Months after the Oscars, if I
haven’t seen the top films already, I may deign to put them on my Netflix queue
and watch them at my leisure. The
Academy has a tendency to favor artsy-pretentious films (“The Artist”, “The
English Patient”, “Life of Pi”), politically charged films which advance a Blue
State agenda, and of course the old fall-back, any films highly favorable to
the GLBS community or its agenda.
Is there good acting here? Should we be impressed that Matthew
McConaughey and Jared Jeto dropped upteen pounds for these roles? Should Leto’s transformation into
uber-drag-queen Rayon go unnoticed or ignored?
All valid questions, and perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss this film out of
hand simply because we’re uncomfortable with the subject matter: AIDS. On the other hand, “just because you tolerate
something doesn’t mean you have to like it.”
So when we strip away the “drama”, what are we dealing with here?
Ron Woodruff (McConaughey)
discovers he has AIDS – this was in 1985, when the disease first started
becoming known. According to the film,
he caught it from unprotected sex with a female heroin user, possibly a
prostitute. The person who gave it to
him is never identified (possibly he never found out), and neither his straight
friend who shared his female lovers, nor those lovers, are portrayed as
contracting the disease themselves. In
any case he was careless about his sexual partners and very promiscuous – plus
he used drugs. You know, the biblical
“Prodigal Son” lifestyle.
Ok, so what does he do now? The first major drug was AZT, but due to FDA
regulations it had to be “tested” first, which meant double blinds and placebos
to the control group. Woodruff initially
procures AZT from a hospital worker until the hospital tightens things up. Then he goes to Mexico and finds a doctor,
Vass (Griffin Dunn) who knows that AZT – at least in the existing dosages – is
garbage and has better results with a cocktail featuring vitamin supplements
(totally legal in the US), an “unapproved” drug, DDC, and a protein which the
FDA knows is safe. In other words, leave
it to a rogue doctor in Mexico to come up with a better treatment than the
fancy rich folks in the US.
In addition to setting up the
framework of a smuggling operation, Woodruff-as-Walter-White finds his “Jesse
Pinkman” – the marketing genius – in Rayon (Jared Leto), a transvestite drag
queen. They form the Dallas Buyer’s
Club, a $400/month “club” which distributes “free” AIDS pharmaceuticals out of
a motel room. He also befriends Dr. Eve
(Jennifer Affleck) who can see for herself that the clinical trials of AZT are
obviously flawed.
In addition to Mexican sources,
Woodruff travels to Europe and Japan to find alternative sources – whatever he
can find, however he can do it. This
itself takes some ingenuity, persistence, and diligence.
Naturally, the FDA wasn’t asleep
at the switch. After some cat-and-mouse
business, eventually the FDA succeeds at shutting down Woodruff’s operation,
and an appeal to the US District Court in California eventually fails when a
sympathetic judge, able to see the forest for the trees, nonetheless has to
acknowledge that he has no authority to grant the relief requested: victory for the FDA. Bravo, Mr. Peck, you’ve shut down the
containment field. (Yes, I know,
different agency.)
Interestingly enough, the FDA
doesn’t come off as homophobic here.
Rather, it’s an entrenched bureaucracy trying to defend its turf and its
“way of doing business”, plus it has a vested interest in remaining cozy with
the pharmaceutical industry. Even
without any homophobic bias, however, the FDA is still hidebound, inflexible,
and utterly devoid of imagination and compassion. This is the government, remember, protecting
us from snake oil salesmen, patent medicines, and other harmful quackeries from
the early twentieth century - just doing its job, right? The private sector would penetrate us six
ways to Sunday were it not for good old Uncle Sam, right? If nothing else, this movie should get the
liberals who love the GLBS community rethinking their blind faith in the
infallible government and its superiority over the wild, untamed private sector
– you know, that unscrupulous doctor down in Mexico doing who-knows-what with
the lives of AIDS victims.
What about Woodruff’s
motives? Since he himself had full-blown
AIDS, clearly he had a personal interest in establishing a working “cocktail”
of treatment, whether the FDA approved of it or not. Sometimes he comes off as money-motivated,
which perhaps he was; though if he was truly out to fleece his fellow AIDS
victims, somehow I doubt this film would have seen the light of day. Most likely he was simply trying to cure
himself and others and possibly turn the operation into a self-sustaining enterprise,
and maybe even reform the FDA’s regulatory procedures in the process (scant
luck with that, though). Ultimately he
died of AIDS in 1992, seven years after an initial prognosis of 30 days to live
(in 1985).
However, there’s another angle I
wasn’t keen on. My “gaydar” suggested
that Woodruff, although portrayed as a heterosexual throughout the film, was
probably bisexual, if not gay. I’m led
to understand that in fact he was. But
how sympathetic to him would we be, as straights watching the film, if they
were honest about his lifestyle?
Outside the US, off in Africa where married men consort with prostitutes
as a matter of course, AIDS hits the straight community pretty hard. But here in the US, aside from outliers like
Magic Johnson, the AIDS problem is almost entirely that of gays & heroin
addicts. If the film was honest about
Woodruff, chances are most straights would write this whole thing off as, “what
do we care if gays and junkies die of AIDS?”
Even without joining the Westboro Baptist Church and barking and braying
that “God Hates Fags”, our tolerance hardly stretches far enough to warrant
throwing our time, money, and efforts at an issue which primarily concerns a
disfavored minority of our society.
Again, the GLBS community has a
right to ask for tolerance, forbearance, and perhaps a little compassion. But beyond that, it can’t expect the rest of
society to shoulder the cross and jump into the fray. We’ll remain neutral, we won’t put up
obstacles, we won’t fight you. But it’s
up to us to determine exactly how much help we feel comfortable giving. That, I maintain, is not homophobic.
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