Unclear and Present Danger - Outbreak

Episode Date: April 2, 2023

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John discuss Wolfgang Petersen’s medical thriller slash action movie “Outbreak.” We spend the bulk of the episode discussing the experience of watching this movie having lived through a pandemic, as well as the pandemic fears of the 1990s that might have inspired this film. Unfortunately, a few technical difficulties meant the audio quality isn’t as high as it should be, but we did our best to compensate and we appreciate your patience.Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. Our most recent episode of the Patreon is on Alan J. Pakula’s paranoia thriller “The Parallax View.”On our next episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we cover “Die Hard: With a Vengeance.”

Hey, everyone. It's Jamel. This episode, we had some technical difficulties that affected the quality of the audio. We tried her best to get that quality back up to par, but you may notice that it sounds a little different, and we apologize. Thank you for listening, and next episode, everything should be back to normal. In a remote African jungle, a small monkey is captured, bound for a pet store in America. America, the animal carries a deadly virus. Ah, that's what. You're gonna.

Your town is being quarantined. We got 19 dead. We got 100 more infected. It's spreading like a brush fire. What are you talking about? If one of them's got it, then 10 of them got it now. And if one of them gets out of Cedar Creek, we have a very interesting problem. If that bug gets out of there, 260 million Americans will.

Americans will be dead or dying. I'm leaving with the team in an hour. From the heart of a small California town. Damn it, Sam. I want to save these people same as you. To the inner circle of power in Washington. The most optimistic projection for the spread of the virus is this. 24 hours, 36 hours, 48 hours.

The greatest medical crisis of all time... We can't stop it. Begins. Try to remain calm. remain calm. Many people are dying and are going to continue to die unless we find this monkey. There will be panic the likes of which we have never seen. There you are. Attention, Portland residents, Seattle, citizens of San Diego.

A station, residents of attention, Denver residents of Detroit. Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. My name is Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. My name is John Gans. I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front.

And I have finished, but am about to edit. a book about American politics in the early 1990s. This week, we watched Outbreak, the 1995 medical thriller, I guess, is what you'd call it, that inexplicably becomes a very bad action movie in the final act. Outbreak was directed by Wolfgang Peterson. A previous unclear pod movie was in the line of fire with Clint Eastwood. It stars Dustin Hoffman, Renee Russo, Morgan Freeman, and Donald Sutherland, a frequent unclear pod actor, as well as Cuba Gooding Jr., Kevin Spacey, and Patrick Dempsey.

Quite a stacked cast, and there are lots of interesting character actors throughout. Not sure if I'd call this a good movie, but a lot of good actors. Here is a short plot summary. A deadly airborne virus finds its way into the U.S. and starts killing off people at an epidemic rate. Colonel Sam Daniels' job is to stop the virus and spreading from a small town, which must be quarantined, and all. also to prevent an overreaction by the White House, really by Donald Pugnone's character.

The taglines for Outbreak are tried to remain calm, which is very generic. And then here's the long one. This animal carries a deadly virus, and the greatest medical crisis in the world is about to happen. True. Yeah, I mean, I guess. Outbreak is available for rental on iTunes and Amazon. It may also be on Netflix. I'm not sure.

it was released on March 10th, 1995, so let's check out the New York Times for that day. Okay, big story here. Gorbachev's new battle, overcoming his legacy. Vigorous, opinionated, and deeply frustrated, the last communist leader of the Soviet Union floats across the political landscape like a restless ghost, unable to make his presence felt. Mikhail S. Gorbachev's name is not even mentioned in most surveys of voters favor politicians. he complains that national television declines his request for airtime. We are witnessing a monopolization of the mass media, which is disgusting. He sent an interview this week in his large, oddly impersonal office at the Gorbachev Foundation, his research institute.

He still refers to himself in the third person, and they were trying to persuade Gorbachev not to run. When Russians lowered the red flag over the Kremlin and rid themselves of communist tyranny, a little bit of editorializing there, four years ago, they also tried to bury the man who boldly set out to re-apolitate the Soviet state and ended up presiding over its demise. Ten years after he introduced a sweeping reform of the Soviet system, Mr. Gorbachev is straining to wriggle free of his forced retirement. Well, this is true. Gorbachev, who passed away recently, was not a popular figure in post-Soviet Russia. Not so much because he was the last Soviet leader, but that he kind of let the Soviet system fall apart. he was considered to have allowed chaos to take over.

There was a lot of nostalgia, and there still is in a certain sense for the Soviet Union as at least stable time. Gorb Trump is a very interesting character, in some ways a very principled and intelligent man, but his idealism is considered to have led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and, you know, therefore a lot of politics that's based on idealism rather than kind of crude and harsh realism is distrusted in the former Soviet sphere.

So, yeah, Gorbachev's legacy still complicated. There was lots of retrospectives after his death, a lot of people wrestling with what he accomplished or did not accomplish. Okay, let's see what we got. else we got, Clinton to permit fundraising in the U.S. by top IRA figure. Brushing aside strong objections from the British government, President Clinton has decided to permit Jerry Adams, the political leader of the Irish Republican Army, to make his first money raising to her in the United States, the White House said.

Mr. Clinton also invited Mr. Adams to attend a St. Patrick's Day reception at the White House and will be the first encounter between American President and Mr. Adams, the leader of Sinn Faye in the IRA's political way. Until last year, the United States maintained a generation-long ban on official context with Sinn Féin, which had condemned as a terrorist organization for cantoning decades of bombings, assassinations, and other violence by the IRA. Mr. Clinton ended that bike in prohibition after the IRA declared a ceasefire in Northern Ireland last September, but until today he had deferred to British sensitivities by barring Mr. Adams from raising money here.

The president has now lifted that final barrier, it said, because he felt that Sinn Fain was living up to its commitment to seek peace, by peaceful means. Okay, that's a little awkward. Today, Mr. Adams sent a statement to the White House saying his party would discuss disarmament with British ministers. The aid said Mr. Clinton also believed that the United States might gain some leverage with the Sinn Féin

that could help open direct talks between Sinn Féin and the British government, which is what happened. This was the beginning of the overtures of peace that led to the Good Friday Agreement. I know for a lot of people, this was upsetting, especially on the British side, but in a way, in hindsight, these were very wise and intelligent moves to bring the IRA and Sinn Féin into the political process. And to this point, the Good Friday agreements have been quite successful, and the violence of the troubles has ended. And there might be a peaceful unification of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in our lifetime. If the British keep going on their path.

Yeah, yeah, which would be interesting. And Sinn Féin is actually doing quite well in the North as well as the South now. So, yeah, that's sort of the end of the troubles. You know, a lot of these conflicts, and we'll talk about this in regard to this movie in a weird way, all these conflicts had to do with the Cold War and wrapped up with that, the process of decolonization. Obviously, decolonization was a little bit more the case with the IRA, but they were implicated in the Cold War in complicated ways.

What else that we got here? PLL gets a date. This is just a very small thing. Ending in past, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization at a July target date for an accord on expanding Palestinian self-rule. Anything else look interesting to you, Jamal? Yeah, so two things. One significant, one less.

I mean, one kind of significant. The first is Mexico initiates an economic plan of extended pain, long silence, ended. As government acts without consensus, price and tax rises boat a recession. After weeks have been decision that sent the devalued pay so plummeting the new lows, the Mexican government today adopted a tough new economic stabilization plan that presents a bleak picture of recession, job loss, and personal hardship as unavoidable steps to the nation's recovery. Unlike previous plans, government was unable to reach a binding agreement with labor and business on the hardship needed to control inflation and get the economy moving again. This time, the government

and essentially acting on its own with Mexican workers and business sure to fight for their own interests. Okay, so Mexico isn't an interesting point in its modern political history right now. First, we're sort of in the middle of the, not the dissolution of the institutional revolutionary party, the PRA, which is the dominant ruling party in Mexico throughout the 20th century, but the end of its total dominant. If you don't know a ton about Mexican political history, basically from 1929, roughly, up until about 2000, Mexican politics was dominated by the single party, kind of a center-right business-oriented party called the PRI, which basically, you know, dominated elections through a combination of clientelism, fraud, and outright repression. In the 70s and 80s, there are protest movements against the PRI, smaller party.

third parties begin, or second and third parties and fourth parties begin running and winning in local elections, kind of showing the weaknesses of the PRI. In 88, there's a presidential election and widely thought to be highly fraudulent in which I believe the current president, the president kind of in office at this point, is elected. And it's in the 90s that we see more moves towards political liberalization, the PRRA introducing more democratic reforms. because of public discontent and pressure and such, but also this program of economic liberalization, along with the creation of NAFTA, the United States, and a kind of a global liberalization of trade laws and capital flows. So a lot going on in Mexico and this point, the kind of recession that results from this is part of what produces a renewed influx of migrants to the United States, a reminder that Mexican politics are actually very relevant to American domestic politics as much as Americans in just like ignore Mexico as a political as a political unit and and yeah so just want to highlight that it's um it's it's it's it's kind of an important it's an important moment in Mexico right now important for Mexicans important for the United States

the less serious but maybe kind of important is uh in a the bottom left under inside, Jordan may re-join Bulls. Michael Jordan, who left basketball 17 months ago and twitched baseball has been practicing with the Chicago Bulls and reports that he'll return to them. He will return to them in one another championship. Michael Jordan, I don't know if you could call Michael Jordan the greatest athlete, American athlete of his generation, but he's certainly the most sociopathically competitive. I think he's the greatest. I think I think maybe he's the greatest I mean it's difficult right

because what do we mean by that do you mean by like raw athletic ability do we mean by just ability to win do you mean by ability to dominate because like by ability to dominate you know Michael Jordan is kind of a contemporary with Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods still quite young at this point but like Woods yeah woods you know I don't know if you saw that Tiger Woods documentary last year or two years ago But it was a reminder that Woods at, like, his peak was just utterly dominant in golf in a way that, like, few athletes are in any sports. Serena Williams, obviously utterly dominant in women's tennis. So, I mean, Jordan, yeah, maybe. I don't know.

But he's about to rejoin the Bulls. This is a big cultural moment. It's dramatized in the film Space Jam. Oh, that's right. Which we probably won't cover. No, we will not. So Outbreak, Outbreak, a film directed by Wolfgang Peterson. Wolfgang Peterson, as I mentioned, Big Hollywood blockbuster director of this period.

This previous film, In the Line of Fire, about a Secret Service agent. And Outbreak is an immediate follow-up in the Land of Fire for which he is director and producer. His next movie will also be on the pod, Air Force One. the movie after that will not be on the pod, The Perfect Storm. And then there's two relative bombs, Troy and Poseidon. Outbreak however was not a bomb. It was a huge hit.

The public really love this movie. I have actually very strong memories of this movie, like being really popular at people seeing this movie. I think my parents saw it and talked about it. It played on television all the time. So that's how I saw it on like TNT or whatever. So very, it made about $190 million at the box office. So a bona fide hit for Peterson and a big hit for all the stars.

Hoffman, Rousseau, Freeman, Sutherland. Dustin Hoffman, of course, kind of one of the big, not quite new Hollywood guys, but sort of like the new class of actors coming out of the 1960s, his big break was the graduate. Nicholson's film, and then he has a very productive 70s, Midnight Cowboy, Marathon Man, a movie will probably cover on the Patreon. It's interesting to read about Hoffman because he was, you know, very unconventional leading man, and I think it's the pictures of a revolution is the book that really goes into the making of the graduate.

I think that's the one. But Mike Nichols, the original idea for the lead of the graduate was going to be someone like very waspy like Robert Redford and Nichols who had who had auditioned Hoffman for a stage play really liked Hoffman's audition, didn't choose him from the play, but wanted to consider him for the role in the graduate. And when you read the critical response to Hoffman and the graduate, it. You get the strong feeling that what everyone's saying is, isn't it wild that there's a Jew as a leading man? Like, that's kind of the vibe. It's like the subtext. Yeah, that's kind of the subtext of it all. Again, Hoffman ends up becoming a huge star. And yeah, René Russo, a personal favorite doctor's of mine, she's a model in the eight in the 70s in early 80s goes into acting in the 80s

her first big role is in Major League in 89 she is in a movie I really like that's dumb as hell called Free Jack I've never seen that it's extremely stupid it's like a cyberpunk movie she's in Lethal Weapon 3

and then in the line of fire Major League 2 outbreak gets shorty her career kind of takes off in the Thomas Crown Affair remake in 99 which is a great film with Pierce Brosnan Oh, yeah. I've seen that. That's good. I don't need to say much about Morgan Freeman and to Morgan Freeman.

Kevin Spacey, Cuba Goading Jr. and Patrick Tim's here are quite young at this point. This is sort of like, this is actually Cuba Goading Jr. is about to become a big star after this. This is kind of his last movie. It's kind of more of a character actor. One thing I wanted to point out about this moment in kind of U.S. cultural life is that there's a lot more concern about epidemics, pandemics and such happening around this time. In fact, when this movie comes out, there is an Ebola outbreak in Zaire, which is where the beginning of the movie takes place. Yeah.

But there are, in the years prior to this movie coming out, there are quite a few books that are coming out about the threat of epidemic disease or pandemic disease. There is a plague outbreak in India, the previous year, that got a ton of American news attention. Outbreak is very much of the zeitgeist in how it's like tapped into this like fear of deadly, you know, epidemic, pandemic, pandemic disease. So John, you watched the movie yesterday as to die. What did you think of outbreak? I found after the pandemic watching this movie to be not so enjoyable, I remember I used to like to watch movies that had to do. with some kind of crisis that was going on to, I don't know,

try to understand it better. I remember my friends and I, after being sent home from school on 9-11, we were right across the river from it. The video store was still open and we rented the siege, I guess, to try to watch that on 9-11, I guess just to try to imagine what the possibilities would be or just process it in some way. I know a lot of people watch this movie and Contagion, I think,

like right around the start of the pandemic. but I didn't do that. And I would say after the pandemic, I did not enjoy watching this because it was just sort of like, first of all, I found some of the stuff about virology and epidemiology to be unbelievable now that we've kind of like

learned so much about viruses. And second of all, the things that did ring true were things I don't really want to remember. You know, the sense of panic, the hospitals filling up with a strange disease. This was not that long ago. and it was a very unpleasant experience, to say the least. So I didn't enjoy that part of the movie.

And the action parts of it, you know, as you mentioned elsewhere, were kind of silly. So I think I just was not really in the mood. I think I took away some interesting things from it, though, which we can get into. It's interesting that like the other virus that we have to talk about. I mean, there was an Ebola outbreak. As you mentioned, there was a plague outbreak in India. But, you know, the HIV virus and AIDS was, crisis was raging at this time and really had not gotten under control. 1995, I think, was maybe one of the worst years of deaths from AIDS in the United States.

I think it peaked around then. So I think that that's a subtext here and was a highly politicized subtext because obviously, you know, AIDS was associated with the LGBT community, well, let's be real with gay men and with minorities and the fears of that and also had a certain and obviously Africa, subsequently Africa, where it ranged out of control and also was considered a factual basis, its origin, especially among, you know, assumed to be among primates, which is moving, that kind of has a virus that comes from a monkey. So that, you know, the origins of AIDS and Simeon amino deficiency virus are kind of

subtly referenced here. So I think that's another context for the movie dealing with a lot of people's fears. People did not understand AIDS very well at the time of HIV at the time they thought you could just get by touching somebody, I remember kids were very scared of this and led to a lot of nasty bullying and misinformation and, you know, lots of cruel things. So I think that that's another background in this movie, which was the AIDS crisis, which is we've lived now, I think, for some 20 years, at least in a world where if you can get the drugs, AIDS is not a death sentence. HIV is not a death sentence. But in the 90s, and especially the early 90s and late 80s, the terror of HIV was intense.

And it had lots of political resonances. So I think that's another context for the movie. Yeah. I thought it was interesting where this movie begins with this weird, obscure piece of Cold War and post-colonial history. Yes. So the movie, as always, we will talk about the plot as we go through. And this is a good place to start. The movie begins, if I have this right, in Zaire during the Stanleyville mutinies.

Sorry, not in Zaire, in the Congo. Yeah, I think it was Congo. that yeah so uh in the democratic republic of the congo is where the movie begins during these mutinies which i don't really know much about um i'm i just had to pull up the wikipedia page to the the ousted prime minister on rumors that he was plotting and comeback uh some of his his former soldiers mercenaries uh have a mutiny um and it is suppressed a year later there is a second mutiny led by a Belgian settler mercenary that involves some of the some of those involved in previous mutiny and they you know they attempt to they attempt to do whatever right to

overthrow the government I suppose it's a strange thing well it seems like okay so these mutineers were mercenaries but a lot of them were former colonial troops. Some of them were kind of white colonists. Some of them, white colonists, Belgian white colonists from Congo itself, but also other attracted people from Rhodesia. Not all the mercenaries were white. There was a mix, but this was obviously highly caught up with the process of decolonization. As this movie implies, it seems like there was some covert Western support, I think, for Katanga, which this and then eventually these mutineers but that I was doing research and I still haven't

quite been able to figure it out but for some reason the US Army's there and and so the movie implies that there was was a some US involvement with with this mercenary at least covertly with this with this mercenary mutiny so the reason this is brought up is that our younger versions of our our two of our characters Donald Sutherland and Morgan Freeman as Army doctors, Army research doctors or what have you, come to investigate an unknown sickness that is present amongst some of the, I guess, mutineers. Turns out it is this Ebola-like virus that kills very rapidly. And Down Southland, as will become his want in this movie, orders the entire base obliterate.

to keep it with some special bomb yeah with this is a real bomb it's a it's a the exact name of it but it's fuel air bomb or something like that fuel air bar it's the largest armament the US has Trump

do you remember Trump dropped one we dropped one in we dropped one in on Afghanistan that's right yeah it's it's a it's just it's a very big and powerful bomb but here it destroys everything and then we fast forward to the present

where I think we were introduced to Dustin Hoffman. He's a doctor. He's formerly married to René Russo. They're having some marital problems, blah, blah, blah. But the real action is that Patrick Dempsey, who plays a guy named Jimbo, is transporting a small monkey to, I guess, like an illegal monkey dealer out in California. Yeah. exotic pet store. It's really unclear to me the whole deal with the monkey. It seems like, it seems very illegal. But this monkey happens to be infected with the same virus that we saw 30 years earlier. And so in short order, the monkey, it spits in Patrick Dempsey's face, which is pretty funny. It scratches a pet store owner. They both get infected. And then they kind of begin the cycle of it's spreading.

It first shows up in Boston, where Jimbo returns to, and they kind of isolate it and contain it there at the CDC. But then it mutates, and here's where the movie goes from like the realm of like relative science. It just like utterly fantastical. It mutates very rapidly in this California town, Cedar Grove, I think it's what's called, and becomes airborne and spreads in a movie theater, thus infecting a bunch of people in the town. And this is what sets off much of the action of the film where the CDC shows up, Dustin Hoffman, who's an army doctor, kind of bucks orders, and shows up his friend, who's Morgan Freeman's character, is sort of like, you know, you can't do this, but he does anyway.

And Donald Sutherland recognizes what's happening, and it's like, I guess we got to blow this place up. And that's sort of, that kind of sets off the action of the film with Dustin Hoffman and the CDC, Representative Renee Russo and Kevin Spacey are attempting to treat patients to research, figure out how to stop this thing, and then Donald Sutherland is moving forward with trying to destroy the town and Morgan Freeman's kind of caught in between. It's a classic thing we've seen before where the military has kind of a brutal and violent solution to the problem, but there are like good civil servants that, you know, in the civilian agencies that will take care of it. So a trope we've seen kind of like evil military men. Funnily enough, it's Donald Sutherland who's famous for his appearance in JFK as the person who kind of like reveals the evil plot, you know.

Right. But there's something in the movie where they have a cure or they have a, but why don't, what I didn't understand is like, why is the military just so keen on bombing it? Like they, they reveal like, oh, they had some sort of antibodies or cure. wind up or ability to do that. But Sutherland is like, no, the only way is bomb it, bomb it, bomb it. I don't know. What are we supposed to take away from that? And he's bad or like... What we're supposed to take away from it? And this kind of gets to, I think, some of the politics in the film. So what we're supposed to take away from it or what we learn is that the military

didn't just destroy the virus originally in Congo 30 years prior, that it weaponized it into a biological weapon. And that as part of neutralizing the biological weapon and it developed not only a vaccine, but the cure, that could help its own soldiers if they get exposed to it. And so the military, as Dustin Hoffman kind of begins to say incessantly towards the end,

wants to preserve the utility of this biological weapon. And so wants to destroying the town. I mean, the logic here is that destroying the town, destroying any trace of the virus would thus allow, would reset things to the status quo ante. So they'll still have the biological weapon and still have their cure for the biological weapon. And that's why Donald Sutherland wants to blow up this town so badly. But part of the revelations here in the film is that, you know, Dustin Hoppin is when he discovers that this serum or whatever it's called was developed from the original. strain of the virus. And it kind of, it edges the movie somewhat into conspiracy thriller at this

point. And there are, there are elements of conspiracy thriller and political thriller all throughout this movie, all kind of centered around the idea that you simply cannot trust the military to do what's right by the public. And you can't really trust the civilian government either to do what's right by the public. There is a scene where it seems to be the president's chief of staff, kind of getting input on this blow-up the town plan. And very clearly not thinking about the well-being of the American public, necessarily, but thinking about the politics of doing so. So there's a very, in those scenes, in kind of the entire military plot,

there is a very 1990s cynicism about political, civil, and military authority. Yes, that's absolutely true. I don't find it that plausible, even knowing the bad shit that they would do, that they would try to preserve the potency of their biological weapon. I mean, they could just make another one. It's not like that it doesn't seem that hard. But the question is like, well, why do we need this biological weapon in the absence of a rival like the Soviet Union? So I suppose it's like, oh, we have all these secret things left over from the Cold War, all these weapons programs and now they kind of have taken on the life of their own. Well, Morgan Freeman says at one point in the film, his character says that the reason they are maintaining it is because of everyone else. We're doing this because of all the other maniacs with developing similar weapons. We have to have this capacity. And, you know, my mind immediately went to the post-Gulf War sanctioned regime in Iraq, which it stated justification was keeping Saddam from developing, you know, biological, chemical, nuclear weapons.

And this was very much part of the foreign policy discourse in the 90s, this idea that in the absence of the Soviet Union and in the absence of any kind of like any hegemonic power over smaller states, that there would be kind of the proliferation of all of these many kinds of deadly destructive weapons that could, you know, reach the United States and cause. catastrophic damage. Yeah, okay, that makes sense to me. And I think that was like its effort to create this drama and a villain in the sense of the military. I would find it maybe more convincing if there was some kind of commercial, like some corporation is kind of like holding out to profit from the vaccine. So therefore we can't just like give it away for free or something like that. But I don't, you know, it wouldn't fit with the with the urgency of the situation. So I would say I just don't, the dramatic hook of the movie never really got into me. I find the gore of a sick person in a hospital to be no longer titillating, but just to be deeply upsetting.

And Dustin Hoffman, I have to tell you, I have trouble taking him seriously. One thing, because I also, I watched this movie in Contagion at the start of the pandemic. I was one of those people. Contagent, obviously, the Stephen Soderborough movie that is much more realistic, much more realistic depiction of how these things get started and outbreak very much bigger movie than Contagion was. And I do sort of wonder to what extent this outbreak style depiction of epidemics of pandemics, like shapes public expectations. of both what is going to happen and what the government response is going to be? Absolutely. I think that's true.

And I think that that may go very far to explaining the politics of the pandemic era. With the martial law depicted in this movie, with the fact that the government is not straightforward about its ability to solve the problem, I think that definitely shaped the way people responded to the pandemic. And in the martial law, there's, the town has kept. in the quarantine and there's actually this very kind of um what of one of the scenes that is quite evocative of you know the movie presents them as sort of yokels right slack jawed yokels of the kind you might see on the simpsons trying to escape in a truck with their rifles and then the army troops basically gun them down um they keep them from escaping that to me i'll say you know we've talked we've talked in previous episodes about the

kind of new world order conspiracies Jack put it thug conspiracies And that to me Was evocative of that as well That whole sequence And the movie isn't saying this explicitly It's not like an explicit thing But it does feel as if in the background

Whatever the writers were channeling Was a fear vocalized at the time You only had to listen to talk radio to hear it That basically the feds were itching for some sort of crisis to be able to, like, clamp down on the freedoms of the American public. In this movie, it's the pandemic becomes that opportunity and that excuse. But you see this discourse is part of our experience of the pandemic.

The reason Ron DeSantis is a national figure is in part because he kind of played up and played into this idea that pandemic-related restrictions were exactly this attempt to impose kind of, I think he's even called it like a, like a biomedical authoritarianism or something. Right. Bio. They sort of started talking a lot about biopolitics and a concept that comes from Foucault, someone they previously weren't that crazy about, but suddenly rediscovered his writing. It was like, oh, we're living under a biopolitical regime. The motivation for that is never clear.

Who would want to put this clamp down? Like, are there certain people, I have to be careful with my words here, who, had unrealistic hopes for how much movement could be controlled around the pandemic and wanted certain restrictions to pass by their, you know, useful date? Sure. Was that the dominating voice in policymaking? No. It was very confusing. And frankly, most invested interests in the United States would rather, well, we can't have the economy stop completely. The United States, in terms of its actual ability to control the population during the pandemic compared to what they did in European countries, was minimal. In European countries, there were actual

troops on the street, like scenes like from this movie, and you could not go out. You could not walk your dog. They would check your papers and stuff like this. Those sort of scenes took place in Europe. They did not happen in the United States, but people believe they did. Most of the pressure, I mean, there were businesses were closed by order, but a lot of the pressure was social, you know. And those social controls were deeply resented as they are, you know, because people feel browbeaten. But they exist kind of in the absence of state power, not because of state power, right? I think the memory, not only the memory, but the imagination of what was happening during the pandemic was a lot more restrictive than it actually was. I mean, there was obviously

fear. There was real fear. There was social opprobrium. But the period of actual, quote, unquote lockdown was very limited. We did not experience lockdowns close to, obviously, what they had in China or even what they had in Europe. Two thoughts here. First, to relate back to the film, this movie depicts whether it's the evil

of Don Sutherland wanting to practically nuke this town or whether it is the hypercompetence of the CDC. This movie depicts a United States that is basically running at full steam with regard to state capacity, just has the capacity to do whatever it needs to do, whether, again, whether that is destroy something or cure something.

The issue with the CDC and with the medical teams in this movie isn't that they don't have the capacity to do it. They're able to synthesize a cure after the conclusion of the action sequence, which involves Cuba Gooding Jr. and Dustin Hoffman commandering a helicopter and searching California for this monkey, and they end up persuading some parents whose daughter has befriended a monkey

to let them use their daughter's bait to get that monkey, catch that monkey. That's a movie. That's a movie I'm surprised I haven't made yet. Catch that monkey. The government in this film has the capacity to do that and then also to use that within a matter of hours and synthesize a cure

that can stop the whole epidemic or it has the capacity to just like straight up wipe this place off the face of the map. If there's anything that's truly unrealistic about the film, it's really not the science, it's that. Because what the pandemic kind of revealed in this, not funny, but kind of, I mean, funny, not ha-ha, just a funny way, that the U.S. federal government absolutely has the capacity to do very straightforward things, like

send people out of money very quickly. But in terms of organizing a collective response and forcing that response to a pandemic, the U.S. federal government really is not. doing all that great. So it's interesting, and this relates to the next point I want to make here, it's interesting that so many Americans experienced the pandemic as an instance of state authority trampling on their right. Because as you say, John, it wasn't really a state authority. It was more, it was like social sanction. And this is like not related to the pandemic, but you can see this in other areas how people perceive social sanction as not dissimilar to state authority being used against them, right? Like, you shouldn't

say this thing. It's really shitty and people are going to make fun of you if you do it and be mean to you is treated as a free speech issue, which conceptually is very confused. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I mean, from a certain extent, I understand that. Look, it's a big prominent thing like with cancel culture, with the pandemic. It's like, what is. What is. You know, the nature of social opprobrium? Being on the business end of it is not fun. On the other hand, certain things, that's just the basis of society, you know? And certain things turn out to be irrational and certain things turn out to be unfair. But social censure has to exist in some way. It's just people want to be for the things that they wanted to be and not for things that they

find obnoxious. But if the norm, say, was something that they wanted, they would have no problem with other people being shamed and put down for it. And in fact, that's sort of what they want to see happen. Unfortunately, that's just sort of the way society works. There's a lot of coercion on that level. I mean, or it's, if you don't, if you don't believe in the norm, you experience it as coercion. And I think that Americans are used to an enormous amount of freedom and don't like the idea, did not like the idea, or did not trust the idea of being coerced either through public,

through state action, which was limited, or public shaming, which maybe was more significant. I kind of, I mean, this might sound a little crazy because I think there were some real evil things that happened during the pandemic in terms of lies and propaganda. My feeling is almost to have an amnesty about people's behavior during the pandemic because it was such an unbelievably frightening time and no one really understood how to control it. And in retrospect, so many of the efforts we took to control it failed. And the only thing that really worked was the combination of having.

the vaccine and herd immunity, which obviously, like, not a lot of people helped with because they fucking said shit about the vaccine, too. Some people are just incorrigible, is what we've learned. Also, they just won't listen to reason. So that's why I think, like, it's so silly now when I see people say, oh, well, oh, mass didn't work, and they try to shame people for shaming them about masks. Just let it go. Like, everyone was so scared. No one knew how it worked. Just enough already. weirdly some of the movie is like the fact that people obey the government in the movie is I'm like that's not going to happen which is good and bad which is good and bad you know like obviously there's a certain stupidity to a lot of the resistance to government you know to what were necessary measures to save lives on the other hand you know a little bit of distrust towards just the fact that federal bureaucracies and military could do these things it's not the most unhealthy thing it's just it was propagandized and manipulated in terrible ways that hurt people and have done have done lasting harm to social trust and but I don't know if there's any alternative I think that's just the nature of the

United States and our crazy national character that this was going to be a disaster in a weird way politically you know there is you know we talk about this a lot there is no way to depoliticize things right right like and this is just maybe the nature of the world and then what our system can absorb in a certain way. There is no universe, the liberal fantasy world, unfortunately, where the federal bureaucrats are all good and tell us what to do and we obey because they know science and so on and so forth and they have the good reasons and we're good stuff. That's just not going to happen. First of all, they're going to make mistakes. They're going to have bad motivations, not bad motivations,

but they're going to have complicated motivations. They're going to not know things. They're going to lie or make misleading statements or making mistakes, first of all. Second of all, the public is just not going to be able to understand or unpolitically, you know, relate to what the government is saying, which is good. Like when the government talks, we should politically respond to it in a certain sense. Good. And then they're all going to be politicians, hucksters, demagogues, who are going to be throwing all things in the air.

So it's almost like if you look at the history. of what we experience, you're like, yeah. I mean, obviously, I think Trump, Trump being in command at the time made things a billion times worse. But a lot of countries, even with responsible leadership and intelligent leadership experienced a lot of terrible things, you know. And in China, you have the opposite thing where the government, you know, could enforce those things. And eventually the population eventually got that out with it. And they said, we'd rather experience illness and death than, then this is agony. And it's understandable. So my... feeling about the pandemic is almost a certain amount of empathy for a lot of responses towards

it. Obviously, there are people, I have not that much patience for people who are vaccine skeptical. I have more patients for people who did not like the lockdowns and the masks because the utility of those things may have been limited. I think at the beginning we needed to have locked down. So I have a certain degree of empathy for a lot of people's responses because they I think they were driven by the fight. And there are other people who I just think were really destructive. But I think what the movie just does not show how society would politically respond. And I think that that's a blind spot of 90s movies, which is just that we've talked about.

It's just like the bureaucracies and, you know, this is like what we've talked about in the past, about the response to 9-11, right? So because of the growing up on these movies and the all-powerful U.S. government that they present, I believe, I believe that we, first of all, something like 9-11 couldn't happen, but after it happened, we would kill Osama bin Laden that night, you know, our special forces would go inside. And I think basically my belief about the pandemic was conditioned a certain way similarly that, you know, the U.S. government's extreme powers would come into play and we would get this under, get this in hand really fast. And that's not the case. And that's just what we've learned about the world and the government. The Cold War image of the government was propaganda.

It was our own propaganda, which we came to believe. All of these secret programs and the CIA being, like in a certain way, those are just not true. The competence and capacity is much lower. I wanted to pick up on the point about just the absence of politics from the story or a political reaction to what happens because the movie alludes to it. I mentioned this White House scene where the president's not there.

The president's not there, right? They're discussing sort of the consequences of deciding to blow up this town or the potential political consequences. But there's no other than that, there's no political reaction within the world of the film, even though we know in the world of the film

that the public knows that something that a crazy disease has shown up in this place. That's like part of the, media conversation and that's a real contrast with contagion i thought i mean i think what makes contagion many things make contagion of our superior movie but one of them is that like there is a sense of a political response or conspiracies that emerge there the jude law's character kind of stands in for the kind of like charlatans that might emerge um or that did emerge but there

there's other kind of similar pandemic fiction that also gets at this in a way that this film doesn't And back when the pandemic began, I was rereading or re-listening to the audio book for Max Brooks's World War Z, which is like one of the pieces of zombie fiction back during the zombie boom of the mid-aughts. I'm very, you know, whatever zombies, but I think actually this book is quite good in part because it is and was a shockingly realistic depiction of like how the public and how politics might respond to a pandemic. And I just, I bring that up, just said it like, this is another piece of fiction about pandemic disease that also captures that there would be a non, there would be like a political response, not in terms of lawmakers, we're in terms of the society itself. People would polarize around things. There would be voices that show up to make claims one way or another. It'd be part of the, part of the mix. And especially now as that we're really in the 90s, like, you

over the last year or so of this podcast for the first year in some change we've been in that you know early 90s still kind of the 80s cold war ongoing and about the about the about the end but no one kind of knows that it's still not quite its own era but like 95 is the 90s and in this movie and some of the other reason we've done the kind of absence of politics of like explicit politics despite political premises is really striking it's like it really does speak to the i don't want to say depolitization of american society in the 90s because like politics are so happening and um political conflict is still happening but like in mainstream culture there seems to be this real sense or there was this real sense that um it's a myth of an all-powerful

state, which people hold still as a fear and some as a hope, but doesn't really exist. Right, right. And we see this right now with basically what the United States, the federal government can do, as you mentioned, is just the capacity to basically invent money out of thin air and shoot it at any problem. And that's quite remarkable. And like with this recent banking crisis, you know, it's just like the power of the Fed, the FDIC, the Treasury is astonishing. It's basically ability to create bubbles in the economy and then to fix them.

It's quite astonishing. But its ability to actually like make human bodies not move where they, you don't want them to move. There's not much. States can do that a little bit. but it's it's pretty it's pretty difficult for the federal government to do that i mean we just are a very big country you know even nationalizing all the national guards all you know i don't think that they could really i don't think we could do the same i just don't think we have the not even political will i don't think we have the infrastructure of the state to do what they did in china

you know across the country we have they have many more people and you know again those there are good and bad things about that I had this hope and there and this hope is not totally dashed but it was a little limit we thought okay well look you know this is like another chance you know never let an emergency go to waste right here is another and I think this is what conservatives were worried about in some in some kind of twisted way is that okay we have proven case here and that the federal government needs to take a more active role in the welfare of the American people. And we've seen that these big payments and transfers help people so much that, you know, now we're exiting the world of neoliberalism. We're going to reenter a kind of

new, new deal era of massive government investment and massive government works and throwing money at problems, et cetera, et cetera. That did not quite happen, but we're maybe in a slightly new era in regards that. I think there was a hope that we would leave the pandemic of being as a country with more of a united national purpose, which certainly did not happen, and more of a sense that the state, when it puts its mind to it, can do something positive. In all of these 90s movies we watch, this doesn't happen. The military, the state is usually like all powerful, but kind of doesn't do any good, right? Private individuals on their own initiative, bucking the rules are what gets things done in the end, right? Not, okay, well, you know, we've just

a wise person on top and then the whole machinery of the state falls. No, someone has to disagree. You know, there has to be a dissident. Dustin Hoffman is a dissident figure, which is, again, not the worst sense of the national spirit to have, but also is just like, I think that there's a certain sense for good and ill that this primed people to have a very stupid understanding of what the government does and is able to do. I know a guy, I hope he doesn't listen to this podcast, where I just got into an argument with him. He was like, the federal government wants to make lockdowns happen so Amazon can make money.

And like, they want us to keep us in our homes indefinitely. I was like, dude, don't you think they would just rather let people die of the virus and have all these businesses make money? Like, I mean, eventually that could become a problem. But I just don't understand the political and machination that would want to keep us under lockdown. They want people to work and consume, right? Right. And that's very limited under lockdown.

I mean, you know, some of it can still keep going. But they're basically like the state exists to make sure, you know, things go smoothly for capital. And this was not things going smoothly for capital, you know. I mean, a lot of them made a lot of fucking money. You do have to say that. But I think that for the most part, you know, the preference of everybody was to have commerce return to normal. That is an important insight when thinking about sort of what might be ulterior motives for state action. That like, it's precisely because what the state wants is like a well-organized.

economy. It wants us to work, wants us to consume, that, you know, conspiracies about, for example, as previous I mentioned, like the New World Order sort of like jackbooted thugs, don't really make a lot of sense from that perspective. As you're saying, the idea that the pandemic would be used to institute some kind of, you know, bio-authoritarianism doesn't really make it make a lot of sense. And so far that it doesn't really bear any, relationship to the things that the goal that the state has, which is, A, to preserve itself, but also to, like, maintain the orderly flow of capital and the orderly, the orderly maintenance of this, of the capitalist system. Right. And that's biopolitical in its own sense.

Deciding certain workers can get sick and we don't care that much because they're expendable on some way. That's a biopolitical decision just as much, if not more so, than saying, like, let's try to keep people home. Or even deciding, you know, oh, this propaganda, oh, only upper middle class people are scared of the virus. Good working class people, you know, are going to do their jobs. This is a totally biopolitical piece of propaganda. It's like certain people don't mind being put in the line of danger because they're ready for it. But they're being assigned a role in society. They're like, yeah, you go out in the front lines of getting sick, you know, and we'll be behind you. So I just think, yeah, I think a lot of the discourse around it was highly confused.

I think a lot of the, a lot of it is like there's a belief in evil for evil's sake that doesn't make sense a lot. Any people on the left and right both share this. It's just like, yeah, a lot of people want power. But like this, yeah, the system is based. to continue, like, to reproduce society as it exists. And when that starts to become disrupted, like the, like, look at, look at who's involved in these suits against vaccines or these suits against, you know, masking in public. It's, it's business interests who are like, this is a pain in the ass for us, you know? Like, this is a, this fundamentally

disrupts our business, you know, and the state is into. opinion it's not purely i mean there's interesting conversations about like what how the state works in this the autonomy of the state like helps this capitalist system keep going because it's like well i know restaurant owners want to keep it open but we can't listen to them we have to think about the whole system you know we have to think broadly but in the end in the final analysis the government is not going to end uh commerce you know that's right right It's not even about, okay, obviously profit is a huge motivation, but it's just the way our society reproduces itself. Like we can't, like it starts to be when no one's working as we saw and no one can go do their job, things start to go badly very fast.

We start to run out of things. Like we require constant activity and labor to keep society running in the situation that we kind of can recognize as being normal. And when that breaks down, it gets scary fast. To begin to wrap up a little bit, that to me is the thing about the early days of the pandemic that I do think people have forgotten, which is that within several weeks, you know, they were beginning to be like real shortages. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes sense. And there weren't enough people.

Labor, I mean, it's an object lesson how labor works. We need people to work. That's just like we need people working. And the whole idea of like, oh, front line workers or essential workers, it's like, well, there is a working class still. Like there's a people on which the whole society are holding up the whole society essentially. So that was interesting. But in terms of like thinking, you know, I got to tell you, I hate thinking about the pandemic now.

And like obviously it's important to keep them. memory of these things alive in honor of the people who died, but also to think about what we could have done better, to really litigate, to see who are actually bad actors, you know, to make these things come to clear, an important historical, political task. But to me, so much of the discourse about it is so disheartening and watching this movie just brought this home. And I was just like, you know what, man, I really want to. move on from that era and that time and get back to normal life. And I know there are a lot of people who would find that sentiment. There are a lot of people who share that sentiment and there are a lot of

people who would find that sentiment to be objectionable. First, that it doesn't take seriously the continuing health aspects and it doesn't take seriously rooting out the bad actors and trying to do a better job. But I'm sorry. I hate thinking about the pandemic. I find so much of the discourse about it to be about recrimination and not constructive. So I sort of am, you know, trying to look towards a brighter future, I suppose. I'll say just to close out that in the world of the movie outbreak, it seems, you know, once things are the virus is cured, once things are done, that's going to be a bit never to move on. And that does feel like a real correspondence to reality. One of the things that

people have remarked on, there might even be a whole book about this. I'm pretty sure there's a book on this, is how the Spanish flu of 1990, the flu pandemic of those years, kind of dropped out of like not just American cultural member, but like global cultural memory. This was a catastrophic Blake killed tens of millions of people worldwide, killed many millions in the United States. And there's, it's as if it never happened in terms of like a cultural legacy. And I think that's more or less what's going to happen with the COVID as well, that we're still kind of, we're still kind of in it somewhat. But 10 years from now, people are going to be like, yeah, that was weird. And we'll move on. It's not going to have any, I don't think it's going to have,

it's going to have a lasting cultural impact. I mean, there are movies that take place during the pandemic. There's a handful of Kimmy last year. Another Steven Soderberg, actually. There are a handful of movies. But there isn't really much out of Hollywood that reflects the pandemic, certainly not really in terms of music. It is a cultural legacy that I think will diminish quite quickly.

And I think it's because it's, it's, it's, these things are revealing of human frailty in ways that people just don't want to think about. Yeah. I think that's true. And I feel that way. And I feel bad about feeling that way. But it's just true.

It is, it's true. And also, like, it's so, it's not like war. I think a lot of the, the memory of war can be propaganda and lies and is destructive, probably, the positive or the heroism of war. but the purposiveness of war, it does not share that. It doesn't feel it's isolating and scary. It doesn't feel a sense of comradeship didn't grow up between us over it. We were isolated from each other.

You know, so that's what makes it so horrible in a way that these forms of meaning. I mean, everyone has their memories with their loved ones. But these forms of meaning that create across a society where, you know, well, you know, I knew what it was like to be in a trench or I knew what it was like to be on a troop ship or a submarine or something like that. And those shared existence was, you know, a little bit was different because we were isolated from each other. We had to be isolated from each other, which makes the formation of memories of social memory so much harder and the feeling of solidarity so much harder, which is a sad thing. It was a really horrible.

thing. It was really horrible. And it was so, I mean, there were heroic moments, but none of them feel like a compensation, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that is outbreak. That is outbreak, which became a discussion about the pandemic. So we're going to move on. Okay. That is our show. If you are not a subscriber, Please subscribe. We're available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, and Google Podcasts. Wherever else, podcasts are found.

Let me say it real quick. I totally acknowledge that it was a terrible transition. It happens sometimes. We're not professionals here. No. We're just humble. That's not what you want. We're humble petite bourgeoisie podcasters.

We're not the big boys. That's right. If you subscribe, please leave a rating and review. It really does help people find the show. You can reach out to both of us on Twitter. I am at Jay Bowie. John, you are... Lidal underscore trolling.

You can also reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. For this week in feedback, we have an email from Sean titled Historical Significance of the name Ty Moncrief. This is from a comment on our Drop Zone episode where Gary Busey plays a villain named Ty Moncrief. Hi, Jamel and John, I am probably reading into this too much, but the names Ty and Moncrief will prick the ears of any historian of slavery in the American. American Revolution. Colonel Ty was a well-known black loyalist officer who escaped from slavery in Virginia and led a number of daring loyalist raids in New Jersey. Captain James Moncrief commanded the Royal Engineers in British Occupied Charleston and Savannah and played a significant role at the end of the war in pressing British command to evacuate the black loyalists rather

than returning them to their enslavers. I don't know if Gary Busey really embodies the qualities of either of these figures, but it isn't interesting coincidence. Love the Pod. Sean. Thank you. That's really interesting tidbit. I'm going to use this as an excuse to recommend one of my favorite books that I've read of the last couple of years. It's by an historian named Maya Jasanoff, I think it's a lot you say a last name. It's called Liberty's Exiles. It's about the loyalists, black, white, native, who were in one way, shape, or form exiled from the United States after the Revolutionary War. Americans get really, what's what I'm making for, self-righteous about the fact that our, quote, unquote, revolution didn't have any kind of, like, violent terror, like the French or the Russian one.

But we did harass and expel and cops get the property of loyalists, which is not quite a terror, but not one either. No, and there was a tarring and feathering of people. That's not that pleasant. It's very unpleasant In fact So it's a great book And it's really interesting to follow kind of the lives of black loyalists in particular In Canada

In Africa some return to Africa to help You know Start colonies on behalf of Brits to London Really interesting stuff So thank you Sean for this tidbit And if you are interested in Kind of late 18th century Atlantic world

Liberty's Exiles is a great book episodes come out every other Friday so we will see you in two weeks with Die Hard with a vengeance the 1995 sequel to Die Hard and Die Hard 2 die harder here is a short plot

synopsis I just had this up and I no longer do I don't need to pull something up I can tell you what the plot synopsis of this movie as I've seen a million times in diehard with the vengeance. John McLean is back as a New York City police officer this time in New York and he has to stop the brother of Hans Gruber from committing a terrorist attack in New York by disarming bombs across the city. And he does so with the assistance of Samuel Jackson's character. And there's lots of action in 90s racial politics tied up in it. It's good fun. Probably the best

die-hard. I mean, not probably, it is the best die-hard sequel. It is also directed by John McTiernan so that probably explains it why it's so good. So we'll be covering that in two weeks. Die Hard with the Vengeance is available for rental

on Amazon and iTunes. You can also buy a Blu-ray, and you should watch that. Check it out. You've never seen it. Don't forget our Patreon. The latest episode of our Patreon podcast is on the parallax view. Alan J. Pakula's paranoid thriller about a secretive corporate assassination firm. A great movie, fun episode. You can listen to that and much more

of patreon.com slash unclear pod. Just $5 a month and it is worth it. Our producer is Connor Lynch and our artwork is from Rachel Eck. For John Gans, I'm Jamal Bowie and this is unclear and present danger. We'll see you next time.