Hollywood Pandemic Cinema as Premediation of Global Crises: A Thematic Analysis of Contagion (2011)

Abstract

Cinema Hollywood has been a major contributor to the shaping of imagination in the masses with regards to the large-scale crises through the process of converting scientific uncertainty and social anxiety into easy narrative forms. Movies on pandemics, especially, provide dramatized versions of how the world is at risk, institutionally responding as well as how the population responds, and in many cases, rehearse potential future scenarios instead of creating a prophetic future. This paper focuses on the film Contagion (2011) by Steven Soderbergh in terms of remediation to understand how the film industry envisions and frames the world crisis in pandemic cinema. The film is examined using the approach of qualitative thematic analysis as the cultural text, which creates narratives of risk, governance, scientific power, misinformation, and people response. The analysis indicates that Contagion is no longer a prophetic narrative about real-world pandemics but a mediated depiction that the audience is ready to be emotionally and cognitively involved in uncertainty and systemic disruption. The application of fear, control and technological intervention in a coherent narrative makes fear management schemes normal and strengthens the belief in scientific and institutional control and at the same time reveals the weak spots in the social systems. The study also serves the field of media and film by revealing the functioning of pandemic cinema as an anticipatory media, which informs the collective knowledge of crises around the world that do not pertain to a particular historical context.