

tells General Mancheck (Andre Braugher) near the end of the Andromeda Strain remake, “Your

kind of honor is a bit outdated, sir. I’m not going to fall on my sword for you or anybody else.”

Orantes, however, willing to risk her life to save others, is clearly an anachronism, much like

Cheever and Hextall.

One of the final scenes of Contagion features two teenagers dancing within their

120

domestic quarantine, reasserting singularity in the couple formation. This is a rare moment of

romantic intimacy. Mitch’s daughter and her boyfriend are having an improvised prom in

Mitch’s living room, the two of them providing an unconventional twist to a tradition which

otherwise makes everyone the same. Prom is often portrayed in film (and in related real-life

marketing) as a required ritual for high school seniors, where everyone shops for their prescribed

formal wear and corsages and boutonnieres, before filing into limousines or shared cars to head

to either their high school gym or a rented ballroom to celebrate the completion of their

adolescence. However, the fact that the two teenagers in Contagion are performing a ritual alone

that is customarily taken place with groups is conspicuous, as is the fact that they are confined in

the home. In its celebration of the couple, the scene also emphasizes that Mitch has been stripped

of his partner, forced merely to look at pixelated versions of her on a digital camera. Prom,

usually the event in which everyone from a school year comes together, now seems riddled with

solitude. But there is still a refreshing quality to an activity that depicts shared intimacy between

two people, real physical bodies, monogamous and loyal, a marked contrast to Beth’s violation

of monogamy and loyalty at the beginning of the film. Prom has taken on a new meaning, been

given a new construct. It is no longer about conforming to the masses but about the triumph of

the individual to remake ritual and tradition. The film, which opens with a castigation of a

wayward and globe-trotting woman, concludes with a reassertion of the importance of the

hetero-normative and a condemnation of global expansion and consumption.

There is only one moment of intimacy in the Andromeda remake, where everyone

appears to be isolated, either quarantined in the lab or within the video chat window. This

moment occurs between Dr. Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt) and Dr. Angela Noyce (Christa

Miller) in the lab’s exercise room. However, this moment of intimacy is, much like the prom

121

scene with Mitch’s daughter and her boyfriend, limited since both partners are fully dressed. In

fact, in Andromeda, both characters are wearing long-sleeved workout clothes. They manage one

kiss before Jeremy is summoned to the conference room. That short scene is the only moment of

romance or intimacy in the film. Other than that, the scientists in the lab keep their distance from

each other.

Containment also ends with several hetero-normative couples unified by the outbreak,

one with a baby and an engagement ring, the underlying message being that even in this kind of

abject crisis, singularity can be asserted in the (hetero) couple formation. One of the flaws in

Containment is actually this overinvestment in romance, something that is normally forsaken—

or at least minimized—in the outbreak narrative. Perhaps to appeal to the CW audience,

Containment writers forced several separate romance plots into the season’s arc, which had the

effect of slowing down the main story and creating an air of contrived and unnatural intimacy.

There is a reason personal intimacy and romance is usually left out of the outbreak narrative: it

does not belong.

In the Andromeda Strain remake, video chatting and conferencing are popular means of

communication. Video screens make anyone anywhere present and visible even if not physically

present. Video conferencing also makes it easier to forget that the scientists are quarantined in a

lab far below the surface of the earth, allowing distance to feel irrelevant as long as a screen is

nearby. However, the scientists are reminded just how tenuous this connection is when General

Manchek (Andre Braugher) cuts off all communication between the lab and the outside world.

Their only recourse is a guard’s cell phone and the information they use to blackmail Mancheck

into restoring communication.

Writing in 1990, Mary Ann Doane argues that “television’s ubiquity, its extensiveness,

122

allows for a global experience of catastrophe.”

However, there is a key difference between

“global experience,” as Doane describes it, and globality defined by Daniel Yergin as the end-

state of the globalization process.

While it is true that television and technology can create a

global audience, which the Internet and the spread of viral media only intensifies, this global

audience does not necessarily translate into global unity. With broadcast television (which Doane

is referencing), there is a shared experience of simultaneous consumption. With the Internet,

however, there is fragmentation, political siloing, and me-casting (tailored experiences that do

not necessarily overlap, exacerbated by invisible barriers that separate departments, divisions, or

just groups of people). Audiences may be watching the same thing, but they are rarely watching

it at the same time and certainly not in the same place. To put it simply, despite the greater

technological connectivity, there is still increased isolation.

As we interface via screens more and more, real-life interactions seem to be an

afterthought. In place of intimacy, in both Contagion and the Andromeda Strain remake, we see

screens all the time—in the background, in the foreground, in people’s hands. We see telephone

screens and cash register screens, computer screens and television screens, a screen in almost

every scene. We watch as a man on his phone films another man die and the video goes viral.

We watch through television monitors as a press conference is filmed, and then see the footage

played on an airport television screen. We watch video conferencing happen on television

screens and within computer screens. The CDC briefing room in Contagion, much like the

briefing room in the Andromeda remake, is lined with screens—computer screens on people’s

desks and monitors on the walls. Officials brief each other simultaneously on their (lack of)

progress with the virus, each screen showing a representative of a different country or maps of

affected areas or screens within screens. Laptops and cellphones are everywhere, and they are

123

always on, flickering and glowing. Even the mystery of the outbreak’s origins in Contagion is

literally discovered via screens, as Dr. Orantes scrolls back through both time and surveillance

footage to trace Beth’s steps. The truth is on the screen. The invisible is visible on the screen.

The people are on the screen. Screens are interfaces for information and communication. Even

though globalization is usually used to describe economic integration, this integration is

intrinsically linked to—and often a direct result of—technological innovation.

In contrast, back in 1995, technology—and the accompanying screens—was less

prevalent. Interestingly, the few times we see computers in Outbreak, they are turned off and in

the background, representative of an earlier age when screens were less ubiquitous and less

necessary. The original version of The Andromeda Strain also features screens that are frequently

turned off and in the background, almost like objects of décor. Some monitors are never turned

on during the entire film. It is as if, in an earlier era, it was enough to showcase the monitor in

order to create the appearance of technological prowess. The monitor could remain blank as long

as it was just there. In Outbreak, the only working screens are the ones connected to the

microscopes in the lab and two television screens near the end of the film. Now, however, a

blank monitor, a black monitor, is a sign of failure, disconnection, and breakdown.

Appropriately, in World War Z, there are barely any screens because technology, much

like civilization, has been destroyed. In a postapocalyptic dystopia overrun by zombies, screens

are conspicuously and appropriately absent. (There are also no screens in The Walking Dead.)

Instead, there are lots and lots of (rotting) bodies. However, where they do show up, monitors

provide an organized structure of viewing and an illusion of control. The most spectacular

appearance of screens is on the ship that has become the unofficial central command post for the

military while the rest of the world is overrun with zombies. This scene echoes cultural theorist

124

Paul Virilio’s writing about Desert Storm, the combat phase of the Persian Gulf War that

occurred between 1990 and 1991, and the way military logistics and perception have changed:

“War henceforth takes place in a stadium, the squared horizon of the screen, presented to

spectators in the bleachers.”

We see this literally in World War Z, as the command center safely

watches the chaos happening in the world through a bank of monitors.

These days, information can come via any kind of electronic screen. Identical footage, for

example, is played on a phone as well as on TV screens in the Andromeda Strain remake. As all

our different screens—phones, televisions, computers, electronic signage—converge, “their

comparative differences seem increasingly trivial,”

media scholar Vivian Sobchack writes.

What matters most is their ubiquitous presences in our lives: “We live today primarily in and

through screens rather than merely on or with them. No longer a small, if significant, part of our

lifeworld, screens now are our lifeworld.”

Screens are everywhere, which means information is

everywhere, more viral than ever.

As a result of the increasing pervasion into daily life of digital communication, fear and

speculation can spread like wildfire, echoing the spread of an actual virus. This conceit has

fueled many an outbreak narrative’s promotional campaign. For example, the tag line for

Pandemic was “The fear is real. The panic is spreading.” While “nothing spreads like fear” was

the tag line for Contagion, it was also used as the URL for the promotional website

(www.nothingspreadslikefear.com). An editorial for USA Today from October 14, 2014, was

entitled “Fear Spreads Faster Than Ebola: Our View.”

Similarly, an article for the American

Psychological Association from 2015 was entitled “An Epidemic of Fear,” and its opening

sentence presented the concept of “fearbola.”

Therefore, a common occurrence in the outbreak narrative is for those in power to restrict

125

information because they know that panic is going to be the real problem. This makes those in

charge wary of imposing quarantines or publicizing details of the epidemic before real dangers

are confirmed, arguing that the hysteria is often worse than the disease itself. When Dr. Cheever

confronts Alan Krumwiede, the blogger who intentionally lies in order to further his own agenda

and fuel hysteria, Cheever tells the television journalist conducting the interview that “in order to

get sick, you have to come in contact with a sick person or something that they touched. In order

to get scared, all you have to do is come in contact with a rumor, or the television, or the Internet.

I think what Mr. Krumwiede is spreading is far more dangerous than the disease.” At another

point in the film, Cheever even says, “The virus is the least of our worries.” In Pandemic, a

representative of the CDC, speaking at a press conference, tells the journalists that they are

overreacting, making the story bigger than it really is: “Responsible news coverage should make

it clear that there is absolutely no need for public panic.” Panic is the real problem. But in the

twenty-first century, how does one contain the spread of information?

In Outbreak, the government literally places a media blackout on the town of Cedar

Creek to limit the dissemination of information about the virus, and this strategy works. A

journalist, speaking to the cameras, declares that the residents of Cedar Creek have been

silenced: “All phone communication has been cut off, and those we can hear, those with the

information, will not speak.” However, with today’s viral media and global communication

networks, panic can happen immediately and everywhere, and information can come via any

kind of electronic screen. It is impossible to contain. In Contagion, it is impossible to have a

media blackout; the government cannot even stop Krumwiede’s manipulative blog, and it is the

readers of his blog who bail him out after he is arrested, demonstrating that even the government

cannot keep him imprisoned. In Containment, where the main area impacted by the virus is

126

relatively small, the cell towers are turned off, but radio broadcasts can still be transmitted over

the barricades.

Globalization means many things. It involves many factors that create many issues. It

impacts politics, economics, science, media, and technology, as well as the transmission of

bodies, goods, and information across eroding local, national, and international boundaries with

increasing speed. Even when information is not particularly noteworthy, it is still, as Mary Ann

Doane observes, “always there, a constant and steady presence, keeping you in touch,”

just like

M and Bond. The eradication of temporal and spatial limitations through the spread of networks

and information has destabilized the localized, organic body, even the very idea of “local” in

favor of the transnational body.

Networks are now crisscrossed, interlocked, and seemingly infinite. Viral outbreaks in

particular bring together various networks—biological, transportational, institutional,

communicational—and cross species, national, and economic boundaries, drawing together

“viruses, organisms, computers, databases.”

Ironically, as these networks—both centralized

and decentralized, technological and otherwise—become more integrated into our lives, they

also become harder for us to see. The more comprehensive their role, the more “embedded,

hidden, off-shored and merely forgotten about.”

Galloway and Thacker argue that “computers,

databases, networks, and other digital technologies are seen to be foundational to contemporary

notions of everything from cultural identity to war. Digital media seems to be everywhere, not

only in the esoteric realms of computer animation, but in the everydayness of the digital (e-mail,

mobile phones, the Internet).”

And yet, despite this everywhere-ness, networks are easily

forgotten about until the threat of a viral outbreak reminds us of them.

These new networks, while at first seemingly liberating for their excise of dated

127

categories like “local” and “national,” have also created a whole new set of problems. While

epidemics have existed for centuries, our progressively interconnected world has facilitated the

spread of large-scale epidemics. The story outbreak narratives love to tell is how bodies—

intimacy with them and the blood within them—have become threatening, deadly, and

impossible to avoid, while boundaries, in our increasingly networked society, have become

ineffectual at protecting both us and our countries. The virus—and, in turn, the outbreak

narrative—demonstrates how unstable boundaries are between inner and outer, between human

and world, between infected and uninfected. These unstable boundaries reflect the similar

collapse of nation-state boundaries, a blurring facilitated both by the impact of globalization as

well as by the integration of technology into seemingly every aspect of modern life.

In all outbreak narratives, quarantine and containment are emphasized—but also

fundamentally ineffectual. All the outbreak narratives mentioned in this chapter accentuate that

in order to understand the transmission of viruses, the world needs to be recognized as a complex

and interlocked system where barriers are just as unable to keep viruses out as they are to

keeping viruses in. Globalization and technology have created a thoroughly interconnected and

interdependent world. In the twenty-first century, the threat of contagion is no longer held over a

singular body or a singular location but over a transnational body. These newer narratives

increase fear and anxiety over porous and ineffective boundaries, over the speed with which

viruses can leap over continents, over the deadly ramifications of an increasingly networked

world. Global health and security have become intertwined issues, fed by the seemingly constant

risk of worldwide infection—a sense of risk fed, in turn, by these narratives.

128

The Terrorism Outbreak

In a globalized world order, the boundary between “outside” and “inside” has become

precarious, and the forces and devices of good and evil have become remarkably similar.

—Ruth Mayer, “Virus Discourse”

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, nineteen Al Qaeda terrorists simultaneously

hijacked four passenger planes. Two of the planes were flown into the World Trade Center in

New York City, one into the North Tower and the other into the South Tower. Shortly thereafter,

hijackers flew the third plane into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. When passengers

attempted to seize back control of the fourth plane, the hijackers intentionally crashed that plane

into a field in Pennsylvania. Everyone on all four planes died, as well as more than 100 military

and civilian personnel in the Pentagon, and most staggeringly, 2,753 at the World Trade Center.

In total, almost 3,000 people were killed. The financial, emotional, and social costs were

immense, including property and infrastructure damages of ten to thirteen billion dollars and

ancillary costs to the city of New York (due to lost jobs, lost taxes, damage to infrastructure, etc.)

of ninety-five billion dollars.

In many ways, for Americans, the trauma of 9/11 would define the

end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

The events of 9/11 were seen as acts of war, and at first, President George W. Bush was

seen as America’s great defender. Public approval for Bush skyrocketed by as much as forty

percentage points, reaching a remarkable 90 percent in late September 2001 and lingering around

the high eighties in the months that followed. Sweeping measures against terrorism initially

seemed justified in order to restore a sense of safety and security. For example, a week after the

129

attack, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF),

which allowed the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations,

organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist

attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

On October 26, 2001, President Bush signed the

USA PATRIOT Act into law (the name is an acronym that spells out “Uniting and Strengthening

America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”). The

PATRIOT Act was meant to strengthen the government’s ability to combat terrorism by

allowing, among other things, the indefinite detentions of immigrants; searches of private

property without the owner’s or the occupant’s consent or knowledge; and the Federal Bureau of

Investigation (FBI) to search telephone, e-mail, and financial records without a court order.

In his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault observes

that, in earlier centuries, it was illness that was met with control, containment, and heightened

regulation. With responses that foreshadowed the United States following 9/11, viral outbreaks,

and specifically plague, provided opportunity for “the penetration of regulation into even the

smallest details of everyday life.” Rulers dreamed of an outbreak so that they could experience

absolute power. During an outbreak, for instance, inspection could function ceaselessly,

information about each individual’s life and death passing through representatives of power.

“Omnipresent and omniscient power” allowed “ultimate determination of the individual.” More

specifically, various forms of disease necessitated different types of regulation and jurisdiction.

The leper, for instance, “gave rise to rituals of exclusion,” whereas the plague “gave rise to

disciplinary diagrams.”

The infectious other was removed or excised, while those still healthy

were regulated and contained. The physical self was compartmentalized and controlled—much

as the biological self was classified and segregated—based on health, illness, susceptibility for

130

illness, and proximity to infection.

Protocol for regulating and controlling the body was then repurposed for regulating and

controlling cities. For example, towns were divided into districts, districts into quarters, quarters

by roads and houses, and so on.

These were methods of imposing quarantine and delineating

zones of infection and safety. Each individual was meant to stay fixed in his assigned place. If he

moved, it was at the risk “of his life, contagion, or punishment.”

The justification that outbreaks

required this kind of “spatial partitioning and subdivision” was taken to its extreme point in order

to restrict “dangerous communications, disorderly communities, and forbidden contacts.”

All

these regulations were ways of trying to restore a sense of control in an otherwise uncontrollable

environment and were justified as being for the greater good. This premise is also used to justify

the inevitable quarantine in, among others, Outbreak (Petersen, 1995), Global Effect

(Cunningham, 2002), Contagion (both versions: Murlowski, 2002 and Soderbergh, 2011), season

3 of 24 (Fox, 2003–2004), Pandemic (Hallmark, 2007), Toxic Skies (Erin, 2008), The Crazies

(Eisner, 2010), and Containment (CW, 2016).

Similarly, threats like 9/11 can also prompt institutions (government, medical, and

military) to impose acts of containment and regulation in the name of security while encouraging

citizens to submit willingly to this kind of regulation. There is even a comfort to defining who is

“us” and who is “them,” who belongs and who does not, whom to fear (and contain) and whom

to support. The reassurance of a national identity, fused with a sense of safety and belonging,

presents an easy choice to make, especially during a threatening time. Some pariahs are excised

and profiled, while others are curfewed and quarantined. Xenophobic impulses to limit outside

threats—whether Ebola victims or Syrian immigrants—can be seen as retaliation to the

heightened awareness of “leaky borders” exacerbated by an increasingly networked society.

131

Much as the PATRIOT Act is an example of the government increasing its ability to

regulate and control without legislative or judicial oversight, the National Security Agency

(NSA) also enters naturally into this cultural moment, justifying surveillance of our networks, e-

mails, phone conversations, and even our global footprint via our cell phones. Alexander R.

Galloway and Eugene Thacker write that legislation supporting increased electronic surveillance

“further reinforce[s] the deep penetration of networked technologies and networked thinking”

into our lives.

Like the state of plague Foucault describes, the “War on Terror” following 9/11

became the excuse for this kind of inspection, omniscient power, and expanding networks,

encouraging American leaders to grasp for absolute power while urging terrified American

citizens to allow and support it.

Peter N. Stearns, in his book American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High

Anxiety, discusses the seemingly infinite “capacity of many Americans, including many leaders,

quickly to reinvent threats and hyperbole, as if the emotional rhetorical habits of long years of

hot and cold wars could not be cast aside.” Stearns is quick to emphasize the role that the

“complicit media” play in this reinvention of threats and hyperbole: they are “eager to sell crises

and blessed with new technology that facilitate[s] instantaneous images from almost any hot

spot.” With these tools at America’s disposal, is it any wonder that “an Iraqi dictator—an

undeniable nuisance who arguably needed some attention” would become a latter-day Hitler or

Stalin?

Stearns stresses that this kind of hyperbole is not exclusively tied to the events of 9/11.

In fact, Stearns traces fears of terrorist attacks to well before September 11, 2001: these fears

were also fueled by “the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, plus assaults on American

embassies and military equipment, along with the more general emotional volatility born of a

long diet of crises.” In fact, a poll “taken six weeks before September 11, 2001, revealed that

132

about 90 percent of all Americans were actively afraid of international terrorism and weapons of

mass destruction.”

The events of 9/11 just confirmed that all these fears were warranted.

Starting in 2002, fears of bioterrorism and genetically engineered viruses began showing

up more and more in films and television shows, whether the virus was released accidentally (28

Days Later [Boyle] in 2002 ; The Andromeda Strain [A&E] in 2008; The Crazies in 2010) or

intentionally (Global Effect in 2002; Contagion in 2002; season 3 of 24 [Fox] in 2003–2004;

Covert One: The Hades Factor [CBS] in 2006; Toxic Skies in 2008; The Blacklist [NBC] in

2014; Blindspot [NBC] in 2015; 12 Monkeys [Syfy] in 2015, Madam Secretary [CBS] in 2016,

Person of Interest [CBS] in 2016; Inferno [Howard] in 2016). These narratives reflect the

renewed patriotism that followed the 9/11 attacks, as well as the popularity of rogue heroes—

seemingly America’s only weapon against radical terrorist groups. While the typical outbreak

narrative may function as a metaphor for modernity, the terrorism outbreak narrative literalizes

the martial metaphors often used to describe disease, as well as the disease metaphors used to

describe terrorism. This second wave of the outbreak narrative cycle reflects the fears

dominating American consciousness at the start of the twenty-first century, much as celluloid

portrayals of terrorists reflect fears of infected bodies as weapons.

This combination of viruses and terrorism seems inevitable. As Alison Bashford writes,

“Chemical and biological warfare is perhaps the site at which panic and disease have come

together most intensely.”

After all, pandemics, like terrorist attacks, trigger a specific kind of

fear and anxiety created by events with no end point or temporal dimension. For instance, on an

MSNBC broadcast following the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, American

television journalist Harry Smith opened a segment on the psychological effects of terror by

emphasizing that a key tactic of terrorism is “to instill the fear that it could happen to you, to

133

your family, no matter who you are and where you are.”

That kind of vague and unrelenting

mental anguish adds another larger layer to the actual physical destruction of the terrorist attack.

Therefore, in the aftermath of events like the Paris attacks or 9/11, it is common to have a sense

of terror that extends well beyond the blast radius itself, much as fears of contagion spread well

beyond the radius of the outbreak. Both terrorism and contagion emphasize that nowhere (and no

one) is safe. If pandemics reshape trauma by being open, messy, and timeless, terrorism, too,

disrupts traditional understandings of trauma by being open, messy, and timeless. Anyone,

anywhere may be vulnerable, however implausible those fears may actually be.

Jonathan Metzl, director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt

University, emphasizes the strength of the “psychological mechanism that happens well beyond

the blast radius and the aftermath of seemingly senseless acts of violence like terrorism or mass

shootings.” Metzl describes this mechanism as a “catastrophic loss of innocence” resulting not

just from the direct effects of terrorism but also from the heightened sense that places that

normally provide safety and security—like churches, concert halls, places of business—suddenly

shift to being “places of peril.” This sense of anxiety, he argues, is “heightened by the sense that

the usual rules or safety markers that we use to unconsciously reassure ourselves—things like a

sense that the government is in control or that we are all playing by the same rules of society—

that these factors are not at play.”

Terrorism—like a viral outbreak—happens when the normal

rules of society and space are disregarded, when boundaries of protocol and geography are

ignored. This creates a sense of anxiety and fear that transcends the point of actual physical

impact.

It is not just that terrorism, like a virus, can take place anywhere but that it can take place

at any time. Kevin J. Wetmore describes the color-coded terrorism threat scale that has been used

134

by the Department of Homeland Security since March 2002. Green represents low risk, blue

represents general risk, yellow means elevated or significant risk, orange represents high risk,

and red is severe risk. Wetmore emphasizes that, significantly, there is no color for no risk.

Similarly, the first panel of Art Spiegelman’s post-9/11 graphic novel In the Shadow of No

Towers captures the relentlessness of the anxiety under the heading “the new normal.” First, in

the image dated “Sept. 10” via a calendar in the corner, there is a family (two parents, their

daughter, and their cat) drowsing in front of the TV. Then, in the image dated “Sept. 11,” the

same people are watching the television with their hair standing straight up, cat included. In the

final graphic, where the calendar has been replaced with an American flag, the parents are

drowsing in front of the TV with their hair standing up, while the daughter and the cat keep a

watchful eye on the television. The last panel depicts the relentlessness of the anxiety in America

following 9/11.

There is no reprieve because nowhere feels immune. Terrorism can hit

anywhere, anytime. Or, as attorney Marion Springer (Jayne Atkinson) warns on the Law &

Order: Special Victims Unit episode “Savant” (NBC, Oct. 16, 2007), putting many people’s fears

into words, “There is a terrorist around every corner . . . you just don’t know about it.”

Fusing terrorism with viral fears doubles the terror of both, literalizing a metaphorical

relationship that goes back centuries. Military metaphors have been used to describe disease

since at least the 1600s, when John Donne wrote that we work arduously to maintain our

health—“a long and a regular work”—but, in a minute, “a cannon batters all, overthrows all,

demolishes all.”

Military metaphors for describing illness became even more specific following

Louis Pasteur’s discoveries in the late nineteenth century, when it was no longer the illness that

was the invader but the microbe. Since then, this kind of martial terminology has continued to

“infuse all aspect of the description of the medical situation,” notes Susan Sontag in her book

135

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors.

Phrases like “the invader is tiny,” or “[the

body] begins to mobilize an array of cells,” or “the AIDS virus . . . evades the rapidly advancing

defenders” in order to hone in “on the master coordinator of the immune system” reflect not only

military metaphor but also, Sontag writes, “the language of political paranoia, with its

characteristic distrust of a pluralistic world.”

Joanna Burke describes the image of the AIDS virus on the cover of the January 1987

issue of Scientific American as “looking like a grenade, primed for detonation.”

Emily Martin

expounds at length about this kind of description in her book Flexible Bodies: The Role of

Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Beyond using military

terminology to describe disease, it was used to describe the body’s process of self-defense.

Martin writes, “The portrait of the body conveyed most often and most vividly in the mass media

shows it as a defended nation-state, organized around a hierarchy of gender, race, and class,”

with the immune system as a defense system maintaining the boundary between self and nonself,

with the nonself world visualized as “foreign and hostile.”

Similarly, in an article in Time

magazine entitled “Returning Fire against AIDS” from June 1991, the virus is portrayed as

possessing “hidden parts that do not show up on the immune system’s radar screen.”

This kind of militaristic terminology also appears throughout Randy Shilts’s book And

the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, a chronicle of the early years of

the AIDS epidemic with a focus on the political and social apathy that initially confronted the

outbreak. Shilts compares AIDS to a terrorist attack, observing that “thinkers in the gay

community believed the homosexual plight was less like being in a war than living with

terrorism. At any time, without any coherent reason, the virus could emerge from its victims’

blood and violently seize their lives. Gay men who had lived with terrorism in countries like

136

Israel argued that AIDS was an even more insidious enemy.”

Paula Treichler, in her article

“AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” even gives the

virus an Arabic identity, describing the AIDS virus as a “terrorist’s terrorist, an Abu Nidal of

Viruses”

Conversely, disease metaphors are frequently used to describe invading enemies. For

instance, during the Cold War, Communism was seen as a “malignant parasite”; the Soviet

Union infected by “germs of a creeping disease.”

Communist guerilla movements during the

Vietnam War were described as “a disease of transition to modernization . . . rooted in the

pathology of economic development.”

Colleen Bell, in an article entitled “Hybrid Warfare and

Its Metaphors,” details how “metaphors of infectious disease and its treatment” can also be used

to “express the goal of immunizing local populations against becoming insurgents.”

Insurgency

is portrayed as being purely destructive, with guerillas relying on terror in order to further their

mission. Like viruses, their primary task is “to debilitate and destroy.”

David Kilcullen, former

special advisor to the US secretary of state from 2007 to 2009 and senior advisor to General

David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007, outlines the process of the accidental guerilla using a disease

model: infection, contagion, intervention, and rejection. The infection occurs when the guerilla

establishes a presence, the contagion step demarcates the period when the guerilla’s influence

spreads throughout the country at large, external authorities begin to take action during the

intervention step, and rejection mirrors “an immune response in which the body rejects the

intrusion of a foreign object.”

Terrorism, specifically, is imagined as a foreign disease that can infiltrate boundaries, a

virus that can permeate anywhere or anyone. To illustrate, on October 15, 2001, Richard N.

Haas, then acting as a representative of the US Department of State, gave a speech in which he

137

compared international terrorism to a terrible lethal virus:

Sometimes dormant, sometimes virulent, it is always present in some form. Like a virus,

international terrorism respects no boundaries—moving from country to country,

exploiting globalized commerce and communication to spread. It can be particularly

malevolent when it can find a supportive host. We therefore need to take appropriate

prophylactic measures at home and abroad to prevent terrorism from multiplying and

check it from infecting our societies and damaging our lives . . . We also need to make

sure that the virus does not mutate into something even more deadly through the

acquisition of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons of mass destruction.

Similarly, as Nicholas B. King argues, “Dangerous states and ideologies have given way to

dangerous fragments, circulating globally and freely transgressing the boundaries of the modern

world.”

It is not merely that there has been a shift from vertical to horizontal, from states

represented by armies to individuals acting with their own sovereignty but that the bioterrorist

operates “at the junction between commercial, informational, and scientific economies,”

representing the darkest potential of globalization, transforming “global networks into conduits

of infection,” and symbolizing “American fears of racial, ethnic, and national contamination.”

Just one week after 9/11, an anthrax attack in the United States threw these metaphorical

connections into stark relief; it condensed these fears into a neat real world bundle. Beginning on

September 18, 2001, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to five news media offices

and two Democratic senators. Five people died and seventeen were infected. The FBI eventually

identified the culprit in 2008 as Bruce Ivins, a scientist in the army’s biodefense lab at Fort

Detrick, in Maryland, although many still feel their investigation was inconclusive.

In fact, a

congressional inquiry even identified major gaps in the case.

The length of the investigation, as

138

well as its inconclusive results, combined with the death of Bruce Ivins, a victim of an apparent

suicide, further compounded fears of future incidents of biowarfare. If the American government

was unable to prevent anthrax and 9/11, or even to apprehend those responsible, why should they

be any less inept at preventing future attacks? At the time, the fact that the anthrax used in the

attacks was traced back to Fort Detrick also intensified questions of whether the greatest danger

was already within our borders, possibly in the hands of our own government.

A repeated plot point in many terrorism outbreak narratives is that a virus the American

government has created is then used against the very Americans it is supposed to protect,

echoing the premise set forth by Romero in the original film The Crazies (1973). This is also

exactly what happens in Covert One: The Hades Factor. In The Hades Factor, Hassan (Conrad

Dunn), the terrorist leader, declares to his fellow terrorists, “No one will know they are infected

until it’s too late. All the targets have been chosen to inflict the most infection. We will turn

America against itself. Let them feel the sting of their own creation.” He infects his men with an

American-engineered virus that he then attempts to spread throughout America. In the campy

film Venomous (Ray, 2001), a group of Jihadi terrorists break into an American government lab

and release genetically modified rattlesnakes the American government had bred as weapons.

The snakes breed and multiply underground, eventually coming to the surface after an

earthquake. Anyone they bite can, in turn, transmit the virus. Much like in Outbreak, the

military, desperate to conceal evidence of their biological warfare development, is more invested

in blowing up the town to cover up all evidence than it is in helping the inhabitants. While a

biological weapon is also used in The Crazies (both versions), a significant difference is that the

release of that virus is accidental. A military aircraft containing the Trixie virus crashes into a

local river, infecting the water supply. What is not accidental is the military’s response: to shoot

139

all the civilians, even those not infected, and to blow up the town.

Although anthrax is not a contagious disease, the anthrax attacks demonstrated the

seemingly facile ways in which terrorists could spread disease and the current power of ordinary

social networks to harm us. Both natural viral outbreaks and terrorist-orchestrated outbreaks call

attention to the significance and power of networks in contemporary life. Whereas bombs and

gunfire are location-specific, a viral outbreak can—and often does—travel the world via

networks—both visible and invisible—and can be impossible to contain. A viral outbreak is

literally contagious information spreading throughout globalized vectors of disease, and a

terrorist-planned outbreak merely makes the spread of that contagion deliberate. While a natural

viral outbreak and a terrorist-fueled outbreak may have similar results, a terrorist-fueled outbreak

is chilling for the intentionality of the destruction.

As these narratives remind us, contemporary life makes us all interconnected, leaving us

especially vulnerable to bioterrorism. Who thinks twice before opening mail addressed to them?

Before drinking water? Walking down a city street? These actions, based on this crop of

outbreak narratives—as well as recent news headlines—could kill you. You do not even need to

board a plane. The plane may crash into you. The occasional real-life terrorist attack, however

infrequent, establishes a precedent of plausibility that is reinforced every time a similar scenario

plays out on television or in the movies. After all, viruses do not only spread organically. Unlike

Typhoid Mary, who was a passive carrier of germs within her body, the bioterrorist is an active

agent, “blending science and nature into political weapons.”

A core part of America’s identity following 9/11 became its oppositional role against Al

Qaeda. Fear was a foundation for national unity. The shared sense of purpose also provided a

unifying focus, as well as a way to cope with the trauma caused by 9/11. Simultaneously,

140

patriotism could literally be seen (not just felt) in the proliferation of raised flags displayed

throughout cities, on buildings, and over homes. The unknown Arab had become the deadly

contagious “other” threatening to infiltrate America’s borders, only able to be kept at bay by this

relentless patriotism. The Bush administration declared to the American public, “You are either

with us or against us.”

If you were not unequivocally supporting Bush’s agenda in the Middle

East, if you were not behind the “War on Terror,” you were in bed with the enemy. This simplistic

binary hearkened back to the black-and-white clarity of the Cold War; a Muslim man with a beard

had merely replaced the Communist villain. These rhetorical strategies were employed by

politicians, journalists, and Hollywood to impose a narrative on an otherwise confusing situation.

However, unlike the black-and-white clarity of the Cold War, this new kind of warfare

remains confusing and complex, despite rhetorical efforts to simplify the situation. Much of this

had to do with the fact that, rather than a classic “hierarchical terror organization,” Al Qaeda is

one “devoid of organizational boundaries,” penetrating many levels of Islamic society around the

world. Al Qaeda, much like many terrorist organizations is a network; “highly decentralized and

dispersed,” it has “diffuse structure, indirect connections, and nontraditional modes of

communication.”

American historian and political commentator Walter Laqueur, in his 1996

essay on “postmodern terrorism,” writes that, in the past, “terrorism was almost always the

province of groups of militants that had the backing of political forces like the Irish and Russian

social revolutionary movements of 1900,” which made it much easier to understand allegiances

and agendas. Now, however, terrorists are individuals or like-minded people working in very

small groups, often with varying allegiances and agendas.

This approach was seen with

terrorists such as Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, who mailed or hand-delivered a

series of bombs, or Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the perpetrators of the 1995 bombing

141

of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the two brothers responsible for the Boston marathon bombing on April 14,

2013, claimed to have been inspired by extremist Islamist beliefs, but they were still self-

radicalized and self-taught, unaffiliated with any specific terrorist group. Lacqueur also describes

the “bewildering multiplicity of terrorist and potentially terrorist groups and sects . . . espousing

varieties of nationalism, religious fundamentalism, fascism, and apocalyptic millenarianism”

who defy geographic, as well as ideological, containment.

This is a new kind of war for a new

kind of world.

The idea of power working without a sovereign center echoes French philosopher Gilles

Deleuze’s argument that we are moving toward control societies, where, rather than the closed

and orderly environments of disciplinary societies, we will have corporations made up of

multiple bodies. One key difference between older and newer outbreak narratives is arguably this

shift from discipline to control, from hierarchical social ordering to horizontal and rhizomatic

modes of self and peer-to-peer policing.

The acceptance of the hypersovereignty that emerged

after 9/11, attempting both to cover every space and control every contingency, can be seen as a

compensatory representation designed to alleviate anxieties inspired by these fears. If we cannot

determine whom to trust, much less whom to fear, we rely on our leaders to determine it for us.

We will also do whatever we can to feel safe, regardless of whether that safety is an illusion or

not.

In many ways, the 9/11 attacks could be described as a blow by cellular, networked,

modular, nimble terrorists against a centralized tower, an icon, a pillar, demonstrating the global

shift from centralized hierarchical powers to distributed, horizontal networks.

This evolution

mirrors that of many brick-and-mortar institutions, sovereign power structures, and central

142

bureaucracies, all of which have been increasingly eroded or even replaced with the flatness of

interconnected networks. However, it is not merely that the terrorist organizations are networks

but that terrorist organizations use networks. King, in his 2002 article “Dangerous Fragments,”

writes that contemporary terrorist attacks are facilitated by the “ability to navigate and

manipulate networks.” Global networks of transportation, trade, and information, as well as the

acceleration of international trade and commerce, allow the terrorist to secretly acquire or

construct, and rapidly and efficiently disseminate, weapons of mass destruction to American

cities.

The importance of these networks also makes them prime targets for terrorists. In season

1 of The Strain (FX 2014–2015), for example, Eldritch Palmer (Jonathan Hyde) hires computer

hacker Dutch Velders (Ruta Gedmintas) to disrupt the city’s entire Internet and

telecommunications systems, thus weakening the infrastructure of New York City. In season 1,

episode 2 of Syfy’s 12 Monkeys (“Mentally Divergent,” January 23, 2015), Katarina Jones

(Barbara Sukowa) studies the pattern of the viral outbreak and concludes that it followed an

intentional design aimed at making the virus hit with maximum impact. “They made sure to

infiltrate centers of power, police, government, health,” she tells Cole (Aaron Stanford), because

these are the targets not only for spreading disease but also for crippling social order.

Before the “War on Terror” began, America had been trapped in a liminal state of

helplessness and vulnerability exacerbated by the confusion of this new kind of warfare, where

enemies were unclear and geographical boundaries irrelevant. However, once war began in

Afghanistan, the unknown Arab could be painted as, according to Lynn Spigel, “the antithesis of

Western humanity and progress,”

and an adversary worth conquering. The American desire for

vengeance would surface in an increase of narratives featuring “heroic saviors and violent

143

redemption,” as well as “fantasies of national and subjective coherence,” such as The Agency

(CBS, 2001–2003), The Grid (TNT, 2004), and Threat Matrix (ABC, 2003–2004).

These

thrillers, very much fueled by Bush’s “War on Terror,” aimed to make sense of the political

situation, imposing a clarifying binary and patriotic simplicity to the situation. Evil often

germinated in the Middle East, the threat was most likely Jihadi radicals, and the American

government had tools and tricks that would allow them to remain one step ahead. They also

depicted “the covert, small-scale, ‘low-intensity’ combat” that would become increasingly

common after 9/11.

This kind of small-scale combat appears in all the texts I discuss in this

chapter: battle is between single individuals—often American agents versus terrorist infidels—

involving hand-to-hand combat, computer screens, and microscopes rather than battlefields.

After all, as Lacquer had already written in 1996, “terrorism is becoming the substitute for the

great wars of the 1800s and early 1900s.”

In order to compensate for the confusion that followed 9/11 about who America’s enemy

was and why America had been attacked, these new film and television narratives revolved

around uncomplicated narratives of American “good” versus foreign “evil.”

These stories made

it quite clear that the threat came from without rather than within. Even if the threat was on

American soil—which it almost always was—it came from a terrorist who had slipped over the

border. This fits with the criteria associated with patriotism according to Silvio Waisbord:

“Patriotism establishes that only external forces pose threats to the nation. It excludes the

possibility of internal actors interested in disrupting a seemingly unified community.”

Even if

the threat looked American, it never actually was.

For instance, in the episode “The Plague Year” (Mar. 7, 2002) from the CBS’s television

show The Agency, Tom Gage (Beau Bridges) exclaims that Omar (Grayson McCouch), the

144

terrorist, “doesn’t look Middle Eastern.” Jackson Haisley (Will Patton) confirms that Omar was

born in Algeria, and Quinn (Daniel Benzali) explains that Omar “surgically altered his

appearance: bleached his skin, lightened his hair, cosmetic contacts surgically implanted.” All

this, of course, so Omar could move about the United States without causing suspicion after

literally cutting his way through the fence on the Arizona–Mexico border. Omar’s agenda? To

spread smallpox to his girlfriend, who would, in turn, spread it to a United States senator with

whom she was having an affair. Once infected, the senator would then spread smallpox

throughout Capitol Hill. Appropriately, Wolfgang Petersen, director of Outbreak, was executive

producer of The Agency.

Featuring unprecedented filming at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency

(CIA) in Virginia, the show was developed in collaboration with CIA liaison Chase Brandon and

“was supposed to make the case for the continued necessity of the CIA in a post–Cold War

world of geopolitical complexity.”

Making this case was even more of a challenge after the

intelligence failures that led to 9/11. Each episode became a public relations device of sorts,

showing all the implausible gimmicks that this fictional version of the CIA had at their disposal,

tools enabling them to bring home the bad guys every time in narratives loosely (and sometimes

not-so-loosely) inspired by real-life events. For example, the original pilot hit so close to home—

with its depiction of a plot by Al Qaeda to blow up a London department store and repeated

mentions of Osama bin Laden—that the episode was delayed from September 27, 2001, to

November 1, 2001. CBS pulled completely an episode dealing with an anthrax attack on New

York City.

CBS did, however, air the episode “A Slight Case of Anthrax” (Nov. 8, 2001)—about a

terrorist planning to release anthrax in Washington, DC—fewer than two months after the real-

145

life anthrax attack. The episode capitalized on existing fears by emphasizing just how dangerous

anthrax could be—but not to worry, the CIA was on it. FBI special agent Shelton (Leslie Silva)

describes an incident when less than a teaspoon was accidentally released in a lab, and sixty-four

people died. In response, Carl Reese (Rocky Carroll) warns that “someone with a Dixie cup and

a plan could kill thousands.” To complicate the episode’s plot further, it is discovered that the

anthrax in question had originally been engineered in a government lab in Virginia, much like

with the real-life anthrax attacks of 2001. From the lab, the American government sold the

anthrax to the Iraqis—when the United States was supporting them in their war against Iran—

who then engineered a new strain to resist antibiotics, making its fatality rate 100 percent. Now

that the Iraqis were no longer friendly with Americans, the anthrax posed a serious threat.

Ironically, seconds after the episode’s conclusion, the CBS affiliate broadcasting The Agency

promoted its upcoming nightly news with a clip about a mysterious rash closing Oregon schools.

“We’ll have the latest,” the voice-over declares.

Conceived before 9/11, The Agency, much like Alias (ABC, 2001–2006) and 24 (Fox,

2001–2010), “[was] designed to respond to anxieties about global interconnection and boundary

dissolution with fantasies of national and subjective coherence.”

These anxieties would

intensify after the attacks of 9/11, making these shows even more relevant. While The Agency

reflected the efforts of American agents to protect the United States from terrorist attack, The

Grid—a 2004 miniseries coproduced by the BBC, Fox TV, and Carnival Films that aired on

TNT in the United States and the BBC in the UK—tackled more global efforts to stop terrorism,

reflecting not only efforts by the NSA, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI, but also those of

British agencies MI5 (the United Kingdom’s domestic counterintelligence security agency) and

MI6 (the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence agency). Responding to the complexities of

146

intelligence work in a globalized world, representatives of these various antiterrorist agencies are

forced to work together as an international counterterrorism team.

In the first episode, “Hour One/Hour Two” (July 19, 2004), sarin gas is accidentally

released by a group of incompetent terrorists—a network including a former Al Qaeda

commander—without authorization from any terrorist council. This reflects the new kind of

warfare common to the twenty-first century, with its decentralized and nontraditional terrorist

organizations. Even though the accidental release occurred in London, an informant tells FBI

agent Max Canary (Dylan McDermott) that other extremists are bringing sarin gas across the

Mexican border to Los Angeles. Again, the Mexican border becomes a repeated plot point due to

its supposedly porous nature. Interestingly, the show engages directly with the deep-seated fear

many Americans still feel about Muslims, using CIA agent and Middle East analyst Raza

Michaels (Piter Marek) both to demonstrate the racism that many Muslims experience as well as

to give them a voice. When NSA agent Maren Jackson (Julianna Marguilies) declares, “To me,

Islam is one thing: fear,” Raza tells her that Islam is the religion of almost a billion people. “Are

you saying that all one billion are criminal? I find it inexcusable that a woman with your

standing could judge an entire religion by the actions of a fundamentalist faction. How would

you feel if I judged all Christians by the actions of the KKK? . . . Because of some narrow

thinking by governments like ours and people like you, we are judged by our worst example.”

Even when they state that fear of all Muslims is not the answer, shows like these do

reinforce the suspicion that much of America’s threat comes from the Middle East. These

narratives also reinforce the strength and appeal of clearly defined heroes working together—as a

network and/or a team—fighting against just-as-clearly-defined enemies. In the words of James

William Gibson, author of The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, these stories advocate for

147

“the primacy of heroic male warriors, magic weapons, and horrific enemies as fundamental

cultural categories.”

Virtually nonexistent on TV since the 1960s, this type of story surged in

popularity on small and large screens after 9/11, achieving “a new raison d’être in the wake of

the attacks.”

The explicitly patriotic overtones found in these narratives are not accidental. Shortly

after 9/11, Karl Rove, senior advisor and deputy chief of staff in the George W. Bush

administration, met with film producers, directors, screenwriters, and media executives in

Hollywood in order to strategize how best to make patriotic films that portrayed the government

in a positive light. However, as Justin Lewis, Richard Maxwell, and Toby Miller conclude, the

meeting was really “an intelligence briefing designed to bring the Hollywood power elite up to

date on the White House’s war aims.”

To further the government’s public relations initiative,

many television programs also “received assistance, both before and after 9/11, from U.S.

security agencies, the Department of Defense, and/or the State Department.”

However, despite these efforts by Hollywood and Washington, public support began to

turn away from the government in the years that followed. In 2005, Italian philosopher Giorgio

Agamben wrote that President Bush’s constant references to himself as “commander in chief”

after September 11, 2001, should be seen as a “presidential claim to sovereign powers,” a claim

further reinforced by Bush’s attempts “to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes

the rule.”

In January 2006, in an article for the New York Times, American author and Harvard

law professor Noah Feldman describes this increasingly unchecked presidential power:

The administration of George W. Bush, emboldened by the Sept. 11 attacks and the

backing of a Republican Congress, has sought to further extend presidential power over

national security. Most of the expansion has taken place in secret, making Congressional

148

or judicial supervision particularly difficult. Administration lawyers have gone so far as

to claim that the president as commander in chief is not bound by laws that ban torture

because he is empowered by the Constitution to fight the nation’s wars however he sees

fit . . . The administration has also suggested, in other memos, that the president may

violate international treaties if necessary to fight the war on terror. When added to the

newly declared presidential right to arrest American citizens wherever they might be and

detain them without trial as enemy combatants, these claims add up to what is easily the

most aggressive formulation of presidential power in our history.

By March 2006, at 33 percent, Bush’s overall approval ratings were the lowest of his presidency,

and only 42 percent approved of his handling of terrorist threats, a decline of 20 percent since

January 2005. The word “incompetent” became the word most frequently used to describe the

president.

In June 2006, the Supreme Court struck a significant blow against the Bush

administration with its ruling for Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, declaring that the president “did not have

the right to hold military commissions to try terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay.” This

decision also “slapped down his assertion that, as a wartime commander in chief, he had the

authority to exclude Congress from decisions concerning national security.”

Public sentiment

had officially shifted.

Despite the significant increase after 9/11, trust not only in Bush, but in the government

as a whole, began declining in the years that followed, a tumble that only fell faster during

debates over the war in Iraq, White House and congressional scandals, the gross mishandling of

rescue efforts following Hurricane Katrina, and a worsening economy. A CBS–New York Times

poll conducted in October 2008 found that only 17 percent of those surveyed “trusted the federal

government to do what is right.”

149

This change of heart was reflected by Hollywood. While pro-American patriotic

messages had filled the airwaves immediately following 9/11, in the years after, film and

television narratives began to emphasize that the voice of freedom inevitably stems from the

rogue hero fighting against the military machine or the corporate establishment. These narratives

were still patriotic in that American ideals of freedom and justice always prevailed, but the

difference was that sometimes these ideals would be met in spite of government or corporate

efforts to the contrary. Once again there was the individual hero working outside the system.

Jennifer Gillan describes these heroes as “Cowboy Knights”—“unorthodox, yet honest;

unrefined, yet honorable; ordinary, yet extraordinary.”

Examples of these rogue heroes abound. In Toxic Skies, for example, Tess Martin (Anne

Heche) stands up to the military and pharmaceutical establishments. In The X-Files (Fox, 1993–

2002; 2016–present), Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) routinely questions government protocol

and behavior. In the miniseries Covert One: The Hades Factor, it is army microbiologist Colonel

Jon Smith (Stephen Dorff) who defies government orders and flees a secured military base. In

The Crazies remake, it is David (Timothy Olyphant), the Ogden Marsh sheriff, who discovers

the initial conspiracy, shuts off the town water against the direct order of the mayor, escapes

quarantine, and shoots military personnel, first as an attempt to save the town, but then, after that

fails, himself and his wife. Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland), the lead protagonist on Fox’s 24, is

repeatedly described not only as a patriot by 24 creator Joel Surnow but also as the only man

who can save America. “There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get

it done. America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer,” Surnow explains.

Howard

Gordon, one of 24’s executive producers, describes 24’s success as a reflection of American

audiences’ desire for heroes “who will do whatever is necessary to save society from harm.”

150

While protagonists might prefer to think things through and follow the rules, the circumstances

that put modern societies at risk do not allow for it. Rogue heroes who operate outside the system

“are the only ones that can act sufficiently.”

The television show 24 is an example of a television show that integrates all these core

elements: rogue heroes, patriotism, surveillance, networks, technology, binaries of good and evil.

The main plotline of season 3 was bioterrorism. Originally launching on November 6, 2001, 24

immediately became distinctive for its format as well as for its timeliness. The show runs in “real

time,” with a minute of the show equaling a minute of real life. In order to emphasize this

narrative device, the show regularly features a digital clock displaying the time it is within the

world of the show, as well as split screens depicting multiple scenes happening simultaneously.

The screen splitting echoes a style frequently used on broadcast news programs and in

surveillance footage. This documentary aesthetic is reinforced by the camera work, which is

often gritty and jittery, almost always moving as it follows Jack Bauer through his various

exploits. The format of 24—its real-time elements, serial structure, camerawork, and split

screens—reinforces the show’s illusion of live-ness and realism despite the amplified and

melodramatic plotlines, providing a contagious sense of patriotism and a depiction of the

unrelenting complexity of contemporary life.

The various screens—and the emphasis on the information conveyed within them—not

only communicate the globalization of the crisis, as also seen in Contagion (2011) but also force

the viewer to engage with multiple events happening simultaneously. This simultaneity echoes

shifts occurring in day-to-day life, where multiple-frame images are increasingly common. As

Anne Friedberg describes, over the last twenty years, “the introduction of computer-generated

images and digital display technologies has radically transformed the space of the screen . . .

151

Multiple-frame images are a readable new visual syntax, a key feature in the contemporary

remaking of a visual vernacular.”

Viewers now frequently watch and interact with not only

multiple frames simultaneously but multiple separate screens.

However, it is not merely the split screens that, in the words of Matthew B. Hill, “present

the show as a high-tech or computerized experience.”

The show itself places heavy emphasis

on the use of technology and the transfer and acquisition of data in order to resolve whatever

particular crisis is at hand. Whenever the show presents us with a scene shot within CTU (the

Counter Terrorism Unit) headquarters, it is always filled with glowing monitors; some rooms are

even lined with them from floor to ceiling. Hill writes that, in 24, the “War on Terror” is

presented “as a high-tech information war . . . a computer war, managed, defined, and at times

won by data and those who possess it and process it, technowar transformed into icons and IP

addresses.”

This provides an apt reflection of just how foundational computers and networks—

along with the data transmitted by both—have become.

As I mention in the introduction, flows of information are integral components in all

types of networks, including computer, political, social, and biological. These flows of

information (contagious or otherwise) create and sustain networks. Bauer, as the central figure in

24, both produces and consumes “the data processed and stored by CTU. He is a node . . . on the

network of computers, databases, analysts, and communications systems.”

In fact, his ability to

connect with others—and their ability to connect with him—is such a pivotal part of the show

that whenever Bauer goes off grid, intentionally or unintentionally, things fall apart. Bo

Kampmann Walther observes that Jack’s number one weapon is his cell phone and that

whenever it begins to malfunction “we know for sure that something bad has happened and is

about to occur.”

152

One of the tag lines for season 3 of 24 is: “To stop a weapon that has no cure . . . You

need a man who knows no limits.” The “weapon that has no cure,” is a virus, of course, and in

this case it is the Cordilla virus, engineered by rogue Ukrainian scientists who want to sell it to

the highest bidder. Similar to the hantavirus, Cordilla causes nosebleeds, hemorrhaging, skin

abscesses, and death. The villain here is crystal clear. It is Stephen Saunders (Paul Blackthorne),

a vengeful former MI6 agent, who targets nine American cities, including Los Angeles, New

York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Las Vegas. Saunders uses the threat of a nationwide (and then

worldwide) epidemic to try to force President Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) to comply with a list of

demands, including giving up a list of American undercover agents abroad. This aim is to take

down the American intelligence/military apparatus as revenge for how it abandoned him when

he was on a mission with Delta Force, the United States’ primary counterterrorism unit.

“The man who knows no limits” is classic rogue hero, Jack Bauer. In 24, Jack Bauer is

often seen as the only true patriot, and it is “the government and the military . . . that ha[ve]

strayed from the ideals of American nationhood.”

Hill describes Bauer as a “nearly savage

mythic hero who possesses the ‘dark understanding’ of the Others (the terrorists) . . . He thinks

like them and fights like them.”

When Hill writes that Bauer “fights like them,” part of his

meaning is that Bauer does not play by the rules. Time and time again, Bauer must circumvent

rules, regulations, and incompetent superiors in order to save the day. “The majority of those

appointed or elected to preserve the life, liberty, and happiness of normal Americans are depicted

as incompetent . . . Heroes like Bauer must work outside of the system to ‘save’ it from itself.”

In this sense, Bauer’s extremism reflects America’s extremism, justifying the torture and the

violence that went hand in hand with the “War on Terror.” Rogue heroes must operate outside

the system because the system itself is frequently part of the problem. Those heroes willing to

153

break a few rules “for the greater good” are the only ones who can act sufficiently. They are the

true patriots. Much like in earlier colonial-esque outbreak narratives, these metaphors create a

good versus evil binary, where motives are absolute, eradicating any uncertainty and ambiguity

that exists.

Similar themes manifest in the TV miniseries Covert One: The Hades Factor. The

national security apparatus is also portrayed as ineffectual and corrupt, and again, the rogue hero

is the only one who can save the day. Government agent and disease expert Jonathan Smith

(Stephen Dorff) is the Bauer-esque character who defies authority to save the world and expose

government corruption, fleeing the military base despite lockdown, pursuing truth above all else.

As in the book of the same name by Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds (originally published in

2000), an unknown Ebola-like virus begins to spread rapidly across the United States, but unlike

Ebola, it is airborne and has a 90 percent kill rate, amping up the drama. The miniseries features

several significant changes to the original story, most obviously the addition of Al Qaeda as the

terrorist organization behind the outbreak, likely an attempt to make the story more current.

However, the “othering” here is more complicated, primarily because the terrorists are not acting

alone but are in cahoots with upper-level American government personnel and rogue CIA agents.

They also use biological weapons developed by the American government and tested illicitly on

American soldiers. The conspiracy runs deep, and the miniseries defies easy resolution, ending

with the government’s involvement kept secret. Elwood Reid, writer of the screenplay, attributes

inspiration to real-life conspiracy and corruption by the military-industrial complex in various

illicit activities. Reid elaborates, “There are countless examples, and what they all have in

common is the military ‘defense of country’ excuse and the profit of corporations anxious to put

potentially deadly things into the market place but doing so under the guise and guidance of

154

military defense. It’s a symbiotic relationship that the American public is, by and large,

indifferent to. So that was the idea. The hypocrisy of the US military complex/business.”

It is

particularly telling that this portrayal of US military and government corporation would appear

on a broadcast network’s primetime schedule, reflecting just how popular antigovernment

narratives were to mainstream audiences in the years following 9/11.

All that aside, one of the most significant elements of Covert One: The Hades Factor is

how it reinvents the very act of terrorism. In contrast, season 3 of 24 provides a traditional

bioterrorist threat. When the terrorist eventually takes action, it is by leaving the virus in a

detonation device within a hotel’s ventilation system. In The Hades Factor, however, the virus

replaces the traditional explosive device, and the threat is literally humanized. The “bomb” is the

person. The infected terrorist is the carrier who smuggles the virus into the country before his

symptoms start to show. Once he is sufficiently sick and infectious, his blood is taken and put

into a detonation device, similar in design to the one used in 24. The idea—never executed—is

that his blood will spray innocent bystanders at Dulles International Airport and spread the

disease. Or as the army major (Fulvio Cecere) warns, “Suppose they are the weapon.

Intentionally infected. Perfect patient zeros entering the country with the sole intent of infecting

the populace.” In Global Effect and the Blacklist episode “The Front” (NBC, Oct. 20, 2014), the

threat becomes fully humanized. In those narratives, it is the intentionally infected person

wandering the streets who spreads the virus passively, no device necessary, because the virus is

aerosolized. These various reinventions of the trope of the “suicide bomber” combine already

existing fears of healthy-looking carriers with fear of an unexpected (and impersonal) terrorist

attack.

The trope of the “suicide bomber” is also given a viral twist in the “Desperate Remedies”

155

(Apr. 10, 2016) episode of the CBS show Madam Secretary (2014–present). In this case, the

suicide bomber both is infected with the virus—it is unclear if the infection happened

accidentally or intentionally—and has explosives strapped to his chest. He enters a medical tent

set up by the Americans to help with an outbreak of the Marburg virus in Cameroon,

complaining of symptoms. When the medical staff move to treat him, the man sets off the

explosives, blowing himself up. He kills seven people and infects most of the survivors with his

blood and body parts. The man’s suicide is part of an attempt to lash out at Western intervention

in what is viewed as Boko Haram territory. Another unique element of this episode’s viral plot is

the way an experimental cure for Marburg is used as a negotiation tool with Boko Haram. Hadi

Bangote (Chukwudi Iwuji), the leader of the Boko Haram terrorist group, eventually falls ill with

Marburg, and Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord (Tea Leoni) negotiates to get him a dose of

an experimental cure in exchange for releasing 106 school girls that Boko Haram has captured in

addition to letting the medical personnel treat the infected Africans safely.

One month after “Desperate Remedies” aired on CBS, “Reassortment” (May 24, 2016)

aired, also on CBS. One of the final episodes of the television show Person of Interest,

“Reassortment” would similarly use the terrorist-inflicted virus plot, adding its own unique twist.

In typical terrorism outbreak narrative fashion, the protagonists—Finch (Michael Emerson) and

Reese (Jim Caviezel)—are in a hospital when a military-grade version of H5N1 (avian flu)

begins to spread in that hospital. Also, in typical outbreak narrative fashion, “patient zero” is

international businessman James Ko (James Chen) working with US, British, and Chinese

manufacturers. Much like Beth Emhoff in Contagion, his very job is a product of globalization.

Also like Beth, James is traveling from Hong Kong, delivering the infection unknowingly to

New York City. As Reese says, James is “a man who knows how to cross borders,” or as his

156

partner Finch says later in the episode, “Mr. Ko was waylaid, infected, and then turned into a

weapon of mass destruction.” A professional globetrotter, James is the ultimate viral threat:

clean-cut, seemingly healthy, and spreading death in his wake.

Later in the episode, it turns out that the evil master-computer Samaritan—an artificial

super intelligence designed after 9/11 by the American government to be a mass surveillance

system—is behind the outbreak. The targets are hospital personnel who have noticed Samaritan’s

manipulation of the Network Inventory Database the hospital uses. Like in other outbreak

narratives, the real problem becomes keeping people controlled and quarantined once the virus

breaks out. When the hospital security guard (John Mondin) asks Reese under what authority

they can stop people from leaving, Reese does not miss a beat: “The PATRIOT Act.” The

PATRIOT Act has become a catchall for allowing government powers to extend indefinitely

under threat of terrorism.

The episode also provides a nod to intertextuality moments later, when one of the patients

at the hospital overhears that a contagious virus is in the building. “Oh, hell no, that’s how the

zombie apocalypse starts!” he exclaims, bolting for the exit. Dr. Mason (Jenna Stern) soon

discovers that the contagious virus is an implausible—but highly lethal—combination of avian

flu and the human flu virus, combining the lethality of the former with the spreadability of the

latter. Suddenly, every cough, every sneeze becomes suspicious; a hospital, ironically, is the last

place anyone would want to be during this kind of outbreak. Fortunately, Root (Amy Acker)

locates a cure, saving the lives of those infected—but that is only part of the story. Samaritan has

an even more insidious agenda. Following the outbreak, the CDC requires everyone to be

vaccinated, meaning that Samaritan will have all Americans’ DNA in its National Healthcare

Database. Mona (Rhonda “LaChanze” Sapp), observing the line of people outside the CDC,

157

explains that “after 9/11, people were more than willing to allow the NSA to collect all of their

personal data as long as it kept them safe.” Security is, once again, prioritized over privacy.

There is no explanation for what will happen to those deemed unfit, for how Samaritan will use

the information it collects, but the implication is ominous.

This notion of infected bodies as weapons is increasingly popular, also showing up in the

“Gone but Not Forgotten” (Sept. 18, 2016) episode of the FX show The Strain (2014–present).

Villain Thomas Eichorst (Richard Sammel) brings together a small group of the infected

“munchers,” the vampire minions that serve the Master. If they can follow his simple

instructions, he promises them a great feast: “The virgin blood of seventy humans.” Sacrificing

themselves will be “a great honor.” This is a twist on the concept of martyrdom repurposed by

many radical Muslims, who believe that if they sacrifice themselves for the cause, they will enter

Paradise and receive seventy-two virgins. In this case, virgin blood is a more appealing reward.

Eichorst chooses two from the group—both former employees of Councilwoman Justine Feraldo

(Samantha Mathis)—and slices them open, placing C-4 explosives inside. He then sends the two

“volunteers” to Feraldo’s headquarters, where they easily slip inside, unnoticed, before

exploding, sending millions of contagious white worms—the carriers for the strigoi “virus”—all

over the workplace. Fet (Kevin Durand) saves Feraldo by killing the worm about to infect her,

but sixty staff members are not so lucky.

The notion of infected bodies as weapons dates back to the fourteenth century, when the

Black Plague was making its way through Europe, the Near East, and North Africa. History has

it that the Mongol army threw plague-infected bodies into besieged cities in order to transmit

disease to their enemies.

In these post-9/11 examples, however, unlike with early forms of

biowarfare, the infected bodies are still alive, giving them the ability to move around and spread

158

the virus to unknowing victims. The bomb has evolved from being an explosive, to being a virus,

to being an infected person who may literally explode. Anxieties about contagious disease have

combined with growing fears of terrorist attack to reinvent “the ticking time bomb” phenomenon

and, therefore, redefine the paradigm of fear. The idea of terrorist as contagious threat is fully

realized.

Combining fears of terrorism with fears of progress—and, specifically, overpopulation—

is also a repeated plot point in this wave of the outbreak narrative. One example is The Blacklist

episode “The Front,” aired on October 20, 2014, on NBC. With Ebola getting ample news

coverage at the time due to an outbreak in West Africa, “The Front” was perfectly synchronized

with real-life events. In this episode, Maddox Beck (Michael Laurence) is an eco-terrorist who

resurrects a dormant pneumonic plague virus and weaponizes it so that it operates at an

accelerated rate. His goal is a worldwide epidemic that will kill off the entire human race,

thereby supposedly saving the planet. “To preserve life on earth, we need to become extinct,”

Beck tells his cult-like followers, who then infect themselves with the virus so that they can

spread it around the world. Sharon McManus (Freya Adams) is his first follower to infect herself

before heading to Washington, DC to spread the virus. In this case, it is an average-looking

young woman with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail who spreads the virus to those unlucky

enough to be near her. This technique contains echoes of the 2001 anthrax attack, emphasizing

the seemingly facile ways with which terrorists can spread disease and the current power of

ordinary social networks to harm us. It also reinforces another aspect of a terrorist attack: you

can be killed anywhere through no specific action of your own. Just existing (at the wrong place,

at the wrong time) is enough to kill you. Dressed inconspicuously in torn jeans, a striped sweater

clutched around her, Sharon walks the streets, the pustules around her nose and mouth ignored

159

by passersby, spreading the virus merely by breathing. The virus is airborne and therefore

requires no physical contact to spread. By the time she is identified as patient zero, roughly 2,300

people have been quarantined and given less than a day to live.

Almost exactly a year later, the Blindspot episode “Bone May Rot” aired on October 12,

2015, on NBC. It features two terrorists trying to release a virus to save the planet by killing off

most of its human inhabitants. The only twist is that these two terrorists are also CDC scientists,

again reinforcing the fear that the threat may lie within. Aptly, the plot thickens when former

deputy director of the CDC, Dr. Walter Tunnel (Doug Barron), dies from a tear in his safety suit.

As if by clockwork, the movie Inferno was released a year later, on October 28, 2016.

Based on the 2013 novel by best-selling author Dan Brown, and starring Tom Hanks and

directed by Ron Howard, Inferno follows a similar idea. “Culling is God’s Natural Order,” says

Bertrand Zobrist, the rogue terrorist (played by Ben Foster in the film). These are the new Dark

Ages, and after a necessary culling, there will be a rebirth, a Renaissance, he declares. He even

tries to convince the head of the WHO, Dr. Elisabeth Sinksey (Sidse Babett Knudsen), to support

him, describing the human race as a cancer, its replicating out of control. He provides her with

graphs depicting the skyrocketing rate of human population growth and the ensuing dearth of

natural resources. “Did you know that if you live another nineteen years, until the age of eighty,

you will witness the population triple in your lifetime. One lifetime—a tripling. Think of the

implications.”

The head of the WHO remains unconvinced, declaring him a terrorist and a

murderer, but Zobrist continues with his plan.

The film Global Effect (Cunningham, 2002) also revolves around the concept that in

order to save the world (most) humans have to go. Sasha (Rolanda Marais), the terrorist

ringleader’s girlfriend, infects herself with the virus, so that she can walk the streets of

160

Capetown, South Africa, infecting as many people as possible. There, too, the unlucky victims

are infected through no act of their own, but merely by existing. The lead terrorist, Nile Spencer

(Joel West), despises the fact that there are hundreds of languages and hundreds of religions on

the planet, causing too many wars and too much destruction. Wiping the planet of most of that

would be a benefit, Spencer insists, and having the cure in his possession will enable him to pick

and choose whom to save.

In a scene shortly after Spencer has captured the lead researcher for the Mungia virus

(Mädchen Amick), the only one who has the cure, he explains to her how his plan will take

effect. His words, however, could apply to any outbreak narrative. Pointing at a map of the

world, Spencer says, “When you study the world, you can’t help but draw parallels to the human

body. See the veins? They are rivers. And people like blood cells, racing about, floating around,

keep the world moving, doesn’t it? ’Til the veins get poisoned, and the blood cells get weak and

fail . . . Suddenly, the smallest molecule becomes the most feared.” It is surely no coincidence

that, in Global Effect, the white terrorist in Africa chooses to kill black Africans in order to

cleanse the planet and that advisors to the American president repeatedly advocate blowing up all

of Africa in order to protect the United States. These Americans seem to be the only ones in

charge. There is never a mention of an African government that should be consulted or that

Africans might have the last word on affairs in Africa. Instead, it is the American government

that decides to quarantine Cape Town, the American government that decides to close African

borders and airports, and the American government that blows up Cape Town and even imagines

what the map of the world would look like without Africa on it. Conrad Lee (Kirk B. R. Woller),

the national security advisor, compares the outbreak to “a bodily infection.” And when your toe

becomes infected? “You cut it off to save your foot,” he says, drawing a line through the

161

southern tip of Africa, making the metaphor crystal clear. “Amputate early enough and the fear

of spreading is alleviated,” he continues. “That’s forty million people!” is the shocked rebuttal.

“Forty million to save six billion,” he replies. The issue is not so much a question of

mathematics, but the fact that Africa is not even consulted during the conversation. The white

men (and one woman) in suits make all the decisions. The racial undertones are obvious, much

as they are in many outbreak narratives.

Like in Outbreak, for instance, Global Effect’s Mungia virus begins in a remote African

village, full of standing stagnant water and primitive huts, bodies of “primitive” Africans lying

dead on the dirt. Also like in Outbreak, the American government must bomb this town in order

to protect the world from contagion. Tourists, imports, and smuggling, the film tells us, are the

ways the virus will spread to the United States, Europe, and Asia, emphasizing that Africa is not

a legitimate player in the world economy. In other words, the way the virus spreads is from

tourists visiting exotic and primitive Africa, from Africa importing goods it cannot produce, and

from illegal smuggling. During one of the briefings on the virus for top American political and

military leaders, Spencer is described as the “new face of modern terrorism.” More than that, it is

that these outbreak narratives reflect the face of modern racism.

Throughout all these narratives, with the exception of the relentlessly patriotic Madam

Secretary, there are distinct—and some more distinct than others—overtones of government and

corporate conspiracy. This sense that the government either knows too much but does not do the

right thing with that information or that the government is corrupt/broken/ineffective became

stronger in the years following 9/11, after which many Americans were either disappointed in

their government for allowing the attacks to happen or actively believed that the government had

encouraged the attacks to happen.

162

However, the covert and untrustworthy nature of the American government was already

brewing ten years earlier, as evidenced in most episodes of the Fox television show The X-Files.

One of the longest-running science fiction shows on network television, The X-Files aired from

1993 to 2002 before returning with a reboot in 2016. One of the primary motifs of the television

series is how many secrets the government keeps buried from the general public. For example, in

the X-Files episode “F. Emasculata” (Fox, Apr. 28, 1995)—which tackles notions of

bioterrorism, viral outbreak, pharmaceutical conspiracy, and government cover-ups—

corporations working with the government are villains—specifically, pharmaceutical

corporations who spread viruses intentionally for their own greedy motives. The episode follows

a typical outbreak narrative arc, where we discover a deadly and unknown virus, watch as it is

introduced to the general public, and then follow our heroes as they try to contain it. Of

particular significance is the way the virus is spread (via mail, foreshadowing the later anthrax

attacks), and the culpability of the CDC—working hand-in-glove with Pinck Pharmaceuticals, a

corrupt pharmaceutical company—to bypass FDA regulations by testing new drugs on

unknowing prison inmates. Mulder demands that Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) and the Cigarette

Smoking Man (William B. Davis) reveal to the public what Pinck is doing, but the Smoking Man

refuses, arguing that this kind of knowledge would only cause panic. And so the episode ends,

leaving us with feelings of unease, a lack of resolution, and concerns about government

conspiracies. As Monahan writes—about 24, but equally applicable here—“just when the

characters and viewers long for—and expect—resolution and safety; the best that can be hoped

for is temporary management, containment, or postponement of the indiscriminate annihilation

of civilian populations.”

A happy and satisfying resolution is a thing of the past.

A similar plot, only this time using doctors rather than pharmaceutical companies,

163

surfaced that same year with the NBC television movie Formula for Death (Mastroianni, May 8,

1995), in which a group of doctors intentionally unleashes Ebola at select HMO hospitals in

major American cities with the express purpose of making HMOs look risky.

Even before 9/11, there were feelings that neither the government nor the health industry

could be trusted to protect the American people. This theme grew in popularity during the early

years of the twenty-first century, as evident in the terrorist wave of the outbreak narrative. As

Leger Grindon explains, in his essay “Cycles and Clusters,” in order for a film cycle to remain

relevant, it is common for subordinate and dominant traits to switch positions.

So while

elements of government and military conspiracy can be seen as early as Romero’s original

Crazies, this theme moved from the realm of fringe, camp, and paranoia (à la The X-Files) to

mainstream significance, showing up frequently even on CBS, which is known for having the

most conservative viewership out of the main broadcast networks.

The idea of pharmaceutical cover-up—and the fundamental and relentless pursuit of

profit—also plays a part in the World War Z novel (Crown, 2006), where author Max Brooks

seems to provide a critique of capitalism and/or the pharmaceutical industry with his depiction of

the drug Phalanx. Phalanx is a vaccine marketed as a solution to the “rabies virus” behind the

zombie outbreak. Despite a lack of thorough testing, the drug is pushed to market (we also see

this scenario happen in The Hades Factor) in order to provide the pharmaceutical company (and

its investors) with significant profits and the general public with a sense of calm, even though it

turns out that the drug can do nothing to prevent the zombie outbreak. Breckenridge Scott, the

character behind Phalanx, justifies his ruse by explaining that, in addition to the false sense of

security the drug provided, the success of the drug also brought profits to the biomed sector,

jump-starting the stock market, and giving the country “the impression of recovery.” The notion

164

that a pharmaceutical company could be conspiring against us—more concerned with profit than

our lives—further reinforces the threat that things (and people) that are supposedly good for us

could actually kill us.

Another recent example of pharmaceutical conspiracy is Toxic Skies, a Canadian–

American coproduction, starring Anne Heche as Tess Martin, a specialist with the Global Health

Organization. She discovers that the underlying cause of an epidemic in Spokane, Washington, is

reduced immunity caused by Kellor, a pharmaceutical company that is tampering with the jet

fuel, adding metals to the fuel. The metals yield contaminated chemtrails that cause diminished

immune response, leading to an increased dependency on the very same drugs the company is

producing. Due to their reduced immunity, hospitals fill up with victims of an unknown viral

strain that appears to be spread through touch and is referred to as “the plague.” The outbreak,

which is rapidly spreading among the immune deficient residents of Spokane, was brought over

from Malaysia by Professor Dylan Corbin, who is dead before we even get to meet him. This

outbreak causes symptoms Tess has only seen in “rural Asian countries.” Interestingly, this virus

has many overt (although unmentioned) similarities to HIV: red spots that resemble Kaposi’s

sarcoma; a compromised immune system; initial symptoms are flu-like; the course of the disease

can be documented with a rapidly decreasing antibody count; and the virus will not respond to

any existing medications. The sick patients do not respond to conventional treatment because

their antibody counts are dangerously low. As the virus spreads to other cities, it soon becomes

clear that the military is affiliated with the pharmaceutical cover-up. People keep dying until

rogue hero Tess Martin exposes the scheme.

Her “rogue nature” is evident early in the film, when she stands up to the mayor of

Spokane (Kevin McNulty), the CEO of Kellor (Barclay Hope), and Major Stein (Tobias Slezak),

165

all three of whom are, inexplicably, on a panel while she testifies about the outbreak. The three

of them refuse to allow for the quarantine Tess requests, telling her that she will need more proof

before they take her seriously. This combination of corporate America, political America, and

military America thwart Tess at every turn, despite the growing death toll. Tess even discovers

that Kellor already has a vaccine for the outbreak, but the company does not want to release it

because it would prove their link to the contaminated jet fuel. Nonetheless, Tess, with the

assistance of rogue journalist Jack (James Tupper), does manage to obtain the vaccine and save

the remaining patients. The mayor now praises her resolve, proclaiming in a press conference

that “it is times like these when heroes rise to the occasion.” However, his enthusiasm is empty,

since the conspiracy with Kellor will not be made public, and the film ends with another

pharmaceutical company being invited to work with the military, the motives and agenda

questionable. When Tess asks Major Stein why Kellor would tamper with the jet fuel, the answer

is “Money, Dr. Martin.” In this scenario, corporate America, just like political and military

America, is most concerned with the bottom line; greed is prioritized over people.

These various narratives all reflect the different ways that America, both pre- and post-

9/11, feels itself to be under attack while also depicting how the forms of that attack have

changed. While 9/11 may have brought fears of terrorism to the fore, temporarily alleviating our

distrust in our own government, feelings of disillusionment—that the very establishments

constructed to protect us are actually only looking out for their own interests—soon returned

with a vengeance. Threats, both of viral outbreak and terrorist attack, could no longer be naively

projected upon distant countries. Viruses—much like terrorism—now lurk next door. Internal

threats are just as realistic as external ones, and our own government is as likely to let us die as

the unknown Arab—or so the sound bites tell us.

166

The opening moments of the first episode of the ABC television show Quantico (“Run,”

Sept. 27, 2015) echo these sentiments as Miranda Shaw (Aunjanue Ellis), the assistant director of

the FBI Training Division, tells the new students, “The state of this country is the most

precarious it’s ever been. Not only are there more threats than ever before, but the majority of

those threats don’t come from known organizations or extremist groups but our own backyard—

a neighbor you grew up next to, a one-night stand you had, perhaps even a family member.” We

are under siege by enemies we cannot see.

These ideas can also be seen in the film Contaminated Man (Hickox, 2000), which

portrays, rather than the infectious impact of other countries on America, the infectious impact of

America on other countries, as well as the tragic consequences of bioweapons production. When

an American company begins producing bioweapons in Hungary, Josef Muller (Peter Weller)

accidentally blows up the lab (the “necessary accident” at play). Everyone else dies, but Muller

manages to escape, albeit infected with a virus produced by the company. While the virus does

not kill him, everyone with whom he interacts dies quickly and horrifically. As Ruth Mayer,

points out, in this film, “the categories of ‘foreign’ and ‘familiar’ no longer make sense,” with

the United States “associated both with a contaminating influence and with the source of

therapeutic intervention.”

Chillingly, at one point, Muller puts a sample of his blood into a Coca

Cola bottle in order to infect a water reservoir. What more American symbol is there than a bottle

of Coke?

This film, like so many others, raises the question of “whether the threat from within is as

great as the threat from without.”

Ruth Mayer argues that, even though “the phobic rhetoric of

othering” continues to be used with vigor, and “the blunt logic of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ is far from

defunct,” what remains most alarming is how difficult it can be to distinguish between self and

167

other.

That which is within us may be trying to kill us. As The Agency episode “The Plague

Year” demonstrates, a Jihadi radical might even have blue eyes and light skin. French sociologist

and philosopher Jean Baudrillard observed that the events of 9/11 “brought to the fore a new,

fantastical enemy and an antagonism that ‘is everywhere and . . . in each of us.’”

Those that

look like us may suddenly turn against us. It is with this in mind that Richard N. Haas, from the

US Department of State, references President Bush’s argument from October 2001 that “we are

now engaged in . . . ‘a different kind of war. It’s not the kind of war that we’re used to in

America.’”

In a world where terrorists are increasingly difficult to identify, it becomes just as

hard to know whom to trust as it is to know whom to fear, and the terrorist wave of the outbreak

narrative reflects this.

The “internal threat” does not only come from unseen terrorist factions or from the

occasional renegade patient zero. This threat, as these narratives depict over and over, can also

come from the American government, the American military, and American corporations.

Pharmaceutical companies, whose very purpose should be to cure us and keep us healthy, are

seen to prioritize profits over patients, and the military, meant to protect us, is in on the take. The

compounded impact of all these various conspiracies—terrorist, government, or corporate—

results in a lack of safety in the very place where it should be resolute: our homes.

Without traditional signifiers, like meaningful geographic boundaries or race, gender,

language, or cultural differences, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine who deserves

suspicion. Instead, terrorism is more of a “contagion that circulates throughout society and may,

theoretically, adhere to anybody (though certain bodies—brown, Arab, Muslim—remain more

susceptible).”

This fear that the terror may come from the inside—that the evil is not only

within our borders but that we cannot even identify it—is what truly keeps us up at night.

168

The Postapocalypse Outbreak

Every generation wants to be the last.

—Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

The proliferation of zombies in our dystopia is neither coincidental nor a fluke of timing.

Zombie cinema is known for exploring what the end of the world might look like, with its

widespread infections, biological warfare gone haywire, uncontrollable violence, chaos, and

looting, all images that resonate in a post-9/11 America. The chilling aspect is not that the world

might fall apart but that it is already happening. This is a crucial component in recent zombie

outbreak narratives; they depict a world that, while fantastical, still seems plausible, if not

inevitable. In fact, an article in Rolling Stone from August 2015 was titled ominously

“Apocalypse Soon: 9 Terrifying Signs of Environmental Doom and Gloom,” and listed

reasons—like rising sea levels, earthquake threats, and oil spills—that the world as we know it

might be ending.

Against a real-life backdrop of economic crises, never-ending war,

increasingly obvious climate change, environmental pollution, and corrupt politicians, it can

often feel as if the only viable alternative is a zombie apocalypse.

Zombies have been lurking on the peripheries of American culture since the publication

of William Seabrook’s The Magic Island, a journalistic expose of Haitian voodoo culture, in

1929. Directly inspired by the book, Victor Halperin’s White Zombie was released in 1932,

bringing zombies to American movie screens. Both the book and the movie aim to ground the

horror in a certain amount of plausibility and authenticity. For instance, both emphasize that the

zombie is not merely a fantasy but an entity enshrined in the Penal Code of Haiti, article 249:

169

“Also shall be qualified as an attempted murder the employment which may be made against any

person of substances which, without causing actual death, produce a lethargic coma more or less

prolonged. If after the administering of such substances, the person has been buried, the act shall

be considered murder no matter what result follows.”

In the film, this excerpt from the Penal

Code was not only read out loud in its entirety by one of the characters but also was printed on

promotional posters. The use of this terminology, as well as the adaptation of an otherwise

“journalistic” text, allowed White Zombie to blur fact and faction in ways that would become

common to outbreak narratives. As the first zombie film, White Zombie also goes to great lengths

to make sure audiences understand what was at play. Not only do the “opening titles launch the

word across the screen a letter at a time: Z-O-M-B-I-E,” but one of the characters explains,

“They are not men, monsieur. They are dead bodies. The living dead. Corpses taken from their

graves and made to work.”

It took about a decade, and the onset of World War II, but other zombie films followed:

The Ghost Breakers (Marshall, 1940), King of the Zombies (Yarbrough, 1941), Revenge of the

Zombies (Sekely, 1943), I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943), Voodoo Man (Beaudine,

1944), and Zombies on Broadway (Douglas, 1945). Some aimed to repeat the horror of White

Zombie, some, like Revenge of the Zombies, stayed current by integrating evil Nazis with

zombies—a combination that would continue to bear fruit, even recently with the Nazi Zombie

game mode in various releases of the Call of Duty (Treyarch, 2008) videogame, starting in 2008

or with the film Dead Snow (Wirkola, 2009)—while others, like The Ghost Breakers went for

parody.

After the end of World War II, however, there was a change in the representation of the

zombie. The zombie was no longer “a lone figure or a gang of pitiful slaves under a single

170

master. Instead, the zombies come in an anonymous, overwhelming mass,” describes Roger

Luckhurst.

This was a significant shift that continues to this day. Luckhurst ties this change to

several key historical events. One was the discovery of the concentration camps by British and

American forces, the horrifying sight of thousands of near-dead prisoners surrounded by

thousands of unburied corpses. While the existence of the camps was known, this was the first

time many actually saw them.

Primo Levi, author and Holocaust survivor, describes the

“anonymous mass” he experienced at Auschwitz as “endless . . . continually renewed and always

identical . . . non-men who march[ed] and labor[ed] in silence, the divine spark dead within

them . . . One hesitates to call them living.”

The second historical event that fed horrific images

of near-dead (or dead) hordes into the brains of Americans came about during the Korean War.

Luckhurst describes a tactic long advocated by Mao Zedong in which “thousands of barely

armed infantry [were sent] to overwhelm better equipped professional armies through sheer force

of numbers . . . It was even speculated that the piles of corpses mown down as they advanced

were meant to demoralize the Americans, who would be disgusted by their own slaughter.”

Another key event that impacted American horror films were the nuclear bombs used by

the Americans on Japan in August of 1945. Luckhurst argues that “the atom bomb realized the

prospect for the first time in history of a weapon with genuinely global reach. There was

nowhere on the planet left to escape its deadly technological embrace . . . Fantasies of

destruction—of New York or Chicago leveled within 30 minutes of a declaration of war—

flooded the American imagination.”

Suddenly, it was not just that Americans could imagine

their own destruction but that they could visualize exactly how it could happen. Horror movies—

such as Godzilla (Honda, 1954) or Them! (Douglas, 1954) or The Incredible Shrinking Man

(Zugsmith, 1957)—began to integrate radiation or nuclear bombs into their plots, as well as

171

deadly and out-of-control technology, both as an explanation for the source of the monster, as

well as yet another threat. In Teenage Zombies (Warren, 1960), for example, a mad scientist

backed by foreign agents turns kidnapped teenagers into zombies using an experimental nerve

gas. In Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), the zombies are caused by radiation from a

fallen space satellite.

Inspired both by Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, published in 1954, as well as

by its first filmic adaptation, The Last Man on Earth (Salkow and Ragona, 1964), Romero’s film

replicated those earlier works’ dark atmosphere, the theme of isolation, and the image of an

undead horde trying to get at a barricaded Robert Neville (played by Vincent Price in the film),

the last remaining survivor of a worldwide epidemic. In the book, the virus—to which Neville is

mysteriously immune—has turned everyone into vampires. Romero freely admits to “ripping

off” Matheson, but explains that he could not use vampires, since Matheson had already done so:

“I wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change. Something that was forever,

something that was really at the heart of it. I said, so what if the dead stop staying dead? . . . And

the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That’s really all [the zombies]

ever represented to me.”

Other than that, Romero stuck close to Matheson’s work, replicating

the claustrophobia and helplessness of being trapped in a house, surrounded by monsters who

want you dead.

Despite the fact that Romero’s film was initially met with outrage and disgust—largely

because it was inadvertently screened to young children, audiences not knowing what to

expect—Night of the Living Dead went on to earn twelve million dollars at the American box

office, as well as eighteen million dollars internationally.

In 2017, that translates to a

worldwide box office gross of approximately $213,000,000. Zombies were in the zeitgeist,

172

bigger and badder than ever. Romero went on to make The Crazies (1973), about the accidental

release of a military biological weapon on a small American town. The inhabitants are forced to

contend not only with those driven crazy by the weapon but also the military, which is trying to

contain and conceal the outbreak by killing off residents—establishing tropes of military and

government conspiracy and malfeasance that have resurfaced in countless outbreak narratives. In

1978, he released Dawn of the Dead (1978), cowritten with notorious Italian horror director

Dario Argento. Far larger in scope, it portrayed an America decimated by zombies, with most

cities totally overrun.

The 1980s featured not only Romero’s next zombie feature—Day of the Dead (1985), a

depiction of a world overrun with zombies—but more zombie movies than any previous

decade.

However, many of these were cheaply and quickly made—such as Bloodsuckers from

Outer Space (Coburn, 1984), I Was a Teenage Zombie (Michalakis, 1987), and Beverly Hills

Bodysnatchers (Mostow, 1989). It was only in 1996, with Capcom’s release of the video game

Resident Evil (1996), that zombies finally became a big-budget affair and that the latest wave of

the outbreak narrative was launched. Fittingly, Romero’s zombie films were a key inspiration for

the game, which also drew on the plot of The Crazies.

Originally called Baiohazādo, which

translates literally to “Biohazard,” more than twenty different versions of the game have since

been released, as well as comic books, novels, and action figures (six films, seven novels,

twenty-three games, and two CGI films, just for starters). The highest-grossing film series to be

based on video games of all time, the combined box office gross of all the films is $1.233 billion

worldwide.

So far, the twenty-first century has been full of horror films—remakes, reboots, and

originals—and the preoccupation with zombies and the apocalypse now fills both television and

173

movie screens. To say the last two decades have mainstreamed zombies is an understatement. In

2005, Steven Wells from the Guardian exclaimed that “there were zombies everywhere,” while

the New York Times declared a “zombie literary invasion” in 2006.

The invasion continued,

with more than forty-one films listed for 2008 alone, and the debut of the most popular basic

cable drama of all time—The Walking Dead, AMC’s contribution to the zombie canon—in 2010.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has a list of the fifty most popular zombie films from

2015. Focusing only on the “most popular,” the list is not exhaustive, implying that there were

many from which to choose.

There are now too many to count.

As these various narratives demonstrate, we have become increasingly fond of zombies

and the postapocalyptic narrative. A term that sounds inherently contradictory, James Berger

argues that the term apocalypse can mean a literal end to everything, but it can also refer to

catastrophes that function as “definitive historical divides, as ruptures, pivots, fulcrums,

separating what came before from what came after.”

It is in this respect that I use the term

“postapocalypse” to describe the latest and most popular incarnation of the outbreak narrative.

Movies like the Dawn of the Dead remake (Snyder, 2004) and I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007),

the most recent filmic adaptation of Neville’s book, as well as television shows like The Walking

Dead (AMC, 2010–present), Fear the Walking Dead (AMC, 2015–present) and The Last Man on

Earth (Fox, 2015–present), play into our fascination with the idea of a postapocalyptic world

devoid of humans, governments, and technology, forcing survivors to adopt a ruthless neoliberal

ethos. These narratives look at what happens after an unstopped infection, after social order has

broken down, after cities have been devastated and deserted. They play on the tension of what

might be possible, preparing us for what may occur in a way that our families and our

governments do not.

174

Zombie narratives, by their very conventions, speak to present-day America precisely

because of how well they capture what feels like an eventual future (if not the actual present).

Kyle William Bishop argues that “the aftereffects of war, terrorism, and natural disasters so

closely resemble the scenarios depicted by zombie cinema . . . Scenes depicting deserted

metropolitan streets, abandoned human corpses, and gangs of lawless vigilantes have become

more common than ever, appearing on the nightly news as often as on the movie screen.”

Zombie narratives play out the dystopia that already seems to be occurring. The empty streets,

the packs of zombies, and the fetishization of guns, in particular, have now become tropes for a

twenty-first century where war and the need for security feel just as ubiquitous as the threat of

socioeconomic collapse and environmental crisis.

Another reason contemporary zombie narratives speak to present-day America has to do

with their portrayals of networks with indeterminable centralized figures, with their emphasis on

diminishing individuality and diminishing individual agency, and with their fusion of disease

with fears of a terrorist attack. Even though the world was overrun with zombies in Day of the

Dead, World War Z (Forster, 2013) is generally considered to be the first global zombie narrative

because of its depiction of a worldwide fight to stop the outbreak. In the film, Gerry Lane (Brad

Pitt) flies from New York to South Korea to Israel to Wales to Nova Scotia. The original book,

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, written by Max Brooks and published in

2006, was a critical and commercial success, selling more than one million copies by November

2011. The film adaptation is the most expensive zombie movie to date, with a production budget

of $200 million and a worldwide box office of $540 million.

However, the impact of globalization and a networked world could already be seen in the

earlier Resident Evil franchise. The narrative arc of the franchise revolves around the global

175

health industry, with a stronger emphasis on bioterror following 9/11. The central plot depicts a

set of characters and their battle with zombies, caused as a result of exposure to the t-Virus,

created by the Umbrella Corporation. The original Resident Evil film opens with a description of

how the Umbrella Corporation has become the largest commercial entity in the United States:

“Nine out of every ten homes contain its products. Its political and financial influence is felt

everywhere. In public, it is the world’s leading supplier of computer technology, medical

products, and health care. Unknown, even to its own employees, its massive profits are generated

by military technology, genetic experimentation, and viral weaponry.” This prologue already

establishes a global capitalistic world where one “umbrella-like” company impacts almost every

aspect of contemporary life, hearkening to Galloway and Thacker’s description of a world where

the “networks of FedEx or AT&T can be seen as more important than that of the United

States.”

While the first film and the sequel, Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Witt, 2004), both take

place in Raccoon City, by the third film, Resident Evil: Extinction (Mulcahy, 2007), the

destruction has gone global. In fact, one of the tag lines for the fifth film, Resident Evil:

Retribution (2012, Anderson), is “When Evil Goes Global.” Not only does the series reflect fears

of overly powerful corporations using overly powerful technology and biowarfare to have their

way, but it also demonstrates the way infected individuals are reduced to “animalistic, subhuman

threats.”

After all, the dehumanized are disposable, and the disposable are dehumanized.

Yet another reason for the zombie’s increased contemporary resonance also has much to

do with its lack of centralized agency and control. In early Haitian incarnations of the zombie

figure, as seen in White Zombie, a voodoo master controls and creates the early zombies.

Similarly, Dracula is known for his ability to exert mind control over his victims. In contrast, the

modern zombie terrifies because “no singular agent acts to possess the victim’s mind.”

The

176

zombie’s individuality and mind are both blank, replaced only with an insatiable appetite.

Modern zombies drift aimlessly and mindlessly, driven only by their search of food, an

appropriate shift considering that decentralized networks have become “the most common

diagram of the modern era.”

The lack of centralized agency in an era of networked and global capitalism also results

in a loss of individuality. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, coeditors of Generation Zombie:

Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, argue that, in an era of cloud computing, bots,

and avatars, the possibilities for agency and individuality are “ever more restricted,” our

subjectivity limited to “various network protocols of control.”

Zombies embody fears of no

longer being discrete entities (as people or countries), of losing freedom, identity, and agency.

After all, the zombie is, as Marina Warner describes, “a body which has been hollowed out,

emptied of selfhood.”

Unlike Frankenstein or Dracula, zombies are stripped of their personal

identity, losing their individuality as well as their connections to others. While vampires and

werewolves can be seen as representing attractive states of being—primal, sexual, emotional,

intense, and charismatic—becoming hyperbolic versions of themselves, zombies become empty

versions, with no identity or consciousness. Zombies are fueled by a desire to consume vacantly,

eating their way to the end of civilization, infecting us with their emptiness.

Zombies are us,

hollowed out. They emphasize what we can become when only a body is left.

An additional reason for the zombie’s contemporary resonance is that the zombie,

especially in its current incarnation, fuses current fears of disease with fears of terrorism. In his

book Post-9/11 Horror, Kevin J. Wetmore observes that, since their minds are blank, “zombies

cannot be reasoned with, they seek only to replicate themselves, to contaminate, which also

makes them an excellent metaphor for terrorists.”

The zombie, after all, is the terrorist who

177

infects, an embodiment of both terrorism and infection. The zombie is also the obvious

terrorist—refreshingly easy to identify and kill. There is no ambiguity about who the zombie is

or whether it is acceptable to attack it. In fact, hesitation to do so could be deadly. Nick Muntean

and Matthew Thomas Payne, in their essay “Attack of the Livid Dead: Recalibrating Terror in

the Post–September 11 Zombie Film,” take the terrorist argument further, comparing zombies to

“domestic terrorists within one’s own private and public borders . . . Like the ‘sleeper-cell’

terrorist, the zombie can potentially be anyone at any time.”

For example, the title sequence for the Dawn of the Dead remake begins with a shot of a

temple-like room packed with praying Muslim men. The sequence ends with a reporter on a

balcony in what looks to be Turkey, the Hagia Sophia in the distance. While he is giving his

report, the camera swings to the side, showing us a pack of zombies invading the room. The final

shot of the title sequence is of a seemingly Middle Eastern zombie attacking the camera. Even if

the outbreak is global, it still seems to be centered—inexplicably—in the Middle East. This is an

interesting shift from traditional outbreak narratives, which blame the origin of the virus on

Africa or Asia. It is not just that the zombie–terrorist connection is made literal during this title

sequence but that the terrorist–Middle Eastern connection is made literal as well.

Another connection between zombies and terrorists is that, at least until they turn, they

are ordinary people. Like the sleeper-cell terrorist, the zombie can also be anywhere at any time.

The horror of the zombie ravaging “picture perfect suburbia” is portrayed within the first few

minutes of the Dawn of the Dead remake. The film begins with Ana (Sarah Polley) heading

home to her boyfriend and her manicured-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life suburban neighborhood.

This suburban neighborhood, however, is soon overrun with zombies, tearing it and its residents

apart. The first zombie we see is the sweet little blonde girl from next door (Hannah Lochner),

178

the least threatening figure we could imagine, and the first place we get a zombie attack is in the

suburban bedroom, one of the most private and supposedly “safe” of all spaces. Director Zack

Snyder uses this juxtaposition for maximum impact. The fact that this little blonde girl is the first

zombie we see makes the experience all the more jarring, and interestingly, the first zombie we

see on The Walking Dead is also a small blonde girl. There is something doubly horrifying about

being attacked by what should be the most angelic and least threatening of creatures, and it is

even worse that it happens in what should be the least threatening of environments. When Ana

flees, we see that her perfect neighborhood has become a war zone. A neighbor in a bathrobe

points a gun at her, and seconds later, an ambulance runs him over; surrounding houses go up in

smoke; helicopters dot the horizon. People on a bus are eaten alive while Ana takes off in her

white Toyota Corolla. This is not what should happen in Small Town, USA. The mundane meets

the monstrous. The terror literally hits home.

A fifth reason for the increasing popularity of narratives that visualize humanity’s demise

has nothing to do with fear at all. We are genuinely curious to see what the end of the world will

look like, to imagine how quickly social order will deteriorate and what will cause it to happen.

As Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead comic and television show, puts it,

“Apocalyptic storytelling is appealing when people have apocalyptic thoughts. With the global

economic problems and everything else, a lot of people feel we’re heading into dark times. As

bad as it is for society, I’m benefiting greatly.”

When confronted with the question of how the

world may likely end, a pandemic continues to feel like a legitimate possibility in the current

climate, or so politicians, journalists, and Hollywood continue to emphasize. As the title

communicates, twenty-eight days is all it takes for social order to collapse in 28 Days Later

(Boyle, 2002). Selena (Naomie Harris) describes the process in detail:

179

It started as rioting. But right from the beginning you knew this was different. Because it

was happening in small villages, market towns. And then it wasn’t on the TV any more.

It was in the street outside. It was coming through your windows. It was a virus, an

infection. You didn’t need a doctor to tell you that. It was the blood. Or something in the

blood. By the time they tried to evacuate the cities, it was already too late. The infection

was everywhere. The army blockades were overrun. And that’s when the exodus started.

The day before the TV and radio stopped broadcasting there were reports of infection in

Paris and New York. You didn’t hear anything more after that.

After she recounts the chain of events for Jim (Cillian Murphy), who has been in a coma, he asks

her about the government. “What are they doing?” he wants to know. Selena tells him there is no

government. Jim replies that this is impossible. “Of course there’s a government. There’s always

a government. They’re in a bunker or a plane.” Mark (Noah Huntley) shakes his head. “No,

there’s no government, no police, no army. No TV, no radio, no electricity.” Twenty-eight days

was all it took for everything to fall apart.

Ironically, many of the films discussed in this chapter were shot during or immediately

following real-life outbreaks, or had their release date postponed due to a real-life outbreak—or

both. For instance, while 28 Days Later was in production, there was an outbreak of foot-and-

mouth disease in England. Affecting mainly hoofed animals, like sheep, cows, and pigs, it was

discovered in February 2001 in Essex but quickly spread across the country. The highly

infectious disease “plunged the agricultural industry into its worst crisis for decades,” and

government contingency plans (which were based on a maximum of only ten affected farms)

were woefully underprepared.

The film’s American release also coincided with the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory

180

Syndrome) epidemic in 2003. SARS initially surfaced in November 2002, in the Guangdong

province of China, near Hong Kong. The WHO issued a global alert on March 12, 2003,

declaring Hong Kong “a city under siege,” with overrun hospitals, quarantined apartment

complexes, and deserted “restaurants and bars in one of the most crowded cities in the world.”

Many Hong Kong residents wore masks, and public service announcements reminded people to

bow rather than shake hands, to wash properly, and to be aware of contagion. SARS quickly

spread around the world, hitching rides on travelers who left Hong Kong, intensifying fears

already exacerbated by the recent memories of 9/11 and by initial suspicions that bioterrorism

might be to blame. The remake of Dawn of the Dead was shot during this SARS outbreak.

Originally planned for an October 2003 release, the release of Resident Evil: Apocalypse was

delayed almost a year, to September 2004, due to the same SARS outbreak.

These real-life outbreaks had to have impacted the production of these films, however

implicitly, as well as serving as organic promotion for the films’ releases. Hollywood may have

been responding to the zeitgeist by greenlighting these pictures, but the seemingly constant series

of real-life outbreaks only confirmed the public’s fears and the films’ box office potential.

Snyder, director of the Dawn of the Dead remake, said he could not help but notice the parallels

between his film—which portrays the fear and uncertainty that would be likely to occur during a

viral outbreak—and news media reports on the SARS outbreak, “as both were fraught with panic

and misinformation.”

Offscreen, zombies may not be roaming the streets, and social order may still (somewhat)

exist, but the world knows what it is like to have continuous war, threats of terrorism, random

shootings, and police violence. It is not merely that war has become a constant in the distant

Middle East but that war has invaded domestic territories as well. Both zombies and terrorists hit

181

close to home rather than on distant battlefields, ignoring any “rules” or “protocols” of war. This

constant fear of attack has translated into a fear of primitive, irrational humans hell-bent on

destroying humanity (in real life) and primitive, irrational zombies hell-bent on destroying

humanity (on-screen). Steven Pokornowski acknowledges in his essay “Burying the Living with

the Dead: Security, Survival and the Sanction of Violence,” that the “same generation of people

who grew up playing ‘survival horror’ video games like the transmedia Resident Evil franchise is

now, in the adult world, faced with the implication that everyday life is like survival horror: we

must be prepared, we must be secure.”

Zombies have become a celluloid substitute for

terrorists, and postapocalyptic narratives a hyperbolized reaction to everyday fears.

While the classic outbreak narrative template, as seen in Outbreak (Petersen, 1995) or

Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011), may most closely resemble the science fiction genre, the

postapocalyptic outbreak narrative fuses the science fiction element of plausibility with the

horrors of a world gone mad, combining the outbreak narrative’s proclivity for viral infection

with our fetish for postapocalyptic visions. Unlike the original Haitian voodoo zombie, who

could only be created by a nonzombie, and unlike the zombie incarnation of the 1950s, where the

zombie outbreak would often be blamed on radiation, the contemporary zombie, as seen in the

narratives I discuss in this chapter, is frequently created via infection. Columnist Ezra Klein

writes for the Washington Post that if “werewolves represent our fear of the wild, aliens our fear

of the unknown and vampires our fear of sex, zombies represent our fear of infectious disease.”

This evolution of fear can be traced through the various adaptations of Richard

Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, published in 1954. The original book blames the initial outbreak

on mosquitos spawned by dust storms caused by weapons used in a massive war—appropriate

for its time of publication, several years after World War II and one year after the end of the

182

Korean War. The pandemic turned ordinary humans into vampires. While its first filmic

adaptation, The Last Man on Earth (Ragona and Salkow, 1964), remained fairly faithful to the

book, in The Omega Man (Sagal, 1971), released during the Cold War, the cause of the zombies

is a bioweapon bomb and, specifically, biological warfare between China and Russia.

Significantly, in I Am Legend, released in 2007, the cause comes from scientific alterations of

existing viruses, and the result is a curious mix of both vampire and zombie. Limited to

nighttime exposure due to an aversion to sunlight, the nameless/faceless quality of the horde still

has more in common with zombies than vampires. Each time, the outbreak reflects anxieties

relevant to that specific time period. While I Am Legend is the latest filmic adaptation, the Fox

television network debuted a television show in 2015 inspired by the book’s fundamental

premise. Its title is The Last Man on Earth, a nod to the 1964 film. In this latest case, the world’s

population is still wiped out by a virus (with the exception of a handful of survivors), and there is

no specific explanation or causality beyond “the virus.” Our fears have grown so abstract that

specifics are no longer needed. The end of the world feels inevitable, even without a medical

diagnosis.

These fears have trickled their way into the current popularity of American zombie and

apocalyptic narratives. Wetmore argues that genres like drama and action “fail to present 9/11 in

a manner that captures the experience and the understanding of that experience.”

Instead, the

fears and shock of 9/11 are best co-opted by the science fiction and horror genres. Cultural

theorist Douglas Kellner writes that it is a fusion of science fiction and horror, in particular, that

most accurately depicts the “allegories of disaster and visions of social catastrophe” that emerged

during the Bush-Cheney era.

In turn, it has been science fiction and horror—in the form of the

postapocalyptic outbreak narrative—that have continued to depict our visions of social

183

catastrophe in the years since. Additionally, Susan Sontag suggests, in her essay “The

Imagination of Disaster,” that by grouping science fiction and horror movies together as modes

of disaster film, the complicity with the abhorrent is shared, even if only to neutralize it.

So it is

not just that these narratives depict the experience but that they help us cope with it, making it

seem more manageable.

It is not as simple as blaming 9/11 and terrorism for this shift, however. The years

following 9/11 have included a variety of other catastrophes, both terrorist and natural,

exacerbating a sense of vulnerability and fatalism. These have ranged from the anthrax attack of

2001 to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the economic meltdown of 2008 to the Gulf oil spill in 2010,

the seemingly endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, to the devastating earthquakes in

Chile, New Zealand, Japan, and Haiti. Max Brooks, writer of World War Z and The Zombie

Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (Three Rivers Press, 2003) and,

explains, “Since 2001, people have been scared. There’s been some really scary stuff that’s been

happening . . . I think people really feel like the system’s breaking down . . . It’s neighbors

knifing each other for food, women being raped, the cops not showing up, children dying of

starvation, an old lady dying in a wheelchair.”

Viruses are our current fear, the way the world now seems most likely to end. For

example, in “Splinter” (Jan. 16, 2015), the first episode of Syfy’s 12 Monkeys (2015–present),

Dr. Cassandra Reilly (Amanda Schull) outlines a brief history of great epidemics in order to

support her argument that it is only a matter of time until we have to confront the next one: “It’s

never been about ‘if.’ It’s always been when,” she declares. Terry Matalas, creator and executive

producer of the show, explains the appeal of viruses: “You get on a plane and somebody sneezes,

and you think, am I going to get that? Every year, the flu seems to be more aggressive. It’s the

184

next step in science gone awry. For a while, the threat was always about a nuke. And now it’s

about viruses. In a way, it’s about absolute destruction.”

Or, as journalist Andy Coghlan

concludes in New Scientist Magazine, infectious diseases are “the new paranoia that’s striking

Western society.”

While this fusion of zombies with viruses establishes a new wave in the outbreak

narrative cycle, the unity is not unprecedented, on- or offscreen. On-screen, in White Zombie,

Bela Lugosi plays Murder Legendre, a voodoo master who turns his victims into zombies via

potions that are little more than primitive pharmaceuticals. Pokornowski, in his article “Insecure

Lives: Zombies, Global Health, and the Totalitarianism of Generalization,” recounts a scene

from the film in which Legendre describes zombification as a “curious medical experiment.”

Offscreen, zombies and viruses have even more commonality. Historically, during the

early years of the HIV crisis, many believed that Haiti was the source for AIDS. The Journal of

the American Medical Association even speculated, under the headline “Night of the Living

Dead,” that HIV might be “spread by Voodoo rituals using human blood.”

Less fantastically,

there are also biological justifications for the fusion of viruses with zombies. Molecular biology

professor Luis P. Villarreal, in an article for the Scientific American, observes that viruses

occupy a netherworld between life and nonlife, allowing them to pull off some remarkable feats

that may sound familiar to zombie aficionados. Villarreal writes, “Although viruses ordinarily

replicate only in living cells, they also have the capacity to multiply, or ‘grow,’ in dead cells and

even to bring them back to life. Amazingly, some viruses can even spring back to their

‘borrowed life’ after being destroyed . . . Viruses are the only known biological entity with this

kind of ‘phoenix phenotype’–the capacity to rise from their own ashes.”

Similarly, Wendell

Stanley, a Nobel Prize–winning virologist, describes viruses as “neither living nor dead,” placing

185

them in “the twilight zone between the living and the nonliving.”

Much as it seems inevitable

that viruses and terrorism would come together in the second wave of the outbreak narrative, it

also seems inevitable that zombies would permeate the third wave of the outbreak narrative,

embodying, as they do, the virus writ large.

Linking the zombie condition to a specific scientific or biological cause, as many of these

recent narratives do, further reinforces the connection between science and zombies. The

specificity of the connection also emphasizes anxieties about microbiological health

interventions, as well as about the dissemination of pharmaceuticals without proper vetting and

research. In Resident Evil, for example, the zombies are a result of the Umbrella Corporation’s t-

Virus. Danny Boyle, director of 28 Days Later, describes his film as “a warning for us as well as

entertainment.”

In 28 Days Later, it is the Rage Virus—a manufactured virus similar to rabies,

somehow caused or triggered by televised images of violence that monkeys are forced to

watch—that causes the zombie outbreak. In Resident Evil: Extinction (Mulcahy, 2007), Dr. Sam

Isaacs (Iain Glenn), the head of Umbrella Corporation’s science division, creates the zombie in

his laboratory, defying regulations and accidentally turning himself into a monster in the process.

In I Am Legend, the Krippin Virus—a manufactured virus based on measles—produces the

zombies. In the novel World War Z, the vaccine for the zombifying “rabies virus” is pushed to

market too soon. Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (2007) also ascribes a scientific cause to the

zombie outbreak. When one of the first men to catch the “zombie virus” goes to a hospital, the

doctor (Josh Brolin) originally describes the symptoms as “chronic viral lesions” in advanced

stages of gangrene and containing epidermal rot, with a “black abscessed tongue,” all of which

reshape the zombie as literally diseased and infected. As the doctor reports to his patient, “What

I’m seeing here is a deep impact wound with several virals and secondary bacterials and that, by

186

the accumulation of denuded tissue around the incision marks, indicates that you’ve had this bite

for over fourteen days.” The zombies in Zombieland (Fleischer, 2009) are the result of a mutated

strain of mad cow disease that became “mad zombie disease.” While there is no specific virus in

The Walking Dead, in season 1, episode 6 of AMC’s The Walking Dead (“TS-19,” Dec. 10,

2010), Dr. Edwin Jenner (Noah Emmerich) documents how the walkers came to be using the

words “microbial,” “parasitic,” and “fungal,” ascribing biological qualities to the walkers and

their “infection.” He explains that the virus “invades the brain like meningitis.” Even Richard

Preston, author of The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story (Anchor Books, 1994), describes Ebola

as triggering “zombie-like behavior.”

The CW television show iZombie (2015–present) dramatically rethinks the zombie

paradigm. Not only does it envision how zombies would manifest in everyday life, without the

requisite apocalypse, but it also subverts the antiquated gender politics common to the genre by

providing viewers with a female zombie protagonist, Olivia Moore (Rose McIver). Moore,

through whose eyes the story is told, absorbs personality traits and memories belonging to the

brains she eats, from frat boy to alcoholic, stripper to housewife. And yet, despite this

reinvention of the template, iZombie digs even deeper into the contemporary zombie text’s

reliance on the trope of infection, portraying “zombie-ness” (also referred to on the show as

“zombie-ism” and “the big z”) as a chronic contagious illness with many similarities to HIV. For

instance, there is much conversation on the show about how to have sex without spreading the

zombie virus. Olivia insists that even people with HIV have sex without infecting their partners,

while Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), her boss and the medical examiner, insists that condoms

will not protect against the transmission of the zombie virus because it is “a hundredth the size of

a typical virus.” (“Max Wager,” Nov. 10, 2015). Rob Thomas, cocreator and executive producer

187

of the show, explains that another aspect of HIV that is important to the show is “the sense that

it’s a condition in which people suffering from it wouldn’t want to tell anyone. Zombies are very

much in the closet.” Thomas also addresses the fact that the zombie virus is worse than HIV in

the sense that condoms cannot stop it from spreading: “We chose to go this route because we

wanted to be able to create a tragic scenario where the couple at the base of the show couldn’t be

together, or at least they couldn’t be together on a sexual level.”

Contagion fosters isolation.

Both infected and infectious, these new zombies are modern-day lepers, hyperbolic

manifestations of the real-life viruses that lurk behind the television set or off the movie screen.

Some, as in iZombie, avoid infecting others, while most zombies only know how to feed and

infect. Fascinatingly, the trope of the infected carrier willfully and sadistically spreading disease

actually played out in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. In her book Bodies: Sex, Violence,

Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend, Gillian Bennett repeats a real-life tale from

Bielsko, Poland: “There is a huge concentration of infected people here. They are terribly

aggressive . . . It is like a vacationland that attracts infected visitors, and the city becomes really

dangerous. Last year they supposedly became so aggressive that they were going after people

with their needles, especially children.” Bennett also recounts stories of HIV-infected gays on

both sides of the Atlantic “who were deliberately spreading (or threatening to spread) the virus

among the straight as well as gay population.”

The most terrifying part of this kind of willful

infection is that, in real life, the carrier most likely looks healthy. Like viral contagion, zombies

contaminate—if not destroy—what they encounter, but unlike viral contagion, you can see them

coming.

And they are coming faster. Viral infection typically creates fast zombies. Infection

results in a state of superanimation as if, media scholar Gwyneth Peaty writes, they are “infected

188

with life, as much as with death.”

In contrast, in the original Night of the Living Dead, a

journalist asks, “Are they slow-moving, chief?” The cop answers, “Yeah. They’re dead.” Even in

the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead (Savini), the heroine describes the horde of

zombies as “so slow” that “we could just walk right past them. I wouldn’t even have to run.”

Now, however, zombies are “a bunch of high-strung car chasers.”

For example the first rule of

survival in Zombieland is cardio: “When the virus struck, for obvious reasons, the first ones to go

were the fatties.” This rule is told to viewers via voice-over as a zombie sprints across a football

field after an overweight victim who is barely able to breathe, much less run. Modern zombies

move so quickly, in fact, that some traditionalists argue they are too fast to be zombies.

Not only do these modern zombies move quickly, but they transform quickly as well.

They can become the living dead without being dead at all. For example, in World War Z, the

time between being bitten and becoming a zombie is fewer than fifteen seconds. As Dawn

Keetley argues in the introduction to her book, We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC’s “The

Walking Dead” and the Fate of the Human, the infected “simply don’t have time to die.”

The

increased speed of contemporary zombies reflects the increased speed of the twenty-first century,

where everything seems to happen at an accelerated speed. Or, as Commander Tom Chandler

(Eric Dane) observes in The Last Ship episode “It’s Not a Rumor” (TNT, June 28, 2015),

“Everything moves a lot faster in the apocalypse.”

Speed is not the only defining characteristic of the contemporary zombie narrative. Guns

also permeate every aspect, much as they appear to be an inescapable part of contemporary

America. This obsession with guns reflects American’s unrelenting emphasis on security and

protection, and the fact that, in whatever society the characters build, these factors must come

first.

In zombie narratives, there is inevitably a hyperbolization of physical structures: building

189

walls, fortifying existing walls, and barricading windows. In fact, quite literally, the central

characters take shelter in the West Georgia Correctional Facility during season 3 of The Walking

Dead. Unlike the Mad Max movies, where the battlements are used to preserve resources, in

zombie narratives there is a constant emphasis on the need to barricade, to isolate and protect in

order to keep others at bay. This arguably reflects our anxiety over our inability to contain things.

We cannot contain within the media body or within the physical body. Boundaries are

increasingly porous, and zombies, like terrorists, do not respect the rules of containment.

In spite of their fetishization of guns, however, zombie narratives are not patriotic odes to

government supremacy, military power, or “the establishment.” Quite the contrary. Not only has

the zombie narrative evolved from reflecting fears of the Cold War and potential nuclear disaster

to more contemporary fears of viral outbreak and the ensuing social breakdown, but it also

echoes concerns about overly strong and opportunistic governments, an out-of-control military,

as well as the increasingly dominant realms of science and technology. For instance, when

Steven Kane and Hank Steinberg adapted William Brinkley’s novel The Last Ship for their

television show of the same name (TNT, 2014–present), they were drawn to “the concept of a

lone war ship surviving a global catastrophe.” However, they discarded the “cold war aspects of

the book, trading a nuclear holocaust for a global pandemic.”

And one result of this global

pandemic was out-of-control authority, politicians and criminals using the situation for their own

personal gain. Even while it fetishizes guns, The Walking Dead does not celebrate the constant

need for violence but, rather, asks at what cost it comes. 28 Days Later questions the dangers of

science and technology. World War Z questions the repercussions of too much fighting and too

many wars. Resident Evil questions what happens when corporations have unlimited monopolies

and no oversight. I Am Legend questions the repercussions of playing God. Each of these stories

190

is cautionary, if not outwardly critical. Each of these narratives emphasizes the direct culpability

our civilization plays in its own demise.

For example, the Syfy network show 12 Monkeys uses a time travel device to jump back

and forth between the apocalyptic future and a dangerous present in order to try to stop the

outbreak that will wipe out humanity. Similar to the movie on which it is loosely based, James

Cole (Bruce Willis in the film, Aaron Stanford in the show), is sent back in time to the “present”

to stop the plague from happening. Season 1 executive producer Natalie Chaidez explains that

the significance of the time travel element speaks to a yearning to being able to go back in time

to fix our problems: “It’s the sense of the world being in jeopardy and that we long to be able to

go back to a time [where we could fix it]. If we could just go back and fix it, if we could just go

back and stop global warming, if we could just go back and stop any of the threads that we see

leading to the threats that we have now, I think people long for that idea.”

This revisits the

issue of blame that I discussed in chapter 1, and the notion that we know our culpability in our

own destruction. It is also a commentary on our failure as a society to look to the long term, our

preference for short-term fixes, and the pessimistic certainty that—without a magical twist—the

world is doomed.

Civilization is also culpable in its own downfall in World War Z. The book, in particular,

emphasizes that those in power ignored initial warnings about the zombie threat, just one of

many government mistakes in a world full of greed, arrogance, and ignorance. The American

military had also been weakened by too much fighting, by endless wars on drugs and terror, and

as such, Travis D’Ambrosia, the supreme allied commander, recounts in the book, “no amount of

incentives could fill our depleted ranks, no payment bonuses or term reductions, or online

recruiting tools . . . This generation had had enough, and that’s why when the undead began to

191

devour our country, we were almost too weak and vulnerable to stop them.”

In stark contrast to the pro-America, promilitary narratives so common after 9/11, the

military—and authority figures in general—are often portrayed as dangerous and/or out of

control in the postapocalypse outbreak narrative. For example, as in 28 Days Later, the primary

villains in Planet Terror are not zombies but military thugs.

In The Walking Dead, the real

threat may have become other humans, but we also see at the beginning of episode “TS-19”

(AMC, Dec. 5, 2010), in a flashback to the initial outbreak, military personnel shooting doctors,

nurses, patients—anyone in the hospital. The evil antagonist in seasons 3 and 4 of The Walking

Dead, known as “The Governor” (David Morrissey) is much more threatening than any zombie.

He rules the town of Woodbury with sadistic brutality, killing anyone he deems a potential

threat. Even Rick, the protagonist, declares at the end of The Walking Dead season 2 finale

(“Beside the Dying Fire,” Mar. 18, 2012) that,“this isn’t a democracy anymore.” Negan (Jeffrey

Dean Morgan) becomes the new evil antagonist in seasons 6 and 7. As the leader of a group of

survivors called “The Saviors,” Negan is ruthless and cruel, maintaining his control through

vicious methods, forcing local communities to give him supplies with the threat of death, and

eventually taking over Rick’s group. Similarly, even though it is done in a comedic fashion, in

The Last Man on Earth (FX, 2015–present), Phil (Will Forte) appoints himself president via a

rigged election. He uses his self-appointed title as a way to justify various efforts to maintain

order in the new society, including almost murdering two of the other characters. These types of

situations propel conflicts between self-interest and public interest, between short- and long-term

needs, between democratic action and authoritarianism. When survival is at stake, there is no

time for negotiation, and yet absolute power can still corrupt absolutely.

When military figures and authority are not presented as dangerous or corrupt, it is

192

because they do not appear at all—or because they are totally useless. The uselessness of the

CDC—a representative of the government in that it is a federal agency under the Department of

Health and Human Services—is also emphasized in the title sequence for the Dawn of the Dead

remake. Interspersed with rapidly edited shots of burning buildings, stampeding mobs, masked

military personnel, and animations of cells spreading, there is a CDC press conference where the

repeated answer is “We don’t know.” (“Is it a virus?” “We don’t know.” “How does it spread? Is

it airborne?” “That is a possibility. We don’t know.” “Is this a health hazard or a military

threat?” “Both.” “Are these people alive or dead?” “We don’t know.”) This sequence is

significant for its fusion of health hazard and military threat (after all, a zombie is emphatically

both) and its depiction of a CDC and a government that is unable to help.

At the end of season 1 of The Walking Dead, the lead characters finally reach their

destination, the Atlanta offices of the CDC, in episode “TS-19” (AMC, Dec. 5, 2010). They

assume that the CDC will have answers and will be able to provide assistance and protection.

The first shocking realization, upon arrival, is that the entire agency is deserted. Dr. Jenner is the

only scientist left, and his response to their arrival is a curt: “Why are you here? What do you

want?” There is no offer of welcome or assistance. Instead, the CDC is little more than a fortress.

Ironically, as the door closes and the group rushes inside, a map of the world is displayed on the

wall in front of them behind the CDC logo. This proves an unsettling reminder of how an

organization once driven to disseminate information and assistance globally has become little

more than a deserted, useless, and isolated prison.

The second shocking realization is that Dr. Jenner, as the CDC’s sole representative, has

no explanation for the zombie outbreak. Jenner plays out our nightmare that, when the big

outbreak hits, the CDC will not be able to stop it or even know what to stop. “I did the best I

193

could in the time I had,” he says, defeated and defensive. Not only is the CDC unable to help, but

the characters survive in spite of the CDC—the building that is supposed to protect them almost

kills them.

Jenner introduces the characters to Vi, the CDC’s supercomputer that controls the

building’s systems and functions. Vi activates high-impulse thermobaric fuel-air explosives to

destroy the building and everything inside it following a power outage, ensuring that no

infectious diseases can escape the facility. This is referred to as a “full decontamination.” In a

sequence that appears to be a clear reference to the original Andromeda Strain (Wise, 1971), the

clock ticks downward as the team is trapped, locked in by Jenner and unable to halt the

inevitable technologically induced and controlled decontamination.

In the Andromeda Strain, the virus causes the lab’s seals to deteriorate, which activates

the nuclear self-destruct countdown. Dr. Mark Hall (James Olson) manages to disable the bomb

that was going to “decontaminate” the laboratory in the nick of time. In the remake, aired on

A&E in May 2008, a similar succession of events occur, only this time they are triggered by

Colonel Ferrus (Louis Ferreira) blackmailing Dr. Barton (Viola Barton) to keep a sample of the

Andromeda virus. The casing around Barton’s sample disintegrates, causing the contamination

sensor to set off the lab’s self-destruct sequence. In an attempt to deactivate the sequence, Keane

(Ricky Schroder) and Chou (Daniel Dae Kim) both die, deaths that do not occur in the original.

However, in both movies and the book, someone reaches the control panel and deactivates the

sequence with seconds to spare, saving the lab from a nuclear blast. In The Walking Dead,

however, there is no deactivation. Jenner eventually relents and opens the doors to the

underground. Rick then blast out one of the CDC building’s windows with a grenade handed to

him by Carol, enabling them to escape. The building erupts into flames behind them.

194

Vi, the supercomputer, seems also to reference the Red Queen, the supercomputer at the

heart of the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil. “You’re all going to die down here,” the Red

Queen tells her similarly trapped survivors, refusing to release them. In order to prevent the t-

Virus from spreading, she locks everyone inside while trying to flood the laboratories and kill

everyone with Halon gas. The survivors have to outsmart her in order to escape, much like in

The Walking Dead and both versions of The Andromeda Strain.

Another notorious supercomputer and source of inspiration could be HAL (Douglas

Rain) from the film 2001 (Kubrick, 1968). HAL (a Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic

computer) is, much like Vi and the Red Queen, an all-knowing computer that controls the

Discovery One spacecraft. Our association with him is primarily auditory rather than visual,

much as it is with Vi and the Red Queen. We hear his calm voice, cool and conversational, as he

orchestrates the demise of the astronauts on board, his visual presence limited to a blinking red

camera eye. Rather than have his malfunction reported, HAL attempts to destroy the humans he

is meant to protect and assist, all in the interest of preserving the mission. 2001, with the

character of HAL, became a seminal depiction of our worst fears of technology gone mad, of

what happens when technology is given too much power. This fear, of technology and artificial

intelligence turning on its creator, is also the central plot in the film Westworld (1973), written

and directed by Michael Crichton (author of the novel it is based on, as well as The Andromeda

Strain) and remade for HBO in 2016 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. In the book, the film, and

the television show, robots literally turn on their human masters as a result of an infectious

disease. In the earlier book and film, the disease is clearly biological in spirit, as the notion of

computer viruses had still not yet emerged. The X-Files episode “Ghost in the Machine” (Fox,

Oct. 29, 1993) deals with a similar premise, as a sophisticated computer begins to engineer the

195

deaths of those who might threaten its control over the infrastructure of an office building,

demonstrating the continued currency of this particular brand of fear.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS outbreak portrayed just how inept and inadequate

the science and medical communities could be at finding a cure, and how inept and inadequate

governments could be at looking after their citizens. It continues to be clear that the American

government, military, and health departments cannot protect their citizens, as evidenced by

incidents like 9/11, Katrina, and the Flint water scandal. This has been a pattern during the end of

the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, and it is one that continues to

resonate in film and television. Max Brooks admits that one of the key inspirations for The

Zombie Survival Guide was the HIV outbreak and the lack of response it received: “I watched

this horrible virus just murder millions of people, and our government did nothing.”

The failure

of the government to keep its own citizens safe only reminds us of how vulnerable and alone we

truly are.

In other outbreak narratives, like 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Contaminated Man

(Hickox, 2000), I Am Legend, and Toxic Skies (Erin, 2008), science is not just missing in action

but explicitly condemned for developing the virus that leads to the inevitable outbreak.

The CDC plotline does not exist in the original Walking Dead comic, and its insertion

into the television show provides a telling critique not only of science but of technology as well.

The high-tech fortress initially offers comfort and safety, but beyond that, the elaborate

technological equipment cannot do anything to help our characters.

In fact, technology seems

out to destroy our heroes in narratives such as The Andromeda Strain, Resident Evil, or The

Walking Dead—and this theme is a pervasive one.

Much as we may fear the impact of too much technology, it is the loss of technology that

196

seems to be the tipping point that turns an urban center into a dystopian wasteland, sending us

back to the natural world. When technology fails (or goes rogue), protagonists are forced to get

by in a world without electricity, computers, televisions, or information networks. The loss of

technology speaks to a lack of control over the environment, nature, or the world around us,

depicting, instead, a return of the natural world, a world we thought we had captured and

controlled. Mary Anne Doane portrays catastrophe as the “conjecture of the failure of technology

and the resulting confrontation with death.”

For instance, the loss of technology figured

significantly into the trauma of 9/11, when cell phones did not work, planes were grounded, and

television broadcasting was interrupted. In our technologically reliant world, it is when the

Internet stops working, when technology fails, that the gravity of a disaster hits close to home.

Without technology, there is no communication, no safety net, no one at the other end of the line,

much like the inactive 9-1-1 service in Containment (CW 2016). There is only disconnect, a

collapse of the network, a further reminder of how vulnerable and alone we truly are.

This loss of technology is especially significant because it is so integrally tied to

contemporary life and social interaction. Twenty-first century culture depends on technology so

much that it turns us into metaphorical zombies. A popular Internet meme shows a group of

adolescents walking side by side, headed in the same direction. All of them have the now

familiar posture—elbows bent, hands raised, heads tilted downwards, attention focused on their

phones. The text reads, “What’s the point of being afraid of the zombie apocalypse when you’re

already a zombie?” We are already detached and de-individualized, shuffling in groups toward

some unclear purpose, connected via our online networks, making it all the more traumatic when

that technology fails, when Facebook crashes, when the Wi-Fi network does not load, when

Netflix refuses to play. We have become zombies without the guiding voice of a master to lead

197

us.

In the title sequence to the zombie parody Shaun of the Dead (2004), director Edgar

Wright portrays with alarming accuracy the seeming equivalence between actual zombies and

those of us on handheld devices or trudging through repetitive labor, with little awareness of our

actions or surroundings. The sequence, in particular, emphasizes the zombifying characteristics

of working-class life. A series of shots features an average morning—a man pushing shopping

carts, cashiers swiping products at the register, a line of people staring at their phones while

waiting for the bus—everyone emotionless and robotic. Wright emphasizes not only the lack of

individuality inherent in modern-day life but also the mind-numbing repetition that consumes

much of our daily routines, especially due to our reliance on technology rather than actual

craftsmanship and labor.

The difference between zombies and low-wage workers is, in this Shaun of the Dead

sequence, intentionally difficult to determine, emphasizing that we may already be partially

zombified. This resonance is nothing new. Zombies originated as slave labor during a time when

American marines used forced labor to perform menial tasks during the American occupation of

Haiti at the start of the twentieth century. Fred Botting compares zombies to symptoms of

“modern mechanical processes,” with living labor having the life sucked out of it, “rendering

workers the mere appendages—puppets, automata—to the mechanisms of production.”

Steve

Beard describes zombies as the “disenfranchised underclass of the material world . . . a

projection of postmodern capitalism’s anxiety about itself.”

It is not only low-wage work that

turns us into zombies but modern life itself. Shaun of the Dead plays on Shaun’s (Simon Pegg)

utmost devotion to routine such that he does not even notice that his village has been overtaken

by zombies, so blind is he to the world around him. Similarly, Shaun’s best friend and roommate

198

Ed (Nick Frost) spends his days staring with glazed eyes at the television, playing video game

after video game. In fact, at the end of the film, even though Ed has since become a zombie, he

continues to play video games, merely chained up in a shed in Shaun’s backyard. Little has

changed. In the final sequence of the film, we also see that zombies have been absorbed into the

workforce, taking over low-paying jobs based on mindless repetition. This seems like a reference

to the original Haitian zombies, who were created to be slaves working in the fields. Based on

these films, the fear is not that we will one day turn into zombies but that we have already

become them. As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze predicted in 1990, we no longer need to be

separated and disciplined because we discipline ourselves through routine (and are even

encouraged to do so).

These tropes are so familiar that they were even repurposed for an episode of

Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants that aired on September 29, 2006 (“Once Bitten,” season

4, episode 73b). In the episode, SpongeBob’s neighbor Squidward walks outside to find that his

yard is covered in slime from SpongeBob’s pet snail, Gary. “This isn’t the first time you’ve

soiled my yard with your revolting excretions,” Squidward shouts at Gary. Squidward tries to

keep Gary out by building a tall fence around his yard. “Now I feel safe,” he sighs happily,

reclining inside his new fort. Unfortunately, like with every other outbreak narrative, borders are

porous, and Gary still manages to climb over the fence and drip his excretions on Squidward’s

head. To everyone’s surprise, Gary also bites Squidward. “This isn’t like you!” SpongeBob

exclaims, and they both agree that something appears to be wrong with Gary. Squidward says

that he hopes Gary has had all his shots: “For rabies?” “Yup.” “Snail pox and softshell dance?”

“Yupie.” “Bronchitis, lumpy-bump trump, teen angst?” “Yup, yup, yup.” But then Patrick

suddenly appears and says, “Well, let’s not forget the worst of them all: Mad Snail Disease.”

199

It turns out Gary has not been vaccinated for this, and now it seems Squidward has

caught it as well. Patrick delivers the bad news: “This disease will ravage your body with

bloodshot eyes, loss of balance, messy pants, ticklish rib cage, severely untrimmed toenails, and

finally, the bite from that infected snail will turn you into . . . a zombie.” Panic breaks out all

over town, as random citizens exclaim that they, too, have been bitten. “Mad snail on the loose!

If he bites you, he’ll turn you into a zombie!” Everyone races around, screaming in total hysteria.

At this point, a “News Blast” entitled “Terror in a Shell” interrupts the episode. The voice-over

proclaims that “fear and disease is spreading like wildfire as a killer snail has been biting the

citizens of Bikini Bottom, infecting them with Mad Snail Disease. Ask any old fish on the street,

and they’ll tell you that germs enter through the bite radius, traveling upstream until the entire

host body is full of Mad Snail Disease!”

We then cut to Action News Reporter Perch Perkins, who interviews Squidward, the

“first victim of the epidemic.” Perkins asks him when he suspected he was a zombie. Squidward

begins to detail his symptoms, which prompts another local resident to declare that he, too, is

infected and that it must be spreading through the air, since some people with symptoms have

not been bitten. Perkins shouts out that everyone is doomed “to a horrible demise,” all because of

a “diseased snail.” The townspeople turn into zombies and chase after SpongeBob who flees to

the safety of a local restaurant. At first, the employees do not want to let him in, asking, “How do

we know you’re not one of those voracious flesh-eaters?” He is forced to convince the others that

he is not a zombie because he has a photo of his best friend in his wallet. The hysteria spreads to

such an extent that Old Man Jenkins asks, “Who’s to say we’re not all zombies?” Everyone

screams.

Gary slithers onto the scene, and SpongeBob says to him, “All those people think you’re

200

a monster. But I know you’re just a snail.” Unfortunately, Gary chooses that moment to bite

SpongeBob, causing Harold to freak out and declare that Gary must be quarantined immediately

before he bites everyone. The citizens gang up and try to wrest Gary away from SpongeBob—

“Seize the snail!”—while SpongeBob tries to protect his beloved pet. At just that moment, Dr.

Gill Gilliam orders everyone to halt, presenting himself as snail disease expert. He tells them that

Mad Snail Disease does not actually exist, that it is an urban legend. “Does that mean we’re not

zombies?” Patrick asks. “Of course not,” he replies. “No one is. It’s just mass hysteria . . . All the

supposed symptoms are just common ailments.” Gary’s strange behavior was merely the result

of a splinter. As soon as the splinter is removed, Gary goes back to normal. However,

Squidward’s zombie-esque behavior continues. SpongeBob reminds Squidward that he is not a

zombie, and Squidward nods before replying in a monotone, “Oh, yes I am.” Getting behind the

cash register, Squidward goes back to work. Robotically, he utters the familiar lines: “Welcome

to the Krusty Krab. May I take your order?” And so the episode ends, reminding us of the

dangers of misinformation and hysteria as well as the incurable zombie disease known as low-

wage work.

I Am Legend also looks at the difference between humans and the “other,” however, the

book and the film do this in significantly different ways. Near the end of the 2007 film

adaptation, Anna (Alice Braga) arrives, disrupting Neville’s solitary existence. She is not

infected and, along with a child, plans to make her way to a survivors’ camp in Vermont. It turns

out that Neville’s blood contains the cure, so he gives her a vial of his blood moments before he

blows himself and a horde of zombies up, thus allowing her to escape. This, naturally, makes his

character sympathetic and admirable, reinforcing whatever tenuous distinction there was

between him and the zombies.

201

The film’s original ending—referred to as the “alternate ending”—however, is quite

different. Neville, Anna, and the child are in the underground lab as the zombies invade, just as

in the official version. However, in this case, the leader of the zombies, who had been pursuing

Neville ever since Neville captured a female zombie for his experiments, draws a butterfly on the

wall of the lab. Neville remembers that the female zombie has a butterfly tattoo and makes the

connection. He wheels the female zombie out into the main room. The leader and the female

subject have a loving reunion, and then all the zombies leave. Neville looks at the photos of all

the zombies he has killed in the guise of research, as if realizing the repercussions of his work,

realizing that the zombies were not as dehumanized as he made them out to be.

The differences between the two endings are significant because the alternate ending

humanizes the zombies and complicates Neville’s “heroic” status, reinforcing the blurring

between the two types of being. This echoes the conclusion of the Matheson’s book, where, after

having killed hundreds of the infected vampires, Neville realizes that “many of the infected are

still very much sentient, rational beings, however transformed by vampiris, . . . [and] it is he who

is the Dracula-like monster in this new world . . . still clinging to a nonexistent world of property

and privilege.”

Matheson collapses the traditional distinction between protagonist and monster,

giving us zombies with consciousness and community rather than what we might expect,

questioning both what it means to be human and whether being human is better. However, test

audiences did not like the original ending, prompting the studio to replace it with the current

“theatrical ending,” thus changing the moral thrust of the story.

By proposing that we are not that different from—or better than—zombies, clear-cut

definitions of monster versus human fall apart, much like clear-cut definitions of life versus

death. For example, in the original Dawn of the Dead (1978), when one of the characters is asked

202

what the zombies are, he responds, “They’re us, that’s all.” This blurring between “us” and

“other,” infected and uninfected, is dramatized in 28 Days Later, when American soldiers

instructed to shoot the infected end up shooting everyone because they cannot tell who is sick

and who is not. Similarly, in I Am Legend, Neville’s wife initially fails the eye scan, incorrectly

demarcated as infected. She is about to be dragged off to the infected zone, but Neville insists

she get checked again. Luckily for her, the eye scan is correct the second time, but in most cases,

when in doubt, when the possibility of viral or zombie infection lurks, elimination is the only

sure option. This inability to determine friend or foe, infected or healthy, is compounded when

friends and family become infected, and the threat they create is not immediately apparent. It

might not become apparent, in fact, until it is too late, which is why the only safe course of

action is to be quick and ruthless.

On The Walking Dead, the fact that all humans contain the “zombie virus,” that those

who are not yet zombies already have the zombie virus within them, blurs whatever binary there

might have been between zombie and human. Everyone is either already a zombie or will

become one after death. Escaping infection is impossible since everyone is infected, thus

emphasizing the difficulty of trying to defend one’s self against what is already inside. As

Bishop writes, “If the early twenty-first century ushered in the viral zombie (notably in 28 Days

Later), it has also, in The Walking Dead, introduced the viral human.”

The viral human confuses distinctions between human and monster, living and dead. As

Rick says in the final episode of season 2 (“Beside the Dying Fire,” Mar. 18, 2012): “We’re all

infected.” At the end of volume 4 of the graphic novel, Rick goes even further, “You know that

when we die—we become them. You think we hide behind walls to protect us from the walking

dead? Don’t you get it? We are the walking dead!”

This blurring is literalized in season 1,

203

episode 2 (“Guts,” Nov. 7, 2010) when Rick and Glenn smear zombie guts on themselves to

make themselves smell like zombies so that they can slip undetected through a horde of zombies,

a technique used often on the show. If the zombie complicates rules of internal and external—

functioning even as body parts dangle and limbs are lost—Rick and Glenn complicate rules of

external and internal by rubbing zombie guts on their bodies. In that same episode, before Rick

chops up a zombie, he looks at the man’s wallet to see who he used to be. While showing the

group the man’s driver’s license, Rick says, “He used to be like us. Worrying about bills, the

rent, or the Super Bowl.” In this case, the horror comes not from the monsters roaming the earth

but from the realization that these monsters were once human, and that those still human will one

day become monsters, both literally and metaphorically.

Shane, in The Walking Dead episode “Pretty Much Dead Already” (Nov. 27, 2011), says

the walkers are not people because “all they do is kill.” And yet, our protagonists do an awful lot

of killing. In fact, at the end of the episode “Twice As Far” (Mar. 20, 2016), Carol (Melissa

McBride) exiles herself from the town of Alexandria because she is not up to the task of being

one of its residents. The town, as a desirable location, is under constant threat of attack. Carol

must leave because, as she puts it, “I cannot love anyone because I cannot kill for anyone.” She

says this even though she has already killed, many times. In The Walking Dead universe, if you

care for anyone, you must be able to kill to protect them. Ironically, in the episode “Heads Up”

(Nov. 22, 2015), Sam (Major Dodson) asks Carol, “If you kill people do you turn into one of the

monsters?” Carol replies, “The only thing that keeps you from becoming a monster is killing.”

At the very end of the season 2 finale of The Strain (“Night Train,” Oct. 4, 2015), the professor

declares: “In order to defeat the Master, we must be as cold and ruthless, as savage as he is—and

yet, without becoming monsters ourselves.”

204

Language may set humans apart from the zombies, as do rituals, rules, and guidelines, but

all of these feel pointless in a world without order. So what happens as language and time

disappear? Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn), for example, winds his watch every day at the same time,

this routine providing him with a sort of solace and structure. However irrelevant the action

might now be, it helps him hold onto a vestige of his former life, affirming his difference from

the zombies. In season 1, episode 4 (“Vatos,” Nov. 21, 2010), Andrea (Laurie Holden) holds her

sister’s dying body and cries that she does not know what to do. Traditional rituals and

guidelines for dealing with the dead and the dying no longer apply when the dead do not stay

dead. The zombies force a disrespect for bodies, for death, and for life by questioning what it

means to be alive.

Humans will also become monsters if the definition of monster is “an abject part of the

self.”

As decaying bodies that will not hide, zombies remind us of the ugliness and terror of

death. The more we try to distance ourselves from the mortality of our bodies, the more zombies

provide an unpleasant reminder. We, too, will one day rot. Zombies pursue us, much as death

does. Normally, we manage to shield ourselves from both death and infection—the former

relegated to crematoriums, mortuaries, and graveyards, the latter to hospitals and quarantine

zones—but zombies make the two very real and present. As philosopher Julia Kristeva puts it,

“Corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”

What is a zombie but a

walking corpse determined to turn you into one, too? Sociologist Chris Schilling explains that

death is especially disturbing to modern individuals because it represents “the precise point

where human control ends in a world which is orientated to the successful achievement of

control.”

And zombies are, as the title goes, the walking dead. Simon Pegg, writer of Shaun of

the Dead, explains that zombies embody our fear of “our own death, personified. The physical

205

manifestation of that thing we fear the most.”

In the Dawn of the Dead remake, Kenneth (Ving Rhames) asks about Fort Pastor, a

nearby US Army base, if everyone there is dead. Steve’s (Ty Burrell) response is that everyone is

“dead-ish.” Zombies are both alive and dead, alive in terms of being a threat, but dead in terms

of being “excluded from the polis and the fortifications of security and political order.”

This

echoes Primo Levi’s description of the “anonymous mass” he experienced at Auschwitz. People

who were once human had become “non-men who march and labor in silence,” arguably alive

but without a voice, either literal or symbolic. The zombies represent the indistinguishable

masses who can be counted—in terms of statistics and numbers—but do not “count.” Italian

philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that the concentration camps were “the place in which the

most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized” precisely because the

inhabitants were divested of political status and reduced to bare life.

Alive enough to be a

threat, but too dead to matter. Or, as political theorist Hannah Arendt describes, the horror of the

concentration camps “can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it

stands outside of life and death.”

Significantly, the release of Night of the Living Dead coincided with a change in the

medical definition of death. Professor Luckhurst describes how the invention of the Intensive

Care Unit (ICU), combined with a new generation of more effective artificial respirators, would

mean that patients with a complete absence of cortical activity—who were “brain dead”—could

continue “to live on within the biotechnical apparatus of the ICU.” Death was shifted “from a

decisive moment to an ongoing process.” Beyond the fact that these medical innovations

complicated the determination of when, exactly, someone was dead, Luckhurst also points out

just how many times the plot of a zombie narrative “is launched from the recovery room of an

206

abandoned ICU.”

28 Days Later and The Walking Dead, for instance, both begin with very

similar hospital sequences: Jim and Rick wake up postcoma to see the wreckage around them.

As zombies blur the boundary between life and death, so, too, do they blur the boundaries

between self and other, echoing the same kind of blurring happening offscreen. Globalization

and technology have caused a process of de-differentiation and homogenization; corporate logics

and networks have replaced cultural diversity and individuality. The more technology and

software quantify and shape our everyday lives, the more standards have become unified,

reducing individuality and turning consumers into little more than dots on a curve. Similarly, the

tearing apart of skin, the consumption of bodies, and the exchange of infectious fluids common

in a zombie movie convert everyone not only into zombies but into a homogeneous mass. This

mass, with its permeable bodies and unstable categories of “otherness,” is at the heart of both

viral outbreaks and zombies.

To illustrate, zombies, when they appear in The Walking Dead comic, are often drawn

with a grey wash that renders them “as one grim mass,” further distinguishing them from the

more individualized human characters.

The zombies are faceless and forgettable. They exist as

the despecified, the ultimate multitude. One zombie is interchangeable with the next, while it is

our individuality that defines us and makes us human.

Another example of this loss of individuality—the human replaced with the despecified

mass—occurs in Resident Evil: Extinction (Mulcahy, 2007), where there are countless Alice

clones, each one an identical physical match. The most disturbing part about them may not be

that Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) created them in a lab, but how identical they are—and how

disposable. A few minutes into the film, we see piles of them, discarded and dead in a ditch,

failures in Isaacs’s experiments. While they are not zombies, the impact comes from the sheer

207

quantity, the disposability, much like with zombies.

The loss of individuality can be seen offscreen in the contemporary treatment of people

as “populations,” aggregated numbers rather than individuals. This shift reflects Michel

Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, which he describes as “a set of processes such as the ratio of

births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on.”

This kind of

disciplinary administration of populations entails a reliance on categorization and statistics, all of

which favors the mass over the individual. James A. Tyner argues that the specific emergence of

biopolitics was, in fact, “predicated on the institutionalization and standardization of censuses

and population-related concepts . . . New technologies of power—including population forecasts,

statistical estimates, and various other demographic measures and concepts—were applied not to

individual bodies, but to a ‘global mass,’ collectivities and aggregates, or, simply put,

populations.”

The process of homogenization encouraged by globalization and technology has

been further facilitated by the treatment of people as populations, as aggregated numbers and

statistics.

Timothy J. Reiss, in an essay entitled “Calculating Humans: Mathematics, War, and the

Colonial Calculus,” traces the process of how “mathematics could become such a constructive,

manipulating, and instrumentalist knowledge—notably of people” back to the sixteenth century,

where “the idea of calculation . . . gave true understanding of the physical world and human

actions.” Calculation of people would become an essential component of military strategy and

management, for instance, where “a strict calculus” would determine the “distribution of human

bodies on the battlefield, in camp, or on the march.”

Once the initial counting is complete, then comes the task of “creating divisions between

different groups and sacrificing (or abandoning) some to secure others.” This technique relies

208

heavily on impersonal statistics and categories, a limited visibility that “results in the erasure of

the individual.”

The shift to population-thinking involves a shift from a mode of power

predicated on discipline and repression—Foucault provides the example of “the ancient patria

potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the right to ‘dispose’ of the life of his

children and his slaves”

—to one predicated on “fostering life.” To foster life most efficiently

may require the deaths of those who pose a “risk” to the population’s health and well-being. As

risks are always only potential, however, this means individuals may be punished for what they

might do or what they represent. It is about probabilities and risk minimization, rather than

“punishment” or “correction.” Thus, for example, the harsher sentences for crack cocaine versus

regular cocaine use in the 1990s were not about differences in the nature of the offense or any

individual offenders but about differences in populations. It was about minimizing the risks to

society posed by a group of people presumed to be dangerous. Correction was not the point;

corralling and containing risk was.

During a viral outbreak, not only are the infected lumped together, individuality

abandoned, but they are also considered less worthy, less human, and more expendable. The

infected, along with anyone deemed potentially infectious, are dehumanized in the interests of

security.

This echoes the core tenant of necropolitics, which, as outlined by philosopher and

political theorist Achille Mbembe, emphasizes that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty

resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must

die.”

In the World War Z novel, for example, under the infamous Redeker Plan, not only are

uninfected citizens routinely killed in order to be certain that the infected have been eradicated,

but they are even used as bait. Their purpose is specifically to distract the undead so that others

can escape. Once you have been infected, or once you are within the proximity of someone who

209

is infected, or even once your death can somehow serve the “greater good,” your traditional

rights as a citizen evaporate. Redeker even devises calculations for who is worthy of being saved

and who is not, based on criteria which includes IQ, geography, military capability, and

fertility.

The Redeker Plan was omitted from the movie.

Biopolitical thinking finds a visual analogue in the zombie horde, but the shambling

horde is also a reminder that life in such a society has no guarantees. We are all equally

expendable if the health and well-being of the masses requires it. For example, in season 4 of

The Walking Dead, Carol (Melissa McBride) kills Karen (Melissa Ponzio) and David (Brandon

Carroll) and burns their bodies after they both come down with the flu—even though they had

been quarantined—in an attempt to keep the flu from spreading. In the episode “Indifference”

(AMC, Nov. 3, 2013), Carol tells Rick when he confronts her about the killing, “I stepped up. I

had to do something.” Rick points out that even though he, too, has killed people to save the

group and himself, he has never killed a member of their surrogate family. Carol points out that

he did, in fact, do so, referring to Shane. “He was going to kill me,” Rick explains. “So were

they,” she responds. “They were going to kill all of us.” Rick tells her that she did not know that,

but while it may not have been a certainty—and the flu ends up spreading anyway—Carol did

what she felt she had to do in order to minimize the risk.

Alternatively, we are all equally complicit in the murder of others—whether real,

symbolic, or social murder—to save ourselves and our way of life. Neoliberalism is a regime that

fosters self-discipline, self-control, and self-protection; in other words, it involves a competition

for survival.

Our ability to thrive (our very survival) may depend on the selective

murder/torture/suppression of “others” (those who do not fit into the aggregate, who are not

members of the population that count), an ever-evolving group—sometimes Japanese, sometimes

210

Africans, sometimes Muslims, sometimes Jews, always the poor. Biopolitics requires

necropolitics; the zombies seem a walking reminder of that connection.

Another way to look at the division between “those who must be protected” (the elite)

and “those they must be protected from” (the masses) is by imposing the parable of the 1 percent.

The target of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that began in 2011 was the wealthiest 1

percent of the United States, a small percentage of people who control nearly half the wealth of

the country. Professor Carlo Rotella posits the argument that many of the changes made to the

original I Am Legend book for its 2007 film adaptation—such as the conversion of the vampires

from the book into the zombies of the film—were to retrofit the text for the twenty-first century

by incorporating elements of the tensions between the “1 percent” and the “99 percent.”

Vampires, after all, are “cosmopolitan, cerebral, queer, often grown rich over their extended

lifespans,” while zombies are “local, dimwitted, gruntingly conventional in their desire for living

flesh, and utterly without possessions over the course of their brutish existences,” Rotella

maintains. Vampire narratives put hunger in the hands of the elite, whereas the recent crop of

zombie narratives depicts the conflict of “the special few against the undifferentiated and

perpetually hungry many.” Unlike the modest, average Neville of the book, Will Smith’s Neville

is a well-educated and wealthy doctor, surrounded by pricey art in his multimillion-dollar home,

forced to defend himself from the ravenous masses outside.

The movie I Am Legend also

reimagines the typical zombie paradigm by situating the conflict as one man against many

zombies, rather than a team of survivors versus an attacking horde, a reimagining that supports

the parable of the 1 percent. Luckhurst points out a similar dynamic during a scene in World War

Z, where the infection breaks out in the crowded economy seats of an aircraft before making its

way toward first class. Naturally, the diseased poor are to blame.

211

The parable of the 1 percent also plays a part in the TNT series The Last Ship. In the

episode “No Place Like Home” (Aug. 24, 2014), when Dr. Scott (Rhona Mitra) discovers

Granderson (Alfre Woodard) is killing those she deems unworthy, Granderson retorts that “the

Plague killed indiscriminately. The artists, scientists, thinkers, so few and precious to begin with,

were wiped out. It upended the social order and prolonged the Dark Ages a hundred and fifty

years. I cannot let that happen here . . . It is my duty to help the right people first. The people

whose survival will ensure the future of our entire society and all that we hold dear.” By the

“right people,” she means those artists, scientists, and thinkers she deems part of her 1 percent.

The elite few gather behind protective walls, while those outside fall ill. However, as

Commanding Officer Tom Chandler (Eric Dane) realizes moments later, they do not fall ill by

chance. They are injected intentionally, killed by whatever “medicine” they are being given by

the men in gas masks. Trucks then move the bodies to a nearby factory where they are burned for

power to fuel the city. Granderson not only decides which members of the human race are worth

keeping, but she turns the rest (the 99 percent) into fuel. Some individuals are arguably “more

human” or “better humans” than others.

So the question is this: Is the zombie narrative commenting on neoliberal capitalism’s

particular way of fostering life (its emphasis on self-discipline and competition)? Is it a critique

aimed at initiating a shift in the regimes of biopower? Or is it advocating this life strategy, since,

after all, these narratives show us—over and over—what happens without self-discipline, self-

control, or self-protection: death. Much like how horror films condemn promiscuity, killing off

the most sexual character first, zombie narratives teach us to remain vigilant, to look out for

ourselves, and not to hesitate to leave the weakest link behind (or dead).

The seminal portrayal of what happens after the end of the world, where survivors are

212

forced to adopt a ruthless neoliberal ethos to survive, may be hit television show The Walking

Dead. James Hibbard, Entertainment Weekly’s editor at large, tries to explain just how big

ratings are for The Walking Dead. They are “23 percent bigger among adults 18–49 than NBC’s

Sunday Night Football (8.4), which is broadcast’s top rated weekly telecast . . . You know

ABC’s Scandal (4.8)? One of the biggest hits on TV, right? Well, The Walking Dead doubles its

rating.”

While these numbers may only factor in viewers between eighteen and forty-nine years

old, the television show is still the most-watched drama in basic-cable history, and the premiere

of its spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead (2015), was also record-breaking for a cable show.

American television reviewer Alan Sepinwall writes that, according to AMC, “the spin-off’s 90-

minute debut drew 10.1 million viewers in its initial airing, 6.3 million of whom were adults 18–

49. Both are records for a cable series premiere.”

Based on a comic series that began in 2003, The Walking Dead originated, as young adult

author Ned Vizzini writes, “between our era’s two most compelling apocalyptic fantasies: 9/11

and the 2008 financial crisis.”

How appropriate for a show devoted to the end of everything

that we once thought safe and secure. On this show, everything civilized—including the

government, the military, science, and technology—is long gone, with no possibility of return.

This absence of government to discipline marks another shift toward Deleuze’s control society,

in which we willingly discipline ourselves. As the first serialized TV zombie narrative, The

Walking Dead immediately signaled a break with tradition. In the words of creator Robert

Kirkman, the initial concept behind The Walking Dead was, for it to be “the zombie movie that

never ends.”

In very simplistic terms, that is exactly what it is. Literally a story without end, we

are deprived of the reassuring conclusions common to cinematic narratives. The show, instead of

crafting resolution, focuses on the human survivors and “their struggle to reconstitute something

213

that looks like a viable social order in the postapocalyptic world.”

The Walking Dead also signifies a paradigm shift for making it especially clear that “the

show about zombies” is not really about zombies. In fact, the zombies are referred to as

“walkers,” because no one in the show knows what zombies are, so that term is never used.

Another demonstration of the fact that it is not a show about zombies is the amount of

screen time they get. For example, during the pilot episode, after the initial shot of a zombie, we

do not see any other zombies for twenty-three minutes. This is in marked contrast to a movie like

Dawn of the Dead (2004), where the first zombies arrive fewer than five minutes into the film

and then never leave. In The Walking Dead, zombies are also conspicuously absent from the

show’s title sequences, arguably responsible for setting the tone of the show. The title sequence

for seasons 1 and 2 only show broken photographs of the central cast, interspersed with images

of urban and rural devastation. The photographs are behind broken glass, often covered with dirt,

rocks, and dust. The images, as they flash by, are all different representations of postdisaster

detritus: a house, a trailer, a teddy bear, a water tower, an empty and trash-filled downtown

street, two different empty cityscapes, an abandoned hospital, another empty street, an

abandoned government building (the King County sheriff’s department) with the American flag

billowing beside an overturned car, abandoned railroad tracks, an abandoned bus, crows eating a

dead cat, and a final shot of more broken-down cars on an abandoned highway, a city on fire in

the background. Transportation is defunct, civilization is defunct, any illusion of safety and

warmth is defunct, even without a glimpse of zombies.

Bloodshot eyes make an appearance in the title sequence for seasons 3 and 4, but it is

unclear if they belong to zombie or human. Vegetation and decay are more pronounced in this

newer title sequence, objects that used to have power in an earlier life now covered with grass or

214

vines. Even the American flag, which billowed proudly in the original title sequence, is now in

tatters. There are hints of threatening figures with the bloodshot eyes but also a figure pacing

behind a door. The editing has also sped up, and in the title sequence for season 5, it speeds up

even more, reflecting the increasing speed of contemporary life, even during the apocalypse. The

human objects, by this point, look decayed and unnatural. We see fingers prying from behind a

locked door, reminiscent, if not identical, to the hand clawing at a barricaded door in the early

minutes of the pilot episode (“Days Gone Bye,” Oct. 31, 2010). But there are still no clear shots

of zombies.

The pilot episode opens with a shot of small town deputy sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew

Lincoln) driving his sheriff’s car down a street blocked by an assortment of abandoned vehicles.

He makes his way through the cars and trucks to an abandoned gas station, hoping to siphon

gasoline. The only sound is the distant chirp of birds. Rick scans the insides of the cars

grimacing at the dead bodies. It appears to have been a makeshift campsite. Rick spots

movement—it is a little girl with long blonde hair, a pink bathrobe, and a teddy bear. “Little girl,

little girl, I’m a policeman,” are the first words we hear in the episode. He tells her not to be

afraid as she turns to face him. The bottom quarter of her face is missing, her eyes shadowed,

blood dripping out of her mouth. She faces the camera straight on, allowing us to stare back at

her. This is the first zombie we see, and the juxtaposition of pale-pink pajamas, pale-pink robe,

long blonde hair, and a teddy bear with exposed flesh and dripping blood makes it even more

jarring. The camera tracks closer, and we can see the redness around her pupils and the braces on

her teeth. She shuffles toward Rick, who does not know if he should shoot or run—or both. He

shoots her point blank, the bullet entering the center of her forehead. The force of the impact

sends her flat onto the pavement, while the camera moves above her, the spray of blood

215

surrounding the outline of her body. Not even five minutes into the episode, and the writers of

The Walking Dead have already conveyed how screwed up this new world has become: cops are

shooting angelic little girls who have blood dripping off their face.

After the title sequence, the episode flashes back to the days before the zombie outbreak,

showing us the accident that landed Rick in the hospital, his coma, and then his eventual

awakening in an abandoned hospital. In a sequence remarkably similar to one near the start of 28

Days Later, where London bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) also wakes from a coma in an

abandoned hospital, all Rick finds, as he drags himself out of his hospital bed, are lights that do

not work, phones that do not work, an elevator that does not work, trashed hallways, a half-eaten

dead body on the floor, bullet holes in the walls, and wires hanging from the ceiling. Like a

Neanderthal, he staggers through a dark stairwell, matches providing brief and limited

illumination. He makes his way outside into the blinding daylight only to discover row after row

of rotting bodies covered by sheets, flies swarming in the air. Rick stumbles past abandoned

military equipment, including a helicopter (the only sign of the military throughout the whole

series), and toward a nearby suburban neighborhood. He finds his first zombie (twenty-three

minutes into the episode) in a neighborhood park and escapes from this zombie via bicycle. Rick

makes his way back to his former home, searching desperately for his wife and son. He calls

their names over and over in desperation, before curling into a fetal position on the floor. This is

his first breakdown. Significantly, meeting a zombie only causes him confusion and alarm but

losing his family causes utter despair. This is one of many crucial signs that this show is not

about zombies. It is about people confronted with impossible situations, about trying to maintain

a semblance of domestic civility in a world determined to crush it.

Rather than seeking cheap thrills or B movie horror, the show aspires to show how these

216

protagonists endure their circumstances as well as evolve because of them. In the introduction to

volume 1 of The Walking Dead, Days Gone Bye, Kirkman describes his attempt to depict what

would happen once the world as we know it falls apart: “I hope to show you reflections of your

friends, your neighbors, your families, and yourselves, and what their reactions are to the

extreme situations in this book.”

Similarly, Frank Darabont, creator of The Walking Dead

television show, explains that the show is about “a group of people who are forced to survive

together, be a family together, and endure very, very difficult circumstances.”

It quickly becomes clear that the walkers are not the real danger. The show provides,

instead, an examination of humanity’s propensity for aggression and destruction. Contrary to

traditional concepts, where the diseased (and contagious) person is the enemy, in this narrative,

the healthy and uncontagious people are the real threat. The fear becomes not of the mindless

monsters but of the damage humans can do to each other when they are competing for their very

survival. Scott Kenemore warns that, “For humans to survive . . . they must become killers.”

typical monster narratives depict the struggle to protect the home from the evil that lurks without,

to keep the monster at bay, in The Walking Dead, the monster is both within and without. This

theme echoes that which has been in outbreak narratives all along but gained dominance

following the terrorist attacks of 2001. Traditional techniques of othering, containment, and

quarantine do not apply because the enemy is already inside the gates. Appropriately enough, the

tag line for season 3 is “Fight the Dead, Fear the Living.”

Rick eventually manages to find his wife, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), and son (Chandler

Riggs) amid a group of other survivors, including his best friend, Shane (Jon Bernthal), another

former member of the police force. Rick and Shane have frequent conflicts over leadership

strategies, as Rick still clings to the ideal of moral integrity, whereas Shane prefers quick and

217

ruthless violence. Rick becomes the group leader and unofficial cowboy sheriff, his trademark

cowboy hat and police uniform a frequent part of his attire. By preserving his uniform, he

preserves himself as a figure of authority, echoing traditional power structures and implying that

they still have a resonance in this new world. The tropes of the Western extend beyond Grimes’s

cowboy hat and boots. For example, in “Guts” (season 1, episode 2), Glenn sarcastically

compliments Rick Grimes when he says, “Nice moves there, Clint Eastwood.” As Rick’s son,

Carl, grows up, he, too, begins wearing a sheriff-style hat given to him by his father. P. Ivan

Young, in his essay “Walking Tall or Walking Dead? The American Cowboy in the Zombie

Apocalypse,” argues that it was clear before The Walking Dead even began “that the story was

steeped in cowboy lore.”

It is not only that The Walking Dead is steeped in cowboy lore but that it actively

reinvents and repurposes tropes of the Western genre. Anna Froula writes that the American

national narrative “has historically cast US corporate and imperial interests as a fantasy of

rugged, masculine individualists fighting for the establishment of white civilization against

savage, dark heathens; for unregulated freedom to consume natural resources; and for the

imagined manifest destiny of global military dominance.” Froula goes on to make direct

comparisons between this rugged narrative and the AMC television show, mentioning Rick’s hat

and six-shooter, the frequent dinners around a campfire, as well as the constant search for a new

frontier that might offer the opportunity for safety and regeneration. A crucial difference between

the show and the genre it so often references is the replacement of the mythological rugged hero

with “tribe-like groups warring over shrinking resources—namely food and shelter—on the ever-

encroaching brink of extinction.” Staying with a group becomes the only way to stay alive,

“eschewing the western genre’s adulation for the lone outlaw hero for the horror genre’s

218

insistence that to go it alone is to guarantee a horrible death.”

This also reflects the trend of

replacing individual heroes with networks, as seen in films like Contagion (2011).

Much like the male heroes discussed in the “Terrorism Outbreak” chapter, The Walking

Dead both favors and complicates (white) masculine leadership. During the shows first two

seasons, the women “keep house,” cleaning (even if this means cleaning the guns), doing

laundry, and cooking. They are, in fact, punished for defying gender roles, while the men go off

on raids and rescue missions.

Rick, even with the occasional hiatus, is the show’s unofficially

official leader. Political writer and editor Kay Steiger, in her essay “No Clean Slate: Unshakable

Race and Gender Politics in The Walking Dead,” observes that the gender roles depicted on the

show “would have been right at home in a John Ford western.”

However, Michonne (Danai Gurira), with her katana sword, dark skin, and aggressive

demeanor, slashes her way through traditional gender expectations. Entering the show as “a

hooded warrior who leads two armless, toothless zombies around by chains as camouflage,” their

scent concealing her own human odor, she is “the ultimate mash-up of inverted American

slavery, Akira Kurosawa samurai remakes of classic westerns, and the exotic solitary woman

warrior, always in a constant state of war preparedness.”

One of the few original cast members

still remaining on the show, Carol (Melissa McBride) is another female character who defies the

initial gender politics of the show. A cast member from the beginning, Carol was initially

defined by her submissive relationship to an abusive husband. However, after his death—she

impales him repeatedly with an ax to prevent reanimation, a significant turning point for her for

various reasons—she evolves into one of the toughest and most ruthless members of the cast and,

along with Rick, one of the longest surviving. Maggie (Lauren Cohan) is another similar

example of a character who initially fell into gender stereotypes, even arguing for compassion

219

for the zombies, whom she felt were merely sick. However, after the destruction of her father’s

farm, followed by his death, and then her sister’s death, she becomes increasingly colder and

more forceful.

If The Walking Dead is any indication, traditional gender roles do not suffice in a

postapocalyptic world, where any kind of individual hero is doomed, and teamwork becomes an

essential component of survival. This is in contrast to real-life scenarios, at least as depicted by

the media. For example, American journalist and author Susan Faludi, in her book Terror

Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, describes the journalistic response during the

post-9/11 era. Faludi observes the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly

men, and a “heightened call for domesticity.”

For instance, in portrayals of 9/11 in the media,

even though nearly three quarters of the victims were male, the media created the perception that

“only men were involved in the response, rescue, and recovery efforts,” with women relegated to

the role of victims and/or widows.

As Kevin Wetmore writes, summarizing Faludi’s argument,

“The immediate media consensus was that feminism was no longer relevant or even useful in the

wake of 9/11.”

The odd example—I Am Legend, World War Z—may still favor the rugged

individual hero, but television narratives that delve deeper into the day-to-day survival in a

decimated world—like The Walking Dead or The Last Man on Earth—reflect the reality that

sustained survival requires a team, because sometimes it is a child (Carl) who will save you,

sometimes it is an African American woman waving a sword (Michonne), and sometimes it is a

blonde with a shotgun and perfect marksmanship (January Jones as Melissa on The Last Man on

Earth).

In these various narratives—the ones that focus on the day-to-day as well as the ones that

focus on tying up loose ends, Hollywood style—the same question remains: How does one

220

embrace a life strategy built on self-discipline, self-control, and self-protection without becoming

a monster? Where does the line lie between human and monster? Rene Descartes famously

declared, “I think therefore I am.” So if one keeps thinking, does one stay human? If one

becomes infected, does one become a monster? If one is infectious, does one become a monster?

Are there categories of “monster,” much like categories of “infected”? Brendan Riley, in his

essay “Zombie People,” writes, “It wasn’t so long ago that upstanding members of society

argued vigorously about whether certain human beings were, in fact, people.” In fact, classifying

people of other races, faiths, or geographic heritage as subhuman was a way of fulfilling the

economic and social needs of the expanding European states and America.

100

For instance, slaves

were deemed property, not people, while those trapped in vegetative states also fuel debates over

who is and who is not worthy of life, over what makes one human.

The horror of these zombie narratives is not merely about turning into a monster; it is also

about a fear of losing one’s self, of being reduced to a grim mass. Echoing many a terrorist, in

season 1, episode 7 of 12 Monkeys (“The Keys”), Adam Wexler (Ari Millen) proposes that

maybe the world needs a plague: “The liars die out, the living forget the lies. Society’s great

reset switch.” Cole responds by saying that this would not reset anything; it would just turn us

“back into animals.” As much as it may be romanticized, the end of the world will turn us into

animals and zombies and monsters, bringing with it a loss of self, the inevitable dehumanization

common to so many of these narratives. The pilot episode of 12 Monkeys (“Splinter”) opens with

the following voice-over: “Where are you right now? Somewhere warm? Safe? Next to someone

you love? Now what if all that was gone? And the only thing you could do is survive? You

would, right? You’d try? You’d do things. Horrible things. Until you lose that last thing you

have left. Yourself.”

221

There is a line that runs straight through the zombie template: that humans are already

zombies, just not quite as abjected. We see it in Dawn of the Dead (1978)—“They’re us, that’s

all”—in the infamous Shaun of the Dead opening sequence, even in the SpongeBob SquarePants

episode. Contemporary life, with its constraints and conformity, with its repetitive labor and

incessant responsibility, may have turned us into zombies. As Kirkman describes, “A hundred

years ago, we were living in houses we built, growing food we ate, interacting with our families.

That’s a life that makes sense. Now we’re doing jobs we don’t enjoy to buy stuff we don’t need.

We’ve screwed things up.”

101

And so, ironically, at the same time that we are struggling to define what sets human

apart from zombie, one of the primary appeals of the zombie apocalypse is that it is only when

society collapses that we begin to come alive, to de-zombify. Ned Vizzini, in his essay “The

Objectivist Hero in The Walking Dead” writes that the biggest draw of the apocalypse is the way

it absolves us of our responsibilities. In the twenty-first century, our lives are “burdened by

crushing metastasizing obligations: to our bodies, our clothes, our homes, our cars, our jobs, our

kids, our Internet presence.”

102

Or as poet Henry David Thoreau said, “Men talk of freedom!

How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred

and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.” From a romantic perspective, the apocalypse

strips all this away, releasing us from slavery and leaving us with only one responsibility—

staying alive—and with one reality—the “real” one.

103

On the back of the first Walking Dead

graphic novel is the following description: “The world as we know it is gone. The world of

commerce and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility . . .

In a matter of months, society has crumbled, no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery,

no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living.”

104

As this quote

222

indicates, it is contemporary life that prevents us from living. In a world burdened by

omnipresent debt and mundane responsibility, the end of the world symbolizes liberation. As

Camilla Fojas believes, “There is no outside to capitalism before the apocalypse. The economic

order atomizes, instrumentalizes, and denatures. The zombie apocalypse occasions an alternative,

an outside to this order and its institutions . . . The eradication of money seems to signify

freedom from its structural logic of valuation.”

105

In other words, before the apocalypse, there is

no escape from capitalism, from the economic system. However, the zombie apocalypse

provides a way out. If money is gone, so, too, is financial responsibility and obligation. In place

of capitalism, there is freedom.

In his book Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Jeffrey

Sconce posits that, “One might even say that violent disasters and catastrophes evoke a certain

exhilaration in that they promise momentary liberation from the mass-mediated social order.”

106

It is when in conflict with the zombie (the metaphorical abject other), when confronted by fear,

that one finally feels alive, or so we imagine. Carol, in The Walking Dead episode “The Same

Boat” (Mar. 13, 2016), when describing herself now versus herself before the world collapsed,

says, “I’m still me but better. I lost everything and it made me stronger.” In their article “A

Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Sarah Juliet

Lauro and Karen Embry remark that “fear heightens our awareness of ourselves as individuals

because our individuality is endangered in life-threatening situations.”

107

So if globalization and

technology have eroded our individuality, perhaps the zombie apocalypse is the only suitable

antidote.

When confronted with the possibility of losing one’s mind, one’s body, and one’s

identity, one becomes acutely aware of all three—a refreshing contrast to the numbness created

223

by everyday contemporary life. Douglas Kellner argues that, prior to 9/11, French sociologist

Jean Baudrillard wrote repeatedly about “the destruction and disappearance of the real in the

realm of information and simulacra, and the subsequent reign of illusion and appearance.”

108

However, the popularity of movies and television shows like The Walking Dead, that strip away

this simulacra and illusion, demonstrates a desire for authenticity and a return to a primal real.

In a world that emphasizes and rewards standardization, that turns consumers into data

and dots on a curve, that homogenizes experience, flushing it through the same algorithms to

achieve maximum efficiency, the postapocalypse outbreak narrative provides a mark of

rebellion. In a world where almost everyone has been lost, the actions of a few take on added

gravitas. Small gestures are now loaded with significance, potentially impacting your fate and

the fates of those you love. It is no longer about a life of monotony. It is no longer about a life

tethered to social and financial upkeep. It is a life where every day could be your last, where an

impulsive decision could mean the end. Perhaps narratives like The Walking Dead are merely

retaliation against a world where networks have overshadowed individuals, where borders have

become ephemeral and irrelevant. They represent a world where, instead, borders are everything,

and individuality is celebrated, where class, education, and nepotism are meaningless, and you

are judged solely on your own merits. The desire to see what would happen after the end of

civilization is not merely about a desire to return to the Wild West or to celebrate white male

patriarchy. It is about a desire to feel alive, to be reborn.

224

Conclusion

If we didn’t fundamentally misunderstand the risk, we probably wouldn’t watch.

—Marc Siegel, False Alarm

Nine years after a ninth season run, The X-Files television series wrapped, only to return to the

Fox network as a six episode revival in 2016. That season’s finale, entitled “My Struggle II”

(Fox, Feb. 26, 2016) revolves around a mysterious outbreak of the Spartan virus. Bearing

remarkable parallels to the AIDS virus, Spartan works by removing a gene from your DNA, thus

causing your immune system to simply vanish—or, as rogue journalist Tad O’Malley (Joel

McHale) declares it, “a fast-moving AIDS without the HIV.” Dr. Rubell (Julian Christopher)

warns that once your immune system is wiped out, you will then be vulnerable to a variety of

contagions, much like with AIDS, and the threats are not limited to conventional fatal diseases.

Agent Einstein (Lauren Ambrose) points out that “pathogens are virtually everywhere. Every

cough, every sneeze, every cut on the finger—deadly.” Even vaccines can now be deadly,

attacking the systems of those with compromised immunities. Soldiers, in particular, who have

been given anthrax vaccines to protect them in the event of biological warfare, are now dying of

anthrax. This, Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson) explains, is only “a harbinger of infections to

come. Measles, mumps, rubella, the flu. We’re all going to be exposed.” In fact, the origin of the

Spartan virus lies within the smallpox vaccine. So rather than it being something you “catch,” the

Spartan virus is already within us, triggered by a release of aluminum in the atmosphere through

chemtrails—à la Toxic Skies (Erin, 2008)—or by microwave radiation, calling to mind horror

narratives from the 1950s. The premise echoes that of The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010-present)

in that everyone is already infected. Hospitals are flooded. The CDC is at a loss. Scully tells

225

Einstein that they are witnessing “what may be the advent of a global contagion.”

Global. Contagion. Pathogens. Vulnerability. Outbreak. AIDS. Immunity. Biological

warfare. Chemtrails. Conspiracy. Infections. Buzzwords that should now be familiar. Buzzwords

that reflect a new and heightened awareness of the increasingly ineffective boundaries between

personal bodies and national bodies, between bodies and microbes, and between good and bad

bodies. As depicted by this episode, the collapse of our immune system has occurred in tandem

with the collapse of political borders, the failures of both to protect and quarantine. While studies

of the immune system have always been concerned with how the body defends itself from

foreign antigens, it had previously been easy to distinguish between self and other. Now,

however, as a result of autoimmune diseases and HIV/AIDS, as well as the blurring of borders

facilitated by globalization and a shift to a more horizontal and networked social structure, this

distinction has grown increasingly murky. There is no longer a single recognizable enemy.

As the Spartan virus would indicate, it is not that we are afraid of getting sick. It is not

even that we are afraid of “catching a bug.” It is that we are afraid we are already sick, that our

compromised immune system will not be able to protect us, that we are living in a world that

cannot protect us and that will most likely make us sick. We are afraid that the things we do—or

things we cannot avoid doing—will make us sick, like traveling or breathing or using a

microwave or getting a shot at the doctor’s office. It is that things that are packaged as “for our

own good” will actually lead to our own death. It is that when something is seriously wrong, the

media will not tell us and our politicians will lie to us. It is that when we get sick, no one will be

able to help us.

We are afraid of discovering, as Todd Haynes said about the memorable protagonist from

his film Safe (1995), that “we all have a little Carol White in us.”

When White first develops

226

multiple chemical sensitivity, her symptoms include nosebleeds, weakness, coughing, vomiting,

and convulsions. An inherently controversial diagnosis, multiple chemical sensitivity is officially

seen to be a reaction to chemicals found in everyday products. As defined by the US Department

of Labor, MCS is an “adverse physical reaction to low levels of many common chemicals . . .

Proposed theories to explain the cause of MCS include allergy, dysfunction of the immune

system, neurobiological sensitization, and various psychological theories.”

MCS is what

happens when your immune system becomes dysfunctional, arguably defined as an allergic

response to the contemporary world. MCS is what happens when your world makes you sick.

In the twenty years or so since Safe was released, anxieties about contagion and

infiltration have continued to swirl through American news and entertainment media. In contrast

to fears from earlier decades, which reflected vulnerabilities of nations as a whole, these latest

threats reflect risk for the individual. Depending on the moment, we have been alternately afraid

of AIDS, swine flu, Zika, Ebola, Al Qaeda, ISIS. . . just fill in the blank. What all these fears

have in common is that they are not isolated events but, rather, inevitable consequences of the

way we live now, results of porous and ineffective barriers. As Peter Knight, a senior lecturer in

American culture, argues, they also are all threats over which centralized and antiquated

governmental systems cannot protect us: “If life-threatening world-wide phenomena such as

global warming or the AIDS epidemic can be neither traced back to a single cause nor confined

to a single location, then individual national governments are unlikely to be able to bring them

under control . . . We now need to think in terms of clusters of causes, convoluted feedback

mechanisms, syndromes, and decentered agency.”

Unfortunately, thinking in terms of clusters of causes and decentered agency lacks

reassurance. And so, as a way to restore a sense of agency and responsibility, there has been a

227

rise in conspiracy thinking. In an article from 2011, author and British screenwriter Nick Harding

looks at the recent rise of conspiracy theories, blaming the increase on how easy the Internet has

made it to propagate rumor and supposition on a global scale.

However, in this case, the

medium is not the message. The medium just transmits the content. While the Internet facilitates

transmission, the crux of what is being transmitted emphasizes that it is more comforting to

imagine that there is someone in control rather than no one in control, that things happen for a

reason, even if that agenda is not a noble one. As Knight explains about the current proliferation

of conspiracy theories: “Even as they draw attention to the people’s lack of power (since the

conspiracy controls everything), they offer a compensatory fantasy that at least things are still

controllable by an all-powerful individual or group . . . in short, to put a name and a face to

otherwise unrepresentable and impenetrable systems.” This notion—that there is a greater

agenda and a greater purpose—appears in The X-Files finale’s opening sequence, as relayed via

an Agent Scully voice-over. Scully acknowledges that there is, in fact, “a larger conspiracy”

behind all the mysteries explored on The X-Files, that there is “a conspiracy of men hiding

science for almost sixty years,” and that there are “secrets kept from the American people by a

self-interested cabal intent on the consolidation of power both at home and on a perilously global

scale.” We are pawns and puppets at the mercy of this cabal, or so some of us want to believe,

because it is easier than believing that there is no one in charge, that there is no greater purpose.

A persistent theme throughout The X-Files has always been this notion of shadowy men

in shadowy corners pulling the strings to further their agenda while concealing the truth, and this

episode is no exception. However, when Agent Mulder (David Duchovny) confronts the

Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis), the truth proves to be more complicated. Yes, the

Cigarette Smoking Man, as “the most powerful man in the world,” is behind the Spartan

228

outbreak. However, as he puts it, he just changed the timetable. Mankind was still headed toward

self-extermination, even without the Cigarette Smoking Man and his shadowy cabal. “I didn’t set

out to destroy the world,” he tells Mulder, “People did . . . We have just had the hottest summer

on Planet Earth. I didn’t do that. I’m not responsible for the 40 percent loss of birdlife or the

decimation of the megafauna.”

In this episode, much like in many recent outbreak narratives, the conceit of the primitive

other, the “dirty immigrant” spreading infection, has been removed. Even the conceit of the

“shadowy cabal” engineering our doom has been complicated. Emerging infectious diseases are

not the fault of Muslims or Africans or Asians or the cabal. Emerging infectious diseases are the

products of globalization, and we are culpable in our own destruction, or so the episode would

like us to believe. As the saying goes in the Walt Kelly poster for Earth Day in 1970, “We have

met the enemy and he is us.” In the poster, Pogo the possum looks sadly at us as he prepares to

clean up the trash littering his planet.

The writing is on the wall. The Cigarette Smoking Man

just sped things up.

It is not difficult to appreciate the appeal of the “eco-terrorist plot” evident in the

Blindspot episode “Bone May Rot” (NBC, Oct. 12, 2015) or The Blacklist episode “The Front”

(NBC, Oct. 20, 2014), or Inferno (Howard, 2016), all of which depict attempts to create a

pandemic in order to reduce the world’s population, thereby saving the Earth. At least, in these

narratives, there is a sense of agency, a sense of purpose, a sense that something is being done.

What The X-Files has always tapped into has been this lack of trust in traditional outlets and

traditional institutions, the notion that there are secrets and conspiracies behind almost every

government door. And now we see that the conspiracy theory, rather than being the worst

possible option, is actually the best one, because it implies that someone is in control.

229

Elaine Showalter, in her book Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media,

brings up an important point as she defines the significant difference between infectious

diseases—which are spread by ecological change, modern technology, urbanization, jet travel,

and human interaction—and infectious epidemics—which are spread by the media, “by stories

circulated through self-help books, articles in newspapers and magazines, TV talk shows and

series, films, the Internet, and even literary criticism.”

While infectious diseases are the result

of, among other things, globalization and environmental destruction, infectious epidemics are the

true cause of unnecessary panic. It is this crucial difference, between the outbreak of a disease

and the outbreak of hysteria, which is integrally linked metaphorically and literally to the “viral”

spread of digital communication. Infectious epidemics are the hyperbolic narrative imposed upon

infectious diseases.

Whether the outbreak narrative depicts the cultural and social impact of globalization, the

increased fear of bioterrorist attack, or the uncomfortable realization that twenty-eight days is all

it takes for society to collapse, it continues to provide allegorical (and sometimes literal)

reflections of our world, both in the current moment and for the future. While the various

fictional texts I have discussed construct versions of reality that perpetuate certain biases in our

culture in ways that may demand critique or condemnation—our anxieties about marginalized

groups such as women, gays, and immigrants, for instance—the outbreak narrative, in all its

incarnations, still reflects an awareness of viral threats, and the inability of immune systems or

national borders to protect us, in ways that can be constructive and enlightening to examine. This

awareness is compounded by a pervasive lack of trust in government and medical institutions to

save us, as well as by hyperactive digital communication reminding us of death and danger at

every turn. Disease metaphors speak profoundly not only to the connections between bodily

230

threats and threats to the body politic but also to the way the world has been reimagined—and

marketed—in terms of containment, protection, and vulnerability.

Fictional texts are especially useful at mapping out this world, at portraying significant

cultural and social changes, for a variety of reasons. One, because they “address dimensions of

the political unconscious that more solution-oriented political and journalistic approaches to the

same phenomena tend to reason away or repress.”

And two, because they teach viewers about

this reimagined world and how to act within it. Professor John L. Sherry, whose research focuses

on media theory and the effects of mass media, argues that viewers intentionally use the media in

this way. In his article on media saturation and entertainment-education, he points out that these

effects are not the result of a single message, “or even a message repeated a number of times,”

but rather the consequence “of a flood of consistent themes about social reality across multiple

television programs.”

And since these narratives are teaching so many viewers so many things,

it is instrumental to look at what is being taught and in what ways. Tellingly, Kyle Bishop, in his

book American Zombie Gothic, recounts the tale of a law student who survived 9/11 and claimed

“that he had been emotionally prepared for the tragedy, not by his family, community, or

government, but by the zombie movies of which he had been a long-time appreciator.”

While

this is a fascinating extrapolation, the attacks of 9/11 were also not a zombie attack. Monsters in

the street were not the threat. No one was being eaten alive. While the event was a tragedy and a

horror, to describe it as a zombie movie also demonstrates the hyperbolic response to danger and

disaster. Ironically, the CDC actually has a fictional “Zombie Apocalypse Defense Plan” on their

website as a means of better educating the public about mass disaster and contagion, implying

that a total apocalypse is something for which to prepare.

To return to Ulrich Beck, it is not that risks have intensified; it is that perceptions of risk

231

have intensified. It is that, in an increasingly media-savvy world, headlines must be hyperbolic in

order to get attention. Skye Cooley, professor of public relations at Mississippi State University,

laments in an editorial for the Huffington Post how little attention the media was paying to the

disastrous floods in Louisiana in 2016: “In order to be worthy of attention the very fabric of

societal order has to have been sheered away; news media requires scenes that look like a zombie

apocalypse.”

The media reminds us of death, bringing it to our phones and our living rooms,

amplifying portrayals of outbreaks into dramatic life-or-death situations—or not covering them if

such amplification is not possible. We have become so used to the hyperbolic din that we cannot

hear anything else.

Exacerbating this amplification is the fact that alterations in media, spectatorship, and

representation have led to an intermedial phenomena in which the news becomes the films

becomes the news becomes the television shows becomes the video games. Is it any wonder that

public responses to real-life outbreaks are so affected by fictional narratives when the “factual”

narratives may be just as hyperbolic as the fictional ones? The threat of plague transcends

medium: the cover of Rolling Stone ominously warns of apocalypse as you download the latest

version of Plague Inc. for your phone, the latest Walking Dead episode hits your television while

Fight of the Living Dead: Experiment 88 (YouTube Red, 2016) streams on your computer and

the latest Resident Evil video game launches on your Xbox. As Lynn Spigel wrote in her article

“Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11” following the events of 9/11, “The

difference between real wars and ‘made-for-TV’ wars hardly mattered.”

Life imitates art

imitates life in a dizzying and self-nurturing circle.

There are even numerous examples of current Hollywood practices that intentionally blur

the boundaries between fact and faction, continuing a trend that began with Seabrook’s The

232

Magic Island. For example, the NBC Nightly News integrated clips from two Hollywood films,

And the Band Played On (HBO, Sept. 11, 1993) and Outbreak (Petersen, 1995), into a story on

the 1995 Ebola breakout in Zaire, with “no verbal mention of the origins or fictive nature of the

film segments.”

Conversely, shows often feature news footage running within the episode,

using staged news footage with real news logos. For example, the television show 24 (Fox, 2001-

10) features not only multiple TVs tuned to Fox News, running staged Fox News footage with

the real Fox News logos during its series run, but the characters on the show also frequently

watch the news, “exuding the heightened state of alert that viewers share (both in watching 24

and the real Fox News).”

It is also common for films and television shows to use real reporters

appearing as themselves in order to lend “a certain authenticity,” says Hollywood producer Kim

Sherrell.

In other words, to make the fictional narrative appear less fictional. Some of the

biggest names in television news have appeared on the Netflix drama House of Cards (2013-

present), for instance. Another blurring of reality and fiction occurs when actors with memorable

characters perform real-life endorsements based not on their real-life persona but on their

fictional personas. For example, Kiefer Sutherland filmed a recruitment spot for the navy

following the success of 24, while Alias (ABC, 2001-06) star Jennifer Garner filmed a

recruitment spot for the CIA. In its press releases, the CIA describes Garner as embodying the

“integrity, patriotism, and intelligence the CIA looks for in its officers.”

In another surreal partnership, the University of Southern California’s Institute for

Creative Technologies unites government officials with Hollywood creators, like directors David

Fincher or Spike Jonze, in order to set the “best minds of the entertainment industry to the task of

creating state-of-the-art training exercises for soldiers and to create possible terrorist scenarios

for government consideration.”

So in this case, Hollywood shapes government scenarios and

233

military strategies rather than vice versa. As I mentioned in the “Terrorism Outbreak” chapter,

another example of fictional scenarios influencing real-life policy occurred when President

Clinton intensified military measures against bioterrorism after reading Richard Preston’s

biothriller The Cobra Event (Random House, 1998), as well as recommending the book to his

advisors and high-ranking Pentagon officials.

This is the same book that Secretary of Health

and Human Services Donna Shalala would use to open her article on bioterrorism for the CDC’s

Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.

Yet another example of Hollywood intentionally blurring fact and fiction occurs on the

season 3 box set for 24. The box set includes a featurette entitled “Bio Threat: Beyond the

Series.” This featurette offers interviews with a variety of scientists, doctors, and government

officials meant to provide an air of legitimacy to the season. Jennifer Gillan, in her book

Television and New Media: Must Click TV, argues that the featurette “leaves viewers with the

impression that the weaponizing of a virus is not only possible, but probable.” She points out that

Joel Surnow, creator of 24, makes a case for the imminent threat of bioterrorism, “despite the

overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

As Surnow himself says in his interview for the

featurette, “Unfortunately, what you can imagine is usually true. As outrageous as some of the

stuff that we come up with is, there is always something there to support it.”

He is not alone in that belief. After the season 6 premiere of 24, which includes the

detonation of a small nuclear bomb over Los Angeles, John Gibson, host of Fox News’s The Big

Story declared, “Well, it may be fiction for now. But 24’s Jack Bauer has it right. People need to

wake up to the possibility of nuclear attack.” Gibson later asked, “Is 24’s faux suitcase nuke

bomb a real wake-up call for America? Should we take this as an early warning sign that

something like this could happen here?”

Similarly, in his January 30, 2007, syndicated column,

234

Cal Thomas urged his readers to watch 24 “for what could be our prophetic and imminent future

with a nuclear device exploding in major cities.”

Apparently, when fictional texts “address

dimensions of the political unconscious that more solution-oriented political and journalistic

approaches to the same phenomena tend to reason away or repress,”

they are also able to

predict the future.

Some even use the fictional as justification for government and military action. For

instance, on January 17, 2007, Neil Cavuto, host of the Fox News show Your World, interviewed

private investigator Richard “Bo” Dietl, a former detective with the New York City Police

Department. The topic was a group of forty American Muslims who had recently been barred

from boarding a Michigan-bound plane in Frankfurt, Germany. Dietl justified the action by

replying, “A bunch of Irish guys are not going to get on a plane now and blow themselves up or

put themselves into buildings. The fact of the matter is—I mean, you don’t watch 24 on Fox TV?

They’re out there. They’re out there. There are cells out there. We have to protect ourselves

against it, as Americans.”

24, much like The Cobra Event, was used as justification for action

without acknowledgement of its fictional status.

However, it is no longer only television and radio that bring sounds, images, and horrors

into our homes, feeding our fears and fueling our emotions. With contemporary events like 9/11,

our exposure is immediate and global and often uncensored. As E. Ann Kaplan writes, “The

phenomenon of 9/11 was perhaps the supreme example of a catastrophe that was experienced

globally via digital technologies (Internet, cell phone) as well as by television and radio.”

While part of the original appeal of television revolved around its “liveness,” watching

television live is becoming an antiquated procedure. Instead, it is the Internet that relies on its

liveness for its relevance, for its immediate delivery of content. Thanks to handheld devices, we

235

are always “in touch,” just as M describes to Bond in Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006). Exposure

is instantaneous and mass-oriented but also personal and private. We can watch the horrors from

the intimacy of our homes, or the checkout line at the supermarket, united and isolated at the

same time. Thanks to this new media immediacy, standard rules of temporality and geography no

longer apply. For example, news of the terrorist attack in Paris on November 13, 2015, initially

spread primarily via social media, with more than 10.7 million tweets posted about Paris between

November 13 and November 14.

Significantly, voice-of-the-truth journalist Tad O’Malley on season 10 of The X-Files

broadcasts via the Internet. Rather than flipping on the television to catch his latest news, the

agents flip open a laptop. The implication, when O’Malley skewers the mainstream news for

ignoring the real story, is that the renegade on the Internet is the one who has the truth. The

corporate suits on the corporate networks are too busy toeing the party line. In terms of being a

renegade, O’Malley echoes the character of Alan Krumweide in Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011).

In 2016, however, the Internet provides the truth, the only truth, rather than being “graffiti with

punctuation,” as Dr. Ellis Cheever describes Krumweide’s website. Much has changed in five

years. The truth, or what so many believe to be the truth, is now to be found online. The truth

does not need the voice of an authority figure (or an authoritative network) to vouch for it. To the

contrary, it works better without either. Alison Bashford, in her essay on “Panic’s Past and

Global Futures,” describes the digital world as “a new world for panic, disease, communication,

and containment,” where “the presence of disease, or suspected disease, can be communicated

instantly and by anybody, bypassing experts, and with little heed for verification or

authorization.”

The digital world may be a new world, but it works in tandem with the world that exists

236

offscreen. The current popularity of images and narratives of contagion—online and off—has

resulted in anxiety both displaced and exacerbated, as evidenced by the Ebola panic of 2014,

which bordered on hysteria even though it was never a significant threat to America. While some

theorists argue that watching a film of something awful decreases one’s sensitivity, these

narratives serve to increase our awareness of infectious disease and our vulnerability to it. Media

portrayals of both terrorist attacks and viral outbreaks legitimize and sensationalize the events

themselves. How a society responds to disease—especially epidemic disease—can illuminate its

relationship not only to science and medicine but also to illness, fear, death, and identity. Public

responses to real-life outbreaks like Ebola and AIDS reflect cultural fears of contagion and

disease as well as the power and internal logic of film and television to construct and shape those

fears. Fear is no longer merely a response but a cultural state of being.

As explored throughout this book, the purpose of the outbreak narrative is to contain,

control, and ultimately obliterate the contagion, whether it be a microbe, a terrorist, a zombie, or

a combination of the three. It is not friendly to contagion, and contagion is not friendly to it.

After all, contagion welcomes the thing—microbe, terrorist, or zombie—that the outbreak

narrative aims to contain, control, and obliterate. In order to succeed, contagion requires the

services of a microbe, terrorist, or zombie. Contagion is also unfriendly to the protagonists of

these narratives, to the hero or team trying to save the day. It does not want them to persevere. It

wants, instead, to contaminate and spread. Contagion is a threat to the subject and, in turn, a

threat to the story about the threat to the subject, because without protagonists, without a subject,

traditional narrative stumbles. In a traditional narrative, there must be at least one key powerful

figure that prevails. Such is the narrative arc. And yet, in our increasingly anonymous and

automatized society, everyone seems to be a pawn in the machine. There are fewer and fewer

237

powerful figures. Instead, there are powerful networks.

First there was the death of God, and then the death of the author, and now it appears to

be the death of Man. The individual is no longer a key agent in history. After all, viral

propagation does not require the individual. It does not require an authority figure or a guiding

voice. It only requires a network. And so the outbreak narrative becomes a last ditch effort to

save the subject, to save the story, to overcome the propagation of the viral with an insertion of a

traditional narrative structure. During a time that feels like the end of days, with the convergence

of one catastrophe after another, the outbreak narrative, perversely, provides a glimmer of hope.

Maybe, as the world falls apart, there will be a voice, a figure to show the way.

238

Notes

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Introduction

1 Alison Bashford, “Panic’s Past and Global Futures,” in Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, ed.

Robert Peckham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 205.

2 Frank Furedi, “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is the ‘Culture of Fear’ Itself,” Spiked, April 4, 2007,

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3053/.

3 Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to “The X-Files” (London: Routledge, 2000), 177.

4 Todd Haynes, interview by Scott Tobias, The Dissolve, December 18, 2014,

https://thedissolve.com/features/interview/856-todd-haynes-on-the-unsafe-world-of-safe/.

5 Michael D. Lemonick, “The Killers All Around,” Time, September 12, 1994,

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981430,00.html.

6 Ibid.

7 Richard Preston, “The Vaccine Debacle,” New York Times, October 2, 1994, D-17.

8 Nicholas B. King, “The Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases,” Osiris 2.19 (2004), 64, 65.

9 Ibid., 66.

10 Harrison Blackman, “Crisis in West Africa: Richard Preston on Ebola,” Affairs Today, August 9, 2014,

http://affairstoday.co.uk/crisis-west-africa-richard-preston-ebola/{~?~AU: This url no longer leads anywhere;

do you have an alternative? I managed to find it here, not sure if we want to include this url or not:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141026122830/http://affairstoday.co.uk/crisis-west-africa-richard-preston-ebola/

, my date accessed for that is May 19, 2017}.

11 Richard Preston, “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” New Yorker, October 26, 1992, 80, 81.

12 King, “Scale Politics,” 71.

13 Stephen S. Hall, “Panic Everywhere,” New York Times, October 30, 1994,

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/30/books/panic-everywhere.html?pagewanted=all.

14 David Hughes, Tales from Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made? (London: Titan Books, 2012),

169–170.

15 King, “Scale Politics,” 67.

16 Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown, “Preemptive Biopreparedness: Can We Learn Anything from History?,”

American Journal of Public Health 91 (2001): 722.

17 Handwritten talk circa 1978, Alexander D. Langmuir Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the

Johns Hopkins Medical Institution, Box no. 1, Folder, “JHV Honorary Degree 1978,” quoted in Amy L.

Fairchild and David Merritt Johns, “The ‘Excited and Terrified’ Public Mind,” in Empires of Panic: Epidemics

and Colonial Anxieties, ed. Robert Peckham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 172.

239

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

18 Handwritten notes, Alexander D. Langmuir Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns

Hopkins Medical Institution, Box no. 5, Folder, “Lecture Notes, Miscellaneous History CDC,” quoted in Amy

L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns, “The ‘Excited and Terrified’ Public Mind,” in Empires of Panic:

Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, ed. Robert Peckham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 172.

19 Fee and Brown, “Preemptive Biopreparedness,” 722.

20 Ibid.

21 “What You Should Know about Biological Warfare,” Johns Hopkins Science Review, WAAM, Baltimore, MD,

April 3, 1951. The video is available to view here: https://archive.org/details/WhatYouS1952.

22 Fee and Brown, “Preemptive Biopreparedness,” 722, 723.

23 William Schaffner and F. Marc LaForce, “Training Field Epidemiologists: Alexander D. Langmuir and the

Epidemic Intelligence Service,” American Journal of Epidemiology 144.8 (Apr. 1996): S16.

24 Martin A. French, “Woven of War-Time Fabrics: The Globalization of Public Health Surveillance,” Surveillance

& Society 6.2, 104.

25 Fee and Brown, “Preemptive Biopreparedness,” 723.

26 Donna Shalala, “Bioterrorism: How Prepared Are We?,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 5.4 (July/Aug. 1999):

ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/eid/vol5no4/ascii/vol5no4.txt.

27 King, “Scale Politics,” 75.

28 Janet Heinrech, “Bioterrorism: Public Health and Mental Preparedness,” in Bioterrorism and Public Health, ed.

Vitali Mellehovitch (New York: Nova Science, 2004), 109.

29 Crystal Boddie, Tara Kirk Sell, and Matthew Watson, “Federal Funding for Health Security in FY 2015,”

Biosecur Bioterror 12.4 (Aug. 2014): 163, 164, http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/pmcc/articles/PMC4106388/.

30 Eugene Thacker, “Cryptobiologies,” Artnodes, no. 6 (2006), 4.

31 Tara Kirk Sell and Matthew Watson, “Federal Agency Biodefense Funding, FY 2013–2014,” Biosecurity and

Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science 11.3 (Sept. 2013): 196.

32 Jennifer Cooke, Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 183.

33 Ruth Mayer, “Virus Discourse: The Rhetoric of Threat and Terrorism in the Biothriller,” Cultural Critique 66

(Spring 2007): 17.

34 John Murlowski, e-mail message to author, August 6, 2015.

35 Bruce Dorminey, “Ebola as ISIS Bio-Weapon?,” Forbes, October 5, 2014,

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2014/10/05/ebola-as-isis-bio-weapon/.

36 Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, “Could Ebola Become ‘Bioterrorist Threat’?,” Fox News, October 17, 204,

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10/03/could-ebola-virus-become-bioterrorist-threat.html.

37 Fred Lucas, “GOP Congressman: Ebola as a Terrorism Tool ‘Should Be on the Radar Screen’,” Blaze, October

17, 2014, http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/10/17/gop-congressman-ebola-as-a-terrorism-tool-should-be-

on-the-radar-screen/.

38 King, “Scale Politics,” 68.

39 Lawrence K. Altman, “The Doctor’s World; Infectious Diseases on the Rebound in the U.S., a Report Says,”

240

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New York Times, May 10, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/10/science/the-doctor-s-world-infectious-

diseases-on-the-rebound-in-the-us-a-report-says.html?pagewanted=all.

40 Ibid.

41 Peter Piot, quoted in Michael D. Lemonick and Bruce Crumley, “Return to the Hot Zone,” Time, May 22, 1995,

62.

42 Lemonick and Crumley, “Hot Zone,” 62.

43 Ibid.

44 Lemonick, “Killers All Around.”

45 Ibid.

46 King, “Scale Politics,” 68.

47 Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 618.

48 Stephen A. Morse, “The Year 2000: Only a Plane Flight Away from Disaster?,” Public Health Reports 110.2

(Mar.–Apr. 1995): 223.

49 Richard Preston, The Hot Zone (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1995), 420.

50 Ibid., 16.

51 N. S. Galbraith, “Reviewed Work: The Hot Zone by Richard Preston,” BMJ: British Medical Journal 309, no.

6962 (Oct. 29, 1994): 1169.

52 Robert J. Howard, quoted in Malcolm Gladwell, “The Plague Year,” New Republic, July 16, 1995,

https://newrepublic.com/article/62521/the-plague-year.

53 Robert J. Howard, “Perspective: Media Coverage of Emerging and Re-Emerging Diseases behind the Headlines,”

Statistics in Medicine 20 (2001): 1357.

54 Brigitte Nerlich and Christopher Halliday, “Avian Flu: The Creation of Expectations in the Interplay between

Science and the Media,” Sociology of Health and Illness 29.1 (2007): 48.

55 Ibid., 54.

56 Ibid., 54, 56.

57 Dorothy Nelkin, “Managing Biomedical News,” Social Research 52.3 (Autumn 1985): 625, 626.

58 Robert J. Howard, “Getting It Right in Prime Time: Tools and Strategies for Media Interaction,” Emerging

Infectious Diseases 6.4 (Aug. 2000): http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/6/4/00-0422.

59 Vicki Freimuth, Huan Linnan, and Polyxeni Potter, “Communicating the Threat of Emerging Infections to the

Public,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 6.4 (Aug. 2000): http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/6/4/00-0403.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 For a more in-depth analysis of The Eternal Flight, see Nicholas B. King, “Mediating Panic,” in Empires of

Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, ed. Robert Peckham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,

2015), 190, 191, 192.

63 Peter N. Stearns, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2006),

210.

241

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

64 Craig Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “Most Americans Who See Fake News Believe It, New Survey Says,”

Buzzfeed, December 6, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-

survey?utm_term=.urzy8yar0#.vnkMxM42L.

65 Sheldon Ungar, “Hot Crises and Media Reassurance: A Comparison of Emerging Diseases and Ebola Zaire,”

British Journal of Sociology 49.1 (Mar. 1998): 41.

66 Ibid., 42, 43.

67 Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 4.

68 Hughes, Development Hell, 172.

69 Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, “Crisis in the Plot Zone,” Entertainment Weekly, March 24, 1995,

http://www.ew.com/article/1995/03/24/crisis-plot-zone.

70 “Outbreak (1995),” Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=outbreak.htm. Accessed on

May 19, 2017.

71 According to Box Office Mojo, the domestic gross was $57,141,459 and the total worldwide gross $168,839,459.

“12 Monkeys (1995),” Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=twelvemonkeys.htm.

{~?~AU: Consider adding an "accessed on" date. Accessed on May 19, 2017.}

72 Kellner, Cinema Wars, 14.

73 Stearns, American Fear, 41.

74 Melissa Leach, “Time to Put Ebola in Context,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, World Health

Organization 88.7, http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/88/7/10-030710/en/.

75 Josh Gardner, “How Ebola Doctor Roamed New York,” Daily Mail, October 23, 2014,

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2805673/Ebola-panic-Brooklyn-Doctor-treated-patients-West-Africa-

visited-hip-bowling-hotspot-ONE-DAY-rushed-hospital-103F-fever.html#ixzz3H3Pv6fLZ.

76 Dana Blanton, “Fox News Poll: More than 6 in 10 Worried about Ebola Spreading to US,” Fox News, August 14,

2014, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/14/fox-news-poll-more-than-6-in-10-worried-about-ebola-

spreading-to-us.html.

77 Paul Bedard, “American Fear: 74% See ‘Catastrophic Terrorist Attack’ inside United States,” Washington

Examiner, January 7, 2015, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/american-fear-74-see-catastrophic-terrorist-

attack-inside-united-states/article/2558294.

78 Kevin J. Wetmore, Post 9/11 Horror in American Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2012), 109.

79 Roger E. Kasperson and Jeanne X. Kasperson, “The Social Amplification and Attenuation of Risk,” Annals of the

American Academy of Politics and Social Science, no. 545 (1996): 97.

80 “On a Wing and a Prayer,” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science, May 25, 2005,

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7041/full/435385a.html.

81 Michael T. Osterholm, “Preparing for the Next Pandemic,” New York Times, June 21, 2005,

http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/20050701faessay-v84n4_osterholm.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

82 Wendy Orent, “Chicken Little,” New Republic, September 11, 2005,

https://newrepublic.com/article/64264/chicken-little.

242

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

83 Marc Siegel, False Alarm (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 145.

84 Orent, “Chicken Little.”

85 Hillary Evans and Robert E. Bartholomew, Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior,

52.{~?~AU: The publisher’s information seems to be missing from this citation; should it be included? San

Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2009}

86 Grey Szymanski, “Avian Flu May Come to America,” American Free Press, October 1, 2005,

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/avian_flu.html.

87 Evans and Bartholomew, Outbreak!, 52.

88 Orent, “Chicken Little.”

89 “Human Death Toll from Bird Flu Tops 100,” Live Science, March 21, 2006, http://www.livescience.com/659-

human-death-toll-bird-flu-tops-100.html.

90 Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear Revisited (London: Continuum, 2006), 30.

91 David Quammen, interview by Michaleen Doucleff, “How The Hot Zone Got It Wrong and Other Tales of

Ebola’s History,” NPR, November 11, 2014,

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/11/11/362379449/how-the-hot-zone-got-it-wrong-and-other-

tales-of-ebolas-history.

92 Ungar, “Hot Crises,” 43.

93 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns, “The ‘Excited and Terrified’ Public Mind,” in Empires of Panic:

Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, ed. Robert Peckham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 169.

94 Gerald Ford, quoted in Richard E. Neustadt and Harvey Fineberg, The Epidemic That Never Was: Policy-Making

and the Swine Flu Affair (New York: Vintage, 1983), 46.

95 Editorial, “Light on Swine Flu,” New York Times, July 20, 1976, 30.

96 Editorial, “Doubts about Swine Flu,” New York Times, August 9, 1976, 16.

97 Harry Schwartz, “Swine Flu Fiasco,” New York Times, December 21, 1976, 33.

98 Siegel, False Alarm, 127–128.

Orent, “Chicken Little.”

100 Orent, “Chicken Little.”

101 Diane Chun, “Experts Dismiss Scare over Bird Flu,” Gainesville Sun, November 1, 2005,

http://www.gainesville.com/news/20051101/experts-dismiss-scare-over-bird-flu.

102 Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 1987), 19, 88.

103 Nerlich and Halliday, “Avian Flu,” 54.

104 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 55.

105 Mads P. Sorensen and Allan Christiansen, Ulrich Beck: An Introduction to the Theory of Second Modernity and

the Risk Society (London: Routledge 2013), 12–13, 15.

106 Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1995), 106.

243

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

107 Ibid., 144.

108 Stearns, American Fear, 3, 9.

109 Oliver Laughland, “The Ministering of Fear: Dystopia and Loathing at the Republican Convention,” Guardian,

July 23, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/23/republican-convention-cleveland-donald-

trump-fear.

110 Dylan Matthews, “Donald Trump’s Convention Speech Was an Overwhelming Victory for Fear,” Vox, July 22,

2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/7/22/12254826/donald-trump-convention-speech-rnc-fear.

111 Danny Boyle, quoted in Kyle William Bishop, American Zombie Gothic (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &

Company, 2010), 28.

112 Stearns, American Fear, 19.

1. The Outbreak Narrative

1 Amanda Ann Klein, American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining

Subcultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 3–4, 6, 13.

2 Leger Grindon, “Cycles and Clusters,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of

Texas Press, 2012), 55.

3 John T. Caldwell, “Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television),” Cinema Journal 45.1 (2005): 91, 92.

4 Klein, American Film Cycles, 6.

5 Nicholas B. King, “Mediating Panic,” in Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, ed. Robert

Peckham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 196.

6 Ibid., 197.

7 Bill Albertini, “Contagion and the Necessary Accident,” Discourse 30.3 (Fall 2008): 462, 444.

8 Alexandra Alter, “Updating a Chronicle of Suffering: Author of The Hot Zone Tracks Ebola’s Evolution,” New

York Times, October 19, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/books/the-hot-zone-author-tracks-ebolas-

evolution.html.

9 Sheldon Ungar, “Hot Crises and Media Reassurance: A Comparison of Emerging Diseases and Ebola Zaire,”

British Journal of Sociology 49.1 (Mar. 1998): 50.

10 Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,”

in American Feminist Thought at Century’s End, ed. Linda S. Kaufman (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 219.

11 Laura Seay and Kim Yi Donne, “The Long and Ugly Tradition of Treating Africa as a Dirty, Diseased Place,”

Washington Post, August 25, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-

cage/wp/2014/08/25/othering-ebola-and-the-history-and-politics-of-pointing-at-immigrants-as-potential-

disease-vectors/.

12 Ibid.

13 Alan M. Kraut, “Foreign Bodies: The Perennial Negotiation over Health and Culture in a Nation of Immigrants,”

Journal of American Ethnic History 23.2 (Winter 2004): 5.

244

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

14 Louis Jacobson, “Rep. Phil Gingrey Says Migrants May Be Bringing Ebola Virus through the U.S.–Mexico

Border,” Politifact, July 18, 2014, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jul/18/phil-

gingrey/rep-phil-gingrey-says-migrants-may-be-bringing-ebo/.

15 Louis Jacobson, “Are Illegal Immigrants Bringing ‘Tremendous’ Disease across the Border, as Trump Says?

Unlikely,” Politifact, July 23, 2015, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/jul/23/are-illegal-

immigrants-bringing-tremendous-diseas/.

16 Geddes Smith, Plague on Us (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1941), 23.

17 Thomas R. Feller, “World War Z,” Science Fiction Film and Television 7.3 (Autumn 2014): 447.

18 Elizabeth Goren, “Society’s Use of the Hero following a National Trauma,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis

67 (2007): 44.

19 Jacqueline Foertsch, Enemies Within: The Cold War and the AIDS Crisis in Literature, Film, and Culture

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 28.

20 “Trump: I’ll Build the Wall and Mexico’s Going to Pay for It,” CNN video, July 31, 2015,

http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/07/31/trump-mexico-border-foster-new-day.cnn.

21 “Great Again TV Spot,” Donald J. Trump for President, January 4, 2016,

http://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/great-again-tv-spot.{~?~AU: This URL is no longer working; is there an

alternative? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itsSDhgKwhw. Accessed May 18, 2017. }

22 In an interview with WGIR radio that was captured by the New Hampshire Democratic Party, Brown was asked

whether he favored travel restrictions on some passengers in and out of West Africa. He replied: “We need a

comprehensive approach and I think that should be part of it. I think it’s all connected. For example, we have

people coming into our country by legal means bringing in diseases and other potential challenges. Yet we have

a border that’s so porous that anyone can walk across it. I think it’s naive to think that people aren’t going to be

walking through here who have those types of diseases and/or other types of intent, criminal or terrorist. And

yet we do nothing to secure our border.” Quoted in Greg Sargent, “Scott Brown: Anyone with Ebola Can ‘Walk

Across’ Our ‘Porous’ Border,” Washington Post, October 14, 2014,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/10/14/scott-brown-anyone-with-ebola-can-walk-

across-our-porous-border/.

23 E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 9.

24 Robin Cook, Invasion (New York: Berkley Publishing, 1997), 238.

25 Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 50.

26 Ibid., 123–124, 131.

27 Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear Revisited (London: Continuum, 2006), xiv.

28 Richard Preston, The Hot Zone (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 405, 406.

29 Allison Fraiberg, “Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions: Resurfacing the Body in the Postmodern,”

Postmodern Culture 1.3 (May 1991): 6.

30 Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of

245

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Minnesota Press, 2007), 86.

31 Peter Christian Hall, “How the Contagion Virus Was Born,” Reuters, September 13, 2011,

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS57323549020110913.{~?~AU: The url here was no longer working, but I

believe this new url is a good replacement. Is this okay? Yes, looks great.}

32 Geoffrey Cowley “How Progress Makes Us Sick,” Newsweek, May 4, 2003, http://www.newsweek.com/how-

progress-makes-us-sick-137163.

33 Torin Monahan, “Just-in-Time Security,” in Reading “24”: TV against the Clock, ed. Steven Peacock (London:

I. B. Tauris, 2007), 109.

34 Geoffrey Crowley, “Outbreak of Fear,” Newsweek, May 21, 1995, http://www.newsweek.com/outbreak-fear-

183188.

35 Heather Schell, “The Sexist Gene: Science Fiction and the Germ Theory of History,” American Literary History

4.4 (Winter 2002): 823.

36 Frederic Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1992), 3.

37 Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to “The X-Files” (London: Routledge, 2000), 208.

38 Ruth Mayer, “Virus Discourse: The Rhetoric of Threat and Terrorism in the Biothriller,” Cultural Critique 66

(Spring 2007): 2.

39 All categories are taken from table 1.10 in Richard Nowell, Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher

Film Cycle (New York: Continuum, 2011), 55.

2. The Globalization Outbreak

1 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 8.

2 Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2007), 9.

3 Robert Gilpin, The Challenge of Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), excerpted

in New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gilpin-capitalism.html.

4 Alexander Galloway, Protocol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 31.

5 Jose van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2013), 5.

6 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden: Blackwell, 1996), quoted in Jussi Parikka, “Digital

Monsters, Binary Aliens—Computer Viruses, Capitalism and the Flow of Information,” Fibreculture Journal 4

(2005): par. 3, http://four.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-019-digital-monsters-binary-aliens-%E2%80%93-

computer-viruses-capitalism-and-the-flow-of-information/.{~?~AU: Should the publisher's location be

"Cambridge, MA" instead of just the state? I think you mean for the book above, endnote 4 – and yes.}

7 Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 2013), 42.

8 Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, 10, 25.

246

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

9 Ed Cohen, “The Paradoxical Politics of Viral Containment; or, How Scale Undoes Us One and All,” Social Text

29.1 106 (Spring 2011): 17.

10 Steven Melendez, “What ‘Safety Check’ Reveals about Facebook’s Changing Role,” Fast Company, July 7,

2016, http://www.fastcompany.com/3061576/safety-check-facebook.

11 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2008), 22.

12 Stacy Takacs, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America (Lawrence: University Press of

Kansas, 2012), 67.

13 Ibid., 69.

14 Bonnie Noonan, Gender in Science Fiction Films, 1964–1979 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015),

81.

15 Ibid., 82, 83.

16 David Holloway, Cultures of the War on Terror: Empire, Ideology, and the Remaking of 9/11 (Montreal: McGill-

Queen’s University Press, 2008), 83.

17 Bonnie Noonan, Women Scientists in Fifties Science Fiction Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,

2005), 44, 48–49.

18 Eileen Pollack, “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?,” New York Times, October 3, 2013,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/why-are-there-still-so-few-women-in-science.html?_r=0.

19 Noonan, Gender in Science Fiction, 109.

20 Laura Prudom, “The X-Files: Gillian Anderson Was Offered Half as Much as David Duchovny for Revival

Series,” Variety, January 22, 2016, http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/gillian-anderson-pay-gap-x-files-david-

duchovny-x-files-revival-salary-1201686438/.

21 Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 6.

22 Ibid., 7.

23 Ibid.

24 Joshua Clover, “Fall and Rise,” Film Quarterly 65.2 (Winter 2011): 8.

25 Brent Bellamy, “Contagion,” Science Fiction Film and Television 6.1 (Spring 2013): 122.

26 Scott Z. Burns, interview with author, November 18, 2015.

27 Edward Douglas, “Interview: Contagion Writer Scott Z. Burns,” Coming Soon, September 6, 2011,

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=81596.

28 Peter Christian Hall, “How the Contagion Virus Was Born,” Reuters, September 13, 2011,

http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare/2011/09/13/how-the-contagion-virus-was-born/.

29 Scott Z. Burns, interview with author, November 18, 2015.

30 Melinda Burns, interview with author, October 16, 2015.

31 Leonard A. Cole, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas (Lanham: Rowman

& Littlefield, 1990), 80, 81.

247

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

32 George Wilson, “Army Conducted 239 Secret, Open-Air Germ Warfare Tests,” Washington Post, March 9, 1977,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/03/09/army-conducted-239-secret-open-air-germ-

warfare-tests/b17e5ee7-3006-4152-acf3-0ad163e17a22/.

33 Ian Sample, “Mutant Virus Experiments Risk Unleashing Global Pandemic,” Guardian, May 21, 2014,

http://www.rawstory.com/2014/05/mutant-virus-experiments-risk-unleashing-global-pandemic-study-warns/.

34 Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear Revisited (London: Continuum, 2006), 74.

35 Peter N. Stearns, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2006),

36, 40, 42–43.

36 Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed.

Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 230.

37 Daniel Yergin, “The Age of ‘Globality,’” Newsweek, May 18, 1998,

https://web.archive.org/web/20090323082216/http://www.newsweek.com/id/92486?tid=relatedcl.

38 Paul Virilio, quoted in Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2006), 188.

39 Vivian Sobchack, “Comprehending Screens: A Meditation in Media Res,” Rivista di estetica, n.s., 55 (Jan. 2014):

92.

40 Ibid., 88.

41 Editorial Board, “Fear Spreads Faster than Ebola: Our View,” USA Today, October 14, 2014,

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/10/14/ebola-aids-sars-fear-virus-cdc-facts-editorials-

debates/17280073/.

42 Stacy Lu, “An Epidemic of Fear,” Monitor on Psychology 46.3 (Mar. 2015): par. 1,

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2015/03/fear.aspx.

43 Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” 223.

44 Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, 91.

45 D. M. Berry, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (London: Palgrave, 2011), 4.

Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, 10.

3. The Terrorism Outbreak

1 “How Much Did the September 11 Terrorist Attack Cost America?,” The Institute for the Analysis of Global

Security, http://www.iags.org/costof911.html.{~?~AU: Consider including an "accessed on" date since the page

itself is not dated. Accessed May 19, 2017.}

2 Public Law 107–40 (2001), http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ40/html/PLAW-107publ40.htm

(emphasis added).

3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1995), 195, 197–

199, 231.

4 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 (New York: Picador, 2003), 41.

5 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195, 197–199, 195.

248

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

6 Foucault, Abnormal, 47.

7 Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2007), 26.

8 Peter N. Stearns, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2006),

190.

9 Ibid., 190–191.

10 Alison Bashford, “Panic’s Past and Global Futures,” in Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, ed.

Robert Peckham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 208.

11 Jonathan Metzl, interview by Harry Smith, “Psychological Effects after Terror Attacks,” MSNBC Live, MSNBC,

Nov. 21, 2015.

12 Ibid.

13 Kevin J. Wetmore, Post 9/11 Horror in American Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012), 173.

14 Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 1.

15 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel (New York: Vintage, 1999), 3.

16 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 97.

17 Ibid., 105, 106.

18 Joanna Burke, Fear: A Cultural History (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006), 311.

19 Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of

AIDS (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 51, 53.

20 Christine Gorman, “Returning Fire against AIDS,” Time, June 24, 1991, 44.

21 Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St Martin’s Press,

1988), 518.

22 Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” in AIDS:

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 60.

23 George F. Kennan, quoted in Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,

2008), 118.

24 Walter Rostow, quoted in Michael A. Hennessy, Strategy in Vietnam: The Marines and Revolutionary Warfare in

I Corps, 1965–1972 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 18.

25 Colleen Bell, “Hybrid Warfare and Its Metaphors,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights,

Humanitarianism, and Development 3.2 (Summer 2012): 226.

26 Bell, “Hybrid Warfare,” 240.

27 David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35–38.

28 Richard N. Haas, quoted in Ruth Mayer, “Virus Discourse: The Rhetoric of Threat and Terrorism in the

Biothriller,” Cultural Critique 66 (Spring 2007): 5.

29 Nick B. King, “Dangerous Fragments,” Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002): 75.{~?~AU: Should this be "Nicholas"? on

the article, it says Nick B. King. Maybe he changed what name he uses?} –

30 Ibid., 77.

249

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

31 Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “FBI to Request Scientific Review of Its Anthrax Investigation,” Science, September 16,

2008, http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2008/09/fbi-request-scientific-review-its-anthrax-

investigation.

32 William J. Broad, “Inquiry in Anthrax Mailings Had Gaps, Report Says,” New York Times, December 19, 2014,

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/science/inquiry-in-anthrax-mailings-had-gaps-report-

says.html?ref=topics&_r=0.

33 King, “Dangerous Fragments,” 77.

34 “You Are Either with Us or against Us,” CNN, November 6, 2001,

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/.

35 Boaz Ganor, “Terrorism Networks: It Takes a Network to Beat a Network,” in The Network Challenge: Strategy,

Profit, and Risk in an Interlinked World, ed. Paul R. Kleindorfer, Yoram (Jerry) Wind, and Robert E. Gunther

(New Jersey: Wharton School Publishing, 2009), 454.{~?~AU: Should the location of publication be a city?

Upper Saddle River, New Jersey}

36 Walter Laqueur, “Postmodern Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs 75.5 (Sept.–Oct. 1996): 34.

37 Ibid., 33, 28.

38 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7.

39 Alexander Galloway, Protocol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 201, 204.

40 King, “Dangerous Fragments,” 75.

41 Lynn Spigel, “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11,” American Quarterly 56.2 (June 2004): 244.

42 Stacy Takacs, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America (Lawrence: University Press of

Kansas, 2012), 61, 65.

43 Matthew B. Hill, “Tom Clancy, 24, and the Language of Autocracy,” in The War on Terror and American

Popular Culture, ed. Andrew Schopp and Matthew B. Hill (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,

2009), 127.

44 Laqueur, “Postmodern Terrorism,” 34.

45 Hill, “Language of Autocracy,” 128.

46 Silvio Waisbord, “Journalism, Risk, and Patriotism,” in Journalism after September 11, ed. Barbie Zelizer and

Stuart Allen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 213.

47 Takacs, Terrorism TV, 65.

48 Ibid., 66.

49 Ibid., 61.

50 James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1988), 200.

51 Takacs, Terrorism TV, 60.

52 Justin Lewis, Richard Maxwell, and Toby Miller, “9-11,” Television and New Media 3.2 (2002): 126.

53 Takacs, Terrorism TV, 62.

54 Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 22.

55 Noah Feldman, “Our Presidential Era: Who Can Check the President?,” New York Times, January 8, 2006,

250

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/magazine/08court.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0.

56 “Bush Approval Falls to 33%, Congress Earns Rare Praise,” Pew Research Center, March 15, 2006,

http://www.people-press.org/2006/03/15/bush-approval-falls-to-33-congress-earns-rare-praise/.

57 Caroline Daniel, “Power Play: Why Bush Is Facing a Backlash against His ‘Imperial’ Presidency,” Financial

Times, July 6, 2006, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/148939e0-0c8c-11db-8235-

0000779e2340.html#axzz3wF2KU6Eh.

58 “Section 1: Trust in Government: 1958–2010,” Pew Research Center, April 18, 2010, http://www.people-

press.org/2010/04/18/section-1-trust-in-government-1958-2010/.

59 Jennifer Gillan, Television and New Media: Must Click TV (New York: Routledge, 2011), 127.

60 Jane Mayer, “Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind 24,” New Yorker, February 19, 2007,

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/19/whatever-it-takes.

61 Bill Keveney, “Fictional 24 Brings Real Issue of Torture Home,” USA Today, March 13, 2005,

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2005-03-13-24-torture_x.htm.

62 Torin Monahan, “Just-in-Time Security,” in Reading “24”: TV against the Clock, ed. Steven Peacock (London:

I. B. Tauris, 2007), 114.

63 Anne Friedberg, Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 193–194.

64 Hill, “Language of Autocracy,” 138.

65 Ibid., 136, 139.

66 Ibid., 139.

67 Bo Kampmann Walter “The Art of Staying Tuned in Real-Time. Remediation in 24,” Contemporanea: Journal

of Communication and Culture 1.1 (2005): 30.

68 Christopher Gair, “24 and Post-National American Identities,” in Reading “24”: TV against the Clock, ed.

Steven Peacock (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 202.

69 Hill, “Language of Autocracy,” 134.

70 Ibid., 141.

71 Elwood Reid, e-mail message to author, November 3, 2015.

72 Mark Wheelis, “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8.9 (Sept. 2002):

par. 2, http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9/01-0536_article.

73 Dan Brown, Inferno (New York: Anchor Books, 2014), 60, 131.

74 Monahan, “Just-in-Time Security,” 111.

75 Leger Grindon, “Cycles and Clusters,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of

Texas Press, 2012), 55.

76 Mayer, “Virus Discourse,” 14–15.

77 “Apparent Suicide of Anthrax Suspect,” New York Times video, August 1, 2008,

http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/1194817108194/apparent-suicide-of-anthrax-suspect.html.

78 Mayer, “Virus Discourse,” 5.

79 Jean Baudrillard, quoted in Ruth Mayer, “Virus Discourse: The Rhetoric of Threat and Terrorism in the

251

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Biothriller,” Cultural Critique 66 (Spring 2007): 6.

80 Richard Haas, quoted in Ruth Mayer, “Virus Discourse: The Rhetoric of Threat and Terrorism in the Biothriller,”

Cultural Critique 66 (Spring 2007): 6.

81 Takacs, Terrorism TV, 75.

4. The Postapocalypse Outbreak

1 John Knefel, “Apocalypse Soon: 9 Terrifying Signs of Environmental Doom and Gloom,” Rolling Stone, August

18, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/apocalyse-soon-9-terrifying-signs-of-environmental-doom-

and-gloom-20150818.

2 Cited in Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 30, 31.

3 Ibid., 81, 82.

4 Ibid., 109.

5 Ibid., 110.

6 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Orion Press, 1947), 96.

7 Luckhurst, Zombies, 119–120.

8 Ibid., 110–111.

9 Mariana McConnell, “Interview: George A. Romero on Diary of the Dead,” Cinemablend, January 14, 2008,

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Interview-George-Romero-Diary-Dead-7818.html.

10 “Box Office History for George A. Romero’s Dead Series Movies,” The Numbers: Where Data and Box Office

Meet, http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/George-A-Romeros-Dead-Series#tab=summary.{~?~AU:

Consider adding an "accessed on" date. Accessed on May 18, 2017.}

11 Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (Godalming, Surrey: FAB Press,

2005), 151.

12 Luckhurst, Zombies, 169.

“Resident Evil,” Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=residentevil.htm.

Accessed on May 19, 2017.

14 Kyle William Bishop, American Zombie Gothic (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010), 10.

15 “Most Popular ‘Zombie’ Feature Films Released 2015-01-01 to 2015-12-31,” IMDb,

http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&keywords=zombie&sort=moviemeter,asc&title_type=feature&year=2

015,2015.{~?~AU: Consider adding an "accessed on" date. Accessed on May 18, 2017.}

16 James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1999), 5.

17 Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 18.

18 Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2007), 9.

19 Steven Pokornowski, “Insecure Lives: Zombies, Global Health, and the Totalitarianism of Generalization,”

Literature and Medicine 31.2 (Fall 2013): 223.

252

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

20 Nick Muntean, “Nuclear Death and Radical Hope in Dawn of the Dead and On the Beach,” Better Off Dead: The

Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (New York: Fordham

University Press, 2011), 83.

21 Alexander Galloway, Protocol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 31.

22 Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, “Introduction: Generation Z: The Age of Apocalypse,” Generation Zombie:

Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, ed. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz (Jefferson, NC: McFarland

& Company, 2011), 6.

23 Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2006), 357.

24 The movie Warm Bodies (Levine, 2013), with the tag line “He was dead inside until he met her,” and the

television show iZombie (CW, 2014–present) are two rare exceptions where the zombie has an actual point of

view.{~?~AU: Should the director or network be mentioned for this movie and this show? added}

25 Kevin J. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012), 2, 159–160.

26 Nick Muntean and Matthew Thomas Payne, “Attack of the Livid Dead: Recalibrating Terror in the Post–

September 11 Zombie Film,” in The War on Terror and American Popular Culture: September 11 and Beyond,

ed. Andrew Schopp and Matthew B. Hill (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 246–247.

27 Robert Kirkman, quoted in David Peisner, “The Rise of The Walking Dead,” Rolling Stone, October 31, 2013,

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/the-rise-of-the-walking-dead-20131031#ixzz3jyV383bD.

28 Kevin Voigt, “Hong Kong and SARS: A City under Siege,” CNN, February 21, 2013,

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/21/world/asia/hong-kong-sars-anniversary/.

29 Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 28.

30 Steven Pokornowski, “Burying the Living with the Dead: Security, Survival and the Sanction of Violence,” in

We’re All Infected, ed. Dawn Keetley (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014), 53.

31 Ezra Klein, “Don’t Be Afraid of Fast Zombies,” Washington Post, November 15, 2015,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/28/dont-be-afraid-of-fast-zombies/.

32 Wetmore, Post 9/11 Horror, 2.

33 Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 81.

34 Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 437.

35 Taffy Brodessor-Akner, “Max Brooks Is Not Kidding about the Zombie Apocalypse,” New York Times, June 21,

2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/max-brooks-is-not-kidding-about-the-zombie-

apocalypse.html?ref=magazine&_r=1.

36 Terry Matalas, interview with author, July 29, 2015.

37 Andy Coghlan, quoted in Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 27.

38 Pokornowski, “Insecure Lives,” 200.

39 Luckhurst, Zombies, 181.

40 Luis P. Villarreal, “Are Viruses Alive?,” Scientific American 291.6 (Dec. 2004): 104.

253

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

41 Wendell Stanley, quoted in Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 163.

42 Danny Boyle, quoted in Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 28.

43 Richard Preston, The Hot Zone (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 98.

44 Rob Thomas, e-mail message to author, October 18, 2016.

45 Gillian Bennett, Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend (Jackson: University Press

of Mississippi, 2005), 105, 111.

46 Gwyneth Peaty, “Infected with Life: Neo-Supernaturalism and the Gothic Zombie,” in Gothic Science Fiction:

1980–2010, ed. Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 108.

47 Josh Levin, “Dead Run,” Slate, March 24, 2004,

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/03/dead_run.html.

48 Max Brooks, in his Zombie Survival Guide, describes a zombie’s top speed as slower than a human’s calm stride:

“Zombies appear to be incapable of running. The fastest have been observed to move at a rate of barely one step

per 1.5 seconds.” Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (New

York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 13.

The original book version of World War Z, written by Brooks, uses slow zombies, while the movie uses

quick ones. Brooks himself cannot imagine how much more terrifying quick zombies would be. Brodessor-

Akner, “Brooks Is Not Kidding.”

Simon Pegg, co-writer and star of Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004), argues that “Zombies don’t run! I

know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a

vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can’t fly; zombies do not run. It’s a misconception, a bastardisation

that diminishes a classic movie monster.” Simon Pegg, “The Dead and the Quick,” Guardian, November 4,

2008, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/nov/04/television-simon-pegg-dead-set.

49 Keetley, “Introduction,” in We’re All Infected, ed. Dawn Keetley (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014),

50 Ibid., 7, 10.

51 Steven Kane, e-mail message to author, August 6, 2015.

52 Natalie Abrams, “Syfy’s 12 Monkeys Changes the Rules of the Movie,” Entertainment Weekly, January 6, 2015,

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/01/16/12-monkeys-syfy.

53 Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 53–54.

54 The reason they want the DC2 virus (codename “Project Terror”) is complex. Rather than predictably wanting it

to take over the world or conquer governments, like in 24, these military thugs want it in order to prevent

themselves from becoming zombies. As in The Hades Factor, these men were originally infected with the virus

while hunting Osama Bin Laden. The unique twist here is that in order to prevent themselves from turning into

horrific monsters, they need to be exposed continually to low doses of DC2, which stops the infection from

spreading. At the same time, if they continue to infect enough people, and then experiment on the survivors,

they also increase the chance of finding a cure for themselves. So in this case, their agenda is both self-

254

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

preservation, and destruction of anyone who gets in the way.

55 Brodessor-Akner, “Brooks Is Not Kidding.”

56 Kim Paffenroth, “For Love Is Strong as Death,” in Triumph of “The Walking Dead”: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie

Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder (Dallas: Smart Pop Books, 2011), 222.

57 Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed.

Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 229.

58 Fred Botting, “Zombie Death Drive: Between Gothic and Science Fiction,” in Gothic Science Fiction: 1980–

2010, ed. Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 42.

59 Steve Beard, “No Particular Place to Go,” Sight and Sound 3.4 (1993): 30.

60 Sean Moreland, “Shambling towards Mount Improbable to Be Born: American Evolutionary Anxiety and the

Hopeful Monsters of Matheson’s I Am Legend and Romero’s Dead Films,” Generation Zombie: Essays on the

Living Dead in Modern Culture, ed. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and

Company, 2011), 81.

61 Keetley, “Introduction,” 1.

62 Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn, The Walking Dead, vol. 4: The Heart’s Desire (Berkeley:

Image Comics, 2005), 129.

63 Xavier Aldana Reyes, “Nothing but the Meat: Posthuman Bodies and the Dying Undead,” in We’re All Infected,

ed. Dawn Keetley (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014), 146.

64 Julia Kristeva, quoted in Laura Kremmel, “Rest in Pieces: Violence in Mourning the Un(Dead),” in We’re All

Infected, ed. Dawn Keetley (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014), 84.

65 Chris Schilling, Body and Social Theory (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 60.

66 Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 21.

67 Eugene Thacker, “Necrologies; or the Death of the Body Politic,” in Beyond Biopolitics, ed. Patricia Ticineto

Clough and Craig Willse (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 157.

68 Giorgio Agamben, Moyens sans fins. Notes sur la politique (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1995), 50–51, quoted in J.-

A. Mbembe and Libby Meintjes, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (Winter 2003): 12.

69 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1966), 444.

70 Luckhurst, Zombies, 174–175, 178.

71 Boluk and Lenz, “Introduction: Generation Z,” 7.

72 Lisa Morton, “The Walking Dead and Dance of Death,” in Triumph of “The Walking Dead”: Robert Kirkman’s

Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder (Dallas: Smart Pop Books, 2011), 177.

73 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1976–1976 (New York: Picador,

2003), 243.

74 James A. Tyner, War, Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count (New York: Guilford Press, 2009), 31,

32.

75 Timothy J. Reiss, “Calculating Humans: Mathematics, War, and the Colonial Calculus,” in Arts of Calculation:

Quantifying Thought in Early Modern England, ed. David Glimp and Michelle R. Warren (New York: Palgrave

255

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Macmillan, 2004), 137–138, 144, 145, 153 (original emphasis).

76 Volha Piotukh, Biopolitics, Governmentality, and Humanitarianism: “Caring” for the Population in Afghanistan

and Belarus (New York: Routledge, 2015), 70, 73, 74.

77 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 135.

78 The “disposability of the infected” plays out not only in zombie texts but also in other apocalyptic texts as well.

In Blindness (Meirelles, 2008), the infected are the abject other. All those infected are taken to an increasingly

crowded makeshift quarantine zone in an abandoned asylum. As they enter the quarantine facility, a voice-over

declares, “The isolation in which you find yourselves represents above any personal considerations an act of

solidarity with the rest of the nation.” Submitting to quarantine is an act of patriotism! Despite the increasing

urgency, the government ignores the people in the quarantine zone, denying them anything but the barest

essentials, forcing the sick to fight over food and allowing the asylum to become overrun with filth and feces.

The soldiers outside the asylum are hostile and refuse to get close to any of the infected. By the end of the

movie, the same space that was once white and clean has turned into total squalor. People are raped in exchange

for food, and eventually the asylum burns down after riots break out among the infected.

79 J. A. Mbembe and Libby Meintjes, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11.

80 Brooks, World War Z, 107, 109.

81 The movie Nerve (Joost and Schulman, 2016) takes this competition and literalizes and commodifies it, as

players compete in ever more challenging “dares” for money, for fame, and for their lives.

82 Carlo Rotella, “The American City in Literature,” American Urbanism, ed. Joseph Heathcott, forthcoming from

Routledge.

83 Luckhurst, Zombies, 186.

84 James Hibbard, “The Walking Dead: How to Comprehend Its Massive Ratings,” Entertainment Weekly, January

17, 2015, http://www.ew.com/article/2013/11/11/the-walking-dead-ratings.

85 Alan Sepinwall “Record-Setting Fear the Walking Dead Debut Proves Americans Still Love Zombies,” HitFix,

August 24, 2015, http://www.hitfix.com/the-dartboard/record-setting-fear-the-walking-dead-debut-proves-

americans-still-love-zombies#cLXCa9z0HfBUmQ6L.99.

86 Ned Vizzini, “Rick and Rand,” in Triumph of “The Walking Dead”: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and

Screen, ed. James Lowder (Dallas: Smart Pop Books, 2011), 129.

87 Robert Kirkman Tony Moore, and Cliff Rathburn, The Walking Dead, vol. 1: Days Gone Bye (Berkeley: Image

Comics, 2008), 7.{~?~AU: This seems to cite an introduction rather than the text itself, but the illustrator and

any other contributors should be included in the citation as well, as they are in the other reference to the series

(The Heart's Desire). In the other reference, only a year is given; should a full date be included there as well?

Consider making this consistent. I made it consistent.}

88 Keetley, “Introduction,” 6.

89 Kirkman, Days Gone Bye.

90 Frank Darabont, quoted in Jeff Jensen, “The Walking Dead: TV’s Best New Bloodbath,” Entertainment Weekly,

November 12, 2010, http://www.ew.com/article/2010/11/12/walking-dead-tvs-best-new-bloodbath.

256

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

91 Scott Kenemore, “Rick Grimes: A Zombie among Men,” in Triumph of “The Walking Dead”: Robert Kirkman’s

Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2011), 193.

92 P. Ivan Young, “Walking Tall or Walking Dead? The American Cowboy in the Zombie Apocalypse,” in We’re

All Infected, ed. Dawn Keetley (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014), 59.

93 Anna Froula, “Homeland Insecurity: The Walking Dead on the Postapocalyptic Frontier,” paper presented at the

annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), March 2014.

94 Philip L. Simpson, “The Zombie Apocalypse Is upon Us!,” We’re All Infected, ed. Dawn Keetley (Jefferson, NC:

McFarland & Company, 2014), 36, 37.

95 Kay Steiger, “No Clean Slate: Unshakable Race and Gender Politics in The Walking Dead,” Triumph of “The

Walking Dead”: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen, ed. James Lowder (Dallas: Smart Pop

Books, 2011), 107.

96 Froula, “Homeland Insecurity.”

97 Susan Faludi, Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Macmillan, 2007), 14.

98 Ina Rae Hark, “Today Is the Longest Day of My Life,” in Film and Television after 9/11, ed. Wheeler Winston

Dixon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 126, 127.

99 Wetmore, Post 9/11 Horror, 15.

100 Brendan Riley, “Zombie People,” in Triumph of “The Walking Dead”: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page

and Screen, ed. James Lowder (Dallas: Smart Pop Books, 2011), 86.

101 Robert Kirkman, quoted in David Peisner, “The Rise of The Walking Dead,” Rolling Stone, October 31, 2013,

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/the-rise-of-the-walking-dead-20131031.

102 Vizzini, “Rick and Rand,” 128.

103 Ibid.

104 Kirkman, Days Gone Bye, back cover.

105 Camilla Fojas, Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture (Urbana: University

of Illinois Press, 2017), 91.{~?~AU: Removed highlighting and reminder text here: (Page number may be

adjusted once book is released) I got the book and found the page numbers: 68, 69.}

106 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2000), 115.

107 Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced

Capitalism,” Boundary 2 35.1 (Spring 2008): 89.

108 Douglas Kellner, “Baudrillard, Globalization, and Terrorism,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 2.1

(Jan. 2005).

Conclusion

1 Todd Haynes, quoted in Jason Tougaw, “We’re Still Vulnerable: Todd Haynes’s Safe in 2011,” Women’s Studies

Quarterly 39.1&2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 44.

257

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2 “Multiple Chemical Sensitivities,” Occupational Health and Safety Administration, United States Department of

Labor, https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/multiplechemicalsensitivities. Accessed on May 17, 2017.

3 Peter Knight, “ILOVEYOU: Viruses, Paranoia, and the Environment of Risk,” in The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy

Theory and the Human Sciences, ed. Jane Parish and Martin Parker (Oxford: Blackwell/Sociological Review

Monograph, 2001), 17–30.

4 Nick Harding, “Truth and Lies: Conspiracy Theories Are Running Rampant Thanks to Modern Technology,”

Independent, November 11, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/truth-and-

lies-conspiracy-theories-are-running-rampant-thanks-to-modern-technology-6260128.html.

5 This line was a reference to the famous quotation “We have met the enemy and they are ours” from American

Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry after defeating a British naval squadron during the War of 1812.

6 Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New York: Columbia University Press,

1997), 5.

7 Ruth Mayer, “Virus Discourse: The Rhetoric of Threat and Terrorism in the Biothriller,” Cultural Critique 66

(Spring 2007): 2.

8 John L. Sherry, “Media Saturation and Entertainment-Education,” Communication Theory 12.2 (May 2002): 219.

9 Kyle William Bishop, American Zombie Gothic (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010), 35.

10 Skye Cooley, “The Flood of 2016: Southeast Louisiana and the Consequences of Real Community,” Huffington

Post, August 18, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-flood-of-2016-southeast-louisiana-the-

consequences_us_57b47ffae4b0b3bb4b088bcd.

11 Lynn Spigel, “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11,” American Quarterly 56.2 (June 2004): 238,

240.

12 Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 178.

13 Jennifer Gillan, Television and New Media: Must Click TV (New York: Routledge, 2011), 77, 94–95.

14 Itay Hod and Anita Bennett, “Why TV Newscasters Are Hollywood’s Latest Casting Obsession,” Wrap,

December 22, 2015, http://www.thewrap.com/why-tv-newscasters-are-hollywoods-latest-casting-obsession/.

15 Tricia Jenkins, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas

Press, 2012), 74–75.

16 Richard Lindhelm, interview by Bob Edwards, Morning Edition, NPR, October 15, 2007.

17 Mayer, “Virus Discourse,” 2.

18 Gillan, Television, 102, 107.

19 John Gibson, The Big Story, Fox News, January 16, 2007.

20 Cal Thomas, “Aquarius Sunset,” Townhall, January 30, 2007,

http://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2007/01/30/aquarius_sunset.

21 Mayer, “Virus Discourse,” 2.

22 Matthew Biedlingermaier, “Dietl Tells Imam ‘the Facts of Life’: ‘If You’re on a Plane with Me . . . You’ll Be

Looked at a Little . . . More Carefully than Me,’” Media Matters for America, January 19, 2007,

258

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://mediamatters.org/research/2007/01/19/dietl-tells-imam-the-facts-of-life-if-youre-on/137791.

23 E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2.

24 Sarah Whitten, “Misinformation Spreads on Social Media following Paris Attacks,” CNBC, November 16, 2015,

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/misinformation-spreads-social-media-following-paris-attacks-

n464291.

25 Alison Bashford, “Panic’s Past and Global Futures,” in Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, ed.

Robert Peckham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 206.