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.
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.
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.
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).
