Imagining Bio-disaster, Reproducing Social Order

Abstract

This article studies the imagination and representation of biological disaster in contemporary popular cinema. The texts chosen are Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagion, Danny Boyle’s modern zombie-horror classic 28 Days Later (2002), Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006). This article is interested in the ‘sensual elaboration’, within filmic narrative, of biological disaster, and will argue that these films not only communicate with but organize their viewers’ perceptions of biological disaster. It studies the narrativizing of the onset and consequences of biological disaster, coded as an ‘invasion’ of the individual and social body in these films. It further argues that the individual and social body in these texts form the key site of negotiating anxieties surrounding their inevitable collapse in the wake of social, cultural and economic breakdown following biological disaster. The narrativizing of biological disaster in these films, this article will demonstrate, performs a crisis of reproducibility and reproductivity.