{"id":143587,"date":"2020-03-16T12:48:01","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T16:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=143587"},"modified":"2020-03-17T09:08:12","modified_gmt":"2020-03-17T13:08:12","slug":"america-infected-the-social-distance-catastrophe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/16\/america-infected-the-social-distance-catastrophe\/","title":{"rendered":"America Infected: The Social (Distance) Catastrophe"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from Elia Kazan\u2019s Panic in the Streets<\/em> (1950)<\/p><\/div>\n

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky\u2026 A pestilence isn\u2019t a thing made to man\u2019s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Albert Camus, La peste<\/em> (1947)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The plague that gave Albert Camus\u2019s novel its title is the plague but it is also, as Stephen Spender put it in his 1948 New York Times<\/em> review, a \u201cSocial Catastrophe.\u201d In that sense, The Plague<\/em> is a political allegory with a large cast of quasi-allegorical characters\u2014the perfect prototype for a disaster movie. Camus started writing The Plague<\/em> under German occupation. The novel was published in 1947 when he was thirty-four and already, thanks to The Stranger<\/em> as well as his writing for the underground resistance newspaper Combat<\/em>, a cultural icon\u2014the Humphrey Bogart of Saint-Germain-des-Pr\u00e9s.<\/p>\n

French critics mostly read The Plague<\/em>, which, after many deaths, ends by defining \u201cplague\u201d as \u201cjust life, no more than that,\u201d as a metaphor for the human condition. It was also understood as an allegory of the German occupation, with France separated from the West\u2014although the references to crematoria and concentration camps scattered throughout have intimations of something more. <\/p>\n

Topical when published, this complex and absorbing account of how a range of men (and only men) cope with the awesome irrationality of pestilence, \u201ca laboratory for studying attitudes,\u201d in Spender\u2019s phrase, now addresses our moment. It not only concerns mass death in an isolated city, but for three years, we have lived with a president obsessed with quarantine and contagion\u2014not to mention a cable news network that two decades ago began warning of leprosy being spread by illegal immigrants from Mexico.<\/p>\n

The novel is rich in incident. Camus\u2019s protagonist and secret narrator Dr. Rieux notes the effect of the plague and quarantine on Oran\u2019s residents, including the early holiday atmosphere produced by the closing of shops and offices. Gas rationing had its upside. The enforced idleness produces a city where \u201ctraffic is stopped to give a merry-making populace the freedom of the streets.\u201d This, however, gives way to a sense of abandonment and isolation.<\/p>\n

When not stockpiling toilet paper and keeping their social distance, Americans have been comforting themselves by streaming Contagion<\/em>, Steven Soderbergh\u2019s naturalistic homage to technocratic efficiency in combating an Ebola-like pandemic. The Plague<\/em>, too, was imagined as a movie, acquired by MGM as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. This was embarrassing for Camus, who cancelled the deal. The designated adapter, Richard Brooks, turned his script into Crisis<\/em> (1950), in which Cary Grant plays a morally conflicted American doctor compelled to operate on the dictator of an unnamed Latin American country. The specter of a plague, in Crisis<\/em>, is mutated into a revolution. The real, if unacknowledged, movie version of The Plague<\/em> would be Elia Kazan\u2019s atmospheric Panic in the Streets<\/em>, released shortly before Crisis<\/em>, during the summer of 1950, one month into the Korean War.<\/p>\n

Panic in the Streets<\/em>, officially derived from two stories published in Dime Detective<\/em>, was an experiment in Hollywood neorealism, shot on location in New Orleans, America\u2019s most racially mixed, exotically Caribbean city, characterized by fluid camerawork, the use of non-actors, and overlapping dialogue. Pneumonic plague\u2014a lung infection not unlike that produced by the coronavirus\u2014comes to America and, for much of the movie, only Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) is willing to call it such: \u201cWe have 48 hours! After that we\u2019ll have the makings of a plague!\u201d It\u2019s a movie\u2014all action, no reflection\u2014but at the same time a tale of animated corpses, haplessly running from a sentence of death.<\/p>\n

Camus\u2019s Plague<\/em> and Kazan\u2019s Panic<\/em> are both set in port cities open to the world and feature dedicated medical protagonists who struggle against apathetic authorities. The Plague<\/em> evokes the mood of a quarantined town whose citizens realize that \u201cthey had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment.\u201d In Panic<\/em>, Dr. Reed aside, the people of New Orleans have no such consciousness. Camus evokes a sense of solidarity: \u201conce the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all [were] in the same boat\u2026 No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny.\u201d Kazan, following the exigencies of a Hollywood movie, plays to audience fears, which he allays by constructing an individual hero.<\/p>\n

Army medic and government activist, Dr. Reed wears a uniform. He also shares a surname and a career path with the nineteenth-century public health hero who instituted quarantines against yellow fever and cholera, officiously informing a skeptical meeting of New Orleans city fathers, \u201cOne of the jobs of my department is to keep the plague out of this country.\u201d In telling people that which they don\u2019t want to know, he\u2019s an Ibsen-esque \u201cenemy of the people\u201d\u2014a self-described alarmist who, like the martyred Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, turns out to be right.<\/p>\n

In orchestrating a man hunt for the criminal plague carriers, Dr. Reed enlists another professional: the tough New Orleans cop (Paul Douglas). The grumpy (and Trumpy) policeman hates doctors and has irrational dislike of civil servants. Nevertheless, the men bond in battling dithering politicians and nosy reporters for control of the situation. (The Plague<\/em> has a journalist as well, a visiting Parisian who first tries to escape Oran and later, as the novel\u2019s resident romantic existentialist, comes to embrace his fate. There is also a new newspaper, the Plague Chronicle<\/em>, which is initially meant to provide information and soon devolves into a vehicle for ads promising new, infallible antidotes.) Kazan, a former Communist but not yet an informer (who two years later would name and effectively blacklist eight former comrades), saw Panic<\/em> as an allegory: \u201cThe Doc was a New Dealer and the policeman a Republican. That was the way we thought, the remnants of my former political training: everybody representing some social political position.\u201d<\/p>\n

What then, in this equation, was the pneumonic plague? It is not, as in Camus, spread by rats, but by people\u2014namely foreigners and criminals. As the earth beneath Oran\u2019s houses was \u201cpurged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails,\u201d diseased undocumented aliens and their gangster sponsors emerge from New Orleans waterfront dives to pollute the nation and more. (Dr. Reed\u2019s authority extends into international waters.) In The Plague<\/em>, the disease leaves \u201cas unaccountably as it had come.\u201d Panic in the Streets <\/em>ends with a cathartic ritual cleansing as the infected criminal and major carrier (Jack Palance) is shot down while scrambling, climbing, fighting, running from the police, and demonstrating a will to escape\u2014and, as implacable as any virus, contaminate the free world.<\/p>\n

Given this enemy, Dr. Reed\u2019s emphasis on army control, use of professional informers, advocacy of preventive detention, and press management provides an unavoidable metaphor. As J. Edgar Hoover told House Un-American Activities Committee in spring of 1947: Communism \u201cis a way of life\u2014an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the Nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

What was in Kazan\u2019s mind? The Internal Security Act of 1950 prohibited entry or settlement of immigrants\u2014like Kazan\u2014who were or had been Communists. Panic in the Streets<\/em> was released to excellent reviews, albeit not from the Daily Worker<\/em>, which deemed the director\u2019s \u201cneo-realist\u201d use of locations and actors to be ersatz and his movie\u2019s premise a \u201cmighty cheap\u201d gimmick. The reviewer could hardly miss the movie\u2019s coincidental illustration of Attorney General J. Howard McGrath\u2019s recent warning that in America Communists were \u201ceverywhere\u2014in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although our president was initially paralyzed, perhaps by his own pathological fear of contagion, and thus denied the seriousness\u2014if not the reality\u2014of coronavirus, Panic in the Street<\/em>\u2019s open xenophobia might provide him with a useful model. It might yet. In the meantime, The Plague<\/em> furnishes an appropriately absurd scenario for Trump and his audience, which is to say, us: somehow Oran\u2019s municipal opera house is given license for weekly performances of Gluck\u2019s Orpheus and Eurydice<\/em>. In, what for me is the novel\u2019s tragicomic highpoint, Camus describes a performance\u2014just as Eurydice is taken back to Hades, the actor playing Orpheus \u201cchooses this moment to stagger grotesquely to the footlights, his arms and legs splayed out\u201d and, refusing to act in bad faith, collapses on stage in the manner of a plague victim.<\/p>\n

The orchestra stops playing. The audience rises and slowly begins to exit (\u201clike worshippers leaving church when the service ends\u201d) then, seized with panic, stampedes for the doors, \u201cpouring out into the street in a confused mass.\u201d This hasn\u2019t yet happened in Mar-a-Lago, but Iran got a taste when Iraj Harirchi, the head of the government task force on the coronavirus, began showing symptoms on TV. In the theater of our mediated lives, our hitherto diffident president\u2019s televised admission that he has taken the test for COVID-<\/small>19 is the first instance of such authenticity. Trump claimed to have tested negative. In future weeks, however, we may well notice his septuagenarian political rivals coughing into their elbows, if not seeking tests.<\/p>\n

As states have begun postponing or canceling their primary elections, it\u2019s only a matter of time before Trump fully realizes that his worst nightmare is a blessing in disguise. Quarantine may be an existential condition in The Plague<\/em>, but it is a practical weapon in Panic<\/em>. The movie\u2019s key moment comes when Dr. Reed\u2019s wife gives him justification to take the law into his own hands: \u201cIf there\u2019s a plague here, you\u2019re the most important man in town\u2026\u201d He is the leader. No one need vote, no election required.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

J. Hoberman is the former senior film critic for the<\/em> Village Voice and the author, most recently, of <\/em>Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the real plague movie to be streaming, Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1925,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAmerica Infected: The Social (Distance) Catastrophe by J. 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