Tube Experiment: Good or Unhealthy?

We see scenes in which resources such as food begin to be distributed inequitably, and people begin to exploit their positions by withholding food in exchange for other resources, including coerced anal sex. After the news is made public on national television, raising the category of the crisis to critical, citizens begin fighting for resources and even exploiting the chaos to loot a supermarket. Of note, when infected citizens are forcibly moved to camps, elements of compassion and cohesion develop among camp residents; the most violent reactions come from and are directed toward authorities managing the site. As more citizens contract the disease, the normal functioning of society is upturned: strict government quarantines of the infected are imposed by use of physical force. In recent times, more nuanced views about how societies respond to epidemics can be found in films, especially showing how extreme reactions tend to not be intrinsically associated with the disease itself but rather to be a way of dealing with top-down repression impinging on freedoms and liberties. The connection between disease and deteriorating social morality came from actual observations of contemporaries at the time, for example, the views of Giovanni Villani (Nuova Cronica) and Giovanni Boccaccio (Decameron).

Similar kinds of existentialist angst and pessimism over social values in connection with the Black Death were later famously exploited by Ingmar Bergman in The Seventh Seal (1957), Lars von Trier in Epidemic (1987), Luis Puenzo in The Plague (1992), and Christopher Smith in The Black Death (2010). Those 4 films focus especially on intolerance in the form of scapegoating and persecution of women as witches, but visualization of dread had already appeared earlier in lesser known films, such as Singoalla (1949, Christian-Jaque), Häxan (1922, Benjamin Christensen), and Skeleton on Horseback (1937, Hugo Haas). In the film Trollsyn (1994, Ola Solum), set in Norway, the initial stage of the Black Death outbreak is presented as mass hysteria among the villagers: crying and shouting, desperate prayers, suicides, and frantic searching for buboes and panicked movements. It is well known that the Black Death brought mass persecution of Jews in various parts of Europe (13), and families were gathered up and burned alive.

Following the European Parliament's Transport Biofuels Directive in 2003 promoting the use of biofuels, the cultivation of winter rapeseed increased dramatically in Europe. New York: Routledge; 2003. p. Indeed, although according to Michel Foucault, sickness and disease became an arena through which authorities and elites tried to exert social controls (24), epidemics can also become a context in which those lower down the social hierarchy vent frustrations, leading to conflict, often as a way of protecting freedoms or traditions and customary practices. Good early cinematic examples of lower class involvement include The Citadel (1937, King Vidor), with its scenes of working class miners resisting medical authority during a tuberculosis outbreak, and 1918 (1985, Ken Harrison), in which residents of a small Texas community resolutely try to continue their normal lives, functions, and networks despite the scale of deaths from influenza. Overall, a tension emerges between the medical authorities’ advised procedure of forcible isolation and quarantine, which conflicts with very contemporary demands for maintenance of ordinary patterns of social networking and communication. Although on the one hand, fear and panic can be connected to a perceived breakdown in social morality, on the other hand, disruptive reactions can also work toward societal cohesion to protect freedoms, privileges, and customs under threat.

On the other hand, however, we also see much more focused forms of unrest directed at certain social groups, especially in the process of implementing quarantines. On the one hand, many scenes capture the frenzied breakdown of social norms. In this article, however, we have shown that many films focusing on social responses to epidemic disease outbreaks also shine a light on another side of how people react. Many films focusing on outbreaks of epidemic disease focus on outbreaks of senseless violence indicative of a society completely out of control. It felt like an eternity until he finally backed up and with a plop, came out of me. She said it felt like it lasted forever. Wearing peaked black headdresses and long robes, a procession of Armenian priests is led along the stone streets of Jerusalem's Old City by two suited men in felt tarboosh hats with ceremonial walking sticks. Highlighting the significance of the Armenian Church's actions, both the Palestinian President and Jordan's King Abdullah II - custodian of Jerusalem's Christian holy sites - have suspended their recognition of the patriarch. Then they have to pack up and move fast before the Russians hit their position with counter battery fire.