“Stop touching your face!”: changes in the perception of viewers of the film Contagion with the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the search for the Contagion, a fictional feature film from 2011 whose plot addresses the global spread of a new respiratory transmitted virus, which causes a disease with a high mortality rate. In this paper, we used a quali-quantitative methodology to analyze 4,801 comments about the movie posted on a social network about cinema. We compared the assessments before and after January 2020, when the new coronavirus was considered by World Health Organization a public health emergency of international concern. The analysis of the most frequent words and terms and the proximity between them revealed how the pandemic changed the perception of the viewers, who started to evaluate the film more for its verisimilitude than for its cinematic aspects. We also sought in the movie itself scenes and film elements that could have mobilized the public’s attention to certain aspects revealed in the comments, such as forms of transmission, hygiene measures, social distancing and promotion of medication without proven efficacy. In this sense, the results also show the potential of cinema for science communication when addressing scientific concepts, themes, processes, and controversies.

Keywords
Contagion; COVID-19; coronavirus; pandemic