Nothing spreads like fear.
Like that tag line for the film “Contagion,” much of what Americans know — or think they know — about Ebola and other household-name viruses emanates from Hollywood.
From “The Andromeda Strain” to “Outbreak” to “I Am Legend,” images of hazmat-suited scientists, writhing victims and blood-drenched corpses (or worse, ravenous zombie/vampires) have churned out profits for Tinseltown.
At the box office, it helps if the starring microbe is aided and abetted by misguided scientists or nefarious government officials. Or if the dastardly bug emerged from bats, as Ebola apparently did, as a sudden and relentless killer.
Echoes of those nightmare scenarios ricocheted through metro Atlanta this week at the news that two Americans suffering from Ebola were being airlifted from Liberia to Atlanta for treatment at Emory University Hospital. The first of the two, Dr. Kent Brantly, arrived at Dobbins Air Reserve Base on Saturday and was taken to a special isolation unit at Emory.
“If this Genie is released from its bottle and unleashed here Georgia there is no Turning Back!” a commenter using the name Bernie 31 posted in response to one report on ajc.com. “The Potential of Deaths in the Millions are to be expected. … A fence will be erected all around Atlanta and there will be NO coming in or coming OUT!”
Such tirades weren’t confined to Atlanta.
W. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist who served as an adviser on the film “Contagion,” said the past few days have brought several emails demanding to know why “they” (read: misguided scientists and nefarious government officials) “are letting these Trojan horses, these lepers, into our midst.”
'People panic. Reason does not prevail.'
Rob Weiner, a pop culture librarian at Texas Tech University who teaches classes on zombies and other film phenomena, said such reactions are natural, given most people’s frame of reference. They’ve seen multiple movies and TV shows depicting bio-cataclysms but are likely to be a little behind on their reading of the American Journal of Epidemiology.
“Anyone can post anything online,” Weiner said. “People panic. Reason does not prevail.”
On the other hand, the anxieties evoked by films such as “Outbreak” and TV series such as “The Last Ship” weren’t invented by movie moguls. They’re part of our cultural DNA.
Plagues do happen. Human history is punctuated by waves of death at the hands of microscopic assassins that strike silently, spread uncontrollably and kill horribly. Fear of such diseases is way up there, as survival instincts go.
“This has triggered a very primal fear in people,” said Victoria Sutton, author of the 2014 book “The Things That Keep Us Up at Night,” which focuses on the sub-genres of bio-horror and bio-terror. “It’s about moving away from someone who is sick.”
“Primal” is a word that crops up a lot when scientists talk about the human response to viruses like Ebola.
“It’s a pretty primal fear,” said Lawrence Madoff, a professor at the University of Massachusetts medical school. “The current crisis is frightening. It’s by far the largest Ebola outbreak, and we haven’t been able to contain it, which is unusual. It is hitting frighteningly close to home.”
'A general distrust of government'
It also comes at a time when the would-be white-hat, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, is reeling from self-inflicted wounds to its credibility. Again and again, those alarmed by the decision to bring Ebola victims to Atlanta cited recent revelations about laxness at the CDC. They include reports that workers improperly handled deadly pathogens including anthrax and that vials of smallpox sat in a cardboard box in a New Jersey lab for decades. (To be fair, it wasn’t a CDC lab.)
“The fear is compounded by a general distrust of government and other institutions,” Weiner said. “Accidents happen all the time. We live in a chaotic world. That’s the truth.”
Nevertheless, movies about deadly viruses are generally as realistic as movies about espionage or romance, Lipkin said. “They’re trying to sell tickets. They’re trying to put butts in the seats.”
A very real danger, several experts noted, is that unreasoning fear becomes unreasoning prejudice.
Weiner recalled the way many people reacted when AIDS emerged in the ’80s, when even some nurses refused to care for people with the disease.
In the present case, he said, Ebola’s African origins play into deep-seated stereotypes of that continent as a place of primitive mystery and danger.
“There’s a mistrust there, possibly racially motivated,” he said.
'Other viruses would be jealous'
When it comes to Ebola, fact and fiction diverge on several fronts.
For one, Ebola is far less contagious than its on-screen cousins. Most movie viruses are more like the flu: airborne and spread through casual contact.
For another, Ebola is less deadly than the Hollywood-ized microbes that wipe out everyone who isn’t Will Smith. Mortality rates vary widely between different Ebola strains. The worst is 79 percent, but the next is 53 percent, and it goes down from there to 0 percent, according to the CDC. The rate for the current outbreak has yet to be determined, but thus far roughly 60 percent of known victims have died.
Finally, while Ebola’s symptoms can be gruesome, most victims don’t bleed copiously from every orifice.
“It is not as bloody and dramatic as in the movies or books,” Dr. Armand Sprecher of Doctors Without Borders told medical blogger Tara C. Smith in 2007. “The patients mostly look sick and weak. If there is blood, it is not a lot, usually in the vomit or diarrhea, occasionally from the gums or nose.”
But Ebola is unique in one regard: No virus since HIV has gotten the kind of play in the media that it has enjoyed.
“Other viruses would be jealous” if they knew, Lipkin said.
Ebola has even entered the popular lexicon as a proxy for any really nasty illness.
“It’s become a colloquialism,” Sutton, the author of “The Things That Keep Us Up at Night,” said. “When someone feels really sick, they say ‘I have Ebola.’”
Can you kill it if it’s not alive?
Setting aside Ebola’s peculiarities, viruses as a class make grand movie villains. Central Casting could hardly have dreamed up a bigger creep.
As top-drawer scientists explain in a Discovery Channel-style video released in conjunction with “I Am Legend,” viruses aren’t exactly alive. (Inescapable corollary: You can’t exactly kill them.)
A virus is a parasitic packet of genetic material that invades a living cell, hijacks the cell’s metabolic machinery and uses it for the sole purpose of producing more virus.
In other words, ” … they’re not zombies, but …” University of Texas virologist C.J. Peters explains in the video.
Not easy words to top on the creep-out meter, but immunologist Michael B.A. Oldstone of the Scripps Research Institute manages it. “They’re a piece of bad news, wrapped in nucleic acid,” he declaims.
You can almost see the words crawl across the screen, done in that campy, squiggly horror-movie typeface.
Lipkin, able to bask in the widespread opinion that “Contagion” is the most accurate of the bio-horror movies, said scientists aren’t always above playing to the peanut gallery.
“They like to portray themselves as heroes who put themselves in harm’s way,” he said. “The suits are cool. There is an exotic aspect to it, a certain swagger.”
‘We should look at fiction as fiction’
In another section of the “I Am Legend” companion video, the film’s writer and the CDC’s then chief describe how officials at the Atlanta-based institution “opened their Level 3 labs” to the filmmakers.
“We’ve been really pleased that such an effort was made to create a plausible scenario,” says former CDC Director Julie L. Gerberding. Presumably she’s referring to the part about how the film’s fictional virus arose (from a failed attempt to render a measles virus benign), rather than to the zombie/vampire part.
Lipkin dismisses “I Am Legend” as “a piece of garbage.” He also cheerfully acknowledges that it grossed a cool $276 million, exactly $200 million more than “Contagion” pulled in.
For the most part, scientists interviewed for this article weren’t down on Hollywood for taking liberties with scientific fact.
“We should look at entertainment as entertainment and fiction as fiction,” Madoff said. “I’ve been watching ‘The Last Ship.’ It’s fun. It’s interesting.”
After all, what’s not to like about a good, stomach-turning gore fest?
An April post on The Guardian’s film blog titled “My guilty pleasure: Outbreak,” captured that spirit with frightening enthusiasm.
“When Kevin Spacey’s character is lying in hospital dying and terrified, his grey skin covered in purple lesions, he cries tears of blood,” blogger Becky Barnicoat wrote.
“Tears of blood, leaking out of Kevin Spacey’s liquefying body. That’s what I’m talking about.”
Email staff writers Victoria Loe Hicks or Craig Schneider.
About the Author
