A cranky person watches Contagion

I liked the trailer for Contagion, and then I heard an interview with Laurie Garrett, the science adviser for the movie-- she was very enthusiastic about how reasonable the science was. (Page down to Contagion for the movie stuff.)

So I saw the movie last night. Perhaps it wasn't the perfect thing to take my mind off 9/11 (any suggestions?), but I did get moderately caught up in it and distracted by what I didn't like about it, so it wasn't a total waste.

I'd say that the acting, dialogue, and music were all reasonably good. The science all seemed to make sense.

It wasn't visually interesting enough for me to say that it's worth seeing in a theater.

On the specific level, since Garrett insisted on no evil scientists, we get an evil blogger. He comes up with a fraudulent cure, gets lots of money as a result, and is about to encourage people to not get their vaccinations. He has accurate information about a security breach by a high-status good guy, but I think the implication is that revealing this isn't worth it-- at best, it's neutral.

There is no hint that there are any other bloggers.

I'd say the movie has an underlying theme of showing that all the initiative should be with major institutions. When people outside the institutions do something on their own, it's looting, rioting, kidnapping, and spreading false information. The only bit of low-level initiative which works out well is a janitor who begs for vaccination for his son from his boss, and gets it.

Also, there's less than I would have liked to see about the actual amounts of social breakdown, and what the efforts to rebuild and maintain in the face of a plague would have looked like. Perhaps I wanted a novel.

Minor annoying detail: The evil blogger is pushing homeopathic forsythia as a cure. When he and a top science administrator are arguing with each other for the media, the top science administrator doesn't ask "How did you settle on homeopathic forsythia?"

Possible symbolic weirdness, and I do mean possible.... the woman who brings the disease to the US from Hong Kong. She picks it up in a casino, and spreads it faster because she has an adulterous interlude in Chicago on the way home. Is there a subtext that light-hearted irresponsible behavior brings death?

Anyway, possibly the worst date movie in the history of movies.

9/11 as a mind-killer

Noah Millman wrote:

In retrospect, what suffered the most lasting damage from the terrorist attacks of ten years ago was my belief in my own rationality. I believed that I was thinking things through seriously, and coming to difficult but true conclusions about what had happened, what would happen, what must happen. Here is part of what I wrote, to friends and family, several days later:

Our President has made it clear: we are at war. I do not anticipate that this will be a short or an easy war. Our enemy has operations in dozens of countries, including this one. He is supported, out of enthusiasm or fear, by many governments among our purported friends as well as among our enemies. He has shown his cunning, his ruthlessness, and most of all his patience, in his successful plot to kill thousands of innocents and bring down the symbols of our civilization. And in striking at him, as we must, we will bring down others who will in turn seek their own vengeance upon us.

There is not a single factual assertion in that paragraph that I had any reason to believe I could substantiate. I did not know anything about the enemy. I had no idea whether or not there were “operations” in dozens of countries – I don’t even know what I meant by “operations.” I know what I was referring to with the business about being “supported” by friends and enemies, but “support” is a deliberately fuzzy word; I wouldn’t have used it if I was trying to make a concrete assertion with clear implications. The purpose of that assertion, like everything else, was to build up my first assertion. We were at war. And it wouldn’t be short or easy. Because that conclusion, though grim, was one that imparted meaning to the murder of 3,000 people. I thought I was being serious – examining the facts, calculating the likely negative consequences of necessary action, preparing myself for the unfortunate necessities of life. But I wasn’t doing anything of the kind. I was engaged in a search for meaning in which reason was purely instrumental.

Link (which includes additional good retrospectives) thanks to Ampersand.