The End of the World with Michael and Stu
The Apocalypse is Everywhere. The End of the World with Michael and Stu is a (hopefully) insightful and (hopefully) humorous exploration of the rise of apocalyptic news, apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic culture. Each week, we’ll be looking at a work of art, a piece of media, or an historical event related to the (hopefully not) impending End of the World.
The End of the World with Michael and Stu
Episode 35: Monkey See Monkey Doom
This week we are covering the 1995 Wolfgang Petersen blockbuster Outbreak. Having lived through a pandemic of our own, can we glean new wisdom by revisiting this terrifying tale of an even-deadlier-than-Ebola virus set loose on a small Northern California town? Perhaps not, but it is still fun to examine the politics of this essentially liberal post-Cold War picture, where the real enemy is the US military itself and compare them to the politics of today, where scientists and agents of the federal government are venerated by liberals. We also go into detail about Stu's "near miss" with the New York City Ebola scare of 2014, and discuss whether this film is not, in fact, to blame for Michael's lifelong hypochondria.
We open the episode talking about the devastating effects of the recent hurricane Helene, following up on an earlier conversation we had about the utter lack of seriousness with which climate change and its attendant disasters is treated in contemporary political discourse.
This episode contains spoilers for Outbreak.
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