For the final-but-not-actually episode of Hit Me with Your Best Shot in 2015, Nathaniel has picked an old subject, one that I didn’t follow along with at the time: 2003’s Angels in America, the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s monumental 1993 play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and a late masterwork in the increasingly spotty career of director Mike Nichols.
The original play was presented in two parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika”, and the HBO version follows suit. Each half is around three-ish hours long, so Nathaniel presented a couple of options: choose the best shot from the overall 6-hour monolith, choose the best shot from each episode, or just pick one half and then pick the best shot from that. And while I have prided myself on always trying to pick whatever option is most onerous, this was simply not the week for it. So I confess to taking the easy way out: I only watched “Millennium Approaches”, which I’ve always preferred, on the page, the stage,* and the screen (though the two halves are closer in quality in Nichols’s hands than in Kushner’s original).
Part of the point of Angels in America is that it is a massive, uncontainable beast of a thing, serving as a summary referendum on the history of the United States from prior to its founding to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s (the story is set in 1985), with special attention paid to how identity intersects with history; mostly, but not solely, homosexual identity. It’s trying to be about Everything, and the scary thing is how close it comes to succeeding.
This of course means that it’s not possible to pick one image and say “yep, that’s emblematic of everything I want to say about the piece” (and I also didn’t want to pick any of the big obvious showy images: skipping the Jean Cocteau sequence hurt real bad, though). Not even if we’re just limiting ourselves to “Millennium Approaches”, though I suspect that I’d end up picking the same shot if I were considering the film as a whole (sadly, I did not have anything resembling the free time to watch “Perestroika”, and so I rely on memories that are at least eight years old).
In addition to being about the giant courses of history and society, Angels in America is also about just four characters, with some more important figures on the periphery: two are a Mormon couple whom we needn’t concern ourselves with (though they’re played by Patrick Wilson and Mary Louise Parker in their star-making turns, and they’re both fucking wonderful – in particular, given the amount of top-tier talent showing up onscreen, I never cease to be baffled how Wilson could give my favorite performance out of everybody. But anyway, this is totally irrelevant). Two are a gay couple in New York, Prior (Justin Kirk) and Louis (Ben Shenkman). If there’s a single thing that drives the engine of “Millennium Approaches” – which there isn’t – it’s that Prior has AIDS and near the start of the story, finally tells Louis about it.
But that hasn’t happened yet at the time of my choice for Best Shot – this is less than ten minutes in, and all we’ve seen so far is Louis’s grandmother’s funeral. Prior leaves first, lights a cigarette, and waits for Louis to break away from his extended family. They touch so little that it’s almost an accident, then round the corner, and then, out of sight of the judgmental eyes of relatives, they finally move in close.
Two things are going on: first, the obvious one from the blocking that precedes this image, is the need to hide one’s true self for fear of the cruel opinions of society. The pain felt by the gay characters in Angels in America isn’t simply the mortal terror of AIDS; it’s also being found unworthy by majoritarian culture. It’s about being unable to live an authentic life because of the Way Things Work. The delay of this moment of physical contact draws all of our attention to that fact, and when Prior finally touches Louis’s shoulder, it is a profound statement of identity just as much as it’s simple gesture of affection.
The other thing is, I confess, a hoary bit of obvious symbolism. AIDS suffocates every part of the play and movie, and the nearness of death is a major theme. So here we have two emotional impulses simultaneously marching along: love, in the form of the two men comforting each other, and doing so in a way that unambiguously announces to anyone watching that they are a couple and will not, for now, hide that. And death, in the form of the memorial chapel sign, a thick black bar looming over them as they walk towards it. It is a literal memento mori. This tension – love in the presence of reminders of death, love in the presence of memory bearing down – is one of the major propulsive forces in Angels in America, and this moment foreshadows how important that will eventually be in these two men’s lives.