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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
In a new era of movies like the Farrelly brothers' "Osmosis Jones," we die from bugs, not bombs.
Aug 9, 2001 | Just as atom bomb anxiety infused Cold War-era pop culture, virus anxiety -- in the form of plagues, epidemics, parasites and microbe-caused mutations -- permeates recent pop culture. In "World War III" -- a bloody, made-for-TV movie broadcast last month on Fox, Russian terrorists release an airborne virus that kills almost 200,000 Americans. In Ivan Reitman's lame comedy "Evolution," an alien microbe outbreak threatens the extinction of humanity. Advertised as an "infectious comedy," the Farrelly brothers' new half-live-action, half-animated "Osmosis Jones" is set inside the infected body of a construction worker (Bill Murray), in which a deadly virus (Laurence Fishburne) battles it out with a street-smart white blood cell, Osmosis Jones (Chris Rock).
While the latter two movies try to wring nervous, gross-out laughs from bodily horror, the dark side of virus fear shows up more frequently, such as in the virulent black-oil virus of "The X-Files," the ghastly Ebola epidemic in "Outbreak," the flukelike, mind-controlling parasites from another planet in the 1998 film "The Faculty" and the microbe-caused, mutated monstrosities in the PlayStation games Extermination, Parasite Eve and Resident Evil.
On the literary front, Robert Ludlum's recent thriller "The Hades Factor" centers on a plot by a drug company CEO to create a deadly epidemic. "Mutant," a new book by Peter Clement, concerns a deadly epidemic created by terrorists, while Geraldine Brooks' "Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague" revisits the horrors of medieval pestilence.
Other virus-horror highlights include the worldwide plagues in Connie Willis' "Doomsday Book" and Stephen King's "The Stand" (which was adapted into a 1994 TV serial), the thinking microbes that envelop the Earth and terminate the human species in Greg Bear's "Blood Music" and the deadly combination of organic and electronic viruses that alter human evolution in Philip Kerr's "The Second Angel." A new balance of horror has emerged: We are no longer afraid of the bomb; the virus is our new boogeyman.
Inspiring this cultural anxiety are real fears: the AIDS virus, germ warfare, biological terrorism, foot-and-mouth disease, the West Nile virus and bizarre new antibiotic-resistant supergerms. Paul Ewald's recent book "Plague Time" argues convincingly that diseases once linked with genes and environmental pollution -- like cancer and heart disease -- may be attributed to pathogens. Carl Zimmer, in his 2001 book "Parasite Rex," shines a light on the body-consuming pervasiveness of parasitic invaders.
In the 1950s, our apocalyptic fears centered on radioactive fallout and global thermonuclear war. In science fiction, nuclear anxiety frequently expressed itself as nightmarish visions of gigantic insects and monstrous crustaceans terrorizing the world. After the prehistoric "Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" awoke from its million-year sleep by the underwater testing of atomic devices, the screen was overrun by reanimated-by-the-bomb behemoths and radioactive mutants -- the giant ants of "Them," the colossal lizard of "Godzilla," the enormous octopus of "It Came From Beneath the Sea," the stupendous spiders of "Tarantula" and the Cadillac-size grasshoppers that lumber down Chicago's Michigan Avenue in "The Beginning of the End."
Bomb tests, American/Soviet saber rattling, wailing air raid sirens and duck-and-cover nuclear holocaust exercises generated a paranoid atmosphere that pervaded American culture beyond sci-fi B-movies. Books, essays, television shows and prestigious films explored the medical, psychological and ethical implications of nuclear weapons.
Following the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty, atomic anxiety waned until the 1980s. A brief upsurge of nuclear jitters -- caused by the Three Mile Island accident, the Chernobyl disaster and Reagan's vast military buildup -- was reflected in movies such as "The China Syndrome," "WarGames" and "The Day After." Then the collapse of the Soviet Union significantly reduced apprehension about atomic annihilation.
During the era of bomb terror, ancient fears of disease lessened as science conquered one plague after another, including smallpox and the childhood scourge polio. Only a few movies dealt with the epidemic issue. The earliest such movie -- Elia Kazan's taut 1950 noir drama "Panic in the Streets" -- centers on a manhunt for two gangsters infected with pneumonic plague. John Sturges' 1965 suspense gem "The Satan Bug" shows the nerve-racking chase of a lunatic who has stolen flasks of a deadly virus. In both films, the epidemic threat remained unrealized.
