If He ever did come back, if he ever dared to show His face…if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century He returned to see…how much suffering His abandonment had created, if He did come back you should sue the bastard…. Sue the bastard for walking out. How dare he.
Much of the second part feels this way: an attitude posing as an answer.
Television is, for better or worse, an intimate medium, and on it much of the more grandiose and fantastical elements of Angels seems pretty silly—not least, the scenes that take place in Prior’s “Heaven,” in which the orders of angels hang around in heavy overcoats and mufflers, intoning about God’s Abandonment of Creation. This broken-down-looking, earthquake-addled Heaven of Kushner’s grand imagining, the South Pole, some razzmatazz special effects for the magical Book and the Angel’s apparition: all this comes off on TV as a trifle embarrassing, or perhaps embarrassed, as can be the case when highly artificial or formalized elements are represented in a naturalistic medium. The unfortunate result is that a large part of Kushner’s project—the intellectually ambitious, theatrically daring gestures meant to make us think abstractly about the workings of the cosmos and of large movements in history and the great forces that animate human affairs—now feel strained and inconsequential, while simultaneously showing up certain of the work’s excesses. To imply that the AIDS crisis was more likely to make the heavens break apart than any number of other disasters of the twentieth century suggests, now, a myopia that was the result of the crisis footing that many of us were on ten years ago.
On the other hand, television, precisely because it is so intimate, can focus your attention on, and make you feel, an actor’s performance more minutely than can be the case in the theater, and the mostly excellent performances that Nichols has drawn from his cast—some are superb—help to illuminate, and even transform, aspects of Kushner’s text. The big stars are Al Pacino and Meryl Streep, he as a deeper, more complex, and surprisingly more sympathetic Cohn than the character was in the stage production (there’s a remarkable scene, which hovers somewhere between the heartbreaking and the grotesque, in which Cohn manipulates Rosenberg’s ghost into singing a Yiddish lullaby to him, and you don’t know whether to loathe or thank the character for making it happen), and she as Ethel Rosenberg—and, even better, as a properly flinty Hannah Pitt. (As she leaves Prior’s hospital room the morning after the Angel’s final apparition, he thanks her by campily quoting Blanche DuBois’s “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” to which Hannah tersely replies, “Well that’s a stupid thing to do.”) In what is surely a tongue-in-cheek nod to her famous versatility, Streep even plays the rabbi whose eulogy opens the work. Of particular note are the two young actors who play Louis and Joe: respectively Ben Shenkman, who suggests the nervousness and guilt behind the know-it-all intellectual posing of this seriously selfish character, and, even more, the remarkable Patrick Wilson as Joe Pitt, a character who, thanks to Wilson’s subtle and anguished performance, comes across in the television film as far more tragic than had been the case on Broadway—and, I’m now convinced, than even Kushner knew, or perhaps wanted.
Less appealing, and more damaging to your sense of the balance of the text, are the cliché madwoman-in-the-attic, off-rhythm mumblings of Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, and the misfired performance by Emma Thompson as the Angel. (She also plays a homeless woman and, disastrously, the brisk Italian-American nurse who watches over Prior in the hospital.) On Broadway in 1993, Marcia Gay Harden had a solidity and concreteness that made Harper’s slide into madness all the more pathetic—her physical presence provided some traction; whereas Mary-Louise Parker’s wispy, whiny, one-note pathos seemed culled from old Julie Harris movies, and got to be grating fairly early on. (This Harper makes you realize, now, how necessary it is for the play to work that we feel sorry for her, that she be a victim.) And Thompson’s Angel, writhing in her harness and seeming always to be on the verge of giggling, has none of the angular authority that Ellen McLaughlin brought to the role onstage, and as a result you cringe through the Angel’s scenes.
One result of these performances, good and bad, was that you were likely to shift your focus in different directions—to notice different elements of the play, to reevaluate characters. To my mind, the most significant result of this refocusing—away from the supernatural material, away from those characters you felt compelled to feel sorry for or admire (the fact that the black drag queen is the fount of all wisdom and realism in the play strikes you now, if anything, as patronizing)—was to be made aware of a fundamental dishonesty, something not fully worked out or perhaps even avoided, at the heart of Angels. The terrible anguish evident in every facet of Patrick Wilson’s fierce performance as Joe Pitt—his telephonic coming-out conversation was, for those of us who have had conversations like that, almost impossible to watch—made me realize, as I had not done before, that Joe is, in fact, the only truly tragic—Greek-tragic, that is—character in the play. And yet the play itself seems neither to know nor acknowledge this; if anything, Kushner goes to no little lengths to make us think of Joe as morally deficient, when in fact he isn’t. Why?
From the beginning of “Millennium Approaches,” we are asked to see Joe as an exact structural counterpart to that other lover who abandons his spouse, Louis. Many elements in the play invite us to draw parallels between the two men—not merely the fact that they end up in each other’s arms, but even more to the point, the number of split scenes that the two unhappy couples (Louis/Prior and Joe/Harper) share. (In the film version, the splitting is elegantly conveyed by some very adroit cross-cutting between the two pairs at crucial moments.) And yet this parallelism is surely both unfair and unbalanced. Louis, after all, abandons Prior out of weakness and fear of AIDS, whereas Joe abandons Harper because of his dawning self-knowledge: in order to be who he really is, he can’t remain in a marriage that has become a lie. It’s true that both Louis and Joe cause their loved ones to suffer horribly, but this ostensible similarity is undercut by an important moral difference: the freedom and happiness Louis seeks—freedom from messy diseases, freedom from responsibility to someone else—isn’t, in fact, a bona fide good (it’s just selfishness), whereas most of us, today, would agree that for Joe to come out of the closet, to realize and emancipate his true self, is both a psychological good and, in the end, a moral necessity, whatever the temporary pain it causes.
And yet the moral difference—the difference that ought to redeem Joe—is overlooked in Angels; indeed, in the television version, it’s papered over quite purposefully. There’s a scene in the stage version of “Perestroika” in which Hannah confronts her son after he’s gone to live with Louis; she hasn’t heard from him in weeks, and they have a spat in the Mormon Visitors Center, where she’s got herself a job. Exasperated, Joe cries out that he’s fled the breadth of a continent to get away from her. “And what are you running away from now?” she snaps. “You and me,” he replies. In the film version, some lines have been added between Hannah’s impatient question and her son’s weary answer, and the addition is a telling one, because it reveals a failure of sympathy on the author’s part, which in turn illuminates a great problem of the play:
HANNAH: And what are you running away from now? You have a responsibility to your wife, and you cannot wish it away.
JOE: I want to—I don’t know anymore what I want.
HANNAH: What you want, what you want. Well, that shifts with the breeze. How can you steer your life by what you want? Hold to what you believe.
The added exchange is clearly an attempt to saddle Joe with a moral failure (he’s failed in responsibility to his wife, a responsibility that cannot be wished away) and, further and much more doubtful, to make it seem as if the reason for his abandonment is a kind of selfish, self-indulgent whim, like the reason for Louis’s abandonment of Prior: “What you want, what you want,” his mother dismissively snipes, as if the desire to be a fully fledged human
being unashamed of his most profound self is nothing more than a between-meal snack. It’s an odd line for a gay playwright to have written: you somehow suspect that, in real life, Kushner doesn’t expect gay men to remain in false marriages to make their mothers happy.
The truth of his inner nature is of course a great deal more than a whim, and it’s for this reason that the spectacle of Joe’s suffering is a true tragic spectacle: which is to say, the spectacle of a man torn between two competing goods (his happiness, his wife’s sanity), neither of which can be attained without the destruction of the other. In the classical sense, Joe is the only character in the entire work deserving of those tragic emotions, pity and fear; he’s the only character who has a kind of Sophoclean grandeur. Or, that is, should have, but doesn’t—because instead of working through the meaning of Joe’s conundrum, Kushner sweeps it under the dramatic rug, trying to persuade us that, like Louis, he’s just a selfish monster. (The real evil that Joe does—the legal opinions that he composes—can be seen as a function, if anything, of his closetedness; like many closeted gay men, he is attracted to repressive ideologies that seem to promise the “order” he craves at this stage, the control he wants over his own irrepressible desires.)
Indeed, of all the desertions that Angels depicts, none is as striking as the desertion of Joe by his creator. Angels presents many images of suffering: Prior’s abandonment and illness; Harper’s loneliness and madness; Cohn’s pain; Rosenberg’s death; the angels’ confusion; the discrimination and racism to which Belize alludes; Hannah’s nervous failure as a mother, for which her compensatory crispness can barely cover; even selfish Louis’s spasms of guilt and self-torment. Each of these characters is, by the end of the play, healed, comforted, or forgiven. Prior’s fever breaks, and we are meant to understand that he’ll grow better (in the epilogue, we learn that he’s doing just fine on AZT); Harper asserts herself, grabs Joe’s credit card, and takes a night flight to San Francisco to start a new, emancipated life; Hannah is seen at the end of the play, relaxed, attractively dressed in New Yorker chic, amiably chatting with her new gay pals; Louis has been forgiven, if not taken back, by Prior; and, as we know, even Roy Cohn is absolved, by no less a personage than his most famous victim, Ethel Rosenberg. Of all the sufferers in Angels, only Joe is left alone at the end, the only character who is neither forgiven nor redeemed in a way that conforms to Kushner’s sense of “Perestroika” as a “comedy.”
Why is this? When you look over the cast of characters in Angels and think about whom we’re supposed to sympathize with, and who gets forgiven, you can’t help noticing that the most sympathetic, the “best” characters are either ill, or women, or black, or Jewish. Looking over this rather PC list, it occurs to you to wonder whether, in the worldview of this play’s creator, the reason why Joe Pitt—who alone of the characters is the most genuinely and interestingly torn, who in fact seeks love the hardest and suffers the most for self-knowledge—can’t be forgiven by his creator, and is the only character who goes unredeemed in some way at the end of the play, is that he’s a healthy, uninfected, white, Anglo-Saxon, male Christian. This in turn makes you realize how much of the second part of this play depends, from the in-joke of San Francisco as Heaven to the closing scene (in which Prior addresses the audience and in a valedictory blessing vapidly declares us all to be “fabulous creatures, each and every one”) on a certain set of glib, feel-good, rather parochial assumptions about the world, assumptions that in the end undercut the ambitions and, occasionally, the pretensions of what has come before. I, for one, would have respected much more a play that invited its presumably liberal, often largely gay or gay-friendly audiences to see as its central and truly tragic figure a white, healthy, Protestant male on the verge of something truly transformative and redeeming: not illness and suffering, but self-knowledge. When all is said and done, Angels itself is guilty of its own kind of reprehensible abandonment: abandonment of the tragic for the merely sentimental, of real intellectual challenges for feel-good nostrums, of hard questions about guilt and responsibility for easy finger-pointing at all the usual suspects.
For this reason, it’s hard to know just how the television Angels is going to play during its inevitable reruns and airings during the next few months. The excitement that greeted the six-hour, $60 million production has had, perhaps appropriately, something of the messianic about it—something redolent more of those latter-day, heralding, biblical angels than of their drab classical forbears. The New York Times devoted not one but two front-page Arts & Leisure articles (on the same day) to Kushner and the Angels film; The New Yorker deemed the TV version “cause for celebration.” More ecstatic than either by far was The Washington Post, which declared the TV film “awesome,” “spectacular,” and “one of the most dazzling movies ever made for television or any other means of projecting a film.” I say “messianic” because, behind all this enthusiasm, it was hard not to detect a sense of deep satisfaction that Kushner’s American epic was finally going to be seen in—well, in America. “The number of people who see it the very first night should easily outnumber those who have seen the play in the several hundred North American stage productions since it opened on Broadway 10 years ago,” the Times exulted in one of its two articles, entitled “Hurricane Kushner Hits the Heartland.”
Within Angels lurks that great work about America itself, one that could well speak to the heartland, a work about migrations and revelations and about the essential tragedy of American and possibly even human experience, in which one person’s liberation—now more than ever before—often means another’s suffering. But the play as we have it is a more limited affair, one meant to reassure not the heartland but the marginal groups whom the play cozily addresses. What, in the end, can the “heartland” be expected to make of the play’s real message: that those who come from it are unforgiven, and unforgivable, by those of us who reside on the coasts? Still, the fanfares are loud. Not for the first time, in the case of angels, will the messenger have outdazzled the message.
—The New York Review of Books, February 12, 2004
An Affair to Remember
Brokeback Mountain—the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based—is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words “two homosexual men” or “gay,” the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.
Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie—in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews—has been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with “universal” appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected on the film’s official Web site makes clear. The Wall Street Journal’s critic asserted that “love stories come and go, but this one stays with you—not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance.” The Los Angeles Times declared the film to be
a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Indeed, a month after the movie’s release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as “the gay cowboy movie.” “It is much more than that glib description implies,” the
critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. “This is a human story.” This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the advertising for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer’s understandable desire that Brokeback Mountain not be seen as something for a “niche” market but as a story with broad appeal, whatever the particulars of its time, place, and personalities. (The words “gay” and “homosexual” are never used of the film’s two main characters in the forty-nine-page press kit distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) “One movie is connecting with the heart of America,” one ad that’s part of the current publicity campaigns declares; the ad shows the star Heath Ledger, without his male costar, Jake Gyllenhaal, grinning in a cowboy hat. A television ad that ran immediately after the Golden Globe awards a few weeks ago showed clips of the male leads embracing their wives, but not each other.
The reluctance to be explicit about the film’s themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes themselves, where the film took the major awards: for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as “a story of monumental conflict”; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger’s character as “a cowboy caught up in a complicated love.” After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, “This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story.”
Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film’s many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received. For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 33
