Steve Levitt | Deaf Heaven / 1993

witness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Douglas Shurtleff Cole (screenplay), Steve Levitt (director) Deaf Heaven / 1993

 

Coming almost from the other end from the big blockbuster Hollywood movie about AIDS in 1993, Philadelphia, was the indie, under-budgeted short work, directed by Steve Levitt, Deaf Heaven. And yet how is it possible that the short film seems to me so very much more profound and believable, despite the couple of avowed “miracles” that are described in this film? Perhaps it’s as simple as the fact that, despite its own moments of sentimentalism, Levitt’s short does not force your tears, but permits them to well up in your eyes out of true empathy, and not only for the poor young man, Paul (Charley Lang) who is trying desperately to cope with the impending death from AIDS of his lover Matthew (Kyle Secor), but for a man whose wife and children were killed in Auschwitz almost 50 years earlier.

     In even comparing the Holocaust with AIDS, writer Douglas Shurtleff Cole is in dangerous territory.*  Fortunately, Cole does not attempt to make grand analogies, and approaches the subject only in terms of the two individuals, in this case Paul and an elderly survivor of Auschwitz, Jake (played by memorable Yiddish actor David Opatoshu) who have had to face the death of their still young loved ones by a force that is beyond explanation.

     Like most AIDS dramas, much of the action takes place in the hospital room of the one who is dying. In this case Matthew, suffering from great pain, has been provided intense painkillers which take his mind into delusionary worlds: he is skiing at a lodge with his lover, is about to embark on a long sea cruise. His ability to perceive the world with any normality of perception is minimal.

     That might be fine, even for the lover who finds himself already bereaving a lost companion, if it were not that the hospital has just received word from Matthew’s parents—who in the long period of the diagnosis and gradual illness have never once flown out to see him of even telephoned him except to say the disease he suffers is God’s vengeance—that they would like him to be flown back to Kansas to see out the end of his life. In short, they would take their son away from his true family, his companion of 7 years, to salve their guilty conscience with a few months or even weeks of home care for the son whose sexuality they have never accepted.

     As a young couple Matthew and Paul have not yet made out their wills or drawn up legal papers, and in 1993, long before any possibility of marriage rights, parents and other family members could easily tear apart loving gay couples, even disallowing the partner to attend the funeral or claiming legal rights over shared property. As the head doctor, entirely sympathetic to Paul, attempts to explain, the hospital can do little but ascertain the patient’s level of acuity and determine his wishes—all at a time when Matthew hardly knows where he is, let alone who he is and with whom he would like to remain.

      Troubled, Paul goes for his daily swim at a nearby club, envisioning nightmarish scenes of Matthew’s drowning body and himself suffering the delusions of the mind that often accompany such stress. Sitting in the sauna with the elder Jewish man, Jake, Paul finally lets go, breaking down into sobs.

     Jake pulls him out of the sauna, forces him to drink some water, and sits down with him to have a conversation. When he discovers that a friend of the boy’s is dying, he recounts his own story of how the Nazis had killed his wife and son, but he had kept them alive through a small picture he hid in his boot, speaking with them daily, helping his son to grow up in his imagination as the years passed; and miraculously, he survived when so many thousands of those around him did not. Paul appreciates his help in creating a perspective upon his own situation, and, without the film even saying it, clearly vows to keep Matthew alive, no matter what happens, within his own mind and heart.

      As the friend head nurse, Libby (Anna Maria Horsford) prepares to leave for the day, Paul relays his terror about the next day when the doctors will interview Matthew. She suggests that he pray, but Paul dismisses her request, saying he’s not a believer. Her response is an almost furious protest, attesting to her belief that God doesn’t a care a damn whether you believe in him or not, but if he cares enough about Matthew, he will still ask for His help. She admits that she prays for each of the patients in her ward each morning before she leaves for work.

  

    Paul attempts to break through Matthew’s dementia, eventually falling to sleep on the same small bed where is lover lays dying. The doctors arrive, and send Paul off to a nearby chair, as they attempt to interview Matthew, who is now clearly very much in pain. Nonetheless, he speaks rather coherently in answer to their questions, recognizing that he is ill and “will likely die.” When asked who is family is, he points to Paul whom he describes as “that lug over there in the chair.” And when asked if he might like to go home, he responds that his only home is with Paul.

      As Paul later describes the event to Jake, who makes a special visit to the hospital just to support Paul in his time of sorrow, “a miracle of sorts” has occurred in that room, describing Libby as an angel. Matthew himself has more logically explained events, after his interview, telling Paul that he needs the shots of mind-altering medication just to get through the pain, but promises he will try to “awaken” again before he dies to say goodbye properly to Paul.

      Jake, amazed to hear of the miracle, asks how is friend is, Paul finally admitting that he is not a friend, but a lover, Jakes recognizing what that means, having learned about homosexuality, he claims, from TV. Jake asks if Paul himself has also been stricken by AIDS, the young man relating that without being able to explain it he has remained HIV-negative. And with that information, Jake suddenly describes his role, like one he himself as taken on, as being one of the “Aydes,” given the job of being witness to what has happened, to help explain to future generations how so many beautiful young people suddenly came to die. It is not a joyful role, and some of those who undertook it, later themselves died of the sorrow, and in the case of AIDS epidemic, of the disease itself.

      To be honest, the most compelling witnesses, at least for me, were the early filmmakers, who began creating movies that at the time, in the early 1980s, no one wanted to see, works such as Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs (1985), Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies (1985), John Erman’s An Early Frost (1985), Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), Jerry Tartaglia’s A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M (1988), and Norman René’s Longtime Companion (1989). But of the second wave of these important testimonies to AIDS victims, I’d argue that Levitt’s short film is one of the best.

      

*AIDS is a disease that makes no choice in who it kills. Despite the fact that it has taken the lives globally of approximately 41.6 million individuals to date, it is estimated that 650,000 of those were due to AIDS, a similar number of homosexuals and previously convicted criminals who died in the German death camps where approximately 6 million Jewish people were exterminated (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia). In short to compare the attempted extermination by human beings of those of a particular religious belief or heritage with a basically indiscriminate disease that, due to its spread through sexual contact, struck down a large number of homosexual men is not an appropriate, the one involving only human hate, the other primarily the cause of a disease that has no will but to survive as a virus.

 

Los Angeles, April 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).