How to Survive: AIDS and Its Afterlives in Popular Media

Abstract

A recent trend in documentary and true story films revisiting early years of AIDS crisis and its activism has gained a foothold in popular media. These include We Were Here (2011), Vito (2011), United in Anger (2012), How to Survive a Plague (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and film adaptation of activist Larry Kramer's 1985 autobiographical play The Normal Heart (2014), to name a few. These films adapt video footage and stories about activism generated during early years of crisis. With exception of United in Anger, each film depicts AIDS activism through lens of white male heroes. This is not new. W hat differs is that, unlike popular AIDS films of 1990s-including And Band Played On (1993) and Philadelphia (1993)-today's films narrate white men's struggle for survival as initially tragic, yet ultimately successful in prolonging their lives against odds.1 Women and queers of color are marginal in these films, and appear only in order to missing by narrative's end.Given extensive documentation that recalls central role women and queers of color have played in AIDS activism since onset of crisis, these misrepresentations of past are egregious. Nonetheless, they continue to receive popular endorsement. How to Survive gained an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature. Dallas Buyers Club garnered a bevy of industry nominations and awards for its script and cast. Though film's lead protagonists pass, they are survived by accolades that, presumably, could only be heaped upon white, male, and cisgender actors Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto. The Normal Heart was nominated for and won a number of Golden Globe, television, and online film awards for movie and its cast. What does this popular revision of AIDS past say about our present?Focusing on How to Survive, this article argues that renewed interest in AIDS crisis activism has much to do with a historical impasse we have reached in valuation of living over dead. The AIDS crisis emerged concurrently with late twentieth-century Reaganomics, including arms buildup, dismantling of welfare state, and criminalization of precarity.2 During this time, AIDS activism became first U.S. social movement to integrate handheld camcorder technology into direct action to record lives laid bare to state violence and vehement social neglect ( Juhasz 1995). Since then, further removal of social safety nets, recent economic downturn, exacerbation of class disparities, increased policing, retrenchment of freedoms, and continued global U.S. military occupations have made experience of crisis ordinary (Berlant 2011, 11). AIDS crisis videos portray modes of survival and livelihood that activists fought for which were alternative to what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism-the unrequited fantasy for the good that is sustained by a thin thread of hope, in spite of evidence that opportunities to thrive have severely diminished (1). Archival AIDS activist documentary footage, then, is a living testament to collective will against perpetuation of state oppression and colonial terror.The advance and proliferation of handheld audiovisual technologies, such as smartphone, begs question of what it means to record death as a mundane activity-and for video to survive, go viral, and galvanize social movements. Yet, according to How to Survive, value or quality of one's life is measured and represented principally by an individual's biological endurance. The film trains attention on certain white men within Treatment and Data Committee of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Mixing archival and present-day video footage, it focuses exclusively on their efforts to seek a medical panacea. The advance of this endeavor is attributed largely, if not entirely, to white men. That Treatment and Data helped to forge life-extending medications, and that some of these white men survived crisis, become film's evidence that biomedical interventions can and should work for everyone. …