Intrusions: Families in AIDS Films

Intrusions: Families in AIDS Films' David Caron All happy families resemble each other; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina FAMILIES HAVE BEEN A CENTRAL ELEMENT of mainstream, liberal AIDS films, whether fictions or documentaries. An Early Frost, Our Sons, A Daughter's Diary, In the Gloaming, not to forget Philadelphia2 —the only one in the list not made for TV or cable—most of these movies, in fact, seem to be about families more than anything else. As Vito Russo remarked: "In An Early Frost we see how AIDS affects a young man's mother, father, sister, brother-in-law and grand-mother. There is no consideration given to the fact that this is happening to him—not them."3 This commentary could apply to all the above movies. This shouldn't be surprising since mainstream AIDS films began to appear once AIDS had entered mainstream consciousness, and AIDS entered mainstream consciousness when it began to be perceived as a threat to the family. Starting in 1985, with the announcement of Rock Hudson's illness,4 AIDS could no longer be kept at a safe (but imaginary) distance, and the family needed to be protected from the intrusion of the virus and the queerness (in both senses of the word) attached to it in dominant discourses.5 What is at stake in these AIDS family films, then, is the ultimate reinforcement of the family as a safe, enclosed space from which otherness must be expelled. Paule Muxel and Bertrand de Solliers's French film Sida: Paroles de familles,*1 the main focus of this essay, is an exception to the rule. This documentary, broadcast on December 1, 1995, on state-owned TV channel France 2, shows how AIDS has brought a disruptive element of otherness into five families, and how, rather than reject it, they were forced to rethink themselves in radically new ways. But first: The Family Circle: Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia was an event in France as well as in the U.S., and there too it provided a widely praised model of liberal -humanist response to AIDS. The movie tells the story of Andrew Beckett , a brilliant young lawyer who gets fired from his prestigious law firm because he has AIDS. He goes on to sue his former employer with the help of fellow lawyer Joe Miller, initially introduced as both homophobic—Andy is gay—and AIDS-phobic. Thematically at least, the family issue in Philadelphia belongs to a more progressive generation of mainstream AIDS films. In 62 Fall 1998 Carón contradistinction to other films, the protagonist's family doesn't go through a process of change.' The family isn't made better by its own private AIDS crisis because it was already good before and shall remain good afterward. Unlike An Early Frost, for instance, Philadelphia doesn't include a comingout scene, in which the parents and relatives learn simultaneously about their son's homosexuality and illness. It doesn't mention the difficulty for the parents to come to terms with their son's sexuality, a central dramatic element in both An Early Frost and Our Sons. Finally, it doesn't even address the possibility that the parents might have had a hard time accepting their son's relationship as equally legitimate as theirs, a theme that has remained a crucial component of AIDS family films, even as recently as in In the Gloaming. In other words, all the narrative elements, or crises, that made these movies shift their narrative focus from PWAs to their families, seem conspicuously absent from Philadelphia. The viewer may hypothesize that all these crises took place before the events described in the story, or even that they never took place at all; the movie doesn't tell us. As far as we know, Andy's relatives have no problem with his gayness, are not judgmental about his illness, and respect his lover Miguel so much that he and he alone will stay at Andy's bedside after family members have made their final goodbyes. Furthermore, the Becketts seem to open up to otherness, as evidenced by the presence of various "others" inside the...