Pros and Cons of the Positives in The Normal Heart and RENT

 

Thought I’d write a bit about the ways these works depict HIV+ characters.  Neither is perfect, in my opinion, but both have certain strengths and major, often complementary differences.  It’s to be expected – they were written ten years apart, and understanding of HIV changed a lot in that time, and both pieces have different agendas.  Still, I thought it’d be interesting to explore.  (Note:  for this blog, I’ll be focusing on the versions from my recent reviews – The Normal Heart’s 2014 HBO film and RENT’s 1996 Broadway production.)

 

We’ll start with the major time-period differences.  In the early-to-mid ‘80s, almost nothing was known about HIV.  We didn’t know how it was spread, who could catch it, how to identify those who were HIV+ but not yet sick, or how to treat it.  It was a terrifying, unknown monster that struck without warning and cut down men in their prime.  By the mid-90s, HIV was a serious virus that led to fatal illness, but it was less of a shadowy bogeyman.  We knew a lot more about it, and we had support groups, medicines, and a population of HIV+-identified people who hadn’t developed AIDS yet.  So, from the get-go, we’re dealing with different worlds.

 

RENT’s HIV+ characters are, for the most part, much more developed than The Normal Heart’s.  Roger, Mimi, Collins, and Angel are all full characters with distinct personalities, and we get to know them very well over the course of the musical, whereas in The Normal Heart, Felix is the only HIV+ character who gets much focus.  The others have smaller supporting roles, mainly existing in the story to fall ill and die.  There are far more of them than there are in RENT, even counting the Life Support members, so the sense of horror is heightened, but the personal investment in individuals isn’t as strong.

 

I love RENT’s emphasis that these people are more than a virus; though they know it will take them in the end, it doesn’t get to own them.  Look at the toast “To people living with, living with, living with, / Not dying from disease” – the distinction it so vital it’s said three times.  I get why The Normal Heart doesn’t dwell on this – besides the historical differences mentioned above, it was written with a vastly different goal.  It’s an unnerving political lion designed to shake audiences from complacency, so it makes sense to focus on the horror.  It’s shrewd politics, but as a story, it paints the HIV+ characters as tragic statistics rather than people.

 

At the same time, The Normal Heart always treats HIV as a gravely serious matter, while RENT sometimes takes an almost-cavalier attitude toward it.  Not always – look at “Will I?” or “One Song Glory” – but there are some awfully glib remarks.  It seems disingenuous for a terminally ill person to say, “I die without you,” and the Life Support leader is pretty dismissive of a young HIV+ man’s fears.  Mimi has no qualms about offering herself to Roger on a plate before realizing he’s HIV+, too.  Not that people with HIV can’t have sex, but it seems like something a prospective partner should know upfront. 

 

One final nitpick for each – I really dislike that in RENT, the straight man and woman have a history of intravenous drug use and the two gay men don’t.  While I know it’s not stated how any of them contracted it, it still perpetuates the idea that gay men get HIV from having sex while straight people get it from shooting up, a false and damaging belief.  Also, The Normal Heart is so white.  Seriously, there’s maybe one PoC in the whole thing; RENT clearly has the edge there.

The Normal Heart (2014)

 

This HBO movie aired last night, and I was as hopeful as I was apprehensive.  I knew about its source, Larry Kramer’s 1985 play, and I was looking forward to seeing a fine Hollywood cast perform this story of the early fight against HIV.  At the same time, Ryan Murphy’s attachment gave me pause – my experience with Glee, The New Normal, and Pretty/Handsome has shown me that Murphy’s work tends to be a mix of outrageous, heartfelt, and preachy.  While certain characters, moments, or threads resonate, the overall effect is often messy and/or aggravating.

 

So I guess it’s good that Murphy only directs this TV film, and Kramer himself adapts his largely-autobiographical play.  It’s very “play-ish” in that it’s incredibly talky and each major character gets at least one big “spotlight” speech.  Fortunately, I liked that when it’s done well, and it’s mostly done well here.  The story is told with urgency, confusion, and heartbreak.  When the play was written, it was coming directly from the trenches in the midst of the crisis, and that allows the film to seize its viewer in a way that historical pictures don’t always manage.

 

In The Normal Heart, writer Ned Weeks is enlisted by an overwhelmed doctor to spread the word about the “gay cancer” that keeps appearing in her examination room.  Ned forms the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a group committed to educating the community, lobbying for research funds, and helping the dying.  As the disease tears its way through people in Ned’s life, he grows increasingly angry and desperate at the country’s seeming indifference.

 

I’m most fascinated, not by Ned’s crusade, but by the conflicts that arise between him and his own activist group.  Some of Ned’s practices – publically calling out politicians, insisting that everyone comes out, and urging total abstinence until more is known about HIV – don’t sit well with his more moderate collaborators.  They fear that his strong-arming and scare tactics won’t get them what they need, that he’s giving their important cause a bad name.  Though Ned argues that people are dying and there isn’t time to play nice, his associates aren’t simply weak-willed fence-sitters without stomachs for the fight.  They have valid points as well; they won’t get funding by alienating the politicians who can help them, and, for an oppressed group that’s been taught by the majority to be ashamed of their “unnatural” love, telling them they’ll die if they have sex could prove irreparable.  (Interesting that the idea of using protecting is barely offered as an alternative.  Omitted to maximize the conflict, or the product of a different time?)

 

Mark Ruffalo, after wowing me with his Bruce Banner in The Avengers, does a great job with Ned.  He’s a man combusting, someone appalled to see an epidemic met with apathy.  Julia Roberts plays the doctor crusading alongside him, and Matt Bomer is highly affecting as Ned’s boyfriend.  Among Ned’s fellow activists, Joe Mantello (who I actually know best from directing Wicked on Broadway, but he’s fantastic here) and Jim Parsons (that’s right – Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory as a sweet but stubborn campaigner) are standouts.  The film also features Jonathan Groff (third time Murphy’s cast him, wow!) and Alfred Molina.

 

Warnings

 

Language (including homophobic slurs,) sexual content (including nudity and sex scenes,) some drinking, and hard-to-watch depictions of the effects of AIDS.