'Dallas Buyers Club'

Look Back With Sorrow

Occasionally I meet young people who tell me how much they love the 80s - the movies, the music, the fashion. They tell me it was great. Sure makes one fellow. :)

It's a bit hard to put across to them how oppressive the Cold War and AIDS were and what a relief it was when at least the former came to an end in 1989. AIDS, on the other hand was just this dark shadow that took all the gains of the 70's sexual revolution and flushed it down the toilet. It wasn't a decade that could get you killed violently like the 60's and early 70's did with the Vietnam War, but it was a decade that was going to kill you with a nuclear flash or a strange incurable disease, depending nohow Ronald Reagan was feeling that day, or where you placed your unprotected genitals.

So a movie about AIDS patients is like the wrong kind of nostalgia. That's why it's taken me this long to come around to watching this highly acclaimed film. That's the thing about nostalgia for your won era - you certainly know what was wrong with that era.

What's Good About It

The single most compelling thing about this film is how it has the paranoia and homophobia nailed to a tee. The anxiety of AIDS and how it was for a long time a gay ghetto disease is captured with assiduous, prosaic detail. It's not a film about being gay or being gay with AIDS, it's a film about having AIDS and trying not to die. The focus is searing and that lends itself to some pretty dramatic story-telling.

Mathew McConaughey is doing his extreme actor thing having lost a lot of weight to play Ron Woodroof, and while we never quite can shake it's the A-List actor fro our minds, he is sufficiently committed to give us the character, fully rendered. It's a largely unsentimental portrait with moments of genuine awkward compassion.

The shooting style is raw-boned and documentary-like. Better still, it's devoid of the pretti-fication that usually accompanies turning real life stories into Hollywood fodder. It doesn't pull punches and conveys the full anxiety about AIDS and death. I'm always a bit scared of social realism but this film is quite a good one in that genre.

What's Bad About It

It's hard to say. I can't think of anything I didn't think was good. Maybe the music is entirely forgettable.

It does have a couple of ideological problems that are interesting.

What's Interesting About It

The first thing that sprang to mind were all the people I knew who dropped dead of AIDS. Plus the famous names like Freddie Mercury and Stuart Challender. I thought about the time I was arguing with John Hargreaves and didn't know he was dying from AIDS. There was the production designer at film school who passed away from AIDS. He knew his time was coming and then he was gone. The desperation and despair was hard to watch and even harder to be around at a high pressure workplace.

I recalled sitting in medical lectures in the mid-80s where lecturers would come in and declare that they won't be able to find a cure for AIDS in a generation. 30years hence, that much has been true, but somewhere in the mid-point people stopped dying in droves. That has been a relief. Maybe it's a fake sense of security but back in the late 80's and early 90's, this whole nexus was not only grim but also dehumanising.

I think the politics of LGBT population was headed for normalisation through the 1970s, going into the early 80's when AIDS broke open. The whole AIDS thing and the stigma attached to it and by association, the whole Gay community probably delay the normalisation of the LGBT by a good fifteen years or so. In other words, AIDS prolonged the condition of social and institutional homophobia for that extended time. When I think about that time, I think the whole thing is worse than regrettable. The film is a terrifying reminder of the distance that had tone travelled.

AZT As The Problem Drug

The film makes a wild sort of claim that AZT is toxic and therefore won't work as a treatment for AIDS. This flies in the face of not only the conventional understanding of how the drug works, but also the history of how the drug came tone used to control the HIV virus. The film finishes with a note that gives some credit to AZT at the end, but structurally the film effectively argues against the validity of the drug itself. And one wonders if this is something we should be accepting at face value. It certainly strikes me as the kind of stupidity expressed by anti-vaxers.

The proof in the AZT pudding is that Magic Johnson is still alive with us today thanks to combination therapy and AZT is one of the drugs in the mix that is part of the treatment.

The FDA As The Villain

This is where the film drifts off to a more conspiracy-theory-laden-observation that Big Pharma wants to push this one drug AZT and so it bribes the FDA to let it pass its drug to the exclusion of other treatments. It might have looked that way from Ron Woodroof's position but the reality is that many drugs were pushed through testing stage to get it to the market and all those drugs together form the combination therapy we use today. If it were one drug, the virus becomes resistant to the drug. By combining multiple drugs, it creates too many obstacles for the virus to replicate and pass annoy mutations that might allow it to resist.

The more likely story is that the FDA did resist the wildcat selling of untested drugs because quite frankly it's a little scary that somebody is out there trying to devise therapies on the fly, unqualified, untested, un-reviewed. The films very soft on that problematic as it portrays the FDA as a bunch of statist idiots.

There are days where I might be tempted to do the same, but in the instance of AIDS cure research, I'm not so sure the FDA were such an impediment as they are portrayed this film. The film needs an antagonist, but I'm not sure that painting the FDA like a bunch of corrupt dunces is accurate or fair.