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A cough in the darkness. A drop of blood on an airport floor. A visitor from abroad, coming ashore at the docks. A satellite from space, brought back to us with lumps of unidentified material trapped inside. If movies are to be believed, there are all sorts of ways in which a pandemic can start. There is one way, however, more terrifying than any other. One bearer of mass destruction against which there is no defense, and which none of us could ever have foreseen: Emma Thompson.
At first blush, it seems odd that such a smart and liberal-minded woman as Thompson should be the root of all calamity. It’s hard to picture her jotting it down on her to-do list: “Eggs. Milk. Global extermination. Shampoo.” But there she is, at the beginning of “I Am Legend” (2007), in the role of Dr. Krippin. (The name is a none too subtle warning, given the notoriety of the real Dr. Crippen, who was hanged in England, in 1910, for the murder of his wife.) With a modest smile, the doctor confirms to a TV interviewer that she has, indeed, cured cancer. All that’s required, she says, is a touch of bioengineering—some hooey to do with harnessing the measles virus and pointing it in a new and beneficent direction. That, at any rate, is the plan. Regrettably, it goes awry, and the Krippin virus proceeds to do its worst. Within three years, it kills 5.4 billion people, or ninety per cent of the planet’s population. On the plus side, lions are doing fine.
Mass extinction is an old favorite among moviemakers. They relish the idea that vast numbers of people will, given judicious marketing, pay good money to watch vast numbers of other people being wiped out. The extinguishing can take many forms. Ornery extraterrestrials come in useful, and earthquakes are a blast, too, as evidenced in “Earthquake” (1974), which was a close contest between seismic activity in Southern California and the firmness of Charlton Heston’s jaw. And you can’t beat a nice old-fashioned asteroid, although that didn’t stop Bruce Willis, in “Armageddon” (1998), from having a crack. In the end, however, nothing gets under our skin, or into the spongy lining of our lungs, like a plague film. Nowhere else do we find so enticing a ratio of frisson to relief. We are pricked with dread as to what could happen to us, in a time of ruination, only to be suffused with existential smugness, later on, as the lights go up and we realize that nothing has happened. For now.
The whole genre of fever flicks is having a moment, and the moment has lasted since the start of the year. It was on the final day of 2019 that the first cases of a new disease were reported in China. As the coronavirus has evolved from infancy to its peripatetic prime, it has colonized the human conversation. Whatever your take on the outbreak, you will find a movie to match your point of view. You want origins? Try “Contagion” (2011), whose closing minutes reveal that a Chinese bat gave something nasty to a pig, which gave it to a chef, who gave it to Gwyneth Paltrow, who generously gave it to mankind. Don’t fancy the zoonotic theory? You prefer mad scientists, breeding hell in a jar? I propose “12 Monkeys” (1995), in which a lab assistant with a ginger ponytail goes through the Baltimore/Washington airport, bearing flasks of something odorless and merciless. He is off to trot the globe. Too conspiratorial? O.K., let’s settle for sane scientists, conscientiously doing their duty, until external forces—thieves deployed by a millionaire, in “The Satan Bug” (1965), or animal liberationists, in“28 Days Later” (2003)—break in. The pathogen is stolen or, infinitely worse, set free.
Some of these scenarios, to be honest, are scarier than others. I soon got bogged down in “The Satan Bug,” largely because everybody entering the underground research complex, with its multiple levels of security, keeps having to pause while a sliding glass door goes “pffsschh” and the air leaks out of the plot. At the other extreme lies “World War Z” (2013). Miss the first ten minutes of that, and you’d be too late for the initial burst of strife, with terrified Philadelphians fleeing from something—or somebodies—that we can’t yet identify. Seldom, thereafter, does the pace relent. We glimpse a screen, at a military command center, that registers “Projected Loss,” and it’s already at three billion and counting. (Think of the National Debt Clock, off Bryant Park, reconfigured for deaths.) The story requires Brad Pitt, as a former U.N. gofer, to flit between continents in a hectic hunt for a cure, and though much of his quest, in retrospect, could have been conducted via a clever technique known as “phone calls,” you’re with him all the way. “The biggest cities are the worst off,” he is told. “The airlines were the perfect delivery system.” Tell me about it.
It could be argued that “World War Z” has nothing to tell us, precisely because of the “Z.” If I’m asked to nominate a film that might suit, or somehow illuminate, our present plight, my first question is always: “How do you take it? With or without zombies?” Pitt isn’t racing around trying to stockpile ventilators, or to sew a handy batch of face masks. He’s racing away from people—from those who, once bitten by a zombie, take a few seconds to recompose themselves before jerking back to life, or a crazed facsimile of life, and then swarming to and fro in their hundreds and thousands, seeking whom they may devour. Much the same goes for “28 Days Later” and its sequel, “28 Weeks Later” (2007), in which the infection can, at short notice, transmute even the gentlest soul into a red-eyed ravener, noisily vomiting gore.
Such terrors are not ours. But they are, so to speak, our regular dreads intensified—superheated, speeded up, and luridly lit. We worry about being stuck in bed with a rocketing temperature and drenched pajamas; we worry about our elders, who may be home alone and afraid to be visited, or wrestling for breath in the back of an ambulance. Such worries are only natural. Our imaginings, though, defy both nature and reason. They are as rabid as zombies, falling and crawling over themselves to fabricate what comes next. Dreams travel worstward, during a fever, and one job of the movies is to give our dreams, good or bad, a local habitation and a name.
Say, for example, that your habitation is Manhattan, and that you have it pretty much to yourself. Is that an all-consuming nightmare or an opportunity for a spree? The man to ask is Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith), the lone survivor of the Krippin virus, in “I Am Legend,” though not quite as lone as you’d suppose. His companions include Sam, a German shepherd, and an assortment of Dark-seekers—very cross cannibalistic types who emerge at night and can’t be relied upon for civilized conversation. No matter. Smith is an enjoyer by instinct, and the movie works best when Neville barrels up and down the city’s weed-infested avenues in a scarlet Mustang, or tees up on a rear flap of the A-12 Blackbird, on the deck of the Intrepid, at Pier 86, and practices his swing. “Yeaahh,” he says out loud. “I’m gettin’ good.” A rarity among dystopias, this film has the gall to suggest, however briefly, that the apocalypse might be fun.
“I Am Legend,” based on the book of the same name, by Richard Matheson, is a thrice-told tale. Before Smith there was Charlton Heston (him again), in “The Omega Man” (1971), and before him there was Vincent Price, in “The Last Man on Earth” (1964). Three more different actors it would be hard to find. Price is the connoisseur of doom, both lofty and aghast; Heston the muscular stalwart, sworn to resist; Smith the life and soul of the party, even when the party consists of nobody but him.
All of which proves that the fantasy of total solitude—which stretches back to Robinson Crusoe, and beyond—takes all sorts. Most of us have wondered, secretly and absurdly, how we would fare if stripped of both conveniences and comrades. (Would I opt for a Maserati over a Mustang, and what year of Château Petrus would I choose to drink as I drove? Or would I simply squirrel away in a basement with a bag of nuts?) Some days, I guess, we’d feel like the musty dregs of the species. On brighter mornings, the immensity of our loss would be soothed by our having outwitted the plague that snapped up everyone else. The last man on earth, by definition, gets to be the best, and thereby to fulfill Sinatra’s ambition: “I wanna wake up, in a city that doesn’t sleep / And find I’m king of the hill / Top of the heap.” Yes, but what a heap.
At the end of January, as the new and confounding virus, bearing some resemblance to the flu, descended on South Korea, I ordered the DVD of a South Korean film from 2013, entitled “Flu.” It didn’t help much. More than three months later, in the first weekend of May, with much of the world in shackles, the twelfth most popular film on iTunes, just below “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” was “Contagion.” Huh? Why do we crave fables of sickness when so many of us are sick, or quailing at the prospect of falling sick, or devising ingenious ways to remain non-sick? Can’t we spend our days safely slumped on the couch, watching “Leslie Nielsen’s Greatest Naked Gun Lines” on YouTube, like responsible grownups?
It’s very old, this urge to meet our fears face to face. We know of a plague in Athens in 430 B.C., and the scholarly consensus is that Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex,” which starts with a Theban priest reporting a universal bane (inhabitants, animals, crops) to Oedipus, was first performed as early as the following year. It is as if the drama were a symptom: the lingering fallout of havoc. Ingmar Bergman, who staged many tragedies as a theatre director, was not one to flinch from the mysterious appeal of cataclysm. Hence his parable of medieval Sweden, “The Seventh Seal” (1957), in which a squire (Gunnar Björnstrand), returning from the Crusades in the service of a knight (Max von Sydow), hails a hooded man and gets no reply. The man is dead, with an eyeless head, dried like a fig and hollowed out by pestilence. Elsewhere, wandering flagellants lash one another for having incurred the wrath of the Almighty. The squire greets a cheerful artist, busy depicting the Dance of Death on the walls of a church, and asks him:
“Why paint such daubings?”
“To remind people they will die.”
“That won’t make them happier.”
“Why always make them happy? Why not frighten them a bit?”
“They’ll just close their eyes then.”
“Believe me, they’ll look.”
These days, with hours to fill and a plethora of screens, we’ve done more than our share of looking: enough, perhaps, to drive us slightly mad. To trawl through the archives of plague-infested cinema is to play a grim new game. Works of fiction suddenly sound like news, and vice versa. Lines of dialogue that would once have zipped by, unremarked, now snag in your head, and the plainest of images acquire a tint of irony and menace. Steven Soderbergh, the director of “Contagion,” gets credit for clairvoyance, with his loaded closeups of elevator buttons, glass tumblers, and doorknobs: everyday surfaces, friendly to congregating germs.
If you’d watched the film a year ago, and heard Kate Winslet, as a solemn scientist, assert that “the average person touches their face two or three thousand times a day,” you’d have given a skeptical snort. Now you just nod, stick your hands in your pockets, and silently vow never to blow your nose again. Likewise, a C.D.C. bigwig, played by Laurence Fishburne, declares, “Our best defense has been social distancing. No handshaking, staying home when you’re sick, washing your hands frequently.” The White House should have played that clip on a loop, at the onset of Covid-19, and kept Donald Trump away from the cameras. In “Contagion,” as in “The Matrix,” the law is clear: when Fishburne speaks, obey.
The same goes for Richard Widmark, in “Panic in the Streets” (1950). He plays Clint Reed, a doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, in New Orleans, who diagnoses pneumonic plague in the corpse of a foreigner who recently arrived on a boat. The guy had been shot, so who’s to say that his assassins weren’t infected? And what about the ordinary citizens with whom he came into contact: can they be traced and inoculated? The movie was made by Elia Kazan, whose next film, a year later, was “A Streetcar Named Desire,” with “On the Waterfront” to come, in 1954; no director paid more knowledgeable attention to the working men and women of America, and what makes you chew your nails, during “Panic in the Streets,” is the fate not of potential victims in the aggregate but of specific individuals, with life stories waiting to be cut short. That big sweaty guy, who sat at a card table with Patient Zero: he may have the bug. Or the cook in the Greek restaurant, wearied by her toils. Don’t forget her.
Kazan’s movie—shot on location, with shadows deep enough to harbor fugitives, or worse—feels thrillingly prescient and fraught, never more so than when Reed rounds on the mayor of the city and his associates, who are fretting about the effect of the virus on their immediate community. You can hear a snarl in Reed’s impatient retort. “Community? What community? D’you think you’re living in the Middle Ages?” he says, casually discarding a touchstone of American civic faith. He adds, “I could leave here today and I could be in Africa tomorrow.” The officials are still thinking small, as if New Orleans were a walled town, whereas Reed is thinking ahead, all too aware that the plague has grander plans. In the end, his urgent precautions pay off, and the movie’s title never comes to pass: there is no panic in the streets. Still, it was a near thing. It always is.
What happens, though, in taller and more fantastical tales, in which the scourge has already triumphed? Take a nervy little yarn like “Carriers,” with Chris Pine as a resourceful jock named Brian. Made in 2006 but not released until 2009, after Pine had found fame in “Star Trek,” the film begins with a voice, laying down some easy-to-follow laws:
1. Avoid the infected at all costs. Their breath is highly contagious.
2. Disinfect anything they’ve touched in the last 24 hours.
3. The sick are already dead. They can’t be saved.
And then an afterthought: “You break the rules, you die. You follow them, you live. Maybe.” That has the dark rumble of the genuine B movie, and we laugh at the overstating of the case, though our laughter, in the era of Covid-19, has an anxious edge. Many of the sick can be saved, in our hospitals, but the point about disinfection strikes us as common sense. (“We’ve got loads of Clorox,” Brian says, as if rolling up at a party with kegs of beer.) There are bits of “Carriers”—basically a road trip, with four young Americans coasting through a virus-riddled land—that make you wince, as when the travellers pass a garbage truck labelled “Human Remains Removal and Disposal” or a man’s body strung up at the roadside with a sign around his neck that reads “Chinks brought it.” An old Hollywood tradition, this, going back to the heyday, or the heynight, of film noir: it’s often the smaller and cheaper movies, rather than the prestige productions, that get to root around in paranoia, xenophobia, guilt, and blame.
The most alarming thing I’ve come across, in this trade-off between the real and the imagined, is a brief exchange from Robert Wise’s “The Andromeda Strain” (1971). Chunks of some wacky alien substance—“No proteins, no enzymes, no nucleic acids. Impossible!”—have been exposed to earthly air, annihilating all persons in the vicinity and reducing their blood to a finely sifted powder. (Babies are unharmed: a blessed exception.) The experts’ qualms are relayed to the very top:
“By then, the disease could spread into a worldwide epidemic.”
“It’s because of rash statements like that the President doesn’t trust scientists.”
That’s a little too close to the bone, I reckon, but you have to congratulate Wise on his bold career swerve into sci-fi, six years after making “The Sound of Music,” and on predicting how harshly politics and medicine can scrape against each other, whenever peril impends. And “The Andromeda Strain” is right to prophesy that, should life from elsewhere fall to Earth, it will, as likely as not, comprise a small patch of what appears to be blue-green mold with limited social skills. My main concern, frankly, is not that it could mow us down in droves but that, owing to an unfortunate housekeeping glitch, it might get squirted with bleach and removed with a lemon-scented wipe. Thus would end our only contact with another life-form, although President Trump, of course, would insist on seeing the bright side. “Me and the mold got on great,” he’d say. “It had a terrific time. I also think, and I’m not just saying this, that I would make a tremendous mold.”
Of all the auteurs who have made their point with plagues, the very first was Moses. True, he never slung a pair of headphones around his neck—de rigueur, these days, for any director who wishes to look the part. But his contract really was written in stone, presumably to the delight of his agent. And nobody, before or since, has enjoyed so solid a relationship with the studio boss. As for narrative suspense, what a knack! If you’re persuading a potentate to let your people go, you can’t just wheel on the grandeur. You’ve got to mix it up a little. Most folks, in Moses’ place, would have gone straight from Plague No. 5, the blighting of livestock, to No. 7, the torrents of hail and fire. But not him. He saw the need for something in between, at No. 6. Something intimate and icky. Cue the boils.
And so a great bewilderment fell upon the land, in 1956, when Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”—his second shot at the theme, after an earlier attempt, in 1923—was released. Wise men beheld the film and said unto themselves, Hang on. There are only four plagues here! Whither the other six? Have we not been fleeced, like rams? Word has it that DeMille, rarely a man to be defeated, couldn’t devise a way to conjure a shower of frogs, for instance, without inducing a ripple of sniggers among his viewers. He wanted ’em to be struck dumb with awe, and to stay dumb. Whether he would have scorned or envied Ridley Scott, who did manage to bring on the frogs, in a kind of pestilential hip-hop, for “Exodus: Gods and Kings” (2014), we shall never know.
Time has wrought many changes to “The Ten Commandments.” As Moses, Charlton Heston (him again) still holds the screen in his clutches, extolling “the power of Gud.” And you can’t help admiring DeMille’s pugnacious perseverance; he’s like a Bible salesman who won’t stop knocking until you open the door. Offered the choice between show and tell, he invariably plumps for both. When Moses’ staff is dipped into the Nile, the water turns to blood. “The water turns to blood!” somebody cries out, just in case. And yet, amid the famed enormity of the production, a few of the quieter scenes hit home, not least the spectacle of Pharaoh’s wife slowly entering a room where her husband sits brooding. She bears their dead son—their only son—in her arms.
The problem that DeMille is confronting here, with unwonted finesse, is one with which every filmmaker has to contend when aiming to dramatize not merely affliction—which, heaven knows, is hard enough—but affliction en masse. The relevant passage from the Book of Exodus reads:
And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more.
In the space of two verses, we pull back from one woman, behind a mill, to an entire country, reverse-zooming from a closeup to a panoramic wide shot. How to encompass all that? DeMille’s response is to focus on the clause about Pharaoh’s child, trusting that the intensity of the bereavement will radiate outward and suggest a broader grief.
A similar impulse spurred F. W. Murnau. He was the director of “Nosferatu” (1922) and “Sunrise” (1927), and DeMille’s superior in every respect—apart from longevity, for Murnau died in a car crash, on the Pacific Coast Highway, at the age of forty-one. His most restless creation was “Faust” (1926), all smolder and flare, and the most celebrated image in the film is that of Mephisto, the size of a mountain and the shape of a bat, looming possessively over the neat German town into which he will, at his pleasure, insert the plague. When it arrives, it’s not some invisible foe but a rat-gray mist that creeps through the winding passageways: an effect achieved by the use of a propeller and soot. Yet portent is balanced with pathos. Years before Orson Welles, Murnau recognized that depth of field could be bound up with depths of feeling; notice, near the camera, the feet of a victim, who is unceremoniously picked up and carted away, or the face of an ailing mother, whose distressed daughter, in the background, summons Faust to the sickbed and begs him for aid. No joy. If he is to wield miracles, he will need new powers.
“Faust,” like “Nosferatu,” was made in the long shadow of the Spanish flu, which, in little more than a year, starting in March, 1918, killed tens of millions of people. Its direct cultural imprint was remarkably thin, as if the First World War had exhausted our collective will to commemorate, and we must search for traces where we can: a gaunt self-portrait by Edvard Munch, say, who survived the pandemic, or Egon Schiele’s painting of himself and his wife, Edith, both of whom died of the flu in the fall of 1918. There is also a child in the picture, held and protected between Edith’s feet. She was pregnant at the time, so it’s a child-to-be—and, alas, a child that never was.
Nothing so harrowing, it seems, was allowed to intrude upon the movies, though we do have “The Plague in Florence” (1919), written by Fritz Lang, in which the chief purveyor of death is not a hooded fellow with a scythe but a grinning fiddle player who prances past the deceased, as if the melodies had merely made them swoon. Then, there’s the town crier, in “Nosferatu,” who marches down an eerily vacant street to make his announcement. The townsfolk eagerly muster at their windows to catch the news he brings; when he tells them what else they may be catching, they slam the windows shut.
Only one major director has ventured into the zone of corporeal contagion and loitered there. In film after film, from “Shivers” (1975) onward, David Cronenberg has turned his tranquil and fascinated gaze on sights and sounds from which the rest of us might veer in disgust. In “Rabid” (1977), a leech-like proboscis pokes out from a woman’s armpit. More startling still are the glimmers of beauty and wit; I refer you to the opening credits of “The Fly” (1986), when what seems to be a pulsing mob of microbes, viewed as if on a glass slide, gradually resolves itself into a roomful of Homo sapiens. Can you recall a more telling visual pun? Well before the advent of social media, Cronenberg understood what it means to go viral. “A virus is only doing its job. It’s trying to live its life,” he has said. “I think most diseases would be very shocked to be considered diseases at all. It’s a very negative connotation.” Poor little Ebola! Spare a thought for Covid-19!
Cronenberg would be amused and gratified, no doubt, to learn that, while embarking on a private retrospective of his work, I succumbed to the coronavirus. Pretty soon, I couldn’t decide whether I was watching the films or the films were watching me. Perhaps they smelled fresh meat. To see “Shivers” while having the shivers is quite a ride. Other side effects of the virus include splintered sleep, drumming headaches, and special corona dreams, which are like Hieronymus Bosch without the playfulness; would Cronenberg be interested, do you think, in buying the rights to my nights? “Shivers,” with its talk of fatty cysts and abdominal growths, not to mention the charming scene in which a doctor discusses parasites while chomping on a pickle, finds the director already probing our itchy desire to experiment, and to hell with the outcome. Best of all is the movie’s envoi, in which a steady flow of genial couples, all of them infected with a strain of hungry venereal mania, drive smoothly out of an underground garage and head for a night on the town.
Why does Cronenberg disturb our peace? Because he is the bringer of bad news. He lays bare the elements of which we are composed, thereby reminding us that we shall, like all animals, decompose and die. Nowadays, such disclosures are uncalled for, and the classic memento mori (the fulminating broadside from the pulpit, the skull in the hand) is deemed to be in poor taste—unlike a zombie, say, which, though fond of our flesh, has the decency not to reproach us. Never before, in short, has so little heed been paid to the fact of mortality. Previous generations would be staggered to realize that many of us, apart from doctors, nurses, traffic cops, military personnel, and the staff of funeral parlors, may never see a dead body, unboxed, and will feel all the happier for our lack of experience. To be sure, we are assailed by violent films, yet the violence is mainly a magic show, designed to stun the senses and keep us cruelly entertained, whereas to Cronenberg, as to Bergman and Murnau, the spectacle of our demise is more like a weather report. Beware the cold front, and the storm.
There are innumerable areas of the world, of course, where fatal diseases continue to hover on the threshold. And there is no country in which the impoverished and the underprivileged are not the first port of call for a roving malady. In the cozier nooks of the well-furnished and relentlessly medicated West, however, we have told ourselves—or fooled ourselves—that life, far from hanging by a thread, is sitting comfortably, pouring itself a drink, putting on some Michael Bublé, and going nowhere in a hurry. As for the very rich, I suspect that they regard Covid-19 as a personal insult and a slight on their omnipotence: How dare it trespass on their splendor? Can’t it just be paid to go away?
Whether the coronavirus will jolt us from such blitheness, or whether it will be sorted out and set aside as a freakish interlude, it’s far too early to say. As a rule, though, never underestimate our capacity not to learn from our mistakes. Movies are an excellent guide to human error, because they lean so yearningly toward hope—or, if you prefer, stray so comically into self-delusion. Observe the finale of “I Am Legend,” which takes us to the gates of a fortified settlement, run by the uninfected (where did they spring from?), who provide welcoming smiles and a chance to build a new existence. It’s that simple. Even “Contagion,” the most plausible of fever films, comes over all excited at the climax, as one researcher discovers a vaccine with which to beat the plague. Admittedly, she’s played by Jennifer Ehle, and I can think of no one better or calmer to save the world, but, nevertheless, set beside the vast international effort to combat Covid-19, this vision of the heroic loner owes less to scientific practice than to cinematic myth.
Indeed, it’s what you don’t come across, in the swath of plague movies, that seems most bizarre. There are no proper lockdowns, for one thing, or few that aren’t swiftly interrupted; no sooner have the hideaways, in “28 Weeks Later,” sat down to a relaxing candlelit meal than a zombie horde rampages in and starts treating them as entrées. The landscape of lockdown that we have come to know in 2020—the fidgets, the boredom, the halfhearted initiatives, the quality time that shades into a family furor—is anathema to cinema, although Bergman, again, is the exception. In “Shame” (1968), he presents us with a married couple, huddled tight against war rather than contagion, and musing on their enforced leisure. “I’m going to start learning Italian,” the wife says. Her husband replies, “Each morning, after we’ve fed the chickens, we should play music.” Good luck with that. The two of them wind up famished at sea, in a rowboat, with bodies floating by.
For those newly versed in the coronavirus, though, something else is amiss. The average plague film, to be blunt, is all cure and no care. Characters scramble for remedies, often with sensational success. The renaissance of the human race, according to “I Am Legend,” will depend exclusively on a vial of precious blood. But the hard medical slog, such as we witness on the news, with doctors and nurses all but engulfed by the task of tending the sick—by and large, that doesn’t make it into the movies. If you want both sides of the story, I would recommend not a moving picture but a still one. Tintoretto’s “Saint Roch Cures the Plague Victims” was painted in 1549 for the Church of San Rocco, in Venice, where it remains today. The church has been closed of late, Covid-19 having marked Venice on its itinerary and made sure to swing by. Infections have always loved the place. Like tourists, they keep going back.
As ever, with Tintoretto, the light has something to tell us. Lurid and glaring at the forefront of the action, it recedes farther back into a flickering gloom. And the painting yawns wide, like a CinemaScope screen, as it must, in order to accommodate the host of naked and half-dressed figures who fill the canvas. Many of them display buboes—smarting red pustules that signal the plague—on their thighs. One bubo, a sneak preview of Cronenberg, swells inside an armpit. And there, at the painting’s center, is the saint, not staring up to the heavens, in rapture, but patiently down at a man’s infected leg. In the midst of life we are in death, as Tintoretto, like his fellow-Venetians, knew all too well; but he believed, also, that the opposite holds true. No drama of disease, however monstrous, is complete without the labor of love. ♦
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