Contagion: Nothing spreads like fear. Narration and deliberation about a pandemic

Abstract

Films are a cultural experience to understand reality. But reality is complex and multidimensional; incomprehensible without the moral dimension of the facts that we have in front of our eyes. Narrative ethics allows us to imagine the moral background of all the processes that accompany health and disease in the individual and in the collective, in the biological and in the social. The film Contagion (Sodelberg, 2011) is a disturbing reflection on the global consequences of an infectious disease in terms of the uncertainty it produces and the fear and lack of control it arouses. More than its predictive value on the COVID-19 pandemic, its greatest success is to exemplify the behavior of pandemics in an interconnected and globalized world. The narration of this film invites us to reflect on how to manage, from a public morality, great health crises. Only the search for the common good can hinder individual freedom, only autonomy understood as relational can weave a fabric of shared responsibilities, only public deliberation can be translated into trust towards institutions.