CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
CONCEIVED as a television film, the Emmy Award- winning And the Band Plays On is a painstaking but sometimes flawed docudrama based on the book by Randy Shilts. The transposing of 664 pages of rigorous investigative reporting into a 140-minute film clearly posed a tricky problem of adaptation – – screenplay writer Arnold Schulman was forced to jettison a wealth of confrontational material. One regrettable loss is Shilts’ authorial voice and the merging of the factual and the fictionalised.
Instead, Schulman attempts to present the material (to borrow a Truman Capote formulation) as a “non- fiction novel”. The narrative substance of the film is centred on Dr Don Francis (Matthew Modine) who, haunted by his experience of the ravages of Ebola fever in Central Africa as a forewarning of Aids, does not come to terms with it until he clasps in acceptance the hands of Aids victim Bill Kraus (Ian McKellan). There is orthodox dramaturgy, too, in the treatment of the conflict between Dr Luc Montagnier (Patrick Bucchau), the head of the Pasteur Clinic that first isolated the Aids virus, and Dr Robert Gallo (in a particularly nasty performance by Alan Alda).
The opening shots of rain and mud devised by cinematographer Paul Elliot and production designer Victoria Paul establish the dominant mood of the film, which deals with the pall of Aids and the untimely odour of death. The restrained camera work and the bleak blues, greys and browns are skilfully intercut with newsreel footage.
Two key issues are introduced at the outset of the film: in Central Africa, a puzzled man asks Francis to explain the cause of the fever: “You doctor. Why you don’t know?” In San Francisco, Bill Draus, in his plea for a gay rights plank to the Democratic National Convention, does not ask for special privileges or even to be liked but rather for the recognition that “we, the gay people of this country, are also human”.
The film shows two gay freedom parades: the Halloween parade near the beginning of the film and the Candlelight march in the last reel. The macabre vision of the first parade as the Day of the Dead pervades the film which is filled with references to the Book of Revelations and the Last Days. Many of the characters behold the Pale Horse of Death. When a patient in Room 666 (numbers associated with the Antichrist) expresses his desire to be cremated, there is a shot of tombstones in a vast cemetery. The end-title is a montage of famous victims (Rock Hudson, Rudolf Nureyev, Liberace, among others) and gay activists (notably Elizabeth Taylor). Elton John’s The Last Song is heard on the soundtrack.
What this unnerving film shows is that nobody paid any attention to what was happening. As purple lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma appeared on the legs of gay men, so these men were dying both of red-tape and a disease that did not have a name before it came to be called Grid (Gay Related Immune Disease), a description to which gay men rightly objected. The film looks implicitly at the way in which the behavioral patterns of gay desire and the disturbing image of the insatiable man obsessed and prejudiced many Aids researchers. A straight man who is shocked by what he sees at a gay bathhouse is rather ingenuously asked what he would do if nothing but a small towel separated him from a beautiful woman.
A more important concern raised by the film is the conflicting responses of gay men to the issue of the bathhouses. At a heated meeting, the bathhouses are identified by many as places of freedom and fraternity. The film would seem hesitantly to endorse the resistance of gay men to both straights and gays who seem concerned to desex gay life, turning it into a community of polite American consumers. Gay homophobia and anti-eroticism are combated as the rectum is located as a site of sexual pleasure and sex acts are not dismissed as incidental private behaviours.
The film is directed by Roger Spottiswoode, whose Under Fire (1983) was a biting attack on arrogant imperialism in Latin America. His animus against the Reagans (one bluff and folksy, the other tense in her role as Caesar’s wife) and an administration that increased the defence budget at the expense of medical research, is undisguised. The film is equally hostile to the corrupt Gallo for whom a Nobel Prize is more important than human life. There is a scathing attack on the profiteering of blood donor banks which refused for a while to test blood while infecting and killing babies and haemophiliacs.
Made more than seven years after the publication of the Shilts book, And the Band Plays On eloquently makes the point expressed by Frank Browning in The Culture of Desire: “Aids-era resistance is the assertion that we (gay men) have not disappeared, and that we continue to pursue the fullness of our physical, political, spiritual and emotional existences, acknowledging that the alteration of any one of these is not the elimination of it.”