44 Years Ago, a Legendary Writer Made a Disturbingly Prophetic Sci-Fi Movie That Still Resonates Tod

[Judi Lynn]

44 Years Ago, a Legendary Writer Made a Disturbingly Prophetic Sci-Fi Movie That Still Resonates Today

Story by Carlos Aguilar •
44m

Inside a crowded subway car, a man coughs loudly just before collapsing to the shock of his fellow passengers. Over the course of the next few months, many more people will die from a mysterious respiratory disease that seems to have emerged without warning.

That opening alone could trigger memories from the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s the incisive social commentary that makes the 1979 film The Year of the Plague (El año de la peste) truly pertinent to our current reality. It plays like a cinematic prophecy.

Mexican master Felipe Cazals directed the ambitious ensemble piece from a screenplay co-written by Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez (one of Latin America’s most lauded scribes), Juan Arturo Brennan, and José Agustín. Their clinical chronicle liberally transposes Daniel Defoe’s 18th-century novel A Journal of the Plague Year to the context of a modern developing nation.

As more casualties of this unknown infection land in the morgue, Dr. Pedro Sierra Genovés (Alejandro Parodi), a practitioner at an upscale hospital, develops a theory. He suspects that the illness, which is rapidly spreading across the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city, is the same that brutally decimated the world’s population over centuries: the merciless bubonic plague.

“Don’t tell me that the gringos invaded us?” Sierra Genovés’ wife asks when he suggests she and their daughters take precautions by boiling water and milk before drinking it. Her comment reflects the shadow of American interventionism in Latin America at the time, which had a hand in the violent incidents against Mexican students only a few years prior.

More:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/44-years-ago-a-legendary-writer-made-a-disturbingly-prophetic-sci-fi-movie-that-still-resonates-today/ar-AA1g8mvi

[3Hotdogs]

1. The thing of it, bubonic plague is cured with antibiotics. Also easily diagnosed. Ya get it and

you get black blood clots on parts of your body. (Hence, the phrase, "Aww, let me kiss the boo-boo" that we use when little kids and Trump get hurt.



Side recollection --- 2017 trip to Badlands National Park in S. Dakota. Off one of the roads is a Prairie Dog village with the little critters popping up and down. There was a sign saying to stay on the road because bubonic plague has been found among the animals. Needless to say, several people were wandering among the prairie dog mounds. Gotta get that picture.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Thanks for the information on the bubonic plague. Had no idea!

Concerning the trip to South Dakota, in a sane world, one would be stunned to hear people actually got out of their cars and were stumbling around tempting fate, but our experience since George W Bush was selected seems to have taught us nothing should surprise us by now!



It IS so depressing to hear, though! Wow.

[3Hotdogs]

3. Well, they gotta get the cute video to post on Facebook.