Roger Spottiswoode | And the Band Played On / 1993

shouting without being heard

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arnold Schulman (screenplay, based on And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts), Roger Spottiswoode (director) And the Band Played On / 1993

The spectacular extravaganza that Roger Spottiswoode’s And the Band Played On appears to represent with its all-star cast of Matthew Modine, Ian McKellan, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, B. D. Wong, Phil Collins, Steve Martin, Richard Gere, Anjelica Huston, Richard Masur, Jeffrey Nordling, and numerous others belies the fact that they play a group of individuals who, with the exception of Alda’s rather despicable character Dr. Robert Gallo—who still today is recognized somewhat unfairly as one the major discoverers of HIV as the infectious agent responsible for AIDS—were unknown and unheard by US government agencies and the media, along with other spokespeople of the LGBTQ community in the early years of the AIDS infection when they should have been the ones most listened to and followed. It is almost an irony that director Spottiswoode found so many celebrities to perform the true unsung heroes who fought during the Ronald Reagan years to whom few listened.

       Not so very differently from our own current struggles with the COVID pandemic, these scientists, social organizers, and politicos were ignored, called names, and labeled as hysterics at a time when the nation was turning its back on thousands if not millions of individuals worldwide who might have lived longer but died ignominious deaths.

      Accordingly, we can immediately admit that And the Band Played On is a work with a strong message to convey, and is consequently not as objective as some might have wished—although given the absurdity of the US leaders’ ignorance, I might have wished the film was even more outspoken in its views.

       As it was, even in making this movie screenplay writer Arnold Schulman, the director, his film associates, and his cast encountered almost as much red tape and denial as the original figures described in Randy Shilts documentary book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic upon which the film was based.

       The film begins with epidemiologist Dr. Don Francis (Modine) and an associate arriving in an African medical outpost only to discover that nearly all the villagers are already dead of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. Only one woman is still alive, who after grabbing Francis’ arm in desperation, falls dead. They have nothing to do in this place but to burn the bodies, unable to even explain to a surviving young boy what has happened to his friends and family. It is a horrific vision which haunts the character and the movie throughout, a foretelling of events that will suddenly occur in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, in eventually in nearly all major American cities, particularly and inexplicably among young sexually active gay men.

        I lived through the time, afraid like every other gay man that any of my years of sexual activities might suddenly render me as simply another statistic; and since then, I have watched nearly every LGBTQ-oriented film and television broadcast devoted to AIDS. So I must admit I came to this film with a weak stomach and several gallons of tears ready to be released at every momentary frustration these AID researchers and committed social organizers might face. And there were most certainly enough that by film’s end I felt drained. You must excuse me, accordingly, if I don’t bother to recount them all in detail once again. The discomfort that one feels while watching this film is intentional, a reward for having the conscience and empathy to relive history and to feel enraged by past events.

     The small group of scientists at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were already understaffed and working on a miniscule budget which as doctors Mary Guinan (Glenne Headly), James Curran (Saul Rubinek), and Francis along with CDC investigators Harold Jaffe (Charles Martin Smith) realized did not even allow them an updated electron microscope let alone the sophisticated medical devices they needed to begin to properly research, identify, and explain the new disease. And even worse, under the new Reagan presidency, the CDC was highly under-budgeted facing disease that had stricken a homosexual community that the Regan administration at best did not want to talk about let alone support and encourage. For many religious leaders of the day the disease was the curse of God, a deservéd punishment for their behavior. And the more the CDC administrators might push for funding, the less they were likely to be able to obtain.

     Even worse, once they have begun to suspect that the new disease is viral and spread through sexual fluids and blood, Francis cannot get the CDC admit to the gay community what they have learned. Despite the support of individuals in San Francisco such as the congressional aid, gay rights and AIDS activist Bill Kraus (McKellen) and the highly respected local physician and epidemiologist Dr. Selma Dritz (Tomlin), Francis cannot, with CDC backing, get the gay community to close down their extremely active bath scene. The corrupt owners of the baths, interested only in bringing in their gay clientele to egg the gay community on, as community spokesmen such as the AIDS poster boy Bobbi Campbell (Donal Logue) speaks out against the baths’ closure since to him and others it represents a sexual right for which the gays have fought. Many the initial discoveries of the CDC seem another rouse to take away hard-won rights and blame the disease on the gays.     

      It doesn’t help that Francis is apparently not gay, and has no links with that community other than his new-made friends Kraus and Dritz (not even knowing Kraus in reality). And that becomes a problem for the film as well. Can a gay viewer feel the full frustrations and sympathies for a cause so near to the core of one’s being shared by someone who is basically an outsider? Since the straight world of government and media do not seem to care, how are we to imagine a lone scientist as being the beacon of gay men who are dying from AIDS? Unfortunately, in a world of “them” and “us,” Francis is presented and at times represents himself as one of “them,” and the movie doesn’t have time to explore that important aspect of human folly in depth. When the gays vote down the resolution to close the gay baths, Francis turns to his friend, the presumably lesbian Dritz with utter confusion, she rather lamely explaining, “They’re only human, and they’re scared.” It doesn’t fully answer for his or our frustrations, particularly for those of us, as gay men, who weren’t dependent on the baths and open sex in bookstores or meetups in gay bars for our sexual and social lives. But, in all honesty, in those days I still snuck out occasionally for a gay backroom bookstore hookup, and in so doing endangered my life and that of my companion. I was lucky.

      Kraus has a young lover, Kico Govantes (B. D. Wong) who is devoted to Kraus, but also hurt and lonely that the man has turned his full life over to his activist causes, leaving little time for their own private lives. He leaves Kraus in the midst of the crisis, and sometime after the man who felt no fear of the bath house and bar sexual encounters notices a spot at the base of his leg which might be Kaposi’s sarcoma, and soon after is diagnosed with AIDS, is eventually hospitalized, and dies. Although Kico returns to him at the first sign of his illness, the film hints that it is perhaps the lover who has explored sex with others to salve his sexual loneliness and brought home the disease. But once more, the movie itself is so busy with other concerns that it has no time to truly explore this possibility and its ramifications. Which is also perhaps for the better. The worst thing such a film might do is begin to blame individuals for a national catastrophe.

     It does get close to that, however, when the CDC team finally get hold of the victim they describe as Patient Zero, Gaëtan Dugas (Nordling), a Canadian flight attendant sought out by Dr. William Darrow (Richard Masur) because of his thousands of sexual encounters and ability to recall a large number of their names. By linking his sexual encounters he’s named to other AIDS patients, and their further sexual meetings with people who became sick or died, Darrow was able to prove that AIDS was in fact passed on through sexual contact. 

       The problem is that having discovered this through Dugas and describing him as Patient Zero, the lie was spread for decades that it was Dugas himself who first brought AIDS into North America or that he himself was responsible for the spread of the disease. Fortunately, Spottiswoode and Schulman don’t actually argue that, but neither does the film dispel the idea. In fact, the vast majority of men who were contacted for research admitted to hundreds and thousands of sexual partners within a single year; but unlike Dugas who willingly worked with the CDC and was able to remember names, the others resisted or didn’t even know the names of their numerous sexual partners. Nor was Dugas the first of AIDS cases. And by the time the sexual link had been established researchers had also come to realize that a great many heterosexual women were also coming down with the disease as were, even more tellingly, hemophilic patients and people who had had blood transfusions in surgery. John Greyson’s film Zero Patience (also 1993) is centered upon that travesty.   

      But even with that evidence, the gay community was, once more understandably, afraid of being denied their right to give blood or of being identified automatically as carriers. Until very recently as a gay man I was unable to give blood, something I did quite often as a community service when I was younger. Moreover, the blood industry wasn’t about to put their money into testing all blood samples, even if had they found a reliable method of testing. In this case it took the discovery of AIDS occurring in a wealthy San Francisco couple whose wife had acquired the disease from a blood transfusion, information her doctors had kept from her, to begin to change things by threatening them to sue.

      A wealthy choreographer (played by Gere, obviously representing the hundreds of famed actors and dancers who contracted HIV and died of AIDS, in particular Michael Bennett), after discovering he has AIDS, offers a large check to be spent for the cause.   

       With all these positives, however, there was still one endlessly large problem. The disease cell itself had yet to be identified; and when a French virologists from the Pasteur Institute in Paris Luc Montagnier, Jean-Claude Chermann and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi were finally able to separate out and find the infectious agent, an American biomedical researcher, argued that he believed the agent to be related to the HTLV cell he had discovered in his research on Leukemia, and when the French announced their discovery threatened to sue for the patent which would have further slowed-down the process of identifying the disease for at least another six years.    

        Although the film shows him personally making a pact with the Pasteur scientists, the agreement that he would share equal credit was arranged through Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac; but even then Gallo lied, claiming he had discovered the cell which closely matched those the French had sent him as samples. The Nobel Prize eventually went to the Pasteur team. And the ignominy of seeking personal gain went once more to the American establishment.*     

       And the Band Played On ends, accordingly, in the middle of things, with Francis himself becoming so dispirited that he demands reassignment from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. And there in 1993, the real Francis joined Genentech, Inc. in searching for a HIV vaccine. When their vaccine failed its clinical trials, he left VaxGen and co-founded Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases for which he still serves as Executive Director.  

    The movie closes with a great number of unattached strings hanging from its narrative seams, attempting to wrap them up in the final strains Elton Johns’ “The Last Song” in a montage to those who died of AIDS or those whose lives were lost through the failures of HIV or AIDS education and research, including Rock Hudson, Anthony Perkins, Rudolf Nureyev, Arthur Ashe, Michael Bennett, Liberace, Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth Glaser, Larry Kramer, Magic Johnson, Halston, Willi Smith, Perry Ellis, Peter Allen, Brad Davis, Keith Haring, Stewart McKinney, Denholm Elliott, Amanda Blake, Robert Reed, Michel Foucault, Tom Waddell, all of which seems to make this film even more diffuse than it previously was. What do these many dozens of victims have to do with the film’s actual narrative, about the thousands of those who died of AIDS? Well, everything of course, but these represent only a sampling of celebrities.

      You need only read Betsy Sharkey’s 1993 essay in The New York Times to realize that, after three directors, we were lucky to actually have been able to see this movie in any form without strings attached. As she summarizes early on, later her essay going into the painful details:

 

“The project has had three directors and provoked a furious debate not so much about AIDS but about the nature of docudrama, how truth is determined and whose right it is to decide just what truth is. The issue often comes up in connection with docudrama, but it has been argued most fervently when recent historical events have been dramatized, as with the films Mississippi Burning and Oliver Stone's J.F.K. The literal truth (whether two people ever actually met or had a particular conversation, for instance) is one consideration; a broader truth (what a particular group of people were like at a particular place and time, perhaps) is another.

      Like Randy Shilts's book of the same title and on which it is based, the movie And the Band Played On attempts to expose the deadly role that inaction and infighting among Government officials, blood banks, the scientific community and segments of the gay community played in the early spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The director, Roger Spottiswoode, believed that the film would be as much a social statement as a dramatic work. It was he who wanted the controversial images to remain.** Mr. Shilts thought they should go, and at least one gay-rights advocate threatened to mobilize protests if the scenes weren't pulled.

       The screenwriter Arnold Schulman, who wrote 20 drafts of the script, is brutal in his assessment of the production's troubles. ‘I lived through every issue we dealt with in the movie, egos, greed, politics,’ he says. ‘It was a nightmare.’"

 

        But of even greater significance is the fact that in their search for a larger truth, Schulman  and Spottiswoode often falsified what really happened. For example, in reality, Dr. Francis never met Bill Kraus, let alone talked with him while Kraus spoke gibberish at his death bed. The real Francis observes: "There were many things that happen in the script that indeed did not happen, so I am talking to people I never really talked to. What Arnold [Schulman] did was to accordion this stuff so the truth is there, but it is not in fact what happened."

       No one, of course, could possibly put the millions of pieces of the truth of such horrible failures and laudable attempts together in a two and a half-hour work for general audiences of television. The disaster of AIDS came like a plague upon us, and so many turned away from what was happening or refused to accept the truth if its existence that millions worldwide were made to suffer before those who cared could began to have effect and change the picture. This film, if it does nothing else profoundly reminds us, however, that such a national failure to act in meaningful ways was not inevitable, but a willed decision of those in power.     

 

 *Gallo was only typical of many larger than human egos at the time. I remember an evening when we were invited to dinner at the home of actor Harry Hamlin and his wife at the time Laura Johnson in 1988 or 1989. They had also invited Jonas Salk, the man who created, of course, the Polio Vaccine of which my generation were the first to benefit (I received the shot at age 8). He told us that he was also working on the discovery of a cure for HIV, and believed that only he could accomplish this impossible task. Obviously he made no such discovery before his death in 1995.

 

**These included cuts from the real gay Halloween parade of drag queens, a deletion of much of a scene that took place in a gay bath house, and a bookstore owner’s explanation of what amyl nitrite or poppers are.

 

Los Angeles, April 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Kaige Chen | 霸王別姬 Ba wang bie ji (Farewell My Concubine) / 1993

why does the concubine have to die?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bik-Wa Lei and Lu Wei (screenplay, based on the novel by Lillian Lee), Kaige Chen (director) 霸王別姬

Ba wang bie ji (Farewell My Concubine) / 1993

 

Although Kaige Chen’s 1993 film, Farewell My Concubine won the Cannes Festival’s Palme d’Or (tying with Jane Campion’s The Piano), and received generally favorable press in the US, some film commentators, even today, dismiss the work as overlong, psychologically vague, and as not having a story that can match the epic structure of the whole.

      To me this seems to be a kind of blindness that arises out of a miscomprehension of Chinese cultural values and story-telling procedures. A film historian such as David Thomson, for example, may be literally correct in saying that “the characters are not truly revealed,” but that presupposes that the characters of this work have fully developed psychological beings, while the writers have gone out of their way to indicate that the students of the Beijing Opera had all psychological identity driven from them in their childhood and youth. The whole method of these opera performances, moreover, is about type and form rather than individuation and psychologically motivated action. As master Yuan (You Ge) makes it clear after seeing a performance starring the two central figures of this work—Cheny Dieyi, nicknamed Douzi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou, nicknamed Shitou (Fengyi Zhang)—the proper way to perform the General’s role as he leaves his concubine, is to take seven steps away, not three as Duan Xiaolou has done. It is a work of tradition, in which there is no room for experiment.

     The entire film, in fact, is a statement about the loss of identity, both gender and cultural. The individual is driven out of the unfortunate children studying with Master Guan (Qi Lü) with insistent violence in the form of beatings, whippings, and forms of torture more severe even than those Charles Dickens might have cooked up. When Douzi’s prostitute mother first attempts to get her son into the opera school, she is immediately turned down when it is discovered that Douzi has an extra digit on one of his hands. Unable to keep the child in the brothel, she has no choice but to take up and cleaver and cut off one the child’s offending finger. It is the first of several acts that seems to reify the major platitude of the culture: “You can’t fight fate.”

     Once Douzi has been permitted to join the company, he is beaten endlessly, primarily because he refuses to define himself as a girl—the operatic role his superiors have determined is best for this feminine-looking boy. The child stubbornly and emphatically refuses to say, “By nature I am a girl,” but ultimately has no choice as the tortures escalate, making him fear even for his life. He is forced to literally become a woman in order to survive, required to change his gender. After his first successful performance of the role, he is taken away to be raped.

     It is no surprise, accordingly, that as he grows into adulthood, his relationship with Shitou is not only that of concubine to the other's General but is that of a tortured lover to his/her best friend, who both have been advised to “Stick together until you die.”

    Parallel to these personal dilemmas is the broader cultural picture, in which identity is determined time and again by the political scene. First, it is the war with Japan that requires any citizen of China to shun anything Japanese, disallowing Douzi and Shitou to even perform for the enemy. When Shitou is arrested by the Japanese, Douzi has no choice, so he feels, but to attempt to save him by performing at the Japanese general’s home. He/she saves Shitou, but his friend is outraged that he has given into the Japanese demands; and throughout the rest of his life, as the country's perpetual revolutions alter the political scene, Douzi will continually be branded a traitor.

     So too does Shitou betray him by marrying, almost on a whim, a local prostitute, and creating a wedge between their performative and personal lives. Shitou may be able to separate the two, but as a man living in China performing as a woman and daily living as a homosexual, the beautiful Douzi cannot readily make that separation. He has, after all, been reconstructed by the culture long before the scenes in the film when Madame Mao’s Cultural Revolution attempts to do the same to every Chinese citizen.

    Li Gong’s performance of that prostitute, Juxian—who, as one of the company members whispers, is a true “dragon lady”—is one of the great joys of this film, as she, little by little, binds her husband to her, eventually even forcing him to give up his career as an opera performer. Yet Douzi, in most respects, is her equal, a haughty and regal manipulator, a nasty and campy wit whose very glance (as he remains throughout much of the film in costume, with eyes radically made up demonstrate the concubines’ exaggerated sense of survival and power) withers those around him/her. Inevitably, the two, battling over Shitou, are drawn together as outside political forces overwhelm even the former opera member, and threaten to make Shitou also into another being. At one point, as we watch Douzi voyeuristically peering in their home as the couple make love, we come to understand just how he is wound up in the couple’s life, fascinated as he is by this powerful woman who has stolen his friend.

     For his part, Shitou continues to care for and help his former partner, going so far as to spend hours with Douzi to help in his horrific attempts to overcome opium addiction. But as the Cultural Revolution threatens its severe punishments, Shitou again betrays, this time, both of his lovers, Juxian and Douzi, by revealing her past as a prostitute and Douzi’s involvement with the Japanese. The betrayal is truly unforgiveable, and both the “females” are quite explicably devastated by his acts. Although we do not know specifically how this has affected them, we can gather its force by the final scenes of Chen Kaige’s masterpiece.

    The film begins and ends with a final performance of Farewell My Concubine, in which, in an act of both revenge and redemption, Douzi uses a real sword to kill his character at the end of the opera, thus ending his own bondage to a world that has stolen the being that he might have become, while answering his life-long question “Why does the concubine have to die?”

     

Los Angeles, June 9. 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2011).