Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies - Paperback

by Robert Alpert (Author), Merle Eisenberg (Author), Lee Mordechai (Author)

Discusses how the depiction of diseases in movies has changed over the last century and what these changes reveal about American culture

Back Jacket

Throughout the last century, movies about infectious diseases have reflected and driven dominant cultural narratives. As the projected impact of disease has grown exponentially, these movies have increasingly shifted focus from trying to identify the source of a disease and potentially stopping it, to a dystopian, post-pandemic world in which nobody is safe and humans simply try to survive. Diseased Cinema explores how this narrative mirrors and shapes two thematic transformations. Firstly, the narrative change demonstrates how America has shifted from a belief in solving social problems to despair and acceptance of America's failure to fulfil its social contract. Secondly, this altered narrative reflects a development of capitalism which has spread globally with entrenched American ideas about individualism at the expense of the public good. As capitalism becomes more ubiquitous through newly developed technologies and global trade, movies gradually flatten individual differences or advocate for a complete destruction of the present world ostensibly to offer humanity a fresh start. Robert Alpert is an Adjunct Instructor in the Computer and Information Sciences Department at Fordham University Merle Eisenberg is an Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University Lee Mordechai is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Author Biography

Robert Alpert is an Adjunct Instructor at Fordham University where he has taught courses on computers and robots in film, movies and the American experience, and media law. He haswritten extensively on movies, including on directors, such as Chaplin, Meyers, and Bigelow, as well as on other topics, such as gender, the Hollywood idiom, and the politics of science fiction. His publications can be found in Jump Cut, Senses of Cinema, and CineAction. Alpert received his M.F.A. in Film from Columbia University. He also received a J.D. from New York University and practiced intellectual property law for over 30 years.

Merle Eisenberg is an Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University and a founding faculty member of the Oklahoma State Pandemic Center. He has published articles in journals including The American Historical Review and Past & Present. His work has also appeared in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which received press coverage in CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and the NY Post. He has also appeared on CNN to discuss historical pandemics and regularly teaches courses on plagues and pandemics in history. Along with Lee Mordechai, he is the co-founder and co-host of the Infectious Historians podcast

Lee Mordechai is a Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Associate Director of Princeton University's Climate Change and History Research Initiative. He has published over twenty academic articles, including two in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and two in the leading history journals, The American Historical Review and Past & Present. He has taught several courses on epidemics, including a seminar that uses the current draft of the proposed book. Along with Merle Eisenberg, he is the co-founder and co-host of the Infectious Historians podcast.