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Steven Waddington as Edward and Andrew Tiernan As Gaveston in Derek Jarman’s Edward II.
Steven Waddington as Edward and Andrew Tiernan As Gaveston in Derek Jarman’s Edward II. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Steven Waddington as Edward and Andrew Tiernan As Gaveston in Derek Jarman’s Edward II. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

From Philadelphia to 120 BPM: the changing face of Aids in film

This article is more than 5 years old
Rampant homophobia in the 80s meant that film-makers were reluctant to vent their anger at indifference to the HIV/Aids crisis. Not any more. But should directors of the past have been braver?

From the first films made about the crisis in the mid-80s to recent historical dramas charting the epidemic, cinema has given us many noble dramas about Aids, the vast majority of which focus on gay men. Precious (2009) is a notable exception. But too many lack the vital ingredient that makes Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM a modern classic: anger.

The first feature film to depict Aids was Buddies (1985), a low-budget chamber piece by Arthur J Bressan Jr, a former gay porn film-maker, who died of an Aids-related illness in 1987. The film, about a dying man and his “buddy” – someone who provides companionship and care to people with HIV and Aids – sensitively merges the political and the personal. It boasts an energy missing from many Aids films in the 80s, few of which showed any fury at the lack of action by Ronald Reagan’s administration. The film explicitly criticises the hesitation in providing medical research funding, ending with a one-man protest outside the White House.

Most 80s US films about Aids, however, were cautious about criticising government inaction. Reagan was a popular president, and demand for anti-Reagan propaganda was low. By the time the president delivered his first speech on the subject, more than 25,000 people had died from Aids-related illnesses in the US alone. The lack of action was poorly reported in the mainstream press.

Rampant homophobia, however, and the feeling that people with Aids deserved their fate, contributed to the lack of representation in film. It was still widely seen as the “gay plague”, and therefore unworthy of protest. In 1986 the New York Times published an opinion piece by conservative commentator William F Buckley Jr, which included the declaration: “Everyone detected with Aids should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimisation of other homosexuals.”

While Hollywood was reluctant to confront the crisis directly, the lack of knowledge about the HIV virus suddenly made sex seem terrifying, and a string of erotic thrillers enjoyed huge popularity in the late 80s. In Fatal Attraction (1987), Dan (Michael Douglas) cheats on his wife with a woman (Glenn Close) who refuses to be cast aside (“I will not be ignored!”), ruining his life and intruding on the his formerly idyllic family life – seen by some as a metaphor for the HIV virus. With mainstream US cinema keeping rage against government inaction to itself, film-makers, particularly in Europe, were less well behaved. Rosa von Praunheim took a caustic look at the Aids crisis in A Virus Knows No Morals (1985), a provocative satire that embraced camp to criticise the misinformation circulating around HIV and Aids. Humour is a weapon, and Praunheim wields it without pity. As well as raging against callous homophobes – a doctor advises that “the best defence is shame” – it also mocks men who ignore safe sex advice, with a raucous group of drag queens chanting: “You have your fate in your hands,” to the audience.

The British artist and film-maker Derek Jarman was fiercely critical of the Thatcher government’s homophobia in his 80s films. Jarman was a member of the protest group OutRage!, whose activists appeared in Jarman’s splendid interpretation of Edward II (1991), rallying against the persecution of gay men, but it wasn’t until his final film that Aids, and Jarman’s own diagnosis, took centre stage. Blue (1993), made when Jarman had been rendered partly blind by Aids complications, is a 79-minute-long shot of a blue background, accompanied by a score and Jarman’s own musings about the effects of the syndrome. Confronted by his impending death, Jarman mocks what he saw as useless slogans, such as “Living with Aids”, blurted out by charities and fellow activists. It is Jarman’s masterpiece, infused with a muted and sorrowful anger.

Jaw dropping … Zero Patience. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

On a bawdier note, John Greyson’s jaw-dropping Zero Patience (1993) turned the story of Patient Zero, the Canadian flight attendant falsely believed to have brought Aids to North America, into a musical with outrageous song-and-dance numbers, most memorably the jolly Butthole Duet, belted out by two singing anuses.

If US mainstream cinema was cautious, documentary makers were braver. The moving Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), follows five people who succumbed to Aids-related illnesses, ending with the gigantic quilt dedicated to all Aids victims being displayed in Washington DC, a clear political act designed to shame. Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993) chronicles the final days of a couple dying from Aids complications. A sudden cut to the dead body of one of the two men, followed by medics taking away his emaciated body, is a harrowing punch-to-the-face moment that powerfully conveyed the horror of Aids.

In the early 90s, New Queer Cinema, a US independent film movement which rejected heteronormative values and put gay people behind and in front of the camera, burst on to the scene. Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991) in the style of a B-movie, includes a story of a man rejected by society when he contracts a mysterious grotesque illness. The Living End (1992) by Gregg Araki showed two HIV-positive gay men go on a crime spree, with one declaring: “We’ve got nothing to lose. Fuck work. Fuck the system. Fuck everything. We’re totally free; we can do whatever we want to do.” Araki jeered at the notion that an HIV-positive man was by default a victim.

Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. Photograph: Allstar/Tristar Pictures

Philadelphia (1993), meanwhile, the glossy Hollywood production about a gay lawyer with Aids who sues a law firm for unjust dismissal, remains the best-known mainstream film about the syndrome, thanks to Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning performance. Viewed 25 years after its release, its skittishness around its gay characters is disappointing. The film is never particularly interested in Hanks’ character, whose centrepiece moment of self-expression is an excruciatingly intense reaction to an opera aria. Writer and LGBT rights activist Larry Kramer shredded the film, writing, “Tom Hanks does not act in this movie. His makeup does his acting. I haven’t seen so many changes hinged on shades of Max Factor since James Cagney in Man of a Thousand Faces.” But the film’s biggest failing is the lack of anger. There’s fury in the film, but it is directed at the cruel law firm that fires him, not the government that allowed the inaction to continue.

From the late 80s onwards, playing a character with Aids could be a fast-track to award recognition. Few would begrudge Bruce Davison’s Golden Globe win for his performance as a man with Aids who tends to his dying lover in Longtime Companion (1989), featuring one of the most moving deathbed sequences in the history of cinema. Less deserving was cisgender actor Jared Leto’s portrayal as a trans woman with Aids in Dallas Buyers Club (2013), a performance more informed by drag theatrics rather than a depiction of a vulnerable young woman near the end of her life.

Today, when medical funding and treatment has improved significantly, many films look back with regret at a time when government support was at best reluctant, at worst nonexistent. HBO’s 2014 film adaptation of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart is an excellent dramatisation of the fear and powerlessness that was unleashed when Aids started killing young men, and the admirable, ultimately effective attempts to fight back.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Robin Campillo: ‘I spent the 80s thinking I was going to die. Being a director seemed pointless’

  • 120 Beats Per Minute review – fury meets ecstasy in the face of the Aids crisis

  • Giant condoms and buckets of fake blood: the true story of Aids activists Act Up

  • 'The magic of cinema': the club supporting older people with HIV

  • Robin Campillo on Aids drama 120 Beats per Minute: ‘I didn’t make it to lecture anyone’

  • ‘Gay men were dying of Aids at a terrifying rate’: visiting my friend on the HIV ward

  • Baillie Gifford prize goes to Aids chronicle How to Survive a Plague

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