The Physician: Medieval People are Dumb

Tags

Crappy Prologue Texts, Medical Stuff, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Movies, Movies I Hate, Noah Gordon, Stellan Skarsgard, The Physician, Tom Payne

The Physician (2013, dir. Philip Stölzl) is based on a best-selling novel of the same name by Noah Gordon. It opens in England in 1012, when a young boy named Robert Cole…

Ok, hold it right there. I can’t even get past the main character’s name without having to comment. In 1012, there were no English people named Robert Cole. ‘Robert’ is a French name originally, and this film starts more than half a century before the Norman Conquest of English caused the importation of French names into England. Also, surnames like Cole won’t be in use for about another 300 years.

It’s a serious problem when a historical film, based on a historical novel, can’t even bother to give its protagonist a name that a person could actually have had during the period in question. The main character should have been called something like Aethelstan or Aedward or something like that, a good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon name like the ones used in England in the period before the Norman Conquest. And the fact that Noah Gordon couldn’t be bothered to do the elementary research it would have taken to come up with an accurate name speaks volumes about the source material for this film. I haven’t read the novel, just a summary of it on Wikipedia, but it seems like the screenwriter was about as free with his adaptation of the novel as the novel is with the period it’s dealing with, and the result is a total shitstorm of inaccuracy that left me feeling very stabby. Within five minutes the film had me making such angry noises that my husband prudently left the room lest I accidentally injure him in a momentary fit of rage.

Noah Gordon

Ok, let’s see if I can get through today’s post without triggering an aneurism.

<Deep breath>

Ok, the film opens in 1012 with a young boy who works…

Crap. First we need to cover the prologue text.

“In the Dark Ages the art of healing developed in the Roman era has been widely forgotten in Europe. There are no doctors, no hospitals, only traveling barbers with poor knowledge. At the same time on the other side of the world medical science is prospering.”

So, medieval people live in the Dark Ages, when no one ever bathed or turned on a light. We know they’re ignorant because they’ve forgotten Roman medicine when the ‘other side of the world’, which turns out to be Persia, hasn’t. So, got that? Medieval people are dumb. All they have for doctors are traveling barbers who don’t actually know anything, while other people living someplace else still have medicine.

Ok, the film opens in 1012 with a young boy who works as a miner, exchanging whatever it is he’s digging out of the ground for lumps of bread that he takes home to give to his mother and younger siblings. Because medieval people use children as miners and are too stupid to have money, so they just trade rocks for bread.

On the way home one day, young Robert stops to see a traveling barber-surgeon (Stellan Skarsgard, in a role credited simply as ‘Barber’, so that’s what I’ll call him), who acts like a traveling salesman at an American county fair around 1900.

Grrr! I can’t even get three sentences into this summary without having another issue! Technically there were barber-surgeons in 1000, but they were a brand new thing at the time, and probably mostly based in monasteries, not wandering around in covered wagons acting like showmen. But this film doesn’t give a shit about things like that because it’s not really set in 1012. It’s set in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England, where nothing changed for 1000 years because it was the Dark Ages. So 11^th century people can have 14^th century names and dress like 14^th century people and live in 13^th century architecture because history is just something we teach in high schools so high schools can have an excuse to hire a football coach.

Let me take a break and play with my stress ball for a minute.

<squish squish>

Soon thereafter Robert’s unfortunate mother is feeding them dinner when she has a momentary bout of pain. And we all know what that means. It means she’s about to die from “side sickness”, which is what they used to call appendicitis back in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England before the disease had even been recognized medically. Rob runs to fetch Barber, but by the time they get back home, the local priest has wandered in and given her Last Rites and then declares that nothing can possibly help her except witchcraft and when Rob says maybe Barber can do something, the priest accuses Rob of challenging the authority of the Holy Church because GAAHHH! I hate this film already and we’re not even five minutes into it!

This is when my husband left the room. Maybe you should too.

How many fucking clichés about how bad the Middle Ages were can we fit into one five-minute sequence? Quite a lot, it seems. Where’s my stress ball?

<squish squish squish squish>

Ok, so where was I? Oh yeah, mom’s just died. The priest parcels out Rob’s younger siblings to local strangers, and bribes them to take the kids by offering them all the utensils. Then the priest claims the rest of the property as his fee for his services and leaves because apparently Rob’s mom has no earthly relatives who might intervene and no one cares that that means that the property would legally belong to Rob and his siblings, because they hadn’t invented law yet in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England.

We know Rob’s the main character because unlike everyone else, he gets to wear color

Well, you can probably guess that, in a movie called The Physician, when Barber is the only remaining character left for Rob to interact with, Rob is going to wind up traveling with Barber.

So we flash forward an unspecified number of years, maybe a decade. So now it’s about 1022. Rob’s an adult, more or less, and played by Tom Payne. He’s become Barber’s apprentice.

URK! GAK! AARGH! There’s no such thing as apprentices in 1022 in England! It’s a concept developed by guilds, which don’t exist yet. But this is Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England, so they can apparently have any concepts they need to.

<squishsquishsquishsquishsquishsquishsqui…>

Shit! I just ruptured my stress ball.

Ok, deep breaths. It’s ok. You can do this.

<deep breathing>

Skarsgard and Payne as Barber and Rob

So Rob and Barber travel around long enough for us to see just how crappy medicine was back then. We get to see a tooth extraction with a pair of pliers. During the extraction, Rob suddenly gets a strange feeling, just like the feeling he had when he touched his mom the night she died, and he realizes the guy who just lost a tooth is going to die soon. Barber laughs him off, and they go off to romp in something that’s either a brothel or a tavern held in an old Roman sewer. It could be either, because neither such institution existed in the 11^th century, so take your pick.

Then the unfortunate dental patient turns up dead, and the locals immediately starts screaming that tooth extraction is a form of witchcraft because EVERYONE IN GENERIC OLDE TYME MEDIEVAL ENGLAND IS STUPID! APPARENTLY THE ONLY TIME PEOPLE DIE OR HAVE TEETH EXTRACTED IS WHEN WITCHES ARE INVOLVED. God I hate this movie.

<thumpthumpthump>

That sound you’re hearing is me smacking my head against the wall because I don’t have a stress ball to squeeze anymore and I’m all out of my meds. Go to your happy place, Andrew. It will be ok.

Of all the tropes about medieval society, this one perhaps annoys me more than any other, because it suggests that medieval people were utterly ignorant of basic facts of life and were therefore inclined to suspect supernatural forces at work whenever anything they disliked happens. Medieval people were less knowledgeable than we are today about things involving science and medicine, but they weren’t complete morons. In fact, they were just as smart as we are; they just had a different knowledge base to work with. They knew what tooth extraction involved, and that it wasn’t evil magic.

But anyway, they attack Barber and Rob and burn the wagon and burn Barber’s hands, which means that Rob has to take over the medical practice while Barber recovers. So we get to watch Rob perform his first amputation when a guy is brought in with a broken toe. And when he does it, the guy literally says “My first amputation!” like having body parts removed is a traditional rite of passage in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England.

I hate this movie so much.

Barber after the attack

Well, eventually Barber develops a cataract, and lucky for him and Rob, they run across a family of Jews somewhere that includes a physician who knows how to couch cataracts, which rather astoundingly is an actual medieval practice that the film accidentally knows about. Rob is astonished by how much the physician knows, and the physician tells him that he studied with Ibn Sina, a genuine 11^th century Persian scholar. Why this smart Jew has decided to travel half-way across the known world to treat stupid patients in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England is never explained, nor is how he manages to do medicine without getting accused of witchcraft.

Rob decides that he’s going to travel all the way to Isfahan in Persia because he wants to learn medicine and he can’t do that in England because everyone in Medieval England is stupid except the Jews and because Rob probably hates Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England every bit as much as I do. So he sets off on a journey to Persia. I’ll cover that in my next post because right now, after only 20 minutes of film, I am so full of hate and stabbiness that I’m pretty sure I feel an aneurism coming on.

Want to Know More?

No, trust me you don’t. Seriously, you don’t. Please, don’t make me do this.

Sigh, ok. The Physician is available on Amazon. Noah Gordon’s The Physician (The Cole Trilogy) is available too. Oh, lord! It’s part of a trilogy. I can’t even.

Advertisement

Amadeus: Killing Mozart

Tags

Amadeus, Antonio Salieri, Early Modern Austria, Early Modern Europe, F. Murray Abraham, History, Medical Stuff, Milos Forman, Movies, Peter Shaffer, Wolfgang Mozart

Milos Forman’s Amadeus (1984, director’s cut 2002) opens with Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) loudly calling Wolfgang Mozart’s name and declaring that he had murdered Mozart. As the film progresses, Salieri openly talks about trying to figure out how to kill Mozart, but in the flashbacks that form most of the film we never see him do anything so direct as poison the man (although he does plant a spy in the Mozart household, in the form of a serving maid, who could possibly have poisoned the food). But at the end of the film, Salieri directly says that it was God who killed Mozart, in order to foil Salieri’s plot to steal Mozart’s Requiem Mass for himself. Salieri has only contributed to the death by working to ensure that Mozart would be unable to find work and thus live in poverty. So the film is somewhat coy about exactly what Salieri might have done to orchestrate Mozart’s death. So what really happened to Mozart?

The Evolution of the Story

Mozart grew quite ill late in November of 1791, when he was 35, and he died on Dec 5th. Soon after his death, rumors had begun to circulate that Salieri had poisoned him, driven perhaps by the suddenness of his death. But no one seems to have taken these rumors seriously.  Mozart’s widow Constanze trusted Salieri to tutor her son Franz in music, for example.

Antonio Salieri

Salieri himself died in 1825, at the age of 75. In his last years he suffered from dementia and attempted suicide by slashing his throat; on several occasions when he was in the throes of dementia he claimed to have killed Mozart, but when he was more coherent he denied it. But a few years after his death, in 1831, the Russian author Alexander Pushkin published a short story, “Mozart and Salieri” in which the Italian composer slips poison into the German composer’s drink, out of a profound sense of envy. In 1898, the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov adopted Pushkin’s story into an opera. Pushkin’s story has been adapted three more times, in 1914 as a silent film, in 1979 as a Soviet television mini-series Small Tragedies, and in the same year as Peter Shaffer’s Tony-award winning play Amadeus. Shaffer did the adaptation of the play into a screenplay for Forman’s 1984 film. So the film is based not on history directly but on Pushkin’s short story. Shaffer freely admitted that his work should not be viewed as historical.

Mozart’s Death

Understanding Mozart’s death is surprisingly difficult for a couple of reasons. First, his body was not autopsied, because it was giving off a terrible stench. So instead it was just buried. (Incidentally, the claim, shown in the film, that he was buried in a mass grave is untrue. He was buried in a “common grave”, which does not refer to a pauper’s mass grave; rather it was a reference to a legal distinction made in Austrian funerals at the time. “Common graves” were maintained only for a decade, after which the government had the right to dig the body up and reuse the grave to save space; in contrast “aristocratic graves” were permanent). After the grave was opened around 1801, the gravedigger claimed to have saved Mozart’s skull, but there’s no proof that the skull in question was actually the composer’s.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

To complicate matters significantly, virtually all the descriptions we have of Mozart’s death were written down long after his death. Some of them are based on eyewitness testimony from people such as Constanze Mozart, his son Karl, and Constanze’s sister Sophie Weber. But nearly everyone who wrote accounts of the death had ulterior motives such as profiting from a sensational story, so it is hard to know which accounts are trustworthy. And some of the accounts contradict each other.

His symptoms were numerous. The death certificate says he had a “miliary fever”, meaning a fever that produced many tiny rash-like bumps on the skin. Most accounts say that he had become badly swollen (edema), so much that he could not turn himself in bed, and several accounts say he stank. Sophie’s account of his death says he had a severe fever that a physician tried to bring down with cold compresses, but that the coldness shocked him into a coma he never recovered from (but other accounts claim he was conscious on his last day). A few accounts say that he was bled by a doctor to relieve the swelling. Constanze said that in his last moments, he suddenly produced a massive torrent of brown vomit and died (Forman, perhaps wisely, omits that detail in the film). Other symptoms mentioned in the different accounts include back pain, delirium, and claiming he had been poisoned. A modern examination of what might be his skull found evidence of a chronic subdural hematoma (swelling of the tissue between the brain and the skull, resulting in increasing pressure on the brain), possibly caused by falls in 1789 and 1790.

Was It Poison?

Various people have been proposed as Mozart’s poisoner, including Salieri, the freemasons, the Catholic church, and the Jews (one wild theory has the last three all working in conjunction). A related theory claims that Mozart accidentally poisoned himself with antimony (a heavy metal) or mercury used as a medicine.

Constanze Mozart

The most likely poisons would have been antimony, mercury, or arsenic and lead (a mixture termed acqua toffana, a popular poison that Constanze claimed Mozart thought had been given to him). The problem here is that none of the likely poisons really fits with Mozart’s symptoms. Antimony poisoning is characterized by coughing, arthritis, headache, fainting, facial swelling, abdominal pain, muscle pain, and skin rash. Of those, only the rash is clearly mentioned, although if we stretch things we might be able to fit in the fainting (passing out from the cold compress), and muscle pain (the back pain one person claimed). His edema was not specifically in his face but in his body. He did experience headaches and fainting in 1790, but not around the time of his death.

Mercury poisoning is characterized by tremors in the hands or body, slurred speech, hearing loss, problems with eyesight, memory loss, excessive salivation, and mental deterioration. Of these, Mozart exhibited none of these, unless his claims of being poisoned were a symptom of mental deterioration. But most accounts claim that he was lucid enough to work on his Requiem mass, which would suggest he was more or less ok mentally. Examination of his last manuscripts show no change in his handwriting, so he probably didn’t suffer from tremors.

If it was acqua toffana, the symptoms would have included a metallic taste in the mouth, peripheral neuropathy (pain in the extremities), a burning sensation in the throat, anemia, gastrointestinal distress, nausea, vomiting, constipation, skin problems, breathing problems, seizures, and mental deterioration. This fits slightly better; he had a rash, vomited at least once, and again, might have suffered moments of paranoia. One late piece of testimony said that he could taste death in his mouth, which was perhaps the metallic taste. But he lacked the other symptoms so far as we know, and there is no explanation for the severe edema or stench.

As a result of this, it seems highly unlikely that he was poisoned. His symptoms just don’t fit any of the commonly used poisons. But let’s turn from symptoms to motive. Did anyone have a reason to want Mozart dead?

If we disregard the rather lurid claims of poisoning by evil organizations, the only real candidate for his murder is Salieri. And as noted, Salieri did claim during his delirious moments to have done the deed. If that was true, he must have had a real reason for doing it. Did Salieri have a motive to kill Mozart?

Mozart and Salieri seem to have had a complex relationship. Some of Mozart’s letters to his father Leopold include evidence that he resented the Italian composer. There was a very influential faction of Italian musicians at Emperor Joseph II’s court, of which Salieri was one of the most prominent. In at least two of his letters, Mozart told his father he was being thwarted by Salieri and the other Italians; that might be true, or it might be an explanation Mozart was giving his demanding father for his own lack of progress at court. Leopold Mozart seems to have blamed the Italians for thwarting his son’s efforts to be appointed as music tutor to one of Joseph’s daughters, but whether that’s true or if Wolfgang agreed with that claim is unknown. The Viennese musical world certainly put the two men into competition for a limited number of jobs and patrons. Salieri rejected the libretto that Mozart turned into Cosi Fan Tutte, which might have embarrassed the Italian. He might have resented Joseph II’s decision to favor German opera over Italian, but Mozart was hardly to blame for that.

Emperor Joseph II

However, other evidence points to the two men basically liking each other. They composed at least one piece together, and when Salieri became the Imperial Kapellmeister, he did Mozart the enormous favor of re-staging Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, rather than doing one of his own many operas. Salieri loved The Magic Flute, which Mozart premiered just a few months before his death (not the night before, as Amadeus shows it).And, as I already noted, he agreed to tutor Mozart’s son years later.

Additionally, Salieri was far more successful than Mozart was. He was a highly acclaimed composer for much of his mid-life (although in his last two decades, he stopped composing almost entirely), and his operas were performed all over Europe. He received numerous important offices and public honors, including being made Kapellmeister in 1788. When Mozart died, Salieri was at the height of his fame, influence, and success, while Mozart was struggling financially and enjoying only sporadic success with his operas. And he died a very rich man. So if Salieri hated Mozart, it must have been for some very abstract reason, one not reflected in their relative careers.

That’s the reason that Pushkin and Shaffer make the issue Salieri’s envy over Mozart’s superior skills as a composer. In Shaffer’s story, Salieri wants to praise God but grows envious of how easily composing comes to Mozart compared to how hard it comes to him. This envy turns into a desire to spite God for ignoring Salieri’s earnest struggles to praise God and instead giving a sublime musical talent to a vulgar, childish man. But  it’s hard to see why Salieri would have been angry about his meager musical talents if in fact he was enjoying enormous success that he could easily have attributed to God.

And the real Mozart was nowhere near as childish and vulgar as the film presents him. He was certainly vulgar in private; his letters to family members are filled with dirty jokes. He once composed a piece entitled Leck mich im Arsch, which translates to “Lick My Ass.” But such scatological humor was very common among Germans of the period, and is not remarkable in Mozart’s work. More importantly, most of his vulgarity was shared privately with friends; there’s no evidence that he was vulgar in public or at the imperial court. Mozart had been moving in aristocratic and royal circles since the time he was 6; he certainly understood how to behave around the wealthy and powerful people who controlled his fortunes, and such vulgarity would probably not have been well-received in that circle.

Leck mich im Arsch

So when we consider the whole picture, there is neither evidence for Mozart being poisoned nor a clear motive for Salieri to have done so. No one who has seriously studied Mozart’s death accepts the poisoning theory.

Then What Did Kill Mozart?

No one really knows. Most serious theories have revolved around the possibility of a disease. Suggestions have included smallpox, tonsillitis, bronchitis, pneumonia, typhoid fever, strep leading to kidney failure, Vitamin D deficiency, and rheumatic fever (and those are just the well-known conditions that have been suggested). None of these precisely fits Mozart’s symptoms, but strep and rheumatic fever seem to fit the evidence fairly well. Of particular importance is the fact that there was an outbreak of fever in Vienna at the time Mozart died, so he may well have died during an epidemic. Working against that is the minor point that Constanze wanted to die of whatever had killed her husband, and spent several hours after his death clinging to his body, hoping she would contract whatever had killed him. But maybe she just had a stronger immune system than he did.

Medical malpractice may also have contributed to his death. Sophie Weber said his doctor had shocked him into a coma with cold compresses, but that is contradicted by claims he was lucid in his last hours. Constanze and another source claim he was bled by a doctor, which might have weakened him generally, and could have aggravated any subdural hematoma that he might have had.

A final theory holds that he might have contracted trichinosis, which had not yet been identified medically. While not normally fatal today, it becomes fatal about 20% of the time if left untreated, because larval worms burrow into the muscle tissues and destroy them, and this can trigger a variety of other serious problems including meningitis, encephalitis, and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscles). In a letter 44 days before his death, he mentions eating a plate of pork cutlets; trichinosis has an incubation period of between 8 and 50 days. Its symptoms include fever, rash, vomiting, and edema, all of which he had. Other symptoms include headache, nausea, fatigue, muscle pain, weakness, and sensitivity to light. These are symptoms that fit with the general descriptions of his death and which might not have been mentioned in testimony about it. However, as an explanation, it’s a bit of a stretch, because it requires him to have eaten poorly-cooked pork and to have acquired a very severe form of the disease. And it doesn’t explain the stench that was reported. In fact, none of the proposed solutions clearly accounts for this symptom.

Playwright Peter Shaffer

So we’re left with a puzzle that doesn’t yet have a clear solution. His symptoms don’t fit any of the common poisons of the day, and there’s no clear motive for someone to have poisoned an impoverished musician who was enjoying only sporadic success. But his symptoms are hard to square with known diseases either. Rheumatic fever seems to be the most commonly cited caused these days. I’m hardly a doctor, but my guess is that he was suffering from more than one problem and that his symptoms may have been masking other symptoms or simply not being observed by those close to him. We’ll probably never know for sure what killed him, but it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t poisoned.

Want to Know More?

Amadeus (Director’s Cut)is available through Amazon.

Robert Gutman’s biography Mozart: A Cultural Biography seeks to place Mozart in a wider context and is widely regarded as the definitive biography of the composer.

The Normal Heart: The Impact of AIDS

Tags

20th Century America, AIDS, Gay Rights Movement, Homosexuality, Larry Kramer, Movies, New York City, The Normal Heart

When Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart debuted in New York City in 1985, it was probably the first piece of theater to confront the emerging AIDS crisis. It was an incredibly angry play, with a protagonist who is filled with fury over what he sees as gay folly and government indifference. Kramer was trying to draw attention to a disease that was erupting with lethal intensity among gay men. In a pre-Internet age, he sought not to entertain the audience but to educate them. So the play is filled with facts about the AIDS crisis and the government’s lack of response to it. It is the theatrical equivalent of a pamphlet handed to people on street corners.

It was also a play meant to mobilize its audience to take action. Kramer had already become an activist within the gay community in 1981, when he invited what he saw as the A-List of gay New York to his apartment to hear a doctor talk about this new disease (not, as The Normal Heart suggests, Dr. Laubenstein, but another doctor who had begun to work on the problem). That meeting led to the foundation of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982, the first AIDS organization. Kramer’s bold, confrontational style helped bring the  crisis to wider public attention, but it also made many gay men uncomfortable, both because he seemed to be blaming gay men for contracting AIDS and because he was alienating many of the people whose help GMHC needed if it was to succeed. As a result, in 1983, he was ousted from the board of the organization.

The Normal Heart is a fictionalized account of these events from Kramer’s perspective, as I explored in my previous post. One of his goals in the play was the rouse viewers to action, to get them to protest, demand greater government attention, and try to change the course of the emerging epidemic. The play seeks to show the audience how the forces of homophobia, the closet, and general disinterest were combining to kill large numbers of gay men.

By 2014, when HBO premiered its adaptation of the play, however, things had changed drastically. AIDS is no longer an obscure disease. While there is neither a cure nor a vaccine yet, enormous strides have been made in understanding exactly how the disease operates and how it spreads. The development of various drugs have turned AIDS from a quick death sentence into a disease with significant though largely manageable health effects, although the drugs themselves come with side effects and can be quite expensive. In many patients, these drugs work to reduce the infected person’s viral load to a level where it is undetectable, which appears to render the person non-infectious. (Indeed, this has led many gay men to describe themselves as “Poz undetectable” to prospective sex partners.) The anti-viral drug Truvada now offers pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PReP) to those who take it regularly, and appears to be nearly 100% effective at stopping the spread of the virus when used properly; it’s not a vaccine, but it’s a big step toward one.

Ruffalo and Bomer as Ned and Felix

Another equally important change is that gay men are no longer so universally reviled as they were in the 1980s. One recent poll found that 80% of Americans believe that people should not be fired because of their sexual orientation; indeed many people are surprised to discover that it is still legal to fire someone for being gay or lesbian in 29 states. Support for gay marriage rights has reached an all-time high. Last month, my husband and I celebrated the first anniversary of our legal wedding; 15 years ago that would have been inconceivable. A majority of mainline Protestants now support gay marriage and these churches permit their ministers to conduct gay weddings. While coming out of the closet can still carry risks, particularly in more conservative parts of the country, large numbers of gays and lesbians and even transgender people are now able to live openly and with a considerable degree of social acceptance. And, of course, it is quite possible that later this month, the Supreme Court will decide in favor of permitting gay marriage across the country.

The changing context of gay rights makes the HBO adaptation quite a different piece from its theatrical counterpart. While Mark Ruffalo’s Ned Weeks is still angry and abrasive, the film feels much less pressure to educate and persuade its audience, because much of its audience already knows what AIDS is and why it’s a problem and feels much more sympathy for the plight of those New York gays in the early 1980s. So Kramer trimmed down the bulk of the fact-giving, and instead developed Ned’s relationship with his dying lover Felix, giving the audience a deeper understanding of their lives together. The film is less about educating the audience about AIDS, and more about educating the audience about what it was like to be a gay man dealing with AIDS in the early 1980s. In 1985, the end of the play left the audience with an awareness of the mysterious crisis that was still escalating around them, whereas in 2014, the film ends with the audience aware that the disease has been identified, methods of fighting it have been developed, and the death rate has declined substantially. So the film cannot have the emotional impact that the play originally had. In other words, the story has moved from being a polemic about a growing problem toward being a documentary about the early years of the AIDS crisis and the birth of gay activism.

It’s hard for younger people, especially young gay men, to recognize just how enormous the impact of the AIDS crisis was on the gay community. Prior to the AIDS crisis, gay men had only a rudimentary degree of social organization, mostly focused on gay bars and the Gay Pride movement. Gay men met at bars for social solidarity, to find potential sex partners, and to enjoy a safe space where they could express themselves more openly.

Philadelphia’s first Gay Pride event, in 1972

The AIDS crisis, however, spurred the growth of gay advocacy organizations. Some, like GMHC and Kramer’s second organization, ACT UP, focused specifically on AIDS, while others like the Human Rights Campaign which was organized in 1986 (after a less organized version founded in 1980) emphasized legal issues such as workplace discrimination and gay parenting; in 1989 it reorganized as a lobbying organization. ACT UP helped inspire Queer Nation, a more militant organization than HRC that emphasized street theater and guerrilla protest tactics to demand greater toleration for gays and an end to gay bashing. It helped reclaim the label ‘queer’, which prior to that had mostly be used as a term of abuse and ridicule; today many young non-heterosexuals prefer to label themselves as ‘queer’ rather than ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’, because they feel the former term allows for a wider range of identity. In 1980, the organization that would become PFLAG had about 20 affiliated groups but no national organization, having been founded in 1972 and spreading mostly by word of mouth; today it has more than 350 member groups in all 50 states and is a national organization that claims about 200,000 members. The AIDS Quilt, the world’s largest folk art project, began in San Francisco in 1987 to memorialize those lost to AIDS; today it commemorates some 48,000 men and women who died from the disease and is still accepting panels (incidentally, anyone can make a panel to commemorate someone, even without having personally known that person).

An ACT UP protest

In 1984, only a tiny handful of out gays or lesbians had been elected to public office, chiefly the ill-fated Harvey Milk of San Francisco, who was murdered in 1978 after less than a year in office. In 1999 Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay person elected to an initial term in Congress, and in 2013, she became the first openly gay person elected to the Senate (she was proceeded in the House of Representatives by Massachusetts’ Barney Frank, who was still in the closet when he was first elected in 1980, but was out of the closet when he won re-election in 1990; in contrast Baldwin has been out since she first took public office in 1992).Today she is just one of 8 openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual members of Congress (all Democrats).

Obviously not all of these developments can be attributed to the AIDS crisis. Some of it would have happened had AIDS never emerged; the precursors to the Human Rights Campaign and PFLAG were already in existence in 1981. But it’s clear that the AIDS crisis and the political disinterest it initially received galvanized the gay community in a new way. Because hospitals were often unwilling to accept AIDS patients, many gays and lesbians took up the task of caring for friends, lovers, and relatives stricken by the disease. Films such as An Early Frost, Longtime Companion, and Philadelphia helped bring the problem of AIDS to a heterosexual audience in a sympathetic way, and the death from AIDS of film icon Rock Hudson in 1985 shocked many people, including President Reagan and his wife. President Reagan’s failure to issue a public statement about his friend’s illness contributed to the impression that he simply didn’t care about the AIDS issue; his wife Nancy refused an appeal from Hudson’s publicist to help get Hudson admitted to a French hospital after he collapsed in Paris. Numerous straight friends and relatives of gays dealing with AIDS were just as outraged by government indifference and lack of funding as Larry Kramer was. AIDS forced many closeted gay men to reveal their homosexuality to friends and family. It seems safe to say that had the AIDS epidemic not emerged, gay rights and social acceptance of gays and lesbians would not be as far along as they are today.

Rock Hudson in 1985

And herein lies the lesson of The Normal Heart for those gays and lesbians too young to remember the 1980s. Gay rights didn’t come out of nowhere. They came out of a community of men and women who organized and demanded attention and legal rights and resources. These men and women carved out a space for non-heterosexuals that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. One of Queer Nation’s favorite protest chants was “We’re here, we’re queer; get used to it.” And the nation has. But if non-heterosexuals don’t continue to organize and fight for their rights, for their place at the national table, those rights may easily go away.

One Other Point

The AIDS crisis had another effect on American society, one more subtle and with reach far beyond the gay community. It changed our notions of male beauty in a profound way. Prior to the 1990s, few men engaged in substantial weight-lifting, except a small number of professional bodybuilders and powerlifters. Male actors and models were not expected to be muscular and ripped. Consider for a moment Burt Reynolds’ famous 1972 centerfold for Cosmopolitan:

Reynolds’ is healthy-looking, but hardly muscular. This was considered a sensational display of male beauty at the time; it established Reynolds as one of the leading sex symbols of the decade. This was what sexy men were supposed to look like in the era of sexual liberation: natural, healthy, and not over-groomed. But by modern standards, Reynolds looks downright flabby, and it’s hard for us to recognize the erotic charge this image had in its day. Today an actor with this physique would probably be cast in comic roles like those Steve Carrell gets, where a lack of definition would suggest the character was an ineffective sad sack. (Think of the chest-waxing scene in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.)

So what changed? AIDS.

In the 1980s, before the development of drugs to combat the effects of AIDS, physical wasting was one of the prominent symptoms of the disease. Weight loss is one of the early signs of HIV infection, and gauntness was extremely common as the disease progressed. Matt Bomer’s physical transformation in the film is a very realistic view of what happened to many gay men who struggled with the disease.

Bomer as the emaciated Felix, being washed in the shower by Ned

So in the 1990s, gay men began hitting the gym aggressively, putting on muscle to make a statement that they were healthy and not dealing with HIV. As so often happens, gay men set the standards for straight men in terms of appearance and fashion, so it was inevitable that as gay men began sculpting themselves into Greek statues, straight men would eventually take notice and follow suit. And the result is that now, movie stars don’t like Burt Reynolds in Cosmo, they look like this:

One of the few false notes in The Normal Heart comes early in the film, in a few scenes set on Fire Island in 1981. Ned Weeks sees a number of shirtless (and sometimes pantsless) gay men who look like they stepped out of the Magic Mike poster, when in reality very few men anywhere looked like that at the time. Even Bomer’s Felix, who is only moderately buff, is probably too ripped for 1981. It’s a small issue, but one that momentarily threw me out of the setting.

2014 was the first year since 1983 that AIDS was not in the top ten leading causes of death in New York City. That’s a wonderful accomplishment, and one that can be partly  attributed to the work done by groups like GMHC and ACT UP. Sadly, however, it seems that many younger gay men have been lulled into a sense of complacency by the shift of AIDS from a terminal disease to one that can be managed with drugs, because rates of HIV infection among 14 to 24 year old men have started rising again. It would appear that a new generation of gay men may have to learn some of the lessons The Normal Heart has to offer the hard way.

Dragon Knight: It’s Got Pretty Scenery

Tags

Daniel Auteuil, Dragon Knight, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, Movies, Movies I Hate, Pseudohistory

Perhaps my mistake was watching this when I was under the weather. I came down with something in the middle of the week and watching tv was about all I was up for, so I figured I’d watch something for the blog. And I settled on Dragon Knight (2003, dir. Hélene Angel, aka Rencontre avec le dragon, aka Red Dragon aka The Red Knight; French with subtitles) a film so obscure its Wikipedia page is barely more than a stub, despite starring well-known French actor Daniel Auteuil. But watching this film in my weakened state was a serious error it will take some time to recover from.

The film is set at some unspecified time during the later Middle Ages, in gorgeous southern France. It’s about a 15-year-old boy Felix (Nicholas Nollet) who wants to become a knight because he’s heard a story about the brave Knight of the Red Dragon (or just the Red Dragon), a great hero who rescued his young friend Raoul from a fire and was baptized by the fire (the Red Dragon of different titles) so that he won’t die, although he’s horribly burned. Eventually Felix finds the Red Dragon, Guillaume de Montauban (Auteuil), but learns to his surprise that Montauban is really just a bounty hunter, currently seeking a poet who ran away from the papal court. There’s another bounty hunter, Mespoulede (Gilbert Melki), also hunting the runaway poet, leading a substantial band of thugs who help him. Raoul (Sergi Lopez) is following Montauban, having gone insane; there’s a very complex and angst-ridden back story here involving a love triangle. There’s also a runaway mother superior who’s looking for the poet. Over the course of the film, Felix gradually becomes disillusioned with his hero, who fails to match up to his expectations and wrestles with his own personal demons.

It’s a very French film. People you can’t empathize with are doing things you don’t really understand. This is the sort of film where people get histrionic whenever there’s a moment’s downtime to reflect on how awful their past is, and spend much of the film so physically or emotionally exhausted that they fall down a lot at dramatic moments. If you pay attention you can piece together most of the back story, although you’ll have to care a lot more than I did. Half the cast appear to be delusional from grief at different moments. And the film is riddled with unexplained plot points. Why has the pope placed such a huge bounty on the poet? Why has Mespoulede’s horse died? Who’s the guy who’s wearing a half-face mask and getting angry at Montauban? Where did the baby go? What does the pope want with all those children? Why do Mespoulede and Montauban hate each other? I realize I haven’t explained any of that, but neither does the film. It seems to think that being a French film is an automatic license for not explaining things.

From a historical standpoint, the film is sort of incoherent. Montauban is a former crusader, and there’s another crusade supposed to be getting ready, but this is entirely irrelevant to the film; at no point does crusading actually matter at all. As I said, it’s unclear when the film is set; if I had to take a guess, it would be the early 14^th century, because the pope seems to be living in France. But the sets, other than the gorgeous French countryside, suggest some time around the 12^th century. But the pope is waiting at Aigues-Mort (misspelled in the subtitles as “Wegmort”), which wasn’t founded until the 1240s. But that’s not a problem because apparently Aigues-Mort is just an empty beach.

At first I thought the film’s costume designer was following the “it’s medieval, so it’s all the same” theory of costuming. Montauban spends the whole film wearing a long leather gown with square metal plates sewn onto it, and several other characters wear variations on this. Perhaps this is supposed to be a 14^th century coat of plates, but it’s not. He also wears a 15^th century tournament helmet with wings on it, but only when it provides a good camera shot. Felix runs around in a gambeson and knee guards, while Raoul mostly just wears a big sweater. Mespoulede seems to have a metal grill sewn onto his gambeson, and some of his men are wearing metal forehead guards.

Auteuil as Montauban in his weird coat of plates

And then about an hour into the film, the pope arrives with a massive entourage, and that’s when I realized that the costumer designer was actually smoking crack. The pope is wearing some sort of golden bulb on his head and massive platform shoes, looking like a dropout from the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar. He’s attended by knights in late medieval plate armor, one of whom is wearing—I am not kidding about this—an enormous metal tutu. The pope’s drummers are all covered in white body paint, and the crowd of people around him are variously wearing leather fleeces, generic rags, cloth-of-gold gowns, and red versions of KKK robes. The pope is apparently kidnapping children for his fiendish plot to tonsure them; I’m not really sure about that, but the film puts it out there just to drop it entirely.

After everything else wrong with this film, pointing out that it repeats the myth that medieval armor was so heavy that knights had to be lowered onto their horses with a crane is sort of an anticlimax.

The pope and the guy in the metal tutu. I told you I wasn’t making it up

Also, for reasons that aren’t explained, in a movie that is otherwise trying to be brutally realistic (at least what it imagines brutal realism about the Middle Ages would be), Raoul is a were-pig. He turns into a boar every night. At first I thought perhaps this was supposed to be symbolism, but no, he’s a were-pig. And his dead wife is wandering around covered in blood and talking to people. This really wasn’t a fair twist to throw at me in my weakened state, because I started thinking that maybe I was sicker than I thought and having hallucinations.

In case you hadn’t understood what I’m trying to tell you, this is not a film for watching. This is a film for putting aside and not looking at. This movie needs a warning label (although all the various titles it’s had might qualify, since that’s often a sign of a not-good film). This is not a film for the young, the elderly, or the immune compromised. For the love of God, Montresor, listen to my frantic cries! It’s too late for me; I’ve already seen it and my head hurts. (No joke; I actually got feverish after the film.) But there’s still time to save yourself. Watch an episode of Reign instead.

Update: My friend Bill has suggested that the metal tutu is probably inspired by Henry VIII’s tournament armor. It’s a genuine style of armor, called a tonlet. Clearly, someone associated with this film saw this and thought “I want that in my film! It’s within 200 years of the period of the film, so that will be ok.” Most tonlets aren’t fluted like this one, which was meant to be worn on a horse, not on foot. Thanks, Bill!

Henry VIII’s tonlet

 

Want to Know More?

Dragon Knightis, unfortunately, available from Amazon. You’ve been warned.

You might also want to lay in a supply of this:

Why There Is No Such Thing As “Just a Movie”

Tags

Miscellaneous, Movies, TV Shows

Periodically, people disagree with my analyses of various films and respond that “it’s just a movie.” My post here about Dracula Unbound has gotten a couple comments of that nature, and sometimes my students have said that about my views on Braveheart and 300.

IJAM isn’t really an argument on its own; it’s merely an assertion. But it’s shorthand for an implicit argument that if something is “just” a movie, then it can’t actually have any deeper level of meaning. Put differently, the assumption seems to be that if a movie is entertainment, it must have no other meaning or function.

As a historian, I’m skeptical of IJAM in part because my training makes clear that anything that plays a prominent feature in a society must in some way have meaning for that society. And it’s pretty obvious to us that movies play a major role in American (not to mention Western or world) society. On a basic level, the movie industry is a huge factor in the economy; when a film studio decides to make a major film, it sinks an enormous amount of money into the film and that money goes to pay thousands of people for their contribution to the film as directors, actors, camera-men, caterers, prop-makers, costumers, and so on. Where these films get made is such a big deal economically that states compete with each other to see who can offer the biggest incentives in the form of tax-breaks and other goodies. The film is then marketed in theaters and sold in DVD or streaming form in shops and online through Amazon, Netflix, and so on. Americans shell out an estimated $20 billion on movies each year. That’s a lot of money to spend on Just A Movie.

Beyond the immediate economics, consider how much of our culture revolves around film and television. Our media provides substantial coverage of new films, their making, and how they do at the box office. An enormous portion of our media is devoted to coverage of actors and their sex lives, public appearances, social and political views, and the award shows they attend. The 2015 Oscar Awards ceremony was watched by 36.6 million viewers, down from 2014’s 43.7 million viewers. That means that around 10% of the entire US population watched the Oscars; in an age of fractured media consumption and narrowcasting, very few events can claim that many eyes simultaneously. And that’s not even factoring in the international viewership.

And we argue about our favorite and most hated shows and films. We care when a movie we like does well, and many people will passionately defend shows and movies they like and passionately attack shows and movies they dislike. Sean Hannity tweeted his anger over American Sniper failing to win Best Picture, and many other conservatives agreed with him, taking it as a sign of the Academy’s liberalism and lack of patriotism, while many liberals were angry that Selma failed to earn even a nomination for its director Ava DuVernay, viewing it as a sign of racism and sexism in the Academy. And those are just two of the most recent film controversies; Twitter recently exploded with outrage and counter-outrage over a gay kiss on The Walking Dead.

IJAM is often raised by people who are clearly angry or upset about a critique they disagree with. But the fact that they are angry is itself proof that IJAM is false. If it’s just a movie, then why get upset when someone sees something to criticize in it? If 300 is just a movie, why does a discussion of its hostility toward physically deformed people matter?

If It’s Just a Movie, why do people care enough about these characters that they want to see more of their story? Why would a housewife somewhere want to see Buffy Summers in action one more time badly enough to sit down and write a new story about her? Why do comic book geeks argue about whether Batman could defeat Superman in a fight? Why is there talk about resurrecting Ripley for yet another unnecessary sequel? Why do so many people insist that Han shot first? Why did Star Trek Into Darkness irritate so many fans with its shitty re-imaging of the conflict between the Enterprise crew and Khan Noonien Singh? Why do we debate about which actress can be Wonder Woman the way she’s supposed to be? Because we care about these characters and what happens to them. They may not be real, but they still matter to us, and we want to see their stories told right.

All of this demonstrates that IJAM is simply untrue; people think that movies and tvs are about much more than simple entertainment. We perceive film and tv as moral statements that certain things are ok or not ok; when a film reflects our values we take it as confirmation and when they contradict our values we take it as evidence of moral decay or regressive values.

IJAM asserts, as I said, that if something has entertainment value, it does not have any other meaning. If it’s just a movie, it can’t be a statement about politics or race or women or whatever else it might be seen as. But that’s a rather shallow argument. Just because a film might be a political statement doesn’t mean it can’t also be a thriller or a comedy. One of the things that makes Captain America: the Winter Soldier a cut above many other action films is the way that it examines the political risks of data-mining. Joss Whedon’s films and shows often actively seek to deconstruct cinematic clichés; The Cabin in the Woods is a very smart critique of horror films (and horror film fans) and their interest in mindless violence. And films often unintentionally explore issues because they can be read as metaphors; the various Aliens movies all seem to explore the fear of reproduction in different ways, even though it’s unlikely that there was a conscious choice to make that a theme of the series.

IJAM is a way to reflexively deny the possibility of meaning. Years ago, when I was just starting out as a teacher, I wound up teaching a freshman writing course. One of the assignments was to analyze a film that said something about family or gender. To get the students ready for this, we spent a little time talking about soap operas and what they might say about the women who watch them. Partway through the discussion, one of my students, a typical freshman, suddenly put her hands over her ears and said loudly, “Stop! I don’t want my soap operas to mean anything!” Apparently, the idea that a simple soap opera might have deeper significance was disturbing to this student, perhaps because it implied that the world was a lot more complex than she had assumed; if her soap opera might have meaning, anything could have meaning, and therefore she didn’t understand the world as well as she thought she did. I often think of that moment when someone brings up IJAM. If 300 or Dracula Untold has meaning, maybe that lands the viewer in a far more complicated world than he lived in before.

To me, that world is exciting and fascinating, a playground of ideas that I can romp through. But to some people, that playground of ideas must look more like a dark and menacing circus where terrible things are lurking just around the corner. It’s easier for these people to cover their ears and shout “It’s just a movie! It can’t mean anything!” But to me, the idea that a movie doesn’t mean anything robs it of all interest. I’d rather spend my life watching films and shows that mean something, even if I don’t always like the meaning I find in them. Why would I spent $10 on a film and almost as much on the popcorn if for two hours my life won’t mean anything? When a film has meaning, I leave it chewing over all sorts of issues, fighting with it like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to make sense of what I’ve just seen and figure out the patterns in it. So one movie can give me hours of interest, like a dog gnawing on a bone. That’s a major reason I write this blog; it gives me a chance to watch movies and spend some time trying to understand what I think about what I just saw and then putting those thoughts into words to share and see what other people think. And I think most of my fellow academics are a lot like me. We love to play with ideas and see where they take us.

And perhaps that’s my real objection to IJAM. It’s not just false; it’s boring. I’d rather play in my playground of ideas, because I never run of things to play with. So come on, IJAMers; put down your IJAM and come play with me. I promise you things are way more interesting over here.