UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Going Viral: Outbreak Narratives in Contemporary American Film and Television Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dh3c50p Author Schweitzer, Dahlia Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Going Viral: Outbreak Narratives in Contemporary American Film and Television A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Television by Dahlia Schweitzer 2018 © Copyright by Dahlia Schweitzer 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Going Viral: Outbreak Narratives in Contemporary American Film and Television by Dahlia Schweitzer Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Television University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Denise R. Mann, Chair Going Viral: Outbreak Narratives in Contemporary American Film and Television examines American film and television outbreak narratives, studying how the repetition of characters, images, and story lines has produced a formulaic narrative that reflects and shapes new paradigms of disease and fear. American films and TV shows are situated several historical trajectories: anxiety about emerging viruses and a shrinking, border-less world, as in films like Contagion, the insertion of bioterrorism starting in the twenty-first century, as in television shows like 24, and the current fascination with manifesting the end of the world, as evidenced in TV shows like The Walking Dead and films like I Am Legend. While there are other texts that discuss zombies films or science fiction, this dissertation examines not only outbreak narratives in film and television, but puts them in conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news organizations that have capitalized on public fears about our changing world. ii The dissertation of Dahlia Schweitzer is approved. John T. Caldwell Stephen D. Mamber Toby Miller Denise R. Mann, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iii Contents Preface 1 Introduction 3 1 The Outbreak Narrative 50 2 The Globalization Outbreak 86 3 The Terrorism Outbreak 128 4 The Postapocalypse Outbreak 169 Conclusion 224 Notes 238 iv DAHLIA SCHWEITZER Curriculum Vitae, March 2018 PUBLICATIONS Books In Press L.A. Private Eyes, Rutgers University Press, 2019. 2018 Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World, Rutgers University Press, 2018. 2014 Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster, Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2014. Journal Articles 2017 “Pushing Contagion: How Government Agencies Shape Portrayals of Disease,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 50.3, 445-465. 2017 “Having a Moment and a Dream: Precious, Paris is Burning, and the Necessity of Fantasy in Everyday Life,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 34.3, 243-258. 2016 “When Terrorism Met The Plague: How 9/11 Impacted the Outbreak Narrative,” Cinema Journal, 56.1, 118-123. 2015 “The Mindy Project: Or Why ‘I’m The Mary, You’re The Rhoda’ Is the RomComSitCom’s Most Revealing Accusation,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 43.2, 63-69. 2010 “Opening the Body in Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer,” Jump Cut, Summer 2010. 2010 “Who is Missing in Bunny Lake?” Jump Cut, Summer 2010. 2000 “Striptease: The Art of Spectacle and Transgression,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 34.1, 65-75. CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS 2017 “How iZombie Reinvents the Zombie Paradigm,” Console-ing Passions Conference, Greenville, NC, July 27 – 29, 2017. v 2016 “When Terrorism Met The Plague: How 9/11 Impacted the Outbreak Narrative,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Atlanta, GA, March 30-April 3, 2016. 2016 “War Beyond the Battlefield: Gender, Bodies, and Bioterror,” panel organizer and chair, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Atlanta, GA, March 30-April 3, 2016. 2015 “The Walking Diseased: Zombies, Viruses, and a New Kind of Dystopia,” presented to the Film & History Annual Conference, Madison, WI, November 5-8, 2015. 2015 “Contagious Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, and the Outbreak Narrative,” presented to the Cultural Studies Association Annual Conference, Riverside, CA, May 21-23, 2015. 2015 “When Viral Pandemics Met Economic Globalization in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion: A Hollywood Not-in-Love Story,” presented to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada, March 25-29, 2015. 2014 “Gender and Genre in Office Killer,” presented at New York University’s Monstrous Media Conference, New York, NY, February 14-15, 2014. vi Preface In 1995, I saw a movie called Safe at an art house theater in downtown Washington, DC. Written and directed by Todd Haynes, the film left me speechless. As the enigmatic Carol White, the normally luminous Julianne Moore’s radiant beauty becomes whiter and fainter as the film progresses; she is the victim of a disease no one can diagnose, much less cure. There is no question that Safe is significant not only as a work of cinema but also as an accurate reflection of a particular moment in American history and a prophetic statement about how, in an identity- based culture, diseases would, in the subsequent decades, become another middle-class way to categorize ourselves, manage our problems, file our grievances, and find our communities. As the years passed and AIDS shared the media spotlight with SARS, Ebola, and avian influenza, I grew fascinated not only with the fear that these viruses could stir up but also with the ways that they changed fundamental social interaction. Suddenly, “personal space” could mean the difference between life and death—or so the media headlines would have you believe. The healthy-looking person beside you could kill you. The plane you are about to board could be flying hundreds of viruses around the world. It was not just that viruses impact our interpersonal interactions, but they impact our understanding of the world; they are talking points for politicians as much as box office fodder for Hollywood. Why do we fear these viruses so? And why, over the last few years, have we become so preoccupied with visualizing our demise? Zombies in a postapocalyptic dystopia have become a meal ticket for publishers and producers alike, as readers and viewers are hungry for the next visualization of what our world may become or what we, as humans, can become. The outbreak narrative has become a parable for our fears, evolving to depict our horrors of contagion, of the world, of monsters, and of becoming monsters. It is a template that adapts 1 with changing cultural and social anxieties, as well as a guidepost that tells us where we are going and where we have been. How provincial we were back in 1995, when a deadly virus from Africa only threatened the small town of Cedar Creek, when viruses could forge romances and bring lovers together! In 2011, the world was a much colder place, full of isolation while still, perversely, heavily interconnected—a virus was capable of crossing the world in the blink of an eye. Now The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010-present) one of the highest-rated basic cable shows of all time, visualizes for its viewers week after week just how brutal the future can look and how quickly we can get there. The biggest question is why. Why are we so drawn to these narratives? Why is a film cycle launched in the mid-1990s continuing to reap box office rewards and gain television ratings? Why are we so afraid of viruses halfway around the world? Why are we obsessed with zombies? How does the outbreak narrative reflect anxieties about globalization, risk society, and neoliberal capitalism? This book attempts to answer these questions and more by tracking the permutations of the outbreak narrative as it moves into the twenty-first century and by studying the intersections between fields of medicine, politics, media, and representation. This book attempts to understand why we fear the things we do, how film and television feed those fears, and why we cannot stop watching. 2 Going Viral Introduction Plague remains a virulent metaphor: a powerful and historically lethal way of labeling enemies and outsiders, a disturbing vector for our fears surrounding the fragility of the social bond, and a puissant figuration of the conceptual and psychic infectiousness at work within psychoanalytic thinking and its reception. —Jennifer Cooke, Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film American film and television outbreak narratives surround us, even if we are unaware of their presence, repeating particular characters, images, and story lines in service of a formulaic narrative that both reflects and shapes paradigms of disease and fear. The “outbreak narrative” generally begins with the discovery of an emerging infection and follows it as it spreads, documenting the journey to contain or neutralize it. Some versions incorporate terrorism, while others use zombies. Some destroy the world, while others save it. Many dwell on corporate and government conspiracies, while still others reflect upon what the world would look like if most of us—including those corporations and governments—were dead. All variations of this template reflect various real-life anxieties about emerging infections and potential pandemics, occasionally relieving these anxieties in the neatly removed world of the Hollywood screen, but often feeding them as well. It is with this feeding of the fear that I am most intrigued. The outbreak narrative reveals anxieties related to three types of increasingly