BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Angels in America

  
 
e-n
10:42 / 12.02.04
Due to the fact that I was on-call and had three hours to spare last Saturday I watched (what was quite hyped by the papers) "Angels in America" on channel 4. Only managed to watch the second three hours last night. So did anyone else watch this?

I thought that there'd be some discussion about it here what with it's homosexual-magial-realism-80's-nostalgia content? I thought it was ok. Very odd though. Very funny moments (particularly the talking to angels and hallucination bits) but over all I doubt I'd sit through it again. Any thoughts?
 
 
Aertho
11:46 / 12.02.04
First half "Millenium Approaches" kicked my ass.

The "judgment" card symbology alone was cool. Everybody being pulled so tight they're forced to see the Truth.

Then the second half and I'm expected to "sue God"? What a collosal letdown.
 
 
Jack Fear
15:24 / 12.02.04
I'll repeat here what I wrote as part of a much longer post on my blog:

There were a handful of good lines amidst six hours of grad-school blather, but what galled me about the whole exercise was its epic narcissism: its insistence on conflating the end of one way of life with the End Of The World, and Kushner's own politicization with the Birth Of Politics, full stop. The film's final moments are flesh-creepingly smug as the protagonist addresses the audience, informing us, with desperate self-importance, that "now, the Great Work begins."

Well, no. The Great Work began long before Tony Kushner deigned to give it his imprimatur: it begins anew with each new day since the morning of the world, and will begin afresh long after all we now living are dust. That's the essence of a process: always starting, never ending.


Then there's this interesting piece at THE NEW REPUBLIC (unfortunately, it's a subscribers-only article) that's pretty harsh, but, it seems to me, proceeds from a thesis that is essentially accurate...

Tony Kushner's play was not so much made for television as made to be rescued by television. The rescue consists in turning it into an "event." .... Angels hits the screen with such glamour and noise that Nichols and company almost succeed in burying the play's essential mediocrity in this production's illusion of significance. In The New Yorker, Nancy Franklin actually called these six hours of chic "fearless," as if the film had defied the censors of a police state. Others... have hailed the show as something on television finally "to argue about." But the only thing worth arguing about with regard to Angels in America is why anyone would think Angels in America is worth arguing about.

Angels in America is a second-rate play written by a second-rate playwright who happens to be gay, and because he has written a play about being gay, and about AIDS, no one--and I mean no one--is going to call Angels in America the overwrought, coarse, posturing, formulaic mess that it is. ....

Centering a work of art on the experience of marginality and suffering is like waterproofing your shoes. It repels criticism. You make the work seamless with its subject, so that anyone who criticizes the work seems callous about the subject. (Do you think that The Pianist was tedious and familiar, and that Adrien Brody simply walked through a critic-proof role? Then you hate the Jews and ride with the Cossacks.) And once you join in the praise of a protected work such as Angels in America, you reap the benefit of demonstrating your own virtue by celebrating the play. This confers on you the added halo of not appearing as a snob who presumes to know the difference between artistic success and artistic failure. After all, not everyone can judge the illusions of art, but everyone can project the illusion of goodness.

It's a great review, and savagely funny. No excerpt can do it justice, and I'm leery of pirating the whole thing...
 
 
not nervous
21:30 / 12.02.04
That is hillarious, there's nothing i love more than a savage review of something i don't like. Michael Dwyer in The Irish Times really went to town on Dogville last week, it was the most pleasure i'd gotten out of reading for a long time. I don't think it's online but if anyone would like to read it i scanned it to email to a friend who insists that dancer in the dark is the best film ever made, and i can do the same for you.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:17 / 13.02.04
I saw the first play, Millennium Approaches, eleven times and the second, Perestroika, seven times in Declan Donnellan's and Nick Ormerod's NT production in London in the 1990s. I was a sixth former and had #50 spending money a month, so we usually used to get standing room tickets (that's seven hours standing a day). I've seen, um, three other versions of Millennium since. I haven't seen the TV version yet and will post in more detail when I have (though Meryl Streep? Oh dear).

I just wanted to say - since when is this play about being gay and about AIDS? It's not about religion, politics, the law, the relationship between theory and practice, love, responsibility, Roy Cohn, race, gender?

Oops. Of course not. The dude has gay characters and talks about AIDS. Nothing "universal" there. Christ. All the time in my life I spend having to identify with straight protagonists' lifestyles in discussions of "universal issues" and the New Republic can't hack identifying with queers for six hours?
 
 
diz
13:56 / 13.02.04
Oops. Of course not. The dude has gay characters and talks about AIDS. Nothing "universal" there. Christ. All the time in my life I spend having to identify with straight protagonists' lifestyles in discussions of "universal issues" and the New Republic can't hack identifying with queers for six hours?

i think you're missing the point of the New Republic critique. it's not dismissing its universality because it deals with queer issues. it's arguing that the fact that it revolves so self-consciously around people who are suffering and in an oppressed minority to mask the fact that it's not (in the opinion of the reviewer) a very good play. the key sentence is:

Centering a work of art on the experience of marginality and suffering is like waterproofing your shoes. It repels criticism.

basically, the argument is that the play is not very good, but it provides the illusion of significance by focusing on gay men dying of AIDS, and the audience is happy to buy into it so that it feels like it's partaking in something important.

i can see where they're coming from, though i can't judge properly whether or not they have a point about the play. my inclination right now is to agree with Jack Fear's take on it: that it's ridiculously self-important and equates events in Kushner's life with events of cosmic significance. however, i had never seen Angels in America before the HBO production, and i can't help shaking the feeling that i'm missing out on some of the strengths of the work because the landscape of queerness in America, the political scene, and the issue of HIV/AIDS have changed fairly dramatically since that point, and though it addresses universal themes, it does so through a very topical story which doesn't have the same kind of impact on me now that it might have had when it was written. as such, the gestures at universality ring hollow and seem self-important. i'm sorry if this sounds insensitive, but, honestly, in 2003/04, attaching this level of cataclysmic Biblical importance to what's basically a soap opera about a bunch of yuppies in New York dying of AIDS seems terribly near-sighted and self-indulgent when Africa is practically a fucking plague zone. unfortunately, it's hard for me to judge fairly here because i can't go back in time and see it when it was more timely.

in any case, that only speaks to the question of the relative merits of the play. the HBO production strikes me more readily as obnoxious shit. i find it especially irritating that everyone involved in the HBO version nearly broke their arms patting themselves on the back for producing something so "daring" and "relevant," when, of course, they're doing so about 15 years after anything in it would have shocked anyone. HBO wouldn't have touched this play in the early 90s, and it won't touch anything politically hot now, but it gets to win points with critics for being "relevant." it's so cynical it makes me sick.
 
 
Cat Chant
17:24 / 13.02.04
i think you're missing the point of the New Republic critique

I didn't see a critique, I saw someone congratulating hirself for being "brave" enough to slag off movies about minorities. The reviewer slips a few adjectives into parentheses, but otherwise doesn't actually mention the play/TV show at all, in the part quoted here (the only part I can see, as I'm not a subscriber): ze just demonstrates hir own virtue as a "fearless" reviewer, and polishes hir halo for being the Only One able to see it "objectively".

Oh, well. You gotta love the irony, at least.

I'm mildly confused at people talking about Kushner making "cosmic significance" out of "his own life" - is Kushner in the TV version? He's not in the play, and the character who most closely resembles him - Louis - is the one (possibly the only one) who has no contact with the divine at all.

The stuff about the Angels, and God, and the Book - that's about learning to live with loss; learning to be responsible for yourself; learning to take part in the Great Work, without having to have a Scriptural prescription for how to do it; about keeping on living, fucking up, and muddling through.

I don't see how the relevance of that is restricted to the impact of AIDS on middle-class gay men in New York in the 80s, though the standard narrative of AIDS as the moment when that particular gay culture 'grew up', had to learn to live with loss, had to find the collective strength and mutual aid to withstand a catastrophe that threatened to destroy, if not the world, then a world that had only recently been built, and maybe felt more precious for that... that narrative gives the wider issues a specific framework which resonates with them. We build worlds, we see them destroyed, we keep on going: that's the Great Work.

AIDS isn't equated with the apocalypse, in the cosmological framework of the play, if that's what Jack Fear & dizfactor are implying: AIDS is just another plague (Prior Walter's ancestor: "The plague in my time were much worse than the plague you have now!"). The apocalypse that the angels are trying to prevent with the Book of Immobility is the gradual consequence of God's walking out, the unravelling of a world-view based on stability, order and certainty: AIDS, however, within the imagery/conceptual schema of the play, crystallizes and metaphorizes the idea that you will be punished for too much fucking, too much pleasure, too much life, outside the rigid prescriptions of a Book or a Theory (the Oldest Living Bolshevik in Perestroika: "Change? Yes, we must change, only show me a Theory..."). Prior's rejection of the Book is a rejection of transcendence, of the idea that there is a Theory outside the human world that can make everything all right: it's an acceptance that all we have is what we have and that we have to make our world for ourselves and each other, not for God: that there are no rules for that, except the provisional ones that we make up as we go along.

It's about All of us... falling through the cracks that separate what we owe to ourselves and... and what we owe to love.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:03 / 20.02.04
Hey ho. Okay, I've now seen the first chapter of this on TV. At first I thought it wouldn't translate at all to TV, since much of the way the play worked was very dependent on the space of the stage/the theatre: for example, there's a lot of direct address to the audience (the rabbi in the first [funeral] scene, etc), and often two scenes are played out simultaneously on the stage (Joe/Harper on the left-hand side, Prior/Louis on the right-hand side, with speeches intercut & sometimes overlapping) - which can't be done on TV, it just looks like cutting between two separate places and the effect is very different. But by about 20 minutes in I was starting to enjoy the domesticness of the TV version - the way spaces can be rendered more literally (all the productions I saw were extremely pared-down and minimalistic: armchair + standard lamp = sitting room). So I think it's going to work pretty well as a soap opera.

I'm still intrigued by these criticisms of it, though - even more so after reminding myself of the themes of the play/TV show which are set up so economically, it seems to me, at the beginning: the rabbi's speech about how "America doesn't exist", about the constant movement of immigrants vs idea of tradition ("your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, the air you breathe is the air of the steppes"); Harper's imaginary travel agent ("We set people in motion!"); Joe's speech about how Reaganism is a cosmic force for the good, setting things moving in a positive direction, and how he needs to be connected to that - vs Louis's speech to the rabbi about how he can't incorporate "sickness", decline, death, into his idea of the world. All set carefully in the context of American politics and power relations: Roy Cohn's early speech to his doctor about how "homosexuals are men who in 15 years of trying can't get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Hall" will be balanced later by Louis's long speech about democracy in America and how "AIDS shows us the limits of tolerance".

Okay, so this seems to me to be a play about movement vs stagnation. Migration vs tradition. Progress vs decline. So when Jack says:

The Great Work began long before Tony Kushner deigned to give it his imprimatur: it begins anew with each new day since the morning of the world, and will begin afresh long after all we now living are dust. That's the essence of a process: always starting, never ending.

that appears to me to be exactly what the play argues for: process over Utopia, 'perestroika' - thawing, movement, process - over the implementation of a Grand Theory or the adherence to Scripture. Always starting, never ending.

But those philosophical forces are set in a particular global historical and political context (Reagan's America, Gorbachev's USSR; global warming, AIDS). Hence you can recast "movement vs stasis", "starting vs ending", "process vs scripture" as Millennium Approaches (Scripture/end of world) vs Perestroika (movement/starting), if you like. And it seems to me that the nature of drama is that big themes have to be presented through individual characters, who, in order to be comprehensible characters to contemporary audiences, have to be endowed with inner lives (unlike the characters in Greek tragedy, say): with particular sexual desires, jobs, desires, class, gender and race positions. And that one of the ways in which drama succeeds is in causing the particular and the general levels to harmonize, which in the case of Angels is done partly through the metaphor of AIDS - which functions, like everything in (good) drama, as a specific, historical reality on the level of the characters and as a metaphor on the level of the themes.

Okay. So that's what I think. Jack Fear wrote that he objected to

its insistence on conflating the end of one way of life with the End Of The World...

and dizfactor said:

attaching this level of cataclysmic Biblical importance to what's basically a soap opera about a bunch of yuppies in New York dying of AIDS seems terribly near-sighted and self-indulgent

And - since I can't see this thing about "conflating" AIDS in New York with the end of the world, or saying that the "soap opera" is what the drama "basically is" and the Biblical stuff is "attached" to it (I think that's completely the wrong way round) - I really can't help seeing at least an element of homophobia in there: it sounds uncomfortably like "ah, who cares if a bunch of queers die? Why should that be important?" (Of the five main gay characters, btw, Louis is a typist and Belize is a nurse: though Joe and Roy Cohn [lawyers] and Prior [lives off a trust fund] might be yuppies, I suppose.) Maybe you can explain to me a bit more clearly, Jack & dizfactor, why you think that the end of the world can't be metaphorized through AIDS. I can't help thinking that if all your friends were dying, and they represented a community and a form of solidarity that had only recently emerged, you might be narked if you said "Jesus, it feels like the end of the world" and I accused you of "epic narcissism". I mean that "the end of the world" is always partial, it's always the end of a world, but that AIDS in the 80s in New York is a fairly good microcosmic representation.

On the other hand, while I was thinking about this in my head, it occurred to me that I make a similar argument about American Beauty - ie, that while some people seem to think it has universal significance, I just think "Oh. A movie that tells us that bourgeois white het men find marriage unfulfilling and are attracted to young white women. This is news?", and get really pissed off that anyone pays attention to the movie at all. Really, dude, I know about bourgeois white het men. I think I saw a movie about them once... no, wait, that was every movie ever made.

So obviously there are instances where I think the particular class/race/gender/social positioning of characters obscures or makes irrelevant the 'universal' themes in a drama, which makes me think I'd be really interested if you could try and explain to me a bit more why you think the specific social milieu of the characters in Angels is a flaw or a stumbling-block or whatever - and, actually, whether you think that's also the case with American Beauty, which tries to give universal significance to an extremely narrowly defined lifestyle. I'm sort of more interested in the general issue here, I suppose.
 
 
Jack Fear
12:19 / 20.02.04
For what it's worth, I hated American Beauty, too.
 
 
Cat Chant
12:51 / 20.02.04
For the same reasons?
 
 
Cat Chant
12:52 / 20.02.04
For the same reasons?
 
 
diz
13:38 / 20.02.04
I really can't help seeing at least an element of homophobia in there: it sounds uncomfortably like "ah, who cares if a bunch of queers die? Why should that be important?"

i totally understand what you're saying here, and i don't want to diminish that. see below for more.

Maybe you can explain to me a bit more clearly, Jack & dizfactor, why you think that the end of the world can't be metaphorized through AIDS.

well, obviously i can't speak for Jack, but as for my part - i've been reading your posts on this topic, and i find myself reading and nodding and agreeing, but despite seeing your points, at the end i'm still coming to a different place than you seem to be. this has led me to wonder why exactly it doesn't work for me. i think i've narrowed it down to two main things.

first, and i think most importantly for me, i think i'm coming to feel that it's not that AIDS in NYC in the 80s is a bad metaphor for the end of the world, but that the "End of the World" is itself a metaphor rooted in a sense of self-importance that i just don't click with. it's not even so much that this particular exercise in apocalyptica is a particularly bad one, but there's a certain epic narcissism, as you put it, inherent in most, if not all, apocalypses which really doesn't resonate with me at all.

earlier you posted: "We build worlds, we see them destroyed, we keep on going: that's the Great Work.", and i realized that i nodded along with everything before the colon, but that "That's the Great Work" most emphatically did not follow from that point.

it's not "The Great Work," because, frankly, there is no "Great Work" - it's just "The Way Things Are," which is very different.

to me, Kushner is simply putting too much emphasis on the greater importance and overall value of human life and human endeavor. it's not so much a case of "ah, who cares if a bunch of queers die? Why should that be important?" as much as it is a case of "who cares if anyone dies, ultimately?"

the entire history of the human species is a blip in the history of a fleck of dirt orbiting one of millions of suns in one of billions of galaxies operating on a timescale which is scarcely comprehensible. the one and only reason that shifts in the human population, plagues, wars, the rise and fall of civilizations, etc seem huge and important and Earth-shattering to us is precisely because we are so completely freaking unimportant. a fairly good guideline, to me, is that if it seems important to us, it probably isn't, since really important things happen on a scale we can't perceive, outside of the range of our normal comprehension.

as a result, the humanist quest for a concept of human dignity and importance in the greater scheme of Everything (which Angels in America seems to me to be a part of) strikes me as fundamentally narcisstic and immature. to me, it's a major stumbling block, an exercise in ego masturbation, and certainly not something worth validating at all. presenting anything like this as some kind of spiritual insight seems, to me, laughably naive.

basically, i kept feeling that Kushner really needed someone to smack him and say "hey: your world does not equal the world. take a step back, grow up, and get over yourself."

it's not a question of the particulars of the gay experience in New York in the 80s not serving well enough to illustrate the universals, i fundamentally and rather vehemently disagree with the supposed "universals."

obviously, it's easy for me to say that, not being a gay man in NYC in the 80s, looking for meaning in the ruins of the world i know. this leads me to my second point: because i'm more removed from the specific experience of AIDS in NYC in the 80s, even if i were to get into it through Kushner's eyes, and try to see the beauty and value in his experience even if i have fundamental issues with his belief system, it just doesn't resonate for me.

I can't help thinking that if all your friends were dying, and they represented a community and a form of solidarity that had only recently emerged, you might be narked if you said "Jesus, it feels like the end of the world" and I accused you of "epic narcissism"....AIDS in the 80s in New York is a fairly good microcosmic representation.

if this were 15 years ago i would agree. however, the nature of the AIDS epidemic has changed so drastically in that time period that i think the resonance is lost on me, seeing it now. i sort of addressed that in my earlier post. i can't un-think Africa in the 00s when I hear about AIDS, and so when i see AIDS being talked about exclusively in the context of New York in the 80s, i kind of raise an eyebrow. i can't help it, it's just my first response, and following from that response i can't help but compare the situations of someone having AIDS in a wealthy First World nation and that of someone having AIDS in a poverty-stricken Third World nation. i can't help but think "hey, man, i know you're dying in the hospital, but at least you have a hospital!" i'm already inclined to regard it as self-indulgent just for inflating human-scale issues to events of larger meaning and importance, but even within the scale of human experience, i can't help but think that he's got blinders on.

this is, of course, totally unfair and irrational. Kushner obviously can't help being from a certain time and place, and that's obviously going to shape his work. however, i am not in that time and place, and i can't pretend that my experience in my time and place doesn't shape my viewing. if i was buying his overall theological/philosophical/spirtual agenda, instead of finding it hopelessly self-important, i might be more receptive, but it just doesn't connect for me on any level.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
14:30 / 20.02.04
Nobody in their right mind liked American Beauty.

Okay, first up I have to confess I haven't seen Angels In America. But ever since I first read Jack's objection to the line "the Great Work begins", on his blog, something's been bugging me. With respect, Jack, it's like you already had a point you wanted to make about how the Great Work is a continual process, day-to-day, and so you were looking for something against which you could set that up... Because isn't it just narrative convention, on one level?

And on another level: unless we were lucky enough to be born with all our political/moral convictions already intact, people *do* have moments in which their political awareness awakes, they do have epiphanies. Which can then seem to be a very important turning point in their lives. What's wrong with dramatising that in this way?
 
 
Cat Chant
15:17 / 20.02.04
dizfactor, thank you for a brilliant, thoughtful post. I get what you mean now. Yayy. (Look what happens when I stop shouting! I should try it more often.)

You raise some interesting questions about scale:

really important things happen on a scale we can't perceive, outside of the range of our normal comprehension

But I'll have to come back to those later. Or start a new thread. Or something.
 
 
wicker woman
06:37 / 21.02.04
[b]basically, i kept feeling that Kushner really needed someone to smack him and say "hey: your world does not equal the world. take a step back, grow up, and get over yourself."

it's not a question of the particulars of the gay experience in New York in the 80s not serving well enough to illustrate the universals, i fundamentally and rather vehemently disagree with the supposed "universals."[/b]

By this point in your post, though, you've already established that you think nothing anyone does matters at all on any kind of scale besides our own... were Kushner shoving this down our throats, and national policy/laws, standards of behavior and such being dictated by it, I might agree with you.

But one of my major problems (of which there are several) with extreme anti-Humanism is that it takes the apparent stance that Nothing Fucking Matters, So Why Bother Hanging About? Kill Yourself Now! By your definitions, no story, no belief system, no ANYTHING matters. Being a devout Morrison-ite is one thing, but c'mon.

Oh, and I liked American Beauty. Clearly out of my gourd, I am.
 
 
diz
16:46 / 22.02.04
But one of my major problems (of which there are several) with extreme anti-Humanism is that it takes the apparent stance that Nothing Fucking Matters, So Why Bother Hanging About? Kill Yourself Now! By your definitions, no story, no belief system, no ANYTHING matters.

that's true, but it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter... it's a hell of a lot of fun.

or at least it is for me, and that's really all that matters as far as me deciding whether or not to off myself. as for why anyone else, especially people who are not having nearly as much fun as i am, should not off themselves: i don't know. that's something that you have to answer for yourself. it's not my job, or reality's job, to find you a reason to live. it's kind of narcissistic to suggest otherwise.

if you can't find any reason to get out of bed in the morning in the face of an absurd, meaningless universe, then either don't get out of fucking bed, or stop bugging me about it.
 
 
Brigade du jour
20:00 / 28.03.04
At the risk of a Jack Fear double slap, I'd just like to say that I really enjoyed (if that's the right word) both Angels and American Beauty, probably for much the same reasons. Upper middle brow dialogue and various literary references, showboating acting that still seems kind of subtle at the same time, and best of all the whole production looked absolutely fucking gorgeous.

But the thing is, as much as this mini-series blew me away when I watched it, I now realise that it may have been chiefly because it far exceeded my somewhat mediocre expectations. 'Sure,' I thought before I saw it, 'it looks nice and expensive and ooh, big cast for telly, but it's probably quite ordinary.' On those terms, it was fucking phenomenal. Plus, I was txting my friend who I knew was watching it at the same time, saying things like 'whoa this rocks!'. I suppose that'll teach me for reacting to these things in an emotional way and taking ages to get over that before engaging with it intellectually.

More to the point, I've read all the comments above and found them extremely thought-provoking, so I want to thank everyone for reading way more into it than I did. Jack and Dizfactor especially seem to have put it into a perspective that I know I couldn't, at least not without sitting down and thinking or talking with someone about it for a couple of hours afterwards, or even, say, reading a Barbelith thread on it!

I do think, however, that the whole 'who cares anyway, we're just a blip in the cosmic scheme of things' approach must be a bit crippling when it comes to appreciating any film. I mean, almost every story recounts the minutiae of human life, indeed the only one I can think of off the top of my head that explicitly goes beyond it is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Then again, of course, it's that pesky conflation of story and theme, isn't it? You can provoke consideration of the grandest themes by telling a simple, everyday story. Maybe (and forgive me if everyone's said all this in other words) that's the problem with Angels In America. The story is told as if it's the most important thing ever to happen (meeting ghosts of ancestors, oblique foretellings of armageddon or are they? etc.) when ultimately, it's just a few people undergoing drastic changes in their lives. Death, disease, decrepitude, perhaps even dementia. Why do all the bad words start with 'd'?

Sorry if I'm repeating either myself or indeed paraphrasing everyone else, but as soon as American Beauty was brought up in this thread I remembered how much watching AIA reminded me of Six Feet Under (in fact, at one point I thought Tony Kushner was an Alan Ball pseudonym). which has, I'm sure, another thread devoted to it. But I can't go there because I missed the entire second series and have spent the last year successfully avoiding what's been happening until I can afford the DVD!

But my point (and believe it or not, there is one! Ah here it comes) is that SFU seems to do this 'big-theme' stuff a lot more stylishly, and crucially, in a more restrained fashion. Everything in it seems more matter-of-fact, give or take the odd outwardly emotional moment like David telling the corporate undertaker dude "Look, I really feel like hitting someone right now and it might as well be you!" Did anyone else make this comparison?
 
 
Cat Chant
20:08 / 28.03.04
when ultimately, it's just a few people undergoing drastic changes in their lives

The characters are the vehicles for the story. A story without characters, or one with too many of them, gets confusing and hard to read. Any narrative, from The Iliad to Lucan's Pharsalia to Bridget Jones's Diary can be boiled down to "a few people undergoing drastic changes in their lives", surely?
 
 
Ganesh
20:27 / 28.03.04
I'd seen the first half as a stage play, a few years earlier, and quite liked it - so I was surprised how much the screen version irritated me. I came away thinking all American (white) gay men where whiney, self-obsessed martyrs competing in some sort of twisted psychobabbling Victim Idol contest. I spent most of the second half thinking 'oh, just fucking die'.

All in all, it wasn't nearly as 'important' as it thought it was.
 
 
PatrickMM
04:10 / 19.04.05
basically, i kept feeling that Kushner really needed someone to smack him and say "hey: your world does not equal the world. take a step back, grow up, and get over yourself."

Bringing this thread back with just a preface, I'm only 20, so I wasn't really with it when most of this stuff was taking place, and have never seen the stage play, yet I could still really relate to the character conflicts being played out.

The thing I loved about the miniseries was the very fact that they took individual conflicts and played them out on this massive scale. In a story, the main character's world is the entire world, and I loved seeing the fantasy elements mix into an otherwise relatively realistic world. Yes, the characters may have seemed self important, but these were the most important things that ever happened to them, so it would make sense to play it on a grand scale. Yes, in the grand scheme of things none of this matters, but, to quote Angel, "If nothing we do matters, then everything matters."

I was riveted by the miniseries, which had a great combination of soap stuff and high thematic stuff. I suppose this may be the case of knowing more about the circumstances of production ruining things, but as an uninformed viewer, I thoroughly enjoyed the series, particularly the Mary Louise Parker section.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:54 / 26.04.05
a great combination of soap stuff and high thematic stuff

Fuck. I have to go and lecture to a bunch of teenagers about Adaptation right now, but I really want to get back to this - I'd love to know more about what you thought about this aspect. Watching the TV series more closely, I was struck by how soap-opera-esque it is, and how much that changes it from the play: the space of the stage allows it to be much more immediately universal, especially in the way that I saw it staged (very pared-down sets, often with two different scenes going on on two different landscapes within the same physical space of the stage). The TV setting, with naturalistic sets (real rooms, real costumes, people standing very close to each other) gives it a much smaller, soapier feel, and I think that's part of why it didn't work for people on TV - or part of why I was so surprised at the responses, particularly in advance of having watched the adaptation. (And the script was barely changed at all from the theatre version [I know because I pretty much know it by heart]: I wonder whether that was a mistake? Does anyone know anything about the reasoning behind that decision?)
 
 
PatrickMM
20:06 / 28.04.05
I haven't seen the play, and after seeing the series, I can't even imagine how this would be done as a play, but the material seems to have an inherently soapy quality, in the sense that it is based on relationships, and a bunch of will they, won't they questions. I guess soap is usually thought of negatively, but I associate it more with works that are really concerned with character relationships, so The Sopranos is sort of a mafia soap opera. Oddly, all the HBO dramatic stuff I've seen has a lot in common with what is commonly considered soap opera territory, just this is really good soap opera stuff.

So, I can't really answer your question in relation to the play, but I will say, as I said before, that I think what makes the program work so well is the fact that we are simultaneously getting an exploration of the effect of AIDS on society as a whole, and also seeing the effect it has on the lives of specific characters, which is where I think some of the criticism comes from. These characters are supposed to be universal stand ins, but they're also meant to be just regular people, who happen to be caught up in these big problems.
 
  
Add Your Reply