As American governors already look to reopening states despite a paltry amount of time spent in confinement compared to Europe and China, one can, of course, only think of the mayor in Jaws who assured everyone it was safe to go in the water, keeping the beaches open on Fourth of July weekend (something one imagines will also happen this summer as corona soup a-brews in said waters). Indeed, it seems the only one willing to take a stand (and the risk on angering an already irascible American public in doing so) is California governor Gavin Newsom, who has even admitted to the very state in which the film industry is most dependent that movie theaters are not in the cards for reopening in the early phases of easing lockdown measures. And not without good reason. For let us not forget that it was at a movie theater that the spread of the Motaba virus in Outbreak is allowed to thrive. A movie theater, incidentally, that was also in (Northern) California, in the fictional small town of Cedar Creek.
But before the virus makes its way stateside, it is born in Zaire. At the time of the film’s release in 1995, an ebola outbreak was rampant in the country. However it is in 1967 that the story unfolds, when General Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) and General Billy Ford (Morgan Freeman) choose to decimate a camp where Motaba has wiped out or infected everyone in it. Rather than telling anyone about what they discovered, they simply blow it up–problem solved. Over the course of the nearly thirty years that have gone by since we join in the present our lead character, Colonel Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman), they’ve secretly perfected a vaccine treatment for it, seeking to wield it as a biochemical weapon should certain countries “get out of line” with the U.S. (see: The Demon in the Freezer, also by Richard Preston, who provided The Hot Zone as the source material for Outbreak‘s script).
Of course, what a despot like Donald (always a name that connotes despotism, it seems), who is the one puppeteering Billy’s silence despite his guilt over hiding his knowledge of the virus and a vaccine for it, doesn’t understand is that “weaponizing” in 90s America post-Bush wasn’t the name of the game. At least, not Bill Clinton’s game, whose visage appears in photographic form in one of the defense offices in the film to subtly iterate just who, exactly, is boss. With frequent allusion to what a president can override and demand when emergency measures are being taken to preserve the fate of a nation, screenwriters Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool failed to acknowledge at any point that Clinton was an unabashed peacenik. A Vietnam draft dodger. A person more concerned with explosions of an orgasmic nature than a bombing one.
Granted, some would argue, not wrongly, that Clinton was in anyone and everyone’s back pocket if it served his aims to remain at the political forefront. Regardless, this was a man so filled with the boomer idealism of the hippie 60s (before Charles Manson cast a dark pall over the vibe) that he thought peace between Israel and Palestine could be possible. A man prone to getting misty-eyed in public, and biting his lip in contemplative thought to show empathy (even if this was a trait he was coached on by James Carville to allow him a pause before responding to anyone too rashly). A man, in short, who does not compute with the man who would sanction a decree to blow up a small California town for the sake of containing a killer virus. Even if the models shown were to be as grim as projected.
Yet maybe what Outbreak unwittingly seeks to reveal, more than just the Joshua Lederberg quote, “The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is the virus,” is just how much the president is actually kept in the dark by those that are supposed to be working for him, not against him (again, this was in the 90s, when the presidency still had constitutionally-correct checks and balances in place). Those particularly in the Department of Defense with their own power-hungry machinations and ideas about the way things “ought to be done.” That is to say, recklessly, and with little consideration for the actual humans behind the facade of numerical statistics. That, at any given moment within the chain of command of U.S. government, very few people have any idea what the fuck is actually going on in general or in real time.
It’s a horrifying thought, but an accurate one, to think that those at the highest level are often just as clueless as the average civilian. Riding blind and hoping for the best. Just as Clinton did when he took a risk on that blow J. On Gennifer Flowers. On Paula Jones. And a host of others likely unnamed in his saga of sexual misconduct. And even if Clinton was a “pure” soul (or as pure as a soul can be when it seeks to take the office of U.S. President), maybe it wouldn’t have mattered had a situation like the one in Outbreak arose (indeed, one tends to think if Trump had taken corona more seriously at the outset, maybe he would’ve bombed a few small towns). For there are too many people controlling the strings to wield the marionette “in charge.”
No matter how in control said Commander-in-Chief might look, he is nothing more than, in the end, a symbol. That America’s present symbol is so representative of the overall moral rot in the country and its so-called “American dream” makes one wonder if, in a version of Outbreak released now, it would not have been just one small coastal California town subject to explosion, but anyone anywhere expressing dissent. On that front, one can rest assured Clinton was the most peacenik of presidents, by the standards of what “presidential” has come to mean. Ironically, of course, it was the precedents established by Clinton’s presidency–so filled with “truth massaging” pertaining to sex as it was–that has ultimately led the U.S. government’s highest office to become so devoid of much in the way of “preeminence.”
While some would counter that the corruption of the presidency began long ago, most glaringly with the Kennedys rigging the election and Nixon lying about, well, just about everything, it was Clinton’s modern presidency, steeped in a new era of tabloid-tinted scandal, media relentlessness and, for the first time, making the president a focal point of down at heel pop culture, that activated the present incarnation of debasement. One in which we’re not being blown up…just told to ingest cleaning disinfectants instead. One surely has to admit Clinton was too “peacenik” to suggest that.
