Ever since the coronavirus gained a toehold on these shores, freaked-out Americans have been watching Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 movie Contagion, about the race to stop a mysterious, rapidly spreading disease that emerges from China. Contagion has been in iTunes’s top 10 ever since January. In recent weeks, 1995’s Outbreak, a thriller about a mega-Ebola ravaging a small California town, has regularly been among Netflix’s most viewed movies.



I am not sure, however, that these movies have very much to say about the situation we find ourselves in. Outbreak is a Tom Clancy–ish thriller featuring a comic book virus that practically melts the organs of any human it infects. Contagion is actually a good movie, anticipating the turn toward explainer films like The Big Short, and the Contagion virus is more realistic and contains numerous similarities to ours: It jumps from animals to people! It comes from China! It’s covered up by the Chinese government! But the movie virus is, as in Outbreak, much deadlier, killing one in five people. It spreads globally almost instantly, killing Gwyneth Paltrow within its first 10 minutes.



There is nothing fast-paced about the coronavirus. For months, dread has slowly accumulated in my midsection. Every day brings a succession of new anxieties about the virus and the economy; about my family and friends; about my hands and the many, many things they touch, particularly my face. Above all, there is the sense that everything that is bad today will be worse tomorrow. And the movie that best reflects that reality is not Contagion but Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.



It is notable that the shark is barely in the movie, appearing for all of four minutes. This was not by design. Initially, Spielberg had three mechanical sharks made, but they looked hokey and frequently broke down. He was forced to embrace his inner Hitchcock, rarely showing the movie’s titular villain. As a result, the shark was more of an invisible threat, which turned out to be even scarier. “The visual ellipsis,” Molly Haskell wrote in her critical biography of Spielberg, “created far greater menace and terror, as the shark is nowhere and everywhere.” Sound familiar? If Jaws had been made only a few years later, we would have almost certainly been burdened with a CGI shark. Forty years after its release, the movie’s great white works as a metaphor as well as it does as a shark.



One of the strangest things about the coronavirus panic is how normal everything seems. Even with few people going out, my neighborhood looks the way it does on a Sunday morning. The difference is that I’m bombarded by a constant stream of push alerts and texts. That is a key part of what makes Jaws work. Even when everything appears fine, you know that terror is lurking just beneath the surface.

