It opens on Day 2, with a cough in the dark. This week on Required Viewing, we put Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (2011) under the microscope — the cold, procedural pandemic thriller that spent a decade as a well-made what-if, then climbed back up the rental charts in the spring of 2020 as the whole world's homework.

We get into Soderbergh's refusal to dramatize (he dispatches one of his Oscar winners inside the first ten minutes), Scott Z. Burns' script that treats a virus as a logistics problem, and a camera that teaches you to fear a door handle before anyone explains the science. We dig into what the film called correctly — the spillover, the contact tracing, the race for a vaccine — and what it badly underestimated: us. Jude Law's blogger selling a fake cure looked like a subplot in 2011; it reads like the main event now. Science versus rumor, the system versus the people it serves, and a film that only got more required the longer we waited — from every angle.

Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, wash their hands and trace it back to Day 1.

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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.

New episodes weekly.

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