Last week, I stayed up late and watched Brandon Cronenberg’s (yes, son of David Cronenberg) debut feature Antiviral. What I expected from the trailer and the IMDB description of the film was a sci-fi horror treatise on the cult of celebrity and the fetishization of illness (Cronenberg’s apparent inspiration for the feature came when he saw a talk show interview with a celeb who said she had a contagious cold, at which the audience hooted and cheered). To be sure, Antiviral delivers on this promise, and effectively communicates the eeriness of our culture’s obsessions and the borders of grossness that our TMZ-surfing, reality show-watching media consumption teeters on. But what I found most fascinating about the film was a side feature that touched on the politics of piracy. Antiviral sets up various aspects of the movie’s diegesis to revolve around IP, and at first it seemed to me to be doing something revolutionary. And then its treatment of its own innovation fell completely flat, and I’ve been thinking about my own disappointment ever since.

If you didn’t just view the linked trailer, let me blitz through the premise in a couple of sentences: in Antiviral, when a celebrity gets sick with something, from measles to malaria, they call up any number of companies to come and buy a blood sample off of them. Treated very much like a celebrity lending their name to a fragrance, the company then sells consumers the experience of having the same illness as their beloved star. So if your favorite actor contracted herpes, you can pay someone at a clinic to be infected by the same strain of herpes, distilled from the actor’s blood. Here’s where it gets interesting: before selling the disease, the clinic uses a pointlessly creepy machine to render the strain non-contagious. This is effectively copyright protection for illness, to make sure that only the licensed clinic can infect people with the illnesses they sell. When this concept was introduced to Antiviral, my head swam with excitement. How brilliant, how cool, to frame disease in terms of preciousness and IP—just one of the implications was that in the reality of the movie, the IP movement had effectively made possible what medical science has failed to do since time immemorial: halt the spread of sickness.

The main character of the film is a salesman who works for one of these star sickness clinics who infects himself with the illnesses while at work, takes them home in his body, extracts his own blood and then uses his own pointlessly creepy machine to break the DRM (disease rights management) blocks on the viruses so he can pirate them. Fantastic!

Then the whole thing disappointed me when this character was revealed to be after just one thing: money. Yes, the pirate in Antiviral is framed as the ultimately unscrupulous profiteering thief, willing to sink so low as to infect himself with dangerous sicknesses and turn them into contagions just to turn a buck for himself. Even more disappointing: our pirate in the film is part of a sick and twisted network of other profiteers who take the grossness factor even further, using celebrity DNA samples to grow “cell steaks”—literally cloned tissue they sell as meat at specialty butcher shops. These people are portrayed entirely as worshipping at the altar of the almighty dollar, willing to sell each other out, torture, or murder one another if it will get them the celebrity illness samples they need to run their businesses. In Antiviral, piracy is a criminal enterprise run face-to-face with ethics on par with the mob in a Scorcese flick.

There are so many things going on in this movie that simplifies piracy down to base criminality that bugs me. It isn’t that I think piracy is a good thing, just a complicated and nuanced thing. This film attempts to characterize piracy in North America in the present day (Antiviral doesn’t take place in the future, just a parallel reality). What it describes is a highly organized and stratified network of pirates working in different realms of the same kinds of copyright violation who all meet in person on more or less a daily basis and none of whom have any sort of loyalty to one another. Oh, and they all do it just for money: there’s an organized industry, a formal business to their illicit activities. Here’s something closer to the reality of the North American pirate in the 21^st century: loosely affiliated individuals working with little to no profit motive in a flat, almost non-existent organizational structure who never meet face to face or even learn each other’s real names and operate with almost zero external expectations for productivity placed upon them by anyone else. How can the discourse on piracy, stuck now for many years, move forward when absolutely no effort is being made on either side to understand the other?

Also last week Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom returned from hiatus with its season two premiere. In one scene, a major cable news network head is denied access to a SOPA meeting on Capitol Hill. Complaining on the denial of access to the meeting, the president of the network says, “Do you know how much money we lose to piracy every year? $10 billion? $100 billion? Let’s say it’s $10 billion. I want the $10 billion.” This show probably has it about as near reality as we can get: the effects of piracy are, to date, totally untraceable and immeasurable in any kind of reliable fashion, but all the industry knows is it must be losing some money and it must be piracy’s fault. Never mind any evidence to the contrary that suggests as media sharing evolves, so too must media production and economically-based media distribution.

It’s major media outlets like HBO or the Hollywood film industry that shape the public face of the discourse on piracy, and the face they’ve drawn is a circle with two dots and a downward-turning crescent. Their rhetoric is reductive and dismissive when it’s brought forward, and it’s rare to see the issue playing a central role in a media product. Instead, we have throwaway lines or concepts that would completely validate the archaic industry stance on the issue—if they weren’t so poorly written or uninformatively crafted.

I’m not done with this subject (or rant, it seems)—probably more next week when I’ll try to get into IP and academia.