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One might not naturally think of a disease as a transmedia narrative, let alone the centre of a multi-platform universe, yet by their very nature they move across media, from the individual to the social, from word of mouth to social media, from fact to fiction. Historically these transmedia outbreaks are made sense of after the fact, usually once data has been collected and interpreted. The Covid-19 pandemic is a little different in that not only is there constant access to a huge amount of information that is increasing daily, but it also has a narrative template through which this is being read.
This template, or ‘outbreak narrative’, is one that has been constructed between reality and fictional representation, in books and films, to create a narrative arc of contagion, one which has a start, a middle and an end, but also one which inherently creates a transmedia story-world around it that both explains and supports that arc. This short blog will lay out how this works in the current pandemic and how its narrative world is supported by earlier outbreaks, both real and fictional, yet is simultaneously working against its own successful completion, creating the possibility of a story that will never, truly end.
Priscilla Ward (2008) has described how, around the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, certain narratives arose to explain the disease that were part science, part media reportage, part cultural imaginings. In many ways it describes a transmedia migration at its most fundamental, where bodily manifestations and oral accounts are recorded and interpreted, adapted for newspapers, news programmes and the popular imaginary, creating a kind of ongoing dialogue between actual events and cultural, fictional representations of them. Films, in particular, have played an important part in this process, presenting complex information in a form that is accessible (simplified) and culturally comprehensible — this equally skews or omits parts of the truth to fit existing cultural templates and preferences. This created a pandemic narrative that featured proscribed stages and tropes: 1) a disease originating in an undeveloped part of the world, often involving monkeys or bats, caused by human incursion into the animals’ natural habitat; 2) a ‘patient zero’, often combined with the idea of a ‘super spreader’; civilisation becomes aware of the outbreak, enforcing ‘contact tracing’ and ‘quarantine’; 3) a race against time to develop a vaccine; 4) and, finally, administering the vaccine and returning to ‘normality’.
A good example of how this narrative was used and affirmed in film and fed back to the popular imagination is Outbreak (Peterson: 1995), which follows much of the above template: a deadly virus from Africa (modelled on the HIV/AIDS epidemic); animals are involved; there is a ‘patient zero’, quarantine, contact tracing, a vaccine and a race to save humanity. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) builds on and reinterprets the narrative world of Outbreak and has become the definitive film on the subject in the current pandemic. Originally released after SARS (2003) and Swine flu (2009–10), the film interprets what the world had just experienced, emphasising and adding new parts to the existing narrative.
The film begins with the outbreak already in progress with the designated ‘patient zero’, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), flying back from Hong Kong, infecting people as she goes. Beth is shown as an unfaithful wife who meets an ex-lover on her journey, linking the narrative to that of the earlier AIDS epidemic, which was popularly associated with transgressive sex.
As the world (America) begins to realise that an outbreak is occurring, the investigative stage of the narrative begins, involving contact tracing and the search for the point of origin — a temporal and media movement that embodies what Jenkins calls ‘spreadability’ (2013), in some ways is a natural component of contagion. The outbreak narrative then crosses various media platforms (news media, tv, radio, social media and word of mouth) as well as crossing borders, becoming transmedial and transnational, as researchers follow its path back to where it started. Once contact tracing has begun and the severity of the outbreak has gained greater understanding, the fight for survival begins, which also has two parts: the first is quarantine and containment and the second is producing a cure (vaccine). The former then requires that the ‘readers’ or ‘players’ of the narrative comply with the instructions they are given, which also relies on the coherence and consistency of those directions. This further brings in a new set of players/authors in terms of government or large corporations to discover a cure and produce a vaccine. Interestingly, whilst part of the main outbreak narrative, vaccination development can become a separate but intricately connected one, as multiple governments and corporations become involved that try to gain their own authorial control and influence the overarching urtext of the outbreak narrative.
Of particular note at this stage is the production of counter narratives that often oppose the main one or redirect it for ends other than successfully finding a cure and saving lives as quickly as possible. Contagion touches on this in the figure of Alan Krumweide (Jude Law), a self-styled investigative journalist and blogger who begins to push a story that the outbreak might be being engineered by drug companies to make money and that the government might also be involved. The conspiracy theory finds traction online (stickability and spreadability) and Alan is invited onto news programmes, subsequently claiming to have contracted the disease and being cured by taking a homeopathic remedy (Forsythia), which miraculously saves his life (when he never had the disease, of course).
This aspect is an interesting addition to the outbreak narrative and one that had not occurred as explicitly in earlier films such as Outbreak. In many ways it acts as fan-fiction within the urtext and as a way of wresting authorial control, even if it has deadly real-world consequences. It also shows how different narrative worlds intersect and how narratives of espionage and conspiracy theory have been used to control the direction and possible readings of the original outbreak narrative. In the current pandemic, such battles for authorial control have created a plethora of contradictory narratives propagated by a wide range of authors, with many of them being purposely politicised and altering the shape of the resultant story-world. Unlike Contagion, Covid-19 has highlighted how much each aspect of the wider narrative can be altered to fit a political end beyond the goal of saving lives by weaponising actions such as hand washing, mask wearing, etc. Consequently, this creates narrative confusion and uneven implementation of measures across national and cultural boundaries due to the political leanings of the governments in charge.
As Contagion brings its narrative to close, we discover the outbreaks point of origin; an infection from a bat that eventually reaches Beth. The sense of narrative completion provided then allows ‘normality’ to return, whatever that may look like.
With Covid, though, it is already obvious that any real uncovering of where the outbreak began, and consequently how it might end, are buried in purposeful obfuscation. Did the virus begin in bats, or in pangolins? Where did it originate exactly and how did it spread? Indeed the outbreak narrative described in Outbreak and Contagion is predicated on the idea of a togetherness against the contagion, and the notion of the ‘fight to save humanity’ constructs this as a battle between victim (humanity) and foe (the disease). However, in many ways, this is the one aspect that continues to evade the current pandemic, with many players/readers refusing to acknowledge their place within a shared narrative. Without such central cohesion, the multiplicity of authors struggling for attention and control become increasingly destructive, using the natural stickiness of aspects of the narrative to pull it apart rather than guide it towards a coherent end point.
In this sense the existing outbreak narrative might itself be forced to mutate into one that has no beginning or end, but just keeps repeating as it continually moves across media from fact to fiction and back again. Here then actual reality or science will have little true bearing on the final outcome, as the only recognised ending will happen when enough users/players — whether national governments or large groups of like-minded citizens — co-opt authorial control to write their own version of how normality returns, regardless of its relation to the real-world or the pre-existing outbreak narrative.
Simon Bacon, Editor of Transmedia Cultures: A Companion
Works Cited
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York: NYU Press, 2013.
Stolworthy, Jacob, “Contagion becomes one of most-watched films online in wake of coronavirus pandemic,” The Independent, 15 March 2020. < https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/contagion-coronavirus-download-watch-online-otorrent-warner-bros-cast-twitter-a9403256.html> Accessed 4 March 2021.
Ward, Priscilla, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
