How to Survive: AIDS and Its Afterlives in Popular Media

A recent trend in documentary and “true story” films revisiting the early years of the 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 the film adaptation of activist Larry Kramer’s 1985 autobiographical play The Normal Heart (2014), to name a few. These films adapt the video footage and stories about activism generated during the early years of the crisis. With the exception of United in Anger, each film depicts AIDS activism through the lens of white male heroes. This is not new. What differs is that, unlike popular AIDS films of the 1990s—including And the 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 the odds.¹ Women and queers of color are marginal in these films, and appear only in order to go missing by the narrative’s end.

Given the extensive documentation that recalls the central role women and queers of color have played in AIDS activism since the onset of the crisis, these misrepresentations of the 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 the film’s lead protagonists pass, they are survived by the 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 the movie and its cast. What does this popular revision of the AIDS past say about our present?

Focusing on How to Survive, this article argues that the renewed interest in AIDS crisis activism has much to do with a historical impasse we have reached in the valuation of the living over the dead. The AIDS crisis emerged concurrently with late twentieth-century Reaganomics, including the arms buildup, dismantling of the welfare state, and criminalization of precarity.² During this time, AIDS activism became the first U.S. social movement to integrate handheld camcorder technology into direct action to record the lives laid bare to state violence and vehement social neglect (Juhasz 1995). Since then, the further removal of social safety nets, recent economic downturn, the exacerbation of class disparities, increased policing, retrenchment of freedoms, and continued global U.S. military occupations have made the experience of crisis ordinary (Berlant 2011, 11). AIDS crisis videos portray the 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 life” 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 the perpetuation of state oppression and colonial terror.

The advance and proliferation of handheld audiovisual technologies, such as the smartphone, begs the question of what it means to record death as a mundane activity—and for the video to survive, “go viral,” and galvanize social movements. Yet, according to How to Survive, the 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 the Treatment and Data Committee of the 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 the white men. That Treatment and Data helped to forge life-extending medications, and that some of these white men survived the crisis, become the film’s evidence that biomedical interventions can and should work for everyone. This interpretation of events drastically reduces the revolutionary politics of ACT...