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  • Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health
  • Lisa Yaszek (bio)
Kirsten Ostherr , Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. xii+275pp. US$22.95 (pbk).

One of the oldest sf stories is the narrative of (near) disaster: something terrible happens – dinosaurs rampage, asteroids hurtle toward Earth, aliens attack – and then brave men and women must work together using all scientific and technical resources to solve the problem at hand and save humanity from threatened extinction. Thus, readers of SFFTV should feel right at home with Kirsten Ostherr's Cinematic Prophylaxis, which relates the tale of brave men and women who use all available scientific and technical resources to save humanity from threatened extinction. In this case, however, the individuals in question work for the real world public health and film industries rather than fictional governments or corporations, and their task is to make visible the otherwise invisible threat of contagion as it moves ruthlessly across bodily and national borders. Proving that truth is just as strange and fascinating as fiction, Ostherr maps the history of what she calls 'representational inoculation' over more than a hundred years, from its tentative beginnings in the late-nineteenth-century public health industry to its explosion in mid-twentieth-century Hollywood films and continued popularity in contemporary televisual and digital narratives.

The appeal of Cinematic Prophylaxis derives in large part from Ostherr's interdisciplinary approach. The author draws upon formalist film terminology [End Page 137] to show how filmmakers convey the dangerous nature of contagion to audiences by juxtaposing indexical images of potentially diseased bodies with animated images of disease itself. Unfortunately, this juxtaposition only imperfectly conveys the urgency of identifying and containing disease, and the tension that accompanies this 'reveals the paranoia about maintaining organic national boundaries that underlies the supposed confidence of the globally hegemonic postwar United States' (15). At the same time, Ostherr's cultural studies approach adds nuance to her argument about the visual representation of contagion. By situating specific indexical and animated images in constellations of other texts and discourses (including everything from the Hays Production Code to the Love Bug internet virus), Ostherr demonstrates how the meaning and value of those images changes over time in relation to changing concerns about sources of infection and changing technologies of representation. This dual methodology enables Ostherr to map how the discourse of world health has evolved in a precise and engaging manner. Best of all, readers can do so as well. As I read Cinematic Prophylaxis I found myself applying Ostherr's ideas to a wide range of seemingly unrelated popular and scientific visual texts. Perhaps even more significantly, after some initial resistance, my friends and family began doing the same thing. This – dare I say it? – highly contagious behaviour is clear testament to the compelling way that Ostherr encourages her audience to see the world anew.

This talent is particularly apparent in the first half of Cinematic Prophylaxis. The author begins by showing how the 1924 Public Health Service film How Disease is Spread engaged eugenicist anxieties by treating white, middle-class women as 'problematic subjects of modernity' who inadvertently spread disease by abandoning their domestic duties in the home for the dubious pleasures of commercialised leisure activities in the public sphere (7). This allows Ostherr to illustrate her interdisciplinary methodology and, in so doing, connect current ideas about world health back to earlier ideas about national health. In chapter 1, Ostherr recounts how moral and civic leaders responded to early public-health films – which were often screened in both classrooms and theatres – by distinguishing between education and entertainment films with legislation such as the 1934 Hays Production Code. Such efforts were only partially successful. While the Code ensured that the two types of films would be shown in very different venues, it did little or nothing to halt 'the appearance of consistent, cross-generic techniques for visualizing contagion … [in] both scientific and popular culture' (14). By combining careful readings of early public health films with equally careful accounts of film history, Ostherr provides a rich historical context for her subsequent discussion of contagion and globalisation...

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