Depiction of Disease in Film Promotes Negative Images

Ever since the age of globalization began following World War II, film media have regularly depicted invisible diseases.

Kirsten Ostherr

According to the first historical analysis of these films, whose relevance is underscored by the threat of recent contagions like SARS and bird flu, the techniques used to represent unseen threats also contain embedded views of racial impurity and sexual deviance, inadvertently promoting negative images of racism and sexuality.

In her book Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health, Rice English professor Kirsten Ostherr details depictions of the spread of disease in various types of film media and argues that the problem boils down to a simplified division of the world. “Historically, these films convey a sense that there’s a developed world and a developing world,” explains Ostherr, “where the developed world is full of healthy white people and the developing world is full of nonwhite, diseased people spreading contagions.”

First sparked by an interest in how AIDS was covered in the late-1990s, Ostherr analyzed a variety of sources, including public health films from the 1940s, alien invasion films of the 1950s, and the 1995 Hollywood movie Outbreak, among others. To depict contagion, films have turned to the same production tools time and time again: documentary coverage, animation or graphics, and voice-over. Independently, they don’t convey the presence of a pathogen, but together, they create a highly charged mixture of images and words.

The filmmakers, Ostherr says, do not necessarily raise issues of race and sexuality intentionally. However, the impact of even unintentional negative associations can jump from the screen to the real world. “One of the great consequences of the idea of an underdeveloped world as source of disease is to isolate the source or imply the ‘primitivism’ of the origins of the disease,” Ostherr says. “If a film represents a place as incapable of profiting from advances in healthcare or medicine, it’s hard to convince a country of voters that such a place deserves funding for healthcare research and support.”

A recent television news report on bird flu, for example, started with a news anchor providing some background. It then cut to documentary footage of Chinese people in close proximity to dead chickens, with a voice-over from the anchor, followed by an animated graph. A public health film from the mid-20th century used similar devices. Documentary footage of an African village connected to a pathogen included a voice-over, then moved to an animated image of a globe, with arrows showing the path of the disease starting from Africa and spreading around the world. Both of these portrayals are problematic, Ostherr says. “In both,” she notes, “you get the idea that African bodies or Chinese bodies are inherently diseased.”

Films also can convey a “pathological other” who might initially look like the audience but who, due to some deviant behavior, is different and thus diseased. The alien invasion films of the 1950s often followed such a format, depicting aliens taking on the form of human beings. Homosexuality as sexual deviance also can be depicted this way, as seen in an educational film for military recruits from 1945. Using footage of two men, one of whom is infected with a disease, working in close proximity to each other—perhaps inappropriately close—the film cuts to an animated arrow showing that such close contact has spread the pathogen from the first man’s bunk to the second’s, and then to the entire bunkhouse and beyond.

In an era when outbreaks such as SARS, bird flu, and foot-and-mouth disease continue to threaten the global community, Ostherr knows her research won’t help prevent such pathogens, but she hopes it will make producers and audiences more aware of the implications of such depictions.

“If we can think critically of the images that are used,” she says, “and if producers can understand the subtle implications of the images they use, some of these broader but more insidious problems may be diminished over time.”

—Jennifer Evans